Google 3d visualization–electromagnetic field of the venetian lagoon, a quest for an imaginary future artefact.
Once upon a time, a Venetian Captain named Jacopo Orseolo Falier came back from the Second Crusade with three looted Byzantine Columns as a gift for the Doge25 Domenico Michiel, head of the Serenissima26 Republic at the time. The Captain’s fleet faced strong resistance and difficulties in achieving territories towards the Holy Land, thus the Crusade was an almost entirely failing enterprise. However, in Captain Falier’s eyes, such a firmly political and monumental gift would have created room for his personal rising within the social and political milieu of the Republic. He saw in the triptych the symbolic vibrational conjunction of Sky and Earth, Religion and Government, West and East. Upon their arrival from the seas, the columns were unloaded in the main harbour, right in front of the Doge’s Palace, in Saint Mark’s Square. During this process one of the three columns fell into the deep blue sea due to unexpected stormy weather and was lost. As a consequence of this unlucky operation, the other two columns lay on the ground for some time. Nobody wished to take on the responsibility of raising them until the arrival of an astute engineer, Niccolò Barattieri (or Barattiero) who succeeded in raising the massive columns through a technique employing wet ropes. The Engineer was rewarded with the use of the space between the two columns which he assigned to privatised gambling, an utterly illegal practice throughout the Republic at that time. Subsequently, the area became the main site for capital executions and was known for its ritualistic brutality. Even now, superstitious locals refuse to pass between the columns as this would create negative energies and bad luck. Above all, the two lofty columns functioned as a gate for the Serenissima: boats of all sorts arriving from throughout the Mediterranean would observe their striking presence from far away. Their symbolic prominence is also declared by the statues surmounting them: on one, San Teodoro killing the Dragon which had been the former patron of Venice until 828 AD, when the Venetians looted San Marco’s relics in Alexandria of Egypt in order to achieve religious independence from Papal impositions. On the other, San Marco’s Lion, the successive patron of the city that is singularly made out of a looted Chimera, its wings have been later applied as a collage to convert a previously wingless beast into the symbol of San Marco and its Republic.