But I’m still lacking one crucial piece of information about the Blows Yard horses and their hospice, so that story will have to wait till next month. As I usually write about Venice, and I’m here (amid mist and acqu
But I’m still lacking one crucial piece of information about the Blows Yard horses and their hospice, so that story will have to wait till next month. As I usually write about Venice, and I’m here (amid mist and acqua alta) now, my thoughts have turned instead to the only kind of horse one finds these days* in la Serenissima – seahorses.
Who isn’t intrigued by sea horses? They are unique in their tail twirling locomotion, the primitive inscrutability of their faces, and also in their breeding habits, which I regard as pioneering: the female deposits eggs in the male’s ‘brood pouch’ where he fertilizes and incubates his young until he goes into labour and gives birth to them.(‘Push, Papa! Push!’).
Here are some seahorses, twirled and untwirled, from the Wellcome Trust's collection.
And they have such wonderful names! Among the 54 known species of this animal, we find Hippocampus abdominalis (pot-bellied seahorse)
Hippocampus biocellatus (false-eyed seahorse)
Hippocampus comes (tiger-tail seahorse)
Hippocampus paradoxus (paradoxical seahorse)
I wrote about the seahorses on this site two years ago.
But to recap briefly, seahorses really were used as good luck talismans in Venice where nursing fishwives sometimes kept a dried example tucked into their bodices to facility the flow of their milk. In 1902, the English folklore specialist Edward Lovett went to Venice where he commissioned some examples of Venetian seahorses in pink and blue glass, which can today be seen at London’s Wellcome Collection. Lovett, the author of Magic in Modern London (1925) believed that the distinctive shape of the gondola’s metal ferro was based on the form of a seahorse.
Venice’s own Natural History Museum keeps a miniature section of the Northern Adriatic Sea’s living natural history in