IV. ST. MARK’S 73

on a larger scale; and, with the assistance of Byzantine architects, the fabric was carried on under successive Doges for nearly a hundred years; the main building being completed in 1071, but its incrustation with marble not till considerably later. It was consecrated on the 8th of October, 1085,* according to sansovino and the author of the “Chiesa Ducale di S. Marco,” in 1094 according to Lazari, but certainly between 1084 and 1096, those years being the limits of the reign of Vital Falier; I incline to the supposition that it was soon after his accession to the throne in 1085, though Sansovino writes, by mistake, Ordelafo instead of Vital Falier. But, at all events, before the close of the eleventh century the great consecration of the church took place. It was again injured by fire in 1106, but repaired; and from that time to the fall of Venice there was probably no Doge who did not in some slight degree embellish or alter the fabric, so that few parts of it can be pronounced boldly to be of any given date. Two periods of interference are, however, notable above the rest: the first, that in which the Gothic school had superseded the Byzantine towards the close of the fourteenth century, when the pinnacles, upper archivolts, and window traceries were added to the exterior, and the great screen, with various chapels and tabernaclework, to the interior; the second, when the Renaissance school superseded the Gothic, and the pupils of Titian and Tintoret substituted, over one half of the church, their own compositions for the Greek mosaics with which it was originally decorated;† happily, though with no good-will,

* “To God the Lord, the glorious Virgin Annunciate, and the Protector St. Mark.”-Corner, p. 14. It is needless to trouble the reader with the various authorities for the above statements. I have consulted the best. The previous inscription once existing on the church itself:

“Anno milleno transacto bisque trigeno

Desuper undecimo fuit facta primo,”

is no longer to be seen, and is conjectured by Corner, with much probability, to have perished “in qualche ristauro.”

† Signed Bartolomeus Bozza, 1634, 1647, 1656, etc.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]