This trip report may contain too much ecclesiastical history for some
readers. I have tried to make it as colloquial and easy-going as
possible and have tried to avoid greek and latin terminology whenever
I did not get carried away.
The text follows straight on from my Venice trip report.
Ravenna - Jan 2005, Part I
(original text and images at: http://5telios.blogspot.com/2006/02/ravenna-jan-2005-part-i.html
)
Two nights and two days in fog choked Ravenna followed. Our ambitious
plan was made easier by the fact that the mausoleum of Theodoric and
the chapel of Saint Andrew were both closed for restoration work. That
left only six (if I am not mistaken) UNESCO protected feats of the
mosaicists art for us to go and gawp at. Fortunately, cameras are
allowed here, although the fog cut the available light to a minimum
and I had to use all my tricks to be able to shoot decent shots (not
that I managed with 100% success, mind you).
[image of Corinna wrapped against the cold as effectively as Lazarus
wrapped against death on an early Christian sarcophagus]
After finding our way into town in the morning, and finding a place to
park - something not as easy as it sounds - we headed off to the Saint
Vitale and mausoleum of Galla Placida complex where we spent quite a
while walking around and marvelling at the mosaics.
[image of the Justinian side mosaic]
[image of the Theodora side mosaic]
I suppose I could go off on the Justinian / Theodora tangent right now
and that would lead us through the Belissarius / Procopius / Narses
tangents and back to the goths and all that jazz, but I'd probably
forget to write about how it is that I first came to want to come to
Ravenna and whether or not you can tell that Saint Vitale is an
architectural copy of Saints Sergius and Bacchus in Constantinople.
One thing I was not prepared for was the material used for the windows
- a sort of yellow rock cut thin enough to be translucent and used for
window material in San Vitale, the mausoleum and others of the old
churches we visited.
[image of mosaic work from inside Galla Placida tomb]
We walked across the garden to the tomb of Galla Placida where the
mosaic work was far more classically roman-looking than what we are
used to miscalling Byzantine. Despite the figurative art having one
foot firmly in the Greco-roman tradition, the geometric designs were
incredibly forward looking and modern to our eyes.
[Image of Geometric patterns on the vault of the mausoleum of Galla
Palcida]
Leaving the mausoleum / Vitale area we drove to the cathedral and
museum. The chapel of Saint Andrew was closed, but we managed to see
the exhibits in the museum, which included some good early mosaic work
and of course the amazing ivory throne of Maximian, bishop of Ravenna.
I remember friends doing late Roman art courses getting all excited
about this throne of some bishop in a place I hadn't heard of, called
Ravenna. This was a long time before my "Byzantine" or late roman
awakening. The throne was a masterpiece of ivory work of the period
and it is good to look at. We have nothing in the eastern empire of
this sort (meaning the flammable sort).
We walked around the city centre of Ravenna, which is beautiful enough
and hides a number of later churches which no doubt are just as
exciting to those who call the 17th or 18th centuries their own.
The baptisteries and St. Apollonaris are next and they require some
introduction into the whole Arian / Orthodox thing and probably also
the whole Goth business. This is a different chapter.
Ravenna - Jan 2005, Part II
(original text and images are here: http://5telios.blogspot.com/2006/07/ravenna-jan-2005-part-ii.html)
We made our way to the first of the two baptisteries we intended to
visit.
A baptistery is that part of the church (in early times a separate
building in its own right) where baptism would take place. In the
early days when those yet to be baptised vastly outnumbered those
already baptised most baptisms were carried out on adults, and the
baptisteries reflect this in that the font is big enough for a full
size adult to be baptised in it.
The two baptisteries in Ravenna were built by the two rival sects
practising in the empire at the time. The preferred form at this
period is an octagon, and I have heard that this is to represent each
day of the period from the entry into Jerusalem until Christ's
resurrection. Anyway - what we have going on in the empire at the time
the churches of Ravenna were built is two competing sects of
Christianity living side by side. We're not talking sects in terms of
catholics and protestants thinking they have a different dogma, we are
talking about a full blown disagreement about the nature of Christ.
Let me just write those words out again, because they are important
and to our post-Chalcedonian mindset such a thing is not a matter for
debate and / or discussion.
The nature of Christ.
There, I have written it again. We are all to some extent familiar
with the concept of the creed. It's that bit of the service beginning
with "I believe" or "credo" (or whatever) and it is essentially an
affirmation of belief. In there we see all sorts of funky stuff, used
to describe Christ. Like, he is the only son of the father, he is
begotten not made, of one being with the father, etc. etc.
