St Mark's Basilica

Why it matters

St Mark's Basilica stands at the east end of Piazza San Marco, joined to the Doge's Palace beside it, and for most of its history it was not the city's cathedral at all. It was the doge's chapel, the state church of the Republic of Venice, and it stayed under the doge's authority until the Republic fell in 1797. Only in 1807 did it become the cathedral of the Patriarch of Venice, replacing the older cathedral of San Pietro di Castello.

It exists because of a body. Venetian chronicles tell how two merchants took the relics of Saint Mark the Evangelist from Alexandria in Egypt in 828 or 829 and brought them home, and the city built a church for them beside the doge's fortified residence. Saint Mark became the patron of Venice, and his winged lion its emblem. The present church, the third on the site, was begun probably in 1063 under Doge Domenico Contarini, to show a city growing rich on trade.

A Byzantine church in the West

Its model was the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, a cross-shaped church with five domes, and St Mark's kept that plan: a Greek cross with a dome over the crossing and one over each arm. The builders adapted it for Venetian state ceremony, lengthening the nave toward a raised chancel so processions had somewhere to go. The result looks eastward more than any other great church in Italy, with Romanesque and Islamic details worked in and Gothic ornament added later.

As first built it was a plain brick church. Over the following centuries, and above all in the thirteenth, its walls inside and out were sheathed in marble and precious stone, and much of that was plunder. After the Fourth Crusade of 1204, Venetians stripped churches, palaces and public monuments in Constantinople of columns, reliefs and sculpture and shipped them home; some columns were sliced into panels, others paired across the facades. Venetian carvers then copied the Byzantine capitals so well that some of their work is hard to tell from the originals.

In the same century the low brick domes were given tall outer shells of lead-covered timber with lanterns on top, which is why the domes look bulbous from the square and so much flatter from inside.

What you see outside

The west front faces the length of the Piazza. Its lower register is five deep portals between broad piers, covered with two tiers of columns, most of them spoils of the Crusade. Above the doors, mosaics in the lunettes tell how Saint Mark's body was taken from Alexandria and brought to Venice; only the one on the far left, showing the relics carried into the church, survives from the thirteenth century, and the others were remade between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

The upper register is a crown of Gothic pinnacles and ogee arches added in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, with Saint Mark and angels over the central arch and the winged lion below him. Over the main portal stand the four bronze horses. They came from the Hippodrome of Constantinople and are the only team of horses to survive from classical antiquity; the ones on the balcony are copies, and since 1974 the originals have been kept inside.

Walk around to the south side, facing the Doge's Palace. This is the most richly encrusted facade, and set into the corner of the treasury is the porphyry group of the Tetrarchs, four late Roman emperors embracing, taken from Constantinople like almost everything around them.

What you see inside

You enter through the narthex, the vaulted porch across the front, whose mosaics tell the stories of Genesis and Exodus, from the Creation to Moses. Inside, the domes, vaults and upper walls are covered in gold-ground mosaic showing saints, prophets and scenes from the Bible. Many were retouched or replaced as tastes changed and damaged sections were renewed, so they span some eight hundred years; some are Byzantine masterworks, others follow drawings by Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and Paolo Uccello.

The light is low. Many of the original windows were walled up to make more surface for mosaic, which leaves the areas under the galleries in shadow and makes the gold glow when the lamps are lit.

The chancel is fenced by a Gothic marble screen of 1394, with statues of the Virgin, Saint Mark and the Twelve Apostles. Behind it the high altar has held Saint Mark's relics since 1835, and behind the altar stands the Pala d'Oro, the golden altarpiece of Byzantine enamels on gilded silver. It was ordered from Constantinople in 1102 and installed on the high altar in 1105.

How to visit

The basilica's own site divides a visit into parts: the church, the Pala d'Oro, the museum with the Loggia dei Cavalli, and the Campanile, each with its own entry. The museum is where the original horses now stand, and its loggia is the balcony over the main portal, with the copies beside you and the whole Piazza below.

Allow an hour for the church and the Pala d'Oro and another for the museum and the loggia. It is a working church, and services close parts of it. Lines form across the Piazza on busy days; the basilica sells advance entries on its official site, which is also the only place to check its hours for the day you go (see booking ahead).

Combine it with the Doge's Palace next door and the Piazza outside; together they are the political and religious heart of the old Republic, and they take most of a morning.

Myths and honest notes

Much of the splendor is loot. The horses, the Tetrarchs, many columns and panels, and a good part of the treasury came from the sack of Constantinople in 1204, and the Venetians displayed them as trophies of their power. Napoleon had the horses taken down and shipped to Paris after he conquered Venice in 1797; they were put back in front of the basilica on 13 December 1815.

Saint Mark's body is itself contested. Venice's claim rests on the story of the theft from Alexandria, and in 1968 a portion of the relics was returned to the Coptic Church of Alexandria as a gesture of goodwill, where it was reunited with the saint's head.