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San Marco RevisitedAuthor(s): Otto DemusSource: Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Vol. 41, Studies on Art and Archeology in Honor of ErnstKitzinger on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday (1987), pp. 155-156Published by: Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1291553Accessed: 09/05/2010 06:44

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SAN MARCO REVISITED

OTTO DEMUS

The title of this contribution is a misnomer: Ihave not revisited Venice, let alone S. Marco,since I climbed down from the scaffoldings for thelast time in summer 1979. I

did, however,revisit S.

Marco in my thoughts, dreams (some of themnightmares), and even in a few writings. Commonto most of these numerous imagined visits was theregret that it was not possible to rewrite certainpassages of my book on the mosaics of S. Marco,published in 19841 but written, in some parts, eventen years earlier.

One of these passages is the chapter on the Lifeof the Virgin and the Youth of Christ in the northtransept. Although I still believe that what I said inthis chapter (vol. I/i, 127 if) on the iconographyand the model of these mosaics makes sense, I amnow certain that the execution of the present workdoes not belong to the original decoration but ispart of the extensive restoration or, rather, re-placement of early work by new mosaics in a cam-paign that took place at the very end of the twelfthor even the first years of the thirteenth century.

The reasons for my dating the models of thesemosaics in the early twelfth century I have given inmy book-so I need not repeat them here. In themain, I followed the lead of Mme. J. Lafontaine-Dosogne,2 the best specialist on this part of Chris-tian iconography, whose close reasoning seems tome now as convincing as it did at the time I wrotethe chapter in question. I still believe that the art-ists who carried out the original decorations of S.Marco followed these models so closely as to pre-serve even those of their traits which were inti-mately connected with the fact that these modelswere book illuminations. What I am not so certain

about now is that the original works in the tran-sept were mosaics-it is quite possible that theywere only wall paintings. I need not enlarge on thefact that mosaics and wall

paintingsexisted side

byside in many cases as parts of original decora-tions-I need name only Hosios Lukas and St. So-phia in Kiev. Whether these original representa-tions of the Life of the Virgin had suffered in thecourse of time or were damaged by some catastro-phe-fire or earthquake-it now seems certain tome that they were actually replaced by the presentmosaics at the very end of the renewal campaignunder the Doges Sebastiano Ziani (1172-78), OrioMalipiero (1178-92), Enrico Dandolo (1192-1205), and Pietro Ziani (1205-29), which meansthat

theywere made after the

completionof the

Passion and Resurrection cycles of the west vaultof the central dome. Thus they continued the

downward trend of the Thomas and Noli metangere mosaics, while the main workshop of the

Passion Master kept up-more or less-the stan-dard and the stylistic development of these latterworks with the mosaics of the Lives of the Apostles.

At the same time the workmen who set or re-newed the mosaics of the Life of the Virgin musthave aimed at copying their predecessors as closelyas possible (whether these were wall painters ormosaicists), preserving all their miniature char-acteristics, and even some of the technical featuresof early mosaic work in S. Marco, features whichare to be found mainly in the contiguous mosaicsof the transepts and the choir chapels. The resultis an almost nondescript style which one would notwillingly place in the period between the magnifi-cent art of the Passion and Resurrection master onthe one side and the style (or styles) of the greatGethsemane mosaic of the south wall of the westarm on the other, a mosaic which must be datedbetween 1215 and 1220.

The only intimations of the existence of such aninterim style in S. Marco are the geometrical

'0. Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice (Chicago,1984).

2J. Lafontaine-Dosogne, Iconographie de l'enfance de la Viergedans l'Empire byzantin et en Occident, 2 vols., Acad(mie Royale

deBelgique. Classe des Beaux-Arts.

M(moires,ser. 2, II/3 (Brus-

sels, 1964-65).

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156 OTTO DEMUS

and antiorganic elements in the Thomas andNoli me tangere scenes. Outside S. Marco and

outside the sphere of mosaic altogether, the exis-tence of a style similar to that of the Life of the

Virgin has been pointed out by L. Eleen in some

manuscript illuminations of north Italian, possiblyVeronese, origin.3 Some of these miniatures are soclose to the mosaics in question that one would liketo assume some sort of direct connection; such an

assumption, however, is not absolutely necessary. Itsuffices to suppose that the mosaic master who setthe Life of the Virgin came from a similar milieu-which means that he was, in all probability, not aVenetian but a painter from the terra ferma and,most likely, that he was not a fully trained mosaicistbut a workman (or that there were several work-men of this sort) who had only a superficial train-

ing in the technique of mosaic making, a trainingacquired possibly in S. Marco itself in the followingof the Thomas workshop and in imitating some ofthe technical tricks of some of the earliest Venetianmosaics. He (or they) must have worked at a timewhen trained mosaic workers were scarce so thatthe authorities had to make do with half-trainedand rather poor artisans.

Since one error rarely remains isolated, my mis-take in dating and placing the mosaics of the Lifeof the Virgin at the end of the first decoration, in-stead of at the tail end of the second, led to an

equally erroneous placing of the only work in thelagoon that is akin to the mosaics in question,namely, the apse mosaic of S. Donato in Murano.As things appear now, the Virgin in the apse of this

church must be dated later than my dating, laterthan the magnificent Virgin of Torcello: the rela-

tionship between Murano and Torcello must besimilar to that between the Passion mosaics of S.Marco and those of the Life of the Virgin. Thus

the date of the pavement of Murano (1141) canhave nothing to do with the date of the apse mo-saic.

I have said above that I now regard the style ofthe Life of the Virgin mosaics (and consequentlythat of the Murano apse) as a local, provincial,north Italian style which has no direct connectionwith the great contemporary art of the dynamicstyle of Byzantine painting. Nevertheless, there isa certain parallel between the situation in Veniceand in Byzantium at the close of the twelfth andthe beginning of the thirteenth century: in both

centers there existed, side by side with the greatdynamic style, a rather undistinguished (paceA.

W. Carr) current, widely disseminatedbut diffi-

cult to trace to its source-the (not very aptly) so-called decorative style. The mosaics of the Life ofthe Virgin seem to me Western parallels to the

style 2400,' equally mediocre and equallydifficult

to date and to trace.These difficulties and the horrible state of pres-

ervation of the Mariological mosaics, I would liketo plead, are extenuating circumstances for mymistakes.4

Institut fur Kunstgeschichteder Universitat Wien

3L. Eleen, Acts Illustration in Italy and Byzantium, DOP 31(1977), 253-78, esp. figs. 1, 2, 13, 16 f, 29 f, 36 f, 47 f. I am

grateful to Prof. Eleen for acquainting me with the manuscriptof a study of the illuminations in question and their relation tothe mosaics of the Life of the Virgin in S. Marco.

An aggravating circumstance is the fact that the late Prof.R. M. Kloos dated the mosaics of the Life of the Virgin in the

early thirteenth century on paleographic grounds: Demus, Mo-saics, I/1, 306.