More Mosaic Madness, from the Adriatic to the Great Plains

Ravenna’s mosaics started a craze that’s gone national in the U.S.

O n Thursday I wrote about mosaics — not the best-known medium for art — and not any old mosaics but the ones in Ravenna in Emilia-Romagna, a hefty region in Italy wedged among Tuscany, Lombardy, the Veneto, and the Marche. From the tomb of Galla Placidia, the last of the Roman Empire’s femme fatales and premier intriguers, to Sant’Apollinare Nuovo and San Vitale — a scant 150 years or so — we see the end of Roman naturalism in art and the flower of Byzantium’s flat abstraction. It’s an evolution not only in style but in substance. Divinities no longer walked among us but existed as insubstantial, as symbols.

Whether you absorb them as theology or for their beauty, Galla Placidia’s tomb and Ravenna’s two baptisteries and three churches are among Europe’s great monuments. Today I’ll write about one last church in Ravenna and then jump across the sea, back home, and America’s mosaic treasures. The ne plus ultra are to be found in Lincoln, Neb., at the state capitol, but that’s Saturday’s story.

But, first, to Classe, a small settlement in Ravenna that’s a short bus or train ride from the city center. I visit every time I’m in Ravenna, itself nice and compact today, but the city was the last capital of the western half of the Roman Empire, while Constantinople was the hub of the eastern half. It’s hard to say that the mosaics of Sant’Apollinare in Classe are the tesserae de résistance, given the downtown competition. Still, the church’s sweep of emerald-green flora and fauna, royals and rainbows, prophets, saints, Jesus, the hand of God, and narrative coherence — well, they persuade us that miracles can and do happen.

In front of the church of Sant’Apollinare in Classe, bronze sculptures of cows occupy a field as flat as Nebraska, suggesting real cows picked up and set down. It was not forever thus. Classe comes from the Latin word classis, meaning fleet. Octavian, later Emperor Augustus, established Classe in 27 b.c. as the port for his Adriatic fleet. At its peak, the port was able to park hundreds of warships. Over centuries, with the Romans gone, the port filled with silt. Classe’s last blast was in a.d. 549, when Bishop Maximian – also known as Maximianus — dedicated the church, around the same time as San Vitale. By then the western half of the Roman Empire was no more. Emperor Justinian ruled what was left, still massive and based in Constantinople.

The apse is the thing. In the city center, the mosaic programs tend to be busy, packed with processions and with every inch filled by a mosaic figure, flower, fauna, or design. The exception is the earliest — Galla Placidia’s tomb — and that’s a scene of profound serenity. In Classe, the tranquil mood goes big. Sant’Apollinare in Classe is probably the latest of Ravenna’s mosaicized churches. Its apse was, more or less, finished in the 580s, so it serves as a bookend — chronologically but also in mood — to Galla Placidia’s tomb, which is from the late 420s. Mosaics above the apse were added in the 800s, so I’ll focus only on the early and best ones.

Closest to us is an emerald-green mosaic garden, with birds flying among the leaves and Apollinare standing in the middle of a row of sheep and trees. He was among the earliest evangelists in Italy, based in Ravenna around the time of Emperor Claudius in the 40s and 50s, so Jesus had been crucified only a decade or so earlier. He was repeatedly arrested, beaten, and forced to walk on hot coals before he was finally killed in Classe. Before he died, he predicted further persecutions of Christians and the Church’s eventual ascendancy and freedom to worship.

A gold cross in the center of a blue, star-speckled orb is above the garden. Christ’s tiny face is in the middle of the cross, and a large portrait of Christ is above the cross and orb. The larger Christ is probably from the eighth century, so I always focus on the apse topped by the hand of God and edit out of my thinking what’s above. Sunrise clouds float, birds sing, and flora is at its peak. Christ is flanked by angels. Above the orb but below Christ, the image of a divine hand — less is more — reaches toward it and the altar. God isn’t a figure to be depicted with abandon or head-to-toe. He’s everywhere but nowhere to be found. The hand — what makes and does — is expressive and succinct.

The subject is the Transfiguration. That’s when Jesus took Apostles Peter, James, and John with Him to pray. Moses and Elijah appear as Jesus’s face and clothes burst with light. “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him,” God reveals. The two Old Testament giants endorse the revelation, uniting Old and New Testaments. To the right and left of the orb are the Greek letters Alpha and Omega, and above them is ΙΧΘΥΣ, the Greek word for fish, whose letters are the initials of the Greek words meaning “Jesus Christ, Son of God, the Savior” — what the Transfiguration delivers.

I love the colored clouds, the emerald-green, and little things like the bees on Apollinare’s chasuble. Bees make nectar into honey and wax. Honey nourishes, and with wax we make candles and light. A garden’s a garden because human hands cultivate it from the wild.

Ninety-nine stars evoke Jesus’s parable of the lost sheep in which he left 99 sheep to look for the lost one. It’s also Abraham’s age when God appears to him, linking the two events. The south wall of the apse shows Melchizedek, the first priest in the Old Testament, behind an altar offering bread and wine. Abel, the first martyr, offers a lamb on one side of him. Abraham offers his son Isaac on the other.

