Friday Dec 15. Wandering. Ravenna.

Coming north yesterday the train passed through Ortona, a town I remember my father mentioning. Canadian troops in WWII played a key role in pushing back the Germans from both Ortona and Ravenna. You can see the effects of intense Allied bombing of Ravenna as a lot of the city is modern.  

I came to Ravenna to see the very old churches, some of which did survive the bombings.  In Ravenna, the main historical figure is no longer our dear Emperor Frederick II but another northerner, Theodoric.

Theodoric was an Ostrogoth. He spent his youth in Constantinople, held there by the Eastern Roman Emperor as a guarantee that his father wouldn’t attack the Empire. At this time of history, such an arrangement wasn’t uncommon. Besides hindering the “barbarian” father from attacking, the other advantage was that Theodoric received an excellent “civilized” education. He was then sent as a young military man to Italy to try and restore unity to what was a very fractured region, Rome having been sacked in 455 by the Vandals. 

In 489 Theodoric, calling himself Rex or King, set up court in Ravenna. He was to rule for many years. He had aqueducts and civic buildings, castles and palaces, churches and baptisteries built.  When Theodoric ordered his churches to be decorated, he had artists skilled in mosaics come from Constantinople, and we say that the style of decoration is Byzantine.  This style was copied throughout southern Italy, although very few remnants remain today. The mosaics in Ravenna partially owe their survival to the fact that by the tenth century Ravenna’s port had dried up (the sea coast had receded) and Venice took over as the region’s economic power house. No wealthy families remained in Ravenna to enlarge or modernize or tear down the old churches, so they survived.

A Baptistry built by Theodoric. Now called the Arian Baptistry.

The central mosaic of the dome of the Baptistry. A very human Jesus is being baptized by John the Baptist.(Theodoric was Arian, a branch of Christianity that the Pope was soon to condemn as heresy. For the Arians, Christ was created by God, and therefore not the Trinity where God the father, God the son, and God the Holy Spirit are one and the same). I find the figure on the left very interesting. This is a personification of the River Jordan, where the baptism took place. Can you see the crab claws on the head of the figure?

A mosaic in Sant’Apollinaro Nuovo, a church built by Theodoric, showing part of one of his palaces.

The mausoleum Theodoric had built to hold his body. After an invasion of Ravenna, his body was scattered elsewhere. This building is a very rare surviving example of stonework from the early sixth century.

 

In 540, the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian sent an army to Italy to retake direct control. Here is a mosaic from that period showing Justinian’s wife, the Empress Theodora, in the Basilica of San Vitale.

San Vitale has a second floor gallery for the ladies to attend services.

I love this mosaic of Moses tying his sandal in San Vitale.

And to finish, two photos of mosaics in an early sixth century chapel, the Capella di Sant’Andrea, built for the private prayer of the city’s bishops.  I enjoyed how individual each face is, and as so often in medieval art, birds, animals and plants play a very important role.