Ravenna’s Mosaics, Heaven Comes to Earth

This little Italian city is the place to go for the art of mosaics.

A few weeks ago, I promised a sea-to-shining-sea series from Los Angeles to Portland, Maine, and then to the Adriatic. I did indeed get stuck — gross negligence at the Kennedy Center and, wouldn’t you know it, Theodore Roosevelt — but I’m determined to reach across mountains and oceans, and now we’re, more or less, at the Adriatic, in Ravenna. Now a small city, Ravenna was once the last capital of the western half of the Roman Empire. Unlike Rome, it faced Constantinople. Unlike Rome, it was hard to invade, surrounded as it was by swamps. It was in Ravenna that Romulus Augustulus, the teenage emperor of the West — his other half ruled from Constantinople — was overthrown in a.d. 476.

Ravenna enjoyed a vibrant afterlife, though, as an Ostrogothic and Byzantine hub and the center of the art of mosaics from the fifth through the sixth centuries. In art-history jargon, Ravenna’s religious mosaics cover the end of Classical naturalism — featuring well-proportioned, limber figures and depth — and then the start of frontal, two-dimensional, abstracted figures, more spiritual than anatomical, against backdrops more symbolic than known to nature.

I try to go to Ravenna every few years, having realized in my early 40s that it’s a good, though unusual, place for stocktaking. The mosaics are both salve and overseer as I reflect on the state of my life. Some people use the beach or the woods, some climb Mount Everest, some have an affair, some get drunk, some get a face lift.

“Don’t let’s ask for the Moon, we have the stars,” Charlotte, played by Bette Davis, says to Paul Henreid, playing Jerry, the man she loves, in Now, Voyager. I know, I’m not an old maid, and there’s no implacably unhappy but already married Jerry in my life, but why commune with faraway, inscrutable stars, mere dots, when there’s the star-bedecked dome and barrel vaults in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia? It’s from the late 420s, maybe the ’30s, and packed inside with mosaic decoration. From the outside, the little structure is the plainest of sepulchral Janes. It’s cross-shaped, made of pale-pink brick, and in a churchyard on a quiet city street. All of Ravenna’s best mosaics hide inside drab buildings. Inside, lit by alabaster windows, we’re in another world, a simulated Heaven, a blue-mosaic firmament.

Stars? How about a dome with 567 eight-pointed gold stars in concentric circles, which were thought to repel evil spirits. I’m all for whatever it takes to repel evil spirits. Mosaics are made from pieces — small cubes — of colored glass called tesserae. The pieces for the stars are fronted with gold leaf. The blue glass cubes for the night sky are arranged in circles to suggest atmosphere. They seem to expand to suggest infinity. In the center of the dome is the True Cross. Symbols of the Evangelists are in the corners. Another kind of sky decorates the barrel vaults. Stars are medallions with gold flames, with white and red flowers inside the medallion, a merger of Heaven and Earth.

Cole Porter saw the mausoleum on his honeymoon. Don’t laugh but, yes, he had a wife. The mosaic heavens inspired him to compose “Night and Day.”

The Good Shepherd’s there and all those good, protective connotations. He’s gentle and human and wouldn’t morph into mightiness for another hundred years. A saint seems to run toward a flaming grill. It’s Saint Lawrence. He was roasted alive on a gridiron set over burning coals. In another mosaic, deer standing among vines drink from a stylized river. “As the deer longs for streams of water, so does my soul long for you, O God,” says the 42nd Psalm. Fruits from the different seasons fill a border, winding paths create others.

In one lunette, Peter and Paul flank the famous font where two doves drink. In the early 1980s, having very little money to burn, I bought a living mosaicist’s copy of the font, though I could afford only a work with half the font and one dove. In another lunette, two unidentified the saints flank a fountain with two doves.

The palette is delectable. Indigo and dark blue, gold, of course, and emerald and sea green abound, but there’s also violet and imperial purple — royal colors — and dashes of fire-engine red and burnt orange. And since the tesserae are made from glass or covered with gold leaf, colors don’t fade. The walls below the mosaics are yellow marble, deferential but flattering. There were probably multiple designers, since some passages are more organic and 3-D than others.

Galla Placidia was the daughter of one Roman emperor, sister of two, mother of another, and wife of yet another. She was a Visigoth queen, too, for a year, and a canny politician, a sometime combatant in the era’s civil wars, her son’s regent, and once or twice a hostage. Some recognized her as the empress in her own right. It may or may not have been her tomb. There’s apocrypha aplenty, but evidence is scant. We know she died in Rome in 450, so hauling her body to Ravenna seems impractical. Tomb or not, it’s serene and meant to comfort rather than awe. My Italian family is from the northern Marche, 60 miles south of Ravenna. I like to think that some ancestor — after, say, 400 generations we accumulate a lot — was involved.

How are mosaics produced? Not much has changed from Roman days. Mosaicists — artisans and craftsmen — probably using a detailed plan produced by a designer, press the cubes into fresh, wet grout so that goop covers the sides, sealing them. Often they’re angled to catch the light and shimmer. The palette of the handmade tesserae is extensive and used for shading. The space between the Ravenna tesserae, the interstice, is around a millimeter — tiny — but, optically, it lends order.