It’s majestic and soothing, the garden embracing, the many greens and yellows setting off red flowers and white sheep and doves. Apollinare, the priest, is the intermediary between us and our own Transfiguration, so the program nicely unites past, present, and future, but it’s the peace that the scene suggests that has always pleased me. I tend to see the mosaics in Ravenna in chronological order, so Classe’s are last, the dessert.

Last week I wrote about my visits to Ravenna every few years as a stocktaking. It’s a place I’ve visited since I was a child. At night, it’s like the set of a mystery movie. It helps that Dante finished The Divine Comedy in Ravenna and died there, and he molders there still. I’m not naturally reflective, but the art and atmosphere always put me in that frame of mind. I got to Ravenna and back once more and, turning 70 in a few short weeks, I’m happy, healthy, settled, grateful, and I love my job. The mosaics look the same as they did when I was a young man, so I must look the same! This would indeed mean that the hand of God does plastic surgery on the side.

Renaissance naturalism and the fall of Byzantium ended the primacy of mosaics as a decorative element. It wasn’t until the 1870s that the medium revived. Then, Italian glass and tile masters poured into the United States. Designers were high on mosaics — the look of abbondanza demanded them — and now they had a workforce that could make them.

It’s not far-fetched to think that the Impressionists and especially the next generation — artists such as Seurat and Signac — thought about the old mosaics, giving the medium modern cred. Pointillism à la Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is, like mosaic, the application of tiny dots of pure color side by side so the eye mixes them. We know that Klimt went to Ravenna and absorbed what he saw as well.

Since I love Ravenna’s mosaics so much, I look for mosaics here and find them with delight. A few months ago, I wrote about a commissioned ceiling mosaic at Notre Dame’s new university art museum. Last week in Wichita, I saw Joan Miró’s 1-million-piece marble-and-glass Personnages Oiseaux on the exterior wall of Wichita State University’s art museum. It’s from the early 1980s, one of his last works. The subject is the Surrealist bird – crazy, I know – and at 50 feet wide, it makes a statement.

In 1907, Tiffany & Co. designed a 6,000-square-foot glass mosaic ceiling for the old Marshall Field department store in Chicago. It draws from the dome of Galla Placidia’s tomb for its stars and flourish designs, but it has no narrative content. It’s made from favrile glass, whose color and texture possibilities outstrip Ravenna tesserae. It’s lovely, to be sure, and decorative, but it seems mid-grade octane.

I feel the same way about the massive mosaic program at the Basilica Cathedral of St. Louis in St. Louis — 83,000 square feet, more than 41 million tesserae, and 7,000 colors. That mosaic project started in 1912 and finished in 1988. I saw it once and thought it was both overwhelming in size and derivative of medieval Italian and Byzantine mosaics. It’s tame; it’s meaning with no bubbles. This happens when artists take an old style and imitate it rather than make it their own.

Mosaics are indestructible, so, over the past 20 or so years, new mosaic walls have been commissioned from Chuck Close, Elizabeth Murray, Katherine Bradford, Faith Ringgold, Yayoi Kusama, and even Yoko Ono, at the 72nd Street subway stop under the Dakota in Manhattan – it’s the best art she’s ever made. It’s safe to say there’s a mosaic revival in America now.

Hildreth Meière’s Red Room, once the main banking room at the Irving Trust Company at One Wall Street, was designed by Meière (1892–1961) as a cavernous space with abstract patterns and gradations of red and orange. When it opened in 1931, it was said to be the snazziest Art Deco space in the city. It still is, though after its recent restoration, it decorates not a bank — gone — but what’s now the shoe department at Printemps. Meière was a muralist, tile designer, and mosaicist whose tile roundels outside Radio City Music Hall are seen by thousands of people every day.

Meière’s two mosaic triumphs in New York are from the late 1920s into 1930: Temple Emanu El on Fifth Avenue, which is the world’s largest synagogue, and St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal church on Park Avenue near Grand Central Station. Emanu El’s mosaics are Byzantine-inspired but done in Art Deco style, with bold geometric shapes, zigzags and chevrons, and luscious, saturated color. The synagogue can be seen only on scheduled, organized tours, while St. Bart’s is often open to the public. At St. Bart’s, Meière designed The Transfiguration for the apse in a straight Byzantine style but with a profound understanding of how the church’s light, changing throughout the day, would animate the figures.

To me, the best part of this fabulous church is its five narthex domes with pendatives. The mosaics depict the Six Days of Creation — the center dome gets two days of creation — in a minimalist style, starting with sparkling gold tesserae that fill most of each dome. Each has a centered circle with a topical design from which radiate words and images in streamlined Deco style.

Byzantine style is susceptible to Art Deco since it starts with an abstracted, otherworldly look that diminishes distracting or tangential detail while adding bold color and the sheen that comes from light hitting glass. Meière was a master, as we’ll see when I write about the Nebraska State Capitol, a mosaic triumph, but there are other artists also at work there; the architecture’s great, and it’s a beacon of historic preservation. So on Saturday we go Cornhusker.