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

message to the less enlightened nations of Europe: the ramshackle duchies, republics, counties, and prince bishoprics of the old Holy Roman Empire.
    Of the republic’s free, equal, and brotherly citizens, none was more zealous in the service of his country than Napoleon Bonaparte. An Alexander, an Achilles—an Apollo, to be sure, in his own estimation, and a Nero in that of his enemies—Napoleon crossed the Alps and descended into Italy with dreams of glory. Genoa, Tuscany, Rome, and Naples fell before the revolutionary conqueror, but the Republic of Venice ignored the signs of its approaching doom. The Venetians even allowed Napoleon’s armies to cross their territory as they wrecked the ancient order of Italy. “Venice has always been here,” they said to themselves. “Venice answers to no one. Venice is a free city, suspended on the face of the water, floating between Orient and Occident.”
    Then, on 20 April 1798, a warship entered the lagoon of Venice unannounced, a French vessel named the
Libérateur
. The Venetian government, not in the mood for Napoleon’s brand of liberation, ordered its guns to fire on the ship, and they killed its captain. Napoleon was incandescent: “The murder of the commander of the
Libérateur
,” he declaimed, “is without parallel in the annals of the nations of our time.” He set out to avenge it. Within two weeks his forces were at the shores of the Venetian lagoon. Napoleon sent the Venetians an ultimatum: surrender their republic to the revolution, or see it demolished by modern artillery, against which the water between the city and the mainland would prove no defense.
    Once upon a time, the Venetians would have laughed in the face of such a provocation; but on 12 May the Great Council of the republic was called, which all the ancient families listed in the Golden Bookwere invited to attend. Few bothered. Many had already loaded up their boats and left for the mainland. The council did not even have a quorum, with only 537 members attending out of a necessary 600, and this sorry rump of an assembly voted by 512 to 20 to accede to Napoleon’s demands. Five members abstained.
    So ended the Most Serene Republic of Venice. The doge walked out of the council chamber, returned to his apartments, and handed his traditional phrygian cap and his ancient ring of office to his manservant. “Take them away,” he said. “We shan’t be needing these anymore.” The French forces were welcomed by the Venetian mob, which was delighted to have ousted the ancient oligarchy of the doge and the families of the Golden Book. They erected a tree of liberty in the Piazza San Marco, and they danced around it, singing revolutionary songs of freedom. They congratulated themselves that the old order was past.
    Traveling with the French forces on their campaign was the man who had become known as the “Eyes of Napoleon.” Baron Dominique-Vivant Denon was a connoisseur and a good friend of Napoleon’s wife, Josephine. At the triumphant entries into ancient cities, at peace conferences and the signing of treaties, he was always there, telling his master what to plunder, what to steal, and what to extort. Denon made sure that a demand for works of art—twenty paintings, in total—was included in the terms of surrender dictated to the Venetians. It was these paintings that were unwrapped in the Louvre on the day of the triumph of Year Seven.
    But the French liberators of Venice went much further than collecting pictures, for Napoleon was no mere connoisseur. The gilded barge of the doge was burned and sunk, the winged lion of Saint Mark and Saint Theodore’s crocodile were removed from their eminences. And then Napoleon sent his troops to the triumphal arch of the Venetian republic, the facade of San Marco, and removed the bronze
quadriga
that surmounted it. Denon had told him that these horses had once pulled the chariots of the emperors of Constantinople, of Nero, and of Augustus, even, perhaps,