Steps from Galla Placidia’s tomb is San Vitale, opened in 527. It’s a Hollywood blockbuster of a church compared with a tomb that’s like a tiny, precious, cuddly art film. The mosaics are awesome, showing episodes from multiple chapters of the Old Testament. Moses and the Burning Bush, Cain and Abel, and Jeremiah and Isaiah have spots. Christ — in royal purple, holding a scroll with seven seals, and enthroned on a blue celestial globe — gets an apse. Plants, clouds, water features, patterns, and garlands are so abundant that figures seem to bob and weave around them. It’s packed.

That’s one of two things I love about these mosaics. Abbondanza. When a surface isn’t filled with a design, a figure, a symbol, or an architectural element, it’s covered in gold mosaics. And that’s not all. Variegated marble columns, ornate capitals, and mosaic and marble floors make for total turbo design. The whole scheme looks like one big Christmas tree.

The second thing is the combination of religious and secular images. When I visited San Vitale for the first time as a serious adult, in the late 1970s, I was already in political life and, precocious as I was, had run for office twice and won twice — motto “new blood, old values” — and I was thinking about coalition-building and how power is apportioned. On the north and south walls below Christ seated in his apse are the pols. On the north wall is Emperor Justinian, who ruled the Eastern Roman Empire from 527 to 565. During his long reign, he tried to recapture Western imperial land lost to invaders before 476. He also built Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and stewarded the renaissance that brought us Byzantine art.

In the lineup of men are Justinian in the center, wearing purple; Bishop Maximianus, his man in Ravenna; soldiers; and other clerics. The emperor is dressed to nines and even wears ruby slippers. On the opposite wall is Empress Theodora holding a chalice as she stands in a line with court dignitaries and her attendants. Justinian and his team are front and center, but Theodora gets a canopy, a curtain, and a fountain. She’s beneath her own apse. Justinian and Maximianus are portrait-like. Maximianus has a lean, hungry look. Designers certainly knew his face and knew the likeness of Justinian shown everywhere in Constantinople. The rest of the faces are generic. Klimt, by the way, drew on these two walls for his Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, also called The Woman in Gold.

The ensemble unites church and state and confirms the divine right of kings. Justinian’s general, Belisarius, had just nabbed Ravenna from the Ostrogoths, so the church is a celebration. Justinian probably never visited Ravenna, but he saw the city as his Italian base. In ye olde North Haven in Connecticut, the mainline Protestant churches and a chunk of the two Catholic churches were spokes in the hub in which reposed the Republican machine’s hegemony. Oh, happy days.

Ravenna sports a few other spots with heavy-duty mosaic decoration. Both the Arian Baptistery and the Neonian Baptistery have a snappy mosaic program that features a nude Jesus, a rare sight to see. He’s waist-deep in water, but these Jordan Rivers are transparent. Both have pagan water gods with Jesus. The Arian Baptistry is from 500 or so. A Christian spinoff, the Arian Ostrogoths didn’t believe that God and Jesus were one. In the Arian Baptistery, Jesus is young and beardless and, I’ll add, needs gym time. He’s flabby. The Neonian Baptistry, 50 or so years earlier, shows Jesus as a man. Both Jesuses are wet and shiny. The transparent water shows genius technique.

People often miss the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, in part because Galla Placidia’s tomb is so famous and San Vitale overwhelms, and then it’s time for lunch, a visit to Sant’Apollinare in the nearby town of Classe if you’re a day tourist, or a nap. It’s fantastic in its own way. Parables and the Passion get a dazzling mosaic treatment, and we see Jesus age from a beardless young man to the Man of Sorrows.

The high points for me are two processions, one on each side of the nave, of saints with portrait faces — possibly models were used — and specific iconography so we know who’s who, often through the tools used to martyr them. Below are two more processions, one of 22 virgins. The program is mid-sixth-century, from the Justinian era, and the style is mostly Byzantine-flat except for those Joe Sixpack faces. The virgins have those big, almond-shaped eyes that would be a pictorial standard in religious art for 700 years.

Leading them are the Three Magi, looking very snazzy and nimble. They seem to be wearing tights made of the skin of jungle wildcats. The vignette is thought to be the first time in Christian art where the magi are named — Balthasar, Melchior, and Gaspar. The entire program is splendid, and it’s important to understand that this is early Christian art. Galla Placidia’s tomb dates from a time when the church, organizationally, wasn’t inchoate, but it wasn’t set in concrete, either.

It wasn’t priest-ridden. The two baptisteries and Sant’Apollinare Nuovo are as many as a hundred years later and are heavy on processioning priests and martyrs. The one-to-one communion with God and the Good Shepherd as an agent of care and concern aren’t priorities.

These don’t disappear, of course. Next week, I’ll write about Sant’Apollinare in Classe, now a quiet suburb of Ravenna, but at its glorious peak it was the main port for the Roman Empire’s east-facing navy, starting in the days of Augustus. For hundreds of years, Classe was bustling, so it got its own basilica. The mosaics there are Ravenna’s last blast. I’ll write about stocktaking, too.