Byzantine Culture

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The Pala d'Oro

The golden altarpiece of San Marco holds around 250 Byzantine enamel plaques, most taken from Constantinople in 1204. Its four campaigns, its enamels, its gems and what it tells us about Byzantine goldwork.

Behind the high altar of the basilica of San Marco in Venice stands a screen of gold, enamel and gemstones about three and a half metres wide and two metres high, containing roughly two hundred and fifty enamel plaques and something in the order of thirteen hundred pearls and precious stones. It is called the Pala d’Oro, the golden altarpiece, and it is the largest surviving assemblage of Byzantine cloisonné enamel in the world.

Almost none of it was made in Venice, and most of it was not acquired honestly.

Four Campaigns

The Pala was not made at once. Venetian records and the object itself indicate at least four stages:

976. Doge Pietro I Orseolo commissioned an altar frontal from Constantinople. Nothing identifiable survives from this commission.

1105. Doge Ordelaffo Falier commissioned a new and larger work, again from Constantinopolitan enamellers. A substantial portion of the present enamels belongs to this campaign, including the large central Pantokrator and the row of prophets.

1209. After the Fourth Crusade, Doge Pietro Ziani had the Pala enlarged to incorporate enamels looted from Constantinople in 1204. The upper register — six large festival scenes flanking an archangel — comes from this material.

1342–1345. The whole was reset by the Sienese goldsmith Giovanni Paolo Boninsegna in a gothic frame of gilded silver, which is the arrangement seen today.

The object is therefore a Venetian gothic frame containing Byzantine enamels of at least three different dates and origins, some commissioned and some stolen — which is a reasonable description of San Marco as a whole, as St Mark’s Basilica explains.

Where the Looted Enamels Came From

The six large upper panels — the Entry into Jerusalem, the Anastasis, the Crucifixion, the Ascension, Pentecost and the Dormition — are generally agreed to have come from the Pantokrator monastery in Constantinople, the Komnenian imperial foundation that served as the residence of the Venetian clergy during the Latin occupation.

They are considerably larger than the other plaques, and they were probably made as a templon beam decoration for that monastery’s church. Their quality is the highest in the whole work.

The Enamels

The technique is described in Byzantine enamel and metalwork. Briefly: gold strips soldered on edge to a gold plate form cells, the cells are filled with powdered coloured glass and fired, and the surface is ground and polished flat.

At the scale of the Pala plaques — many are only a few centimetres — this means individual faces built from a handful of glass fields separated by gold wires perhaps a tenth of a millimetre thick. The colours are the standard Byzantine palette: translucent blue and green, opaque red, turquoise, white, and the imperial purple.

The subjects cover the full range of Byzantine iconography: Christ Pantokrator enthroned at the centre, flanked by evangelists; the Virgin; angels; apostles and prophets in ranks; scenes from the life of Christ; scenes from the life of St Mark, added for the Venetian context.

The Contested Portraits

Two panels have caused a great deal of argument.

One shows an empress labelled in Latin as Irene, standing in imperial regalia. Another, opposite, shows a figure originally labelled as a Byzantine emperor, whose inscription was later altered to read as Doge Ordelaffo Falier — the head and inscription reworked, in what is visibly a later intervention.

The most common reading is that both panels originally depicted the Komnenian imperial couple — John II and his wife Eirene — and that the Venetians re-labelled the male figure to convert an imperial portrait into a ducal one. Alternative readings have been proposed, including that the “Irene” is the empress Eirene of Athens or a different Komnenian figure.

Whatever the details, the alteration is a compact demonstration of what Venice did with Byzantine material: kept it, admired it, and made it Venetian.

The Gems

The stones number over thirteen hundred and include garnets, sapphires, emeralds, amethysts, rubies, topazes and pearls. An inventory of 1796 counted them; the count has been repeated since with small variations.

They are mostly uncut or simply polished en cabochon, in the medieval manner — faceting is a later development. Their function is not primarily decorative in the modern sense. In Byzantine and medieval thought, precious stones carried associations of light and of the heavenly Jerusalem described in Revelation, whose walls are built of jasper, sapphire, emerald and the rest. A gem-encrusted altarpiece was a representation of that city.