"Fair cop, guv", you might say, but I ask you why do we have this
creed with all the rhetoric and reaffirmation of Christ's divinity?
What need is it addressing? What's at stake? Yes - the trinity, father
son and holy ghost - fine, but why labour the point when it comes to
the son's divinity?
Once upon a time, in the second city of the newly officially Christian
Roman Empire, there was a chap called Arius and Arius was bishop of
this city, Alexandria. As bishop of the second most important city in
the empire, he had some sway. Egypt and north Africa had always cast
Christianity in a strange mould of their own and there the people
clung on to strange (sometimes gnostic) ideas. These are the sorts of
ideas which then come out of the sands seventeen centuries later to be
turned into "National Geographic" cover stories.
Against this backdrop and only a generation after Origen, comes Arius
with his separation of the nature of Christ the son from that of God
the father. According to Arius, Christ was not "uncreated" and not
wholly God in the way that God the Father was God. Arguing that the
father was greater than the son and existed before him, the
Alexandrine bishop managed to drive a wedge into the divine nature of
Christ, which was to have repercussions many hundreds of years after
the anathemas proclaimed on him. Think about the incongruity of the
terms "one who never changes" and "baby Jesus"...
Before anyone could do anything to check the progress of this idea
(which may have been potentially more palatable than the standard
description of the trinity to the less philosophically inclined
western areas of the empire), it had spread like wildfire, to the
extent that arguments would erupt in the streets of Constantinople
and, more significantly, to the extent that the religious figures sent
to convert the non-citizen Goths who had recently begun to work as
mercenaries in the armies of Rome were followers of Arian. Not only
that, but the Arian theology buttoned itself onto the existing beliefs
of the Goths who worshiped a father / son deity which had the father
more divine than the son.
The council of Nicea gave christianity the Nicene creed with its use
of the term "consubstantial" or "homoousios" which basically put an
end to Arianism in the core parts of the empire. So these beliefs were
anathematized and life went on in the empire with the Arian Goths on
the periphery. Theodosios in the late fifth century had seen to it
that all pagan worship ceased, and made all sorts of deals with the
Goths to give them land for military service, despite their Arianism.
At some point, though, the goths were tired of sitting on the other
side of the Danube and the time came for them to cross the river and
make a bid for Rome. They managed to take much of Northern Italy.
Rather than raze and rebuild, the Goths did something politically
clever, in that they allowed the local population to continue their
worship as they were wont to do, and introduced a parallel hierarchy
of Arian clergy to tend to the Arian Gothic elite, which managed in
this way to keep itself separate from their Trinitarian subjects.
Phew
So - Italy and especially Ravenna at this time (until Belissarius,
essentially) was home to a coexistence of two very different
"Christian" sects.
The reason for all this blah blah blah is that a) the art of the
orthodox and heretical differs in the details in a way which is
interesting to note and b) many formerly Arian buildings were taken
over by Trinitarians after Belissarius re-conquered Italy for Rome.
Belissarius we'll talk about some other time.
Against this backdrop, we can now move into the baptistries, and it is
finally time for some of what might be the last glimmer of classically
inspired sculpture before the renaissance came along. Korinna and I
particularly like the guy in this image as we both independently saw
in him the patron saint of ironing. I am not sure who this funky low-
relief guy is, but he stands below the dome of the baptistery of the
orthodox.
[image of sculpture from the baptistery of the orthodox]
The baptistery of the Orthodox is of course more notable for the
mosaic decoration adorning the vault depicting a belts-off-trousers-
down Jesus in the water being baptised by JTB.
[image of mosaic depicting the baptism of Christ]
Christ is depicted as a fully grown bearded man. He is God,
consubstantial, coeternal. Compare with later when we visited the
slightly earlier baptistery of the Arians.
[image of mosaic depicting the baptism of Christ]
Doesn't JC look a little dumpier, beardless and more boyish - like he
is not quite as fully divine as the Father?
So after baptistery fun in these octagonal buildings displaying the
last embers of truly classical art, we were ready for a visit to a
good old fashioned basilica with three naves and some processional
mosaics with repetitive undistinguishable saints parading towards the
Christ figure. On the north side the saints process, walking from a
depiction of Theodoric's palace towards the east. On the south wall,
the lady saints are walking from the harbour towards the east. Have I
not mentioned Theodoric? Did I throw him out at you without any
explanation? His mausoleum had a brief mention in the previous Ravenna
text.
