THE PRODUCTION OF EX NOVO SPOLIA AND THE CREATION OF HISTORY IN THIRTEENTH-CENTURY VENICE

This article argues against the wide-spread assumption that San Marco's façade decoration is an agglomeration of triumphal spolia, often said to be looted during the Fourth Crusade (1204). However, many of the alleged trophy spolia from Constantinople are, in fact, works produced ex novo by Venetian artists of the thirteenth century. The five case studies presented in this article demonstrate that these sculptural works are not late antique works, as has been increasingly argued by scholarship since the 1980s, but medieval recreations inspired by late antique and Byzantine visual culture. Instead of reading Venice's medieval material culture as the product of looting and the desire to display trophies, we should understand it as a visual reflection of the city's identification with the cultural heritage of the Eastern Mediterranean. This hypothesis is not only supported by the realization that large parts of the decoration are pieces created ex novo instead of trophy spolia, but also by contemporary written sources. No documents from before the early modern period mention any trophies that had been taken from Constantinople to Venice in order to be put on display. The scant evidence we have rather points to the import of marble to Venice from sites that were no longer in use. The reason for this artistic effort is not to create a new Constantinople, but rather to visibly embrace the (Eastern) Roman legacy and to visualize the presence of a sustained and complex Roman history in thirteenth-century Venice.