Just a few more random Venice thoughts then I'll stop

1. My second thought on entering San Marco, after wow, was to feel sorry for Agia Sofia. It was like that once, as you can tell from the odd bits and pieces that survive there. Once it was the religious centre of an empire that lasted for a thousand years, which is how long all empires are supposed to last for, like in Revelation. Even though some of the mosaics in San Marco were badly damaged, and repaired by people who couldn't escape perspective, at least it's still there, and still a place with a proper function. Whereas Agia Sofia is full of people chatting on mobiles, and has no obvious purpose any more except the chewed-up leavings of history. It seems like there's some sort of conspiracy of mutual forgetting between Istanbul and the west which pilfered it. Wikipedia in English finishes its entry on the bronze horses of San Marco, looted from Constantinople, by saying that Venice has no plans to send back either the originals or copies. But what would Istanbul want with them? They used to say that the tetrachs on the corner of San Marco near the Doges' Palace were Lombardic, until they found the missing foot of one of them still attached to a plinth in Istanbul. There's not really anywhere that celebrates the Roman Empire after Rome; Rome is hardly going to, or Italians in general, and for the peoples actually living there now it's not a happy past. The Greeks might except that it's all so very political for them. Nor was it approved of by an old-style Classical education; Gibbon gets very sniffy about the parade of eunuchs and low-born empresses who ran the show. This is why John Julius Norwich's History of Byzantium is so brilliant. It tells a non-Classical story in that Tacitus-style deadpan forward-moving manner which is also characteristic of Robert Graves's better Roman fiction. I remember when I first read it I kept sneaking out of my cousin's wedding feast in a posh hotel in Scotland to finish volume 3. (Admittedly, wedding feasts aren't really my thing.)

2. One morning I went on a tour of the orologio and then round San Marco and its museum, and then in the afternoon I had booked a ticket for the Galleria dell'Accademia, where there happened to be a show about Late Titian. By the time I was only a few rooms into the Galleria, which has wonderful ceilings by the way, covered in the winged cherubim, I started to have major eye hurt from all the art. I remember going to Italy for the first time when I was about 15 to Florence with a small school group. I shortly began to feel like that if I saw one more consumptive almond-eyed madonna on a gold background some vital connection between my eyes and my brain would be cauterised forever. (This is a tad ironic as consumptive almond-eyed madonnas on gold backgrounds are exactly my favourite sort of art these days.) So at the Accademia I was having to look away from anything I didn't really want to look at so as to preserve my art-brain capacity. Afterwards I decided to take a break and spend the rest of the day shopping for earrings on Murano, and I found that looking at the beautiful lagoon, or even the man-made beauty of the Doges' Palace and other things on the waterfront, didn't hurt at all. So there must be some part of the brain that responds to art, rather than just beauty, and which we tire out when we look at it too much. Scientists must surely have hooked people up to machines and worked out which bit of the brain it is. So couldn't they make a little portable headset? You could plug it in to your temples and walk round art galleries with it on, and it would give you a reading: 73% art, or 20% art, 60% architecture. This would put an end to all that tedious debate. Like in Monty Python where they decide to stop arguing about the existence of God, and a university philosopher and a cardinal just get in the ring and wrestle it out. (Result: God exists by two falls to a submission.)

3. How sinister is this? This country is a little sick.