Table Of ContentSaint Marks
Saint Marks
Words, Images, and What Persists
Jonathan Goldberg
fordham university press
New York 2019
Copyright © 2019 Fordham University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in
any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical,
photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief
quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission
of the publisher.
Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the
per sis tence or accuracy of URLs for external or third- party
Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or w ill
remain, accurate or appropriate.
Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a
variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in
print may not be available in electronic books.
Visit us online at www . fordhampress . com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Goldberg, Jonathan, author.
Title: Saint Marks : words, images, and what persists / Jonathan Goldberg.
Description: First edition. | New York : Fordham University Press, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018024885 | ISBN 9780823282081 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780823282074 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Mark, Saint—Art. | Art—Psychology.
Classification: LCC N8080.M28 G65 2019 | DDC 701/.15—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024885
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
21 20 19 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
contents
Preface vii
List of Figures and Plates xv
Part I painting marks
1. Atmospherics (Bellini) 3
2. Gravity (Tintoretto) 40
Part II writing marks
3. Stones (of Venice) 75
4. Secrets 112
Acknowl edgments 143
Notes 145
Index 165
Color plates follow pages 46 and 78
preface
The title of this book could look like a mistake; however, by naming
St. Mark in the plural, I mean to gesture to a range of associations that at-
tach to the name, and to detach the name “St. Mark” from the singularity
of referentiality. The first half of this book is concerned mainly with one of
these associations, Mark as the patron saint of Venice, and with a group of
paintings produced in the sixteenth century that represent the supposed
life and hagiography of the saint. Venetians claimed Mark b ecause of his
status as an evangelist; these images of him do not represent him as the
author of a gospel, perhaps the first association someone might have with
the name “Mark.” That book also is usually referred to simply as Mark (I
turn to it in the final chapter of this book), but as C. Clifton Black points
out in Mark: Images of an Apostolic Interpreter, nothing in the gospel named
Mark connects it to anyone named Mark in Acts or in New Testament
epistles. Moreover, as Black argues, the Marks (or sometimes John Marks)
mentioned in those texts (texts of varying authority in terms of their sup-
posed authors— Luke or Paul or Peter) never say that any of them wrote a
life of Jesus. Moreover, as Black insists, while biblical scholars, starting
with the f athers of the church, have tried to assem ble a consistent bio-
graphical subject from t hese vari ous Marks, it is impossible to do so, let
alone provide a biography for the author of the gospel called Mark.1 These
dispersed Marks do not produce a biographical subject. “The vari ous
‘Marks’ . . . could be, and sometimes were, blended into one legendary
figure” (148), Black writes, but this was done with little historical warrant.
Mark was connected to the gospel that goes u nder that name by church
fathers in the first few centuries A.D.; as Black notes, t hese patristic texts
make almost no mention of the Mark of Acts or epistles in their creation
of a figure of the author. This authorial personage is exceedingly sketchy;
what the early fathers chose to claim about Mark tells us more about how
a church was being founded than about a person named Mark or even
about the book that was said to be his. None of the texts Black surveys
through the first four centuries of Chris tian ity ever mentions Mark in
vii
viii Preface
connection with Venice, of course ( there was no such city then). That con-
nection is not part of the early legends. For those who later sought to con-
nect the evangelizing Mark with Venice, an occasional vagueness in some
early reports of his activity— usually in Rome, but sometimes elsewhere in
Italy— provided a minimal warrant for a connection to Venice. Most ac-
counts find him in the com pany of St. Peter in Rome. In the third and
fourth centuries there are, however, a number of brief references that place
Mark in Alexandria; these follow on reports that date from the second
century that locate him there. Eusebius’s fourth- century Ecclesiastical His-
tory consolidates this story, although the several accounts of Mark told in
separate places in that book do not entirely tally one with the other. An
Alexandrian locale is impor tant for Venetian claims to Mark made centu-
ries l ater, when his body was supposedly stolen from Alexandria and brought
to Venice, its proper resting place for t hose who believed Mark had been
evangelizing in the Veneto early in the first century; this “recovery” of
Mark’s corpse is dated to the ninth century, some eight hundred years after
his death.
