Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Veneto-Byzantine
If Venice seems to have unfair aesthetic advantages, it did have an early start: cosmopolitan
flair has made Venetian architecture a standout since the 7th century. While Venice proper
was still a motley, muddy outpost of refugee settlements, the nearby island of Torcello was
a booming Byzantine trade hub of 20,000 to 30,000 people. At its spiritual centre was the
Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta, which from afar looks like a Byzantine-style basilica on
loan from Ravenna. But look closely: those 7th- to 9th-century apses have Romanesque
arches, and the iconostasis separating the central nave from the presbytery is straight out of
an Eastern Orthodox church. Back in Torcello's heyday, traders from France, Greece or
Turkey could have stepped off their boats and into this church, and all felt at home.
But to signal to visitors that they had arrived in a powerful trading centre, Santa Maria
Assunta glitters with 12th- to 13th-century golden mosaics. Recent excavations reveal Tor-
cello glassworks dating from the 7th century, and those furnaces would have been kept
glowing through the night to produce the thousands of tiny glass tesserae (tiles) needed to
create the mesmerising Madonna hovering over the altar - not to mention the rather alarm-
ingly detailed Last Judgment mosaic, with hellfire licking at the dancing feet of the
damned.
Breakout Byzantine Style
When Venice made its definitive break with the Byzantine empire in the 9th century, it
needed a landmark to set the city apart, and a platform to launch its golden age of maritime
commerce. Basilica di San Marco captures Venice's grand designs in five vast gold mosaic
domes, refracting stray sunbeams like an indoor fireworks display. Even today, the sight
elicits audible gasps from crowds of international admirers. The basilica began with a triple
nave in the 9th century, but after a fire two wings were added to form a Greek cross, in an
idea borrowed from the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. The finest artisans
from around the Mediterranean were brought in to raise the basilica's dazzle factor to
mind-boggling, from 11th- to 13th-century marble relief masterpieces over the
Romanesque entry arches to the intricate Islamic geometry of 12th- to 13th-century inlaid
semiprecious stone floors.
Since the basilica was the official chapel of the doge, every time Venice conquered new
territory by commerce or force, the basilica displayed the doge's share of the loot - hence
the walls of polychrome marble pilfered from Egypt, and 2nd-century Roman bronze
horses looted from Constantinople's hippodrome in 1204. The basilica's ornament shifted
