venth
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Gothic school had superseded the Byzantine towards the close of the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Renaissance school superseded the Gothic, and the pupils of Titian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. Of this
irreparable loss we shall have more to say hereafter; meantime, I wish
only to fix in the reader's mind the succession of periods of
alterations as firmly and simply as possible.

We have seen that the main body of the church may be broadly stated to
be of the eleventh century, the Gothic additions of the fourteenth, and
the restored mosaics of the seventeenth. There is no difficulty in
distinguishing at a glance the Gothic portions from the Byzantine; but
there is considerable difficulty in ascertaining how long, during the
course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, additions were made to
the Byzantine church, which cannot be easily distinguished from the
work of the eleventh century, being purposely executed in the same
manner. Two of the most important pieces of evidence on this point are,
a mosaic in the south transept, and another over the northern door of
the facade; the first representing the interior, the second the
exterior, of the ancient church.

It has just been stated that the existing building was consecrated by
the Doge Vital Falier. A peculiar solemnity was given to that act of
consecration, in the minds of the Venetian people, by what appears to
have been one of the best arranged and most successful impostures ever
attempted by the clergy of the Romish church. The body of St. Mark had,
without doubt, perished in the conflagration of 976; but the revenues
of the church depended too much upon th