St Mark’s Basilica: the gold, the horses, and what your ticket opens

The Basilica is dark when you walk in, and then your eyes adjust and the whole upper half of the building turns out to be mosaic on a gold ground — domes, arches, vaults, the lot. It is the single most overwhelming interior in Italy and it is the part that comes with basic entry.

The Pala d’Oro. Behind the high altar, a screen of gold and cloisonné enamel set with a few thousand stones, assembled and reassembled over four centuries. It is roped off from the main route and costs extra. It is also, in the honest opinion of most people who pay, worth it.

The treasury. A side room of reliquaries, chalices and hardstone vessels, a great deal of which arrived from Constantinople in 1204 and never went back. Separate again.

The loggia and the horses. Up a steep stair to the museum level, where the four original bronze horses stand indoors — the ones on the balcony outside are copies — and out onto the balcony itself for the view down over the Piazza. This is the add-on most people are gladdest they took, partly for the horses and partly because it is the only way to look at the square from above without queueing for the Campanile.

St Mark’s does not look like other Italian cathedrals, and the reason is that Venice did not look east and west the way other Italian cities did. The plan is a Greek cross with five domes, which is Byzantine rather than Roman, and the whole building reads as something that belongs half to Constantinople.

The decoration makes the point more bluntly. A great deal of what is attached to the outside and inside of the church arrived as spoil after the sack of Constantinople in 1204: columns, carvings, the porphyry group of four emperors embedded in the corner by the palace, and the four bronze horses themselves. The building is, among other things, a catalogue of what the Republic brought home.

The mosaics went up over centuries rather than in one campaign, which is why the styles shift as you move through. And the gold ground is not decoration for its own sake: in a building with small windows, gold tesserae set at slightly different angles were the way to make an interior that glows rather than merely being lit.

None of that is obvious standing in the nave, which is the honest case for having somebody with you who can point at a column and tell you where it came from.