page_title: Late Antique and medieval mosaics in Italy
section_title: Venice
hierarchical_section_title: Late Antique and medieval mosaics in Italy / Early Medieval mosaics (550-1200) / Venice
caption_attribution_description: English: St. Mark's Basilica, Venice. detail of its mosaics
context_page_description: Italy has the richest concentration of Late Antique and medieval mosaics in the world. Although the art style is especially associated with Byzantine art and many Italian mosaics were probably made by imported Greek-speaking artists and craftsmen, there are surprisingly few significant mosaics remaining in the core Byzantine territories. This is especially true before the Byzantine Iconoclasm of the 8th century.
context_section_description: The earliest remaining mosaics in the neighbourhood of Venice are on its early rival island Torcello, where the Cathedral has a late 12th-century apse mosaic of famous beauty of the standing Virgin Hodegetria, isolated against a huge gold background.  A Last Judgement on the west wall is of the same period; other mosaics in the cathedral are from the beginning of the 12th and perhaps the 11th centuries. The Church of Santa Maria e San Donato on the nearby island of Murano has a similar, but 13th century, Virgin apse mosaic, as well as an opus sectile floor from 1140.
  The present St Mark's Basilica in Venice was begun in 1061, and its walls have been entirely decorated with mosaic, often replaced, with work continuing until the 17th century. St Mark's is the largest of the remaining handful of buildings, in Ravenna, Sicily, Turkey and Greece, which retain the unique impact of a full mosaic interior.  Some traces of mosaic from before a devastating fire in 1106 probably remain, but the majority of the original mosaics date from the following three centuries, though often heavily restored or entirely redone as copies.  They move from a Byzantinesque style to a more Romanesque one. Later Renaissance additions are fortunately not over-prominent, as they are generally regarded as unhappy mistakes.
  Otto Demus believes that the early mosaics were created by local workshops aware of recent Byzantine work, and perhaps including, or trained by, Greeks.  Whatever there may once have been, hardly any other mosaic work remains in the city.
caption: St Mark's Basilica, Venice
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS Windows", "Image DateTime": "2010:12:15 11:03:32", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "12237", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "628", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "650"}