Stones in Venice: recycled marble from Constantinople and Athens

Michael Vickers

Abstract:

Venice was built on a mud flat in the Lagoon: all the building materials-timber, bricks, stone and marble had to be imported from elsewhere. It is usually impossible to say precisely where the marble comes from beyond identifying the original quarries. Exotic marbles in Venice were rarely newly quarried, however, but were recycled from earlier buildings whose ruins were to be found in the lands of the eastern Mediterranean that the Venetians controlled. Fragments of Proconnesian marble in a and around the basilica of San Marco (notably the lily capitals on the façade, and the so-called Pilastri Acritani) come from the Constantinopolitan church of St Polyeuktos, excavated in the 1960s under the auspices of Dumbarton Oaks. A monument at the Arsenal for Francesco Morosini, under whose command a "chance shot" hit the Parthenon with unfortunate results, probably incorporates reworked fragments of that building. The imagery of the Morosini monument is comparable with that of the Parthenon's west pediment.

Short bibliography and/or website on lecture topic (for lay reader):

J. Binder, "The West Pediment of the Parthenon: Poseidon," Studies Presented to Sterling Dow on his Eightieth Birthday (Durham, NC, 1984) 15-22.

R.M. Harrison, A Temple for Byzantium: the discovery and excavation of
Anicia Juliana's palace-church in Istanbul (Austin, Texas 1989).

C. Renfrew and J. Springer Peacy, "Aegean marble: a petrological study", Annual of the British School at Athens 63 (1968) 45-66.

M. Vickers, "Wandering stones: Venice, Constantinople and Athens", in K.-L. Selig and E. Sears (eds.), The Verbal and the Visual: Essays in Honor of William S. Heckscher (New York, Italica Press, 1990), 225-242.