Mark's."[149]
This first church was however destroyed by fire, when the Ducal Palace
was burned in the revolt against Candiano, in 976. It was partly
rebuilt by his successor, Pietro Orseolo, on a larger scale; and, with
the assistance of Byzantine architects, the fabric was carried on under
successive Doges for nearly a hundred years; the main building being
completed in 1071, but its incrustation with marble not till
considerably later. It was consecrated on the 8th of October, 1085,[150]
according to Sansovino and the author of the _Chiesa Ducale di S.
Marco_, in 1094 according to Lazari, but certainly between 1084 and
1096, those years being the limits of the reign of Vital Falier; I
incline to the supposition that it was soon after his accession to the
throne in 1085, though Sansovino writes, by mistake, Ordelafo instead
of Vital Falier. But, at all events, before the close of the eleventh
century the great consecration of the church took place. It was again
injured by fire in 1106, but repaired; and from that time to the fall
of Venice there was probably no Doge who did not in some slight degree
embellish or alter the fabric, so that few parts of it can be
pronounced boldly to be of any given date. Two periods of interference
are, however, notable above the rest: the first, that in which the
Gothic school had superseded the Byzantine towards the close of the
fourteenth century, when the pinnacles, upper archivolts, and window
traceries were added to the exterior, and the great screen with various
chapels and tabernacle-work, to the interior; the second, when the
Renaissance school superseded the Gothic, and the pupils of Titian
and Tintoret substituted, over one half of the church, their own
compositions for the Greek mosaics with which it was originally
decorated;[151] happily, though with no good will, having left enough
to enable us to imagine and lament what they destroyed.
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