Display and Concealment

For most of its history the Pala was hidden. It stood behind the altar and was covered for ordinary use by a painted wooden panel — the pala feriale, a fourteenth-century polyptych by Paolo Veneziano, now displayed separately in the basilica’s museum — and revealed only on major feasts.

That practice preserved it. Exposure to candle smoke, incense and handling is what destroys enamel and gilding, and the Pala spent most of the last seven hundred years behind a shutter.

Napoleon’s administration took some of the stones in 1797. The work was restored in 1834 and again in the twentieth century.

Seeing It

The Pala is behind the high altar of San Marco and requires a separate ticket from the main basilica entry; there is usually a queue, and visitors are moved past at a brisk pace.

Two pieces of practical advice. Take binoculars or a camera with a decent zoom — the individual plaques are small and the barrier keeps you a couple of metres back, and the detail that makes the work extraordinary is invisible at that distance to the naked eye. And go in the afternoon if possible, when the basilica’s own gold mosaics are lit and the relationship between the altarpiece and the building becomes obvious: the Pala is a miniature of the church around it.

The Enamels by Group

Distinguishing the Pala’s components is the first step in reading it, and the groups are reasonably well established.

The upper register: six large festival scenes flanking an archangel — Entry into Jerusalem, Anastasis, Crucifixion, Ascension, Pentecost, Dormition. These are the largest and finest plaques, generally agreed to come from the Pantokrator monastery in Constantinople and to have arrived in 1209 as loot from 1204. They were probably a templon beam decoration.

The central Pantokrator, enthroned, flanked by the four evangelists — from the 1105 commission under Doge Ordelaffo Falier.

The rows of prophets, apostles and angels — mostly 1105, with some earlier material.

The scenes of the life of St Mark, added for the Venetian context, in a style close to the Byzantine ones but made for Venice.

The imperial and ducal portraits, discussed below, which are the most disputed pieces on the object.

The gothic frame, gilded silver with enamel and gems, by Giovanni Paolo Boninsegna, 1342–1345.

The Altered Portrait

The panel that has generated most of the literature is the one whose inscription was changed.

A standing figure in imperial regalia — the loros, the crown with pendilia, the labarum — was originally labelled as a Byzantine emperor. At some point the head and the inscription were reworked to identify the figure as Doge Ordelaffo Falier, and the alteration is visible: the lettering does not match the surrounding work and the head sits awkwardly.

The companion panel shows an empress labelled Irene, unaltered.

The usual reconstruction is that the pair depicted John II Komnenos and his wife Eirene of Hungary, and that the Venetians converted the emperor into their own doge while leaving the empress alone — possibly because a female figure raised no competing claim.

Alternative identifications have been proposed for the empress, including Eirene of Athens and other Komnenian figures, and the dating of the alteration ranges from the thirteenth century to the fourteenth.

Whatever the details, the object records an act of appropriation in metal: a Byzantine imperial portrait, looted or commissioned, reissued as a Venetian one.

The Pala Feriale

The painted cover deserves attention in its own right and is easy to miss, since it hangs in the basilica’s museum rather than behind the altar.

The pala feriale — the “weekday altarpiece” — was painted in 1345 by Paolo Veneziano and his sons to shield the gold Pala on ordinary days, when it was closed. It is a polyptych in two registers: saints above, scenes from the life of St Mark below.

Its interest is twofold. Artistically it is a major work by the leading Venetian painter of the fourteenth century, and its debt to Byzantine models — gold ground, frontal figures, the conventions of the icon — makes visible the maniera greca discussed in crusader art and Byzantium and Byzantine influence on the Renaissance.

Functionally it explains the Pala’s survival. A gold and enamel altarpiece kept behind a painted shutter for six centuries, opened only on feast days, was protected from the candle smoke, incense and handling that destroy enamel. The Pala d’Oro is in the condition it is because for most of its life nobody could see it.

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