RESTORATION OF ST. MARK'S AT VENICE.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 1846, 22 January 1880, Page 3

RESTORATION OF ST. MARK'S AT VENICE.

There is great agitation in English art eireles about, the proposed re-building of part o£ St. Mark's, Venice The " Globe " tells us that —" The church oE St. Mark at Venice, respecting the proposed restoration of which there has arisen so keen a feeling in England, and especially at the elder university, is the second which has occupied that famous site to the east of the grand square. The firßt of these edifices was erected in 813, about 100 years after the death of the first Doge, and four years after the grand viotory over Pepin and the Franks at the battle of Albiola. It is, however, remarkable that the body of St. Mark is not supposed to have baen transferred to Venice from Alexandria until the year 829, sixteen years after the church was finished. The original structure was destroyed by fire in 976, and was not replaced until a csntury later, when the fabric of the present cburch, built in the Byzintine style, and in the form of a Greek crosß, was raised upon new foundations. The great fire of 1106, which destroyed thirty other churches, fortunat?ly spared that of St. Mark ; and the architecture remained untouched until the 14lh century, when numerous additions in the Gothic style were made. These were further supplemented by Renaissance alterations in the 17th cer.tury ; and in 1807 the building, having its present appearance, became the cathedral and seat of the Patriarch, under the now political and ecclesiastical regime inaugurated by the Treaty of Presburg. The church of St. Mark is, or was, properly iu its origin the Chapel of the Doge, and is of a collegiate and not parochial character. The ritual observed in it was borrowed from Alexandria at the time when the remains of St. Mark were brought there, and the Pope was never ablo to interfere successfully with the maintenance of this independent custom. There is also somethirg Oriental in the BBpect of the grett dome and the four other smaller domes which rise from the transepts, having a low elevation and pi'reed with a row of small windows. I"i is not known how many of the o'her decorations of tlio exterior and interior are of Bvznntine origin, but it cannot be doubted that a vast number of them wore brought back from the Eastern capital, together with the famous horses, in 1205."