Thanks to his supposed martyrdom in Alexandria, narratives of which
cannot be found before the fifth c entury, Mark is taken to be the founder
of the Coptic Church.2 In a 2011 book, Thomas Oden argues for that as a
fitting end, claiming that Mark was north African by origin; Oden pro-
vides just the kind of biography for the apostle that Black suggests is im-
possible, a singularity that must ignore the incommensurate multiples
that attach to “Mark” in New Testament texts and early patristic writ-
ings.3 Oden’s sources all date from years— centuries— after those that
Black considers; they include numerous apocryphal lives of Mark as well
as texts that form part of the Coptic canon. Accounts of Mark in Egypt
like t hese must lie b ehind the thirteenth- century compendium of lives of
the saints compiled by Jacobus de Voragine. His Legenda aurea supports
the Venetian claims to Mark while adding many tales of posthumous Ital-
ian miracles that provide the subject matter for later biographies and
paintings. These stories are completely separate from the texts more
proximate to the time in which a gospel called Mark became canonical.
There is virtually nothing in the New Testament to support the texts that
relate Mark to Alexandria. T hese texts, the ones upon which Oden de-
pends, omit any connection between Mark and Venice, although Oden
countenances the Venetian “comic postscript” (African Memory of Mark,
169) to his story about Mark insofar as it provides evidence that the Vene-
tians believed the story he tells about Mark’s martyrdom in Alexandria
after he founded a church there.
Preface ix
This sketch of Marks means to serve as the background for the Marks
this book contemplates. I have narrowed my focus in the initial section
of this book, “Painting Marks,” to the images of Mark produced in the six-
teenth century for the Venetian Scuola Grande di San Marco.4 These
paintings draw upon narratives of Mark written to elaborate the life of the
saint summarized by Jacobus de Voragine. Most commentary on them is
concerned with elucidating the narratives, identifying figures in the paint-
ings, and pointing out how the stories and images served Venetian ideology.
Although the early theorization of the goals of painting as articulated by
Leon Battista Alberti in Della pittura— its emphasis on istoria as the crucial
component of painting that links its formal features to narrative effects
that are the basis for a viewer’s identifications— could justify such an ap-
proach to painting, the subordination of image to story, and of story to his-
tory, belies Alberti’s formulation that “the istoria will move the soul of the
beholder when each man painted t here clearly shows the movement of his
own soul.” This proposition could have inspired an art history more like
Aby Warburg’s than most inquiries are; these pursue the questionable sup-
position that paintings tell stories, illustrate texts, and that such narratives
can be translated into history as if it too were simply a linear narrative.5
In her recent book on Venetian modernism, Jennifer Scappettone ar-
gues persuasively for anachronism as the historical milieu of Venice, and
for the laguna as a place of lacunae that cannot be added up to produce
some coherent and singular grand historical narrative. Scappettone exem-
plifies this early in her book by pointing to the two columns erected in the
twelfth c entury in the Piazetta, the ceremonial landing place at the en-
trance to the Piazza San Marco. On one was placed a statue of the
Byzantine St. Theodore, the first patron saint of the city, standing astride
a dragon; on the other column, one finds a lion, the emblem of St. Mark:
the patron saint who replaced Theodore is himself replaced by the lion.
As Scappettone remarks, “ these massive shafts of Egyptian granite, hauled
from Constantinople and installed in the Piazetta around 1172, and the apo-
tropaic statues later installed upon them exemplify the hybrid nature of a
city poised between the Romes of Italy and the East.” Moreover, she con-
tinues, the statue of St. Theodore actually sports a Hellenistic head on its
Roman body over which medieval armor has been added; the supposed
dragon is part crocodile, part dog. “The so- called lion of St. Mark crown-
ing the Eastern shaft, a symbol of Venice’s adoption of a second patron
and consequent departure from Byzantium, is thought to be an archaic
Anatolian bronze chimera whose tail, wings, and Bible were tacked on at
a later date.”6 These anachronistic composites bring together disparate
