The Horses of Saint Mark: Venice, Paris and home

On 13 December 1797 the French took four gilded copper horses down from the front of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice. Venetians protested. The horses had stood on the loggia above the main door for about five centuries. They were about to leave the city.

Each horse is about 2.33 metres high and weighs about 900 kilograms. The Basilica says they were cast in several parts and gilded with mercury, and that they are the only four-horse team to survive from antiquity. Nobody agrees on when they were made. The Basilica’s English page gives opinions from the 5th century BC to the 4th century AD. It says the last restoration found nothing that fixes a date, and it leans to the Roman period on technical grounds. Its museum page says some scholars favour the later 2nd or early 3rd century AD, while carbon-14 analysis points to the early 2nd century BC. The University of Padua archaeology portal repeats the carbon-14 date.

How they reached Venice is better documented. After the Fourth Crusade took Constantinople in 1204, the horses came to Venice as plunder, under Doge Enrico Dandolo, the city’s elected ruler. The Basilica says they were probably from the Hippodrome, the chariot stadium of Constantinople. The Basilica places them on the façade probably under Doge Ranieri Zeno (1253 to 1268), and its museum page says after 1261. Gentile Bellini painted them there in 1496.

Napoleon Bonaparte, then a French general commanding the army in Italy, signed an armistice with Venice on 16 May 1797. Its secret articles called for 20 works of art and 500 manuscripts. An Oxford University Press blog summary says the horses were not named in them. They were taken anyway, with the lion of St Mark. Venice passed to Austria by the Treaty of Campo Formio on 17 October 1797, and the French took the horses before they left the city. They also took Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana, which is still in the Louvre.

The Histoire par l’image study, backed by the French state, gives the route. The horses went by sea to Ancona and sailed from there on 5 March 1798. They reached Toulon on 6 April and arrived in Paris on 17 July 1798. The programme for the festival of 27 and 28 July put them first in the sculpture section. The Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel was ordered on 13 February 1806. Dominique Vivant-Denon, director of the Musée Napoléon, planned the horses for a triumphal chariot on top. They crowned the arch from 1808. The figure of Napoleon as charioteer was never placed.

After Waterloo the Allies demanded the looted art. Antonio Canova, a sculptor, worked for the Holy See. The Duke of Wellington and Lord Castlereagh backed the returns. The horses came down in September 1815. The Art Newspaper reports that Austrian dragoons closed the avenues to the Tuileries. The work destroyed the chariot and damaged two lead figures. Venice was now Austrian, so Austria took the horses back. The Basilica says they were put back on the façade on 13 December 1815 before Emperor Franz I, after repair at the Arsenale. Paris got new bronze horses by François-Joseph Bosio, cast in 1827 and 1828.

The Basilica says the horses were lowered in both world wars. They stayed on the loggia until 1977, and since 1982 the originals have been in the Basilica’s museum. Bronze replicas stand outside. In 2022 the Louvre said Bosio’s group would come down for restoration from the end of February 2023.