Free The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories by Edward Hollis

the building, leaving a denuded shell behind them.
    The crusaders came in the end to the Hippodrome. The scholar Nicetas Choniates, who witnessed to the scene, later recalled how
     
these barbarians, haters of the beautiful, did not pass over the destruction of the statues standing in the Hippodrome and other marvellous work. They cut these into coinage, exhanging great things for small ones and things laboured over at great expense for worthless small change . . . For a few staters, and what is more, copper, they consigned these ancient and revered objects of the nation to the smelting furnace.
     
    And he composed a lament for the lost creatures of the Hippodrome, enumerating their wonderful artistry, the miracles they had performed, and their mythical antecedents.
    What the soldiers did not destroy the Venetians loaded onto their galleys and shipped away, leaving the crusaders behind to rule the city and the empire they had wrecked. Some treasures were lost at sea, some were sold along the way, but a great many made it to Veniceintact. The booty was unloaded into the Arsenale of Venice and unpacked in front of the impatient deputies of the people. Fragments of architecture were lifted onto the wharf: capitals, architraves, and pediments of white marble, columns of red Numidian granite, and green onyx ripped from the shrines and palaces of Constantinople. There was a block of porphyry carved with the crude likenesses of the emperor Diocletian and his deputy caesars, and there were strange and wonderful fragments of bronze sculpture: a lion, a pair of angel’s wings, the cuirass of some ancient general, a crocodile, a disembodied head. Crates were prized open, and a rainbow shower of mosaic chips scattered across the pavement. Other chests revealed grisly relics: the head of Saint John the Baptist, drops of Christ’s blood in a vial, a nail of the Cross, pieces of Saint Lucia, Saint Agatha, Saint Helena, Saint Symeon, Saint Anastasius, Saint Paul the Martyr. There were icons, in which the solemn faces of saints peered through windows of gemstudded incrustation; and, of course, there was a
quadriga
of bronze horses.
    Over the ensuing years, all of these things made their way onto the basilica of San Marco, so that what had been an austere brick structure soon shone, and sparkled, and flashed in the sun. The sheets of marble, onyx, and granite from the churches of Constantinople adorned the outside of the building, so that the nakedness of San Marco was clothed in the borrowed raiment of vanished sanctuaries. The porphyry caesars were set into the corner of the basilica; beside them, two beautiful pilasters from Saint Polyeuktos acted as plinths for the heads of decapitated criminals. The facade of the church was set with reliefs of Hercules, and a head of the emperor Justinian was placed on one pinnacle on the southwest corner. The gilded icons were bolted together to make magnificent altarpieces, set with gems ripped from the bodies of the emperors who had lain in the Heröon. The saints’ relics were stored in the crypt, to be brought out on festival days. The brazen wings and lion were welded together to make the emblem of Saint Mark, while the centurion’s cuirass, the crocodile, and the disembodied head became the body of Saint Theodore; and these two patrons of Venice were placed on top of two colossal columns of Numidian granite, raised by the waterside to receive them. The bronze horses, of course, were placed high on the balcony over the main entrance to thechurch, as if they surmounted a triumphal arch surrounded by a great heap of precious spoils.

     
    I N 1792, TIME began all over again. The people of France deposed and executed their monarch and his nobles and declared the republic, in which all the former subjects of the king became free and equal brotherly citizens. The year of Our Lord 1792 they renamed the Year One. Then, having created the best of all possible worlds, they went out to bring their