Theodoric the Goth, then. He was king of the Goths who had come to
scare away those who had overrun Italy at the behest of Zeno, emperor
of the Romans. The Goths had then set themselves up in the ruins of
the empire in the west, taking on Roman airs and titles, playing the
system from the inside and letting the roman aristocracy carry on as
before. The gothic kingdom was ruled from Ravenna from the Palace
pictured in the mosaics of the basilica of Saint Apollinaris, from the
palace, helpfully labelled "PALATIVM" in the mosaic. From the palace
which is less than forty yards down the road from the mosaic depicting
it.
[image of the Palace of Theodoric, setting off point for the
procession of saints depicted in the basilica of Saint Apollinaris]
Theodoric's palace, in the mosaic, featured members of his family
standing in the porches. Members of the royal family with haloes
(normal for imperial portraits of the time) adorning the porches. And
then along came Belissarius, strong -man of Justinian and restorer of
orthodoxy to an Italy suffering under the heretical Goths.
And there, in the basilica of Saint Apollinaris, first to go were the
Arian Saints. Up went the Orthodox saint names... and then away go the
family of Theodoric. In their place, some very fashionable curtains
were put up. You can see above the curtains where the haloes would
have been, but more obvious, and highlighted in green in the next
image, are the body parts painted outside the gaps and over the
columns. They were never taken away - it is not known why and the
hands of Theodoric's family are still there to be seen by whoever
should visit the church.
[Same image as before with highlighted body parts]
Not far from the palace and cathedral of Theodoric sits an unassuming
building for which you really have to be on the look out or else very
much into the back-street narrow-alley form of exploring new places.
Inside is the tomb of Dante.
[image of Korinna as she emerges from the tomb of the poet]
In Ravenna we discovered a very nice caf type thing with good hot
chocolate and also were lucky enough to catch the first day of the
sales.
The next day we were off to Classe - the city named after what it
did... Classe takes its name from Classis - fleet in Latin - for it is
here that the imperial fleet would moor in the days when the empire
was run from Ravenna.
[image of mosaics from Classe]
In Classe we found the last of Ravenna'a UNESCO inscribed buildings -
the church of Saint Apollinaris in Classe. More mosaics, this time
curiously pastoral, to bid us good bye as we set off down the fog
filled autostrade towards Ancona - a place known to me from childhood
voyages as a harbour town with no intrinsic interest.
How wrong I had been! Ancona is a harbour town - yes, its position and
what have you make it a perfect place for setting off across the
Adratic to a number of destinations.
The first surprise - seeing as we had arrived about an hour early, we
had time to explore - was the triumphal arches on the waterfront. I
did not remember them, of course, the last time I had been through
there I didn't know what a triumphal arch represented and what the
roman empire was. My sole source of information had been "Carry on
Cleo" with Kenneth Williams as a rather camp Caesar acting opposite
Sid William's raunchy Mark Anthony, but I digress.
[image of triumphal arches in Ancona with a view to the church on the
top of the hill]
The foreground arch in the picture as far as I can recall was set up
by Napoleon. The one behind was set up by Trajan. The Ferry was
delayed arriving - and therefore would be delayed in departing - by
about five hours, so we had a good chance to walk about and get to
know the city a little. We decided to walk up to the church on the
hill overlooking the harbour and were rewarded with the exteriors of
some baroque buildings on the way up and fine views from the top. Of
course, all this was not really quite so exciting as the building at
the top.
[image of the old cathedral on top of the hill in Ancona]
We were confronted by the rather gothic entrance with the arches all
one inside the other, flanked by lions taken from somewhere I don't
recall. The basilica itself was originally just a standard basilica,
and took on its cruciform groundplan in about the 13th if I remember.
The great thing about it is that in the basement you can see a bunch
of Doric column bases from what used to be the old temple of Aphrodite
which would stand above the harbour - sailors being sailors in all
centuries no doubt had much to do with this choice of deity for the
old temple.
The boat came, we boarded and set off again for Patras and later
Athens.
The Venice / Ravenna trip was over, six days after commencing. The
write-up was finished some five hundred and forty days after
commencing and the report to r.t.e. some 975 days after the trip. Hmm.
** It should be noted that this text mistakenly refers to Arius as
Bishop of Alexandria. He was not ordained bishop ever. **
|