The Basilica of St Vitalis in Ravenna

Following up on Monday’s post of the basilica of St Apollinaris in Classe, the ancient port city of Ravenna, here are pictures taken by the same friend of the church of St Vitalis in Ravenna itself. The titular Saint, the father of the Milanese martyrs Gervasius and Protasius, and said to have suffered martyrdom there; he and Apollinaris, the city’s first bishop and its patron Saint, are named together in the Communicantes of the Ambrosian Canon. This is one of the most important early Christian churches in Italy, particularly because of the magnificent mosaics in the main sanctuary, which are not only very well-preserved, but also contain a very precious testimony to the early history of the Roman liturgy. Founded by a man named Julianus Argentarius, who was both a banker and an architect, the building was begun in 526 under the bishop of Ravenna Ecclesius, and consecrated in 548 by his third successor, Maximian. The main body of the church is octagonal (a shape normally used in that era for baptisteries), surmounted by a cupola.

In the main apse, a young and beardless Christ is accompanied by two angels, and on the left, St Vitalis, on the right, bishop Ecclesius, who offers the church to Christ. The naturalistic representation of the ground, with greenery, rocks and flowers, is typical of the older tradition of Roman mosaics, while the gold background, which represents heaven, and gives the viewer the sense of looking into the sacred place where Christ dwells with his Saints, is more in keeping with the then-emergent conventions of Byzantine art.

On the left side of the sanctuary, the mosaic under the arch represents (left and center) the Biblical episodes of the Hospitality of Abraham (Genesis 18, 1-10), in which the three men who come to Abraham and Sarah are also referred to as “the Lord” in the singular, and were thus of course understood as an appearance of the Holy Trinity. In the right side is the Sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22, 1-18.) Outside the arch on the left are the prophet Jeremiah; in the middle, angels holding a shield with the Cross in it; on the right; Moses receives the Law on Mt Sinai as the people look on from below (Exodus 19 sqq.)

On the right wall, the sacrifices of Abel and Melchizedek; the pairing of these with Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac on the opposite wall is one of the earliest artistic representations of the words of the Supra quae propitio of the Roman Canon, “Upon which do Thou vouchsafe to look with favorable and gracious countenance, and accept them, as Thou didst vouchsafe to accept the gifts of Thy just servant Abel, and the sacrifice of our Patriarch Abraham, and that which Thy high priest Melchizedek offered unto Thee, a holy Sacrifice, an unspotted Victim.” Above the arch, we see the same motif of the angels bearing the Cross within a shield.

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The Basilica of St Apollinaris in Classe

My thanks to a friend for sharing with us these pictures which he took during a recent visit to one of best preserved paleo-Christian churches in Italy, the basilica of St Apollinaris in Classe, the ancient port of the city Ravenna. (In antiquity, Classe was directly on the sea, and important center for both commerce and the navy, but due to the silting-up of the Adriatic coast, it is now more than 5½ miles inland.) From the mid-6th to mid-8th century, Ravenna was the seat of the Byzantine governors of Italy, known as the Exarchs of Ravenna; several Christian monuments survive from this period, including two churches dedicated to St Apollinaris, an early bishop of the city traditionally said to have been a disciple of St Peter. The one here in Classe is the older of these two, originally built by a bishop named Ursicinus, who ruled from 532-36, and destined to be the burial place for the city’s bishops.

The narthex was added to the original brick façade in the 9th century, contemporary with the bell-tower shown below.

As in many early Byzantine churches, there are two small sacristies, one on either side of the apse, called  “pastophoria”, a term which occurs in 1 Macc. 4, 38 and 57.

The circular bell-tower, which stands at over 124 feet, was also built in the 9th-century. Notice how the window space increases as it rises, which decreases the weight of each stage, making the structure seem even taller and lighter than it really is.  

The mosaic in the apse is one of the best preserved examples of early Byzantine work in Italy, dating to the same period as the founding of the church. St Apollinaris is represented in the lower middle, wearing a stole and with his hands raised in prayer. At the very top, Christ Himself is shown, as He is in many early Christian images, with six sheep to either side of Him, emerging from the holy cities of Bethlehem and Jerusalem. These represent the twelve Apostles, of course, and the representation of Apollinaris in similar company is probably intended to remind the viewer of his close connection to the Apostolic era, and therefore also of the antiquity of the see of Ravenna.

In the lower band are shown (left to right): the Archangel Michael and the Apostle Matthew; the Roman Emperor Constantine IV with the clergy of Ravenna; four bishops of Ravenna; Abel, Melchisedek and Abraham (in a single panel, a reference to the mention of them in the Supra quae propitio of the Canon); St Gabriel and another, unidentified Saint.

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The Chapel of St Peter Chrysologus in Ravenna

On the calendar of the post-Conciliar rite, today is the feast of St Peter Chrysologus, who was bishop of Ravenna from around 433 until his death in 450; in 1729, Pope Benedict XIII made him the 13th Doctor of the Church. Within the palace of the archbishops of Ravenna is a chapel dedicated to him jointly with St Andrew the Apostle; he is traditionally said to have built it, but it is actually the work of his namesake Peter II, who held the see from 494-519. The chapel is quite small, a cruciform space with a small atrium leading into it. The upper part of both the chapel and the atrium is covered with some very beautiful mosaic work, although it has been heavily restored several times, and some parts are completely lost. (Photos by Nicola de’ Grandi.)

In the apse, the Cross on a starry background. In this period, the Cross was generally shown empty to emphasize the Resurrection, which took place after Christ’s body had been removed from it. Above it we see Peter II’s monogram on a background of vines.

Following an older convention, which at the end of the 5th century had already become rare in the most important center of western Christianity, Rome, Christ is shown young and beardless, to indicate that He is a different person from God the Father. (The heresy that God the Son IS God the Father under a different guise, known as “Patripassianism”, was the great scare-heresy of the pre-Nicene period, and Arianism, which made the Son a creation of the Father, was the over-reaction to it.) He wears the purple of the Roman Emperors, and has a decorated halo, as signs of His divinity. To the right are the Apostles Peter, Andrew, and Philip; to the left, Paul, James and John

In the center of the vault, four angels support a stylized XP monogram; between them are the symbols of the four Evangelists, which are shown below in greater detail.

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The Basilica of St Apollinaris in Classe

Today is the feast of St Apollinaris, bishop and martyr. The traditional story of his life states that he accompanied St Peter from Antioch to Rome, was appointed by him to be the first bishop of Ravenna, a small city of the northern Italian region now called the Emilia-Romagna; after various persecutions and exiles, he was martyred in the reign of the Emperor Vespasian, ca. 79 AD. This story is not regarded as historically reliable, and his feast was removed from the general calendar in 1969; in the most recent revision of the Missal, however, he was put back, but on July 20th, since his traditional feast day is now occupied by St Bridget of Sweden, who died on this day in 1373.

In the late 5th century, Ravenna was the capital of the Ostrogothic Kings, after they had definitively overthrown the Roman Emperor of the West in 476. It was subsequently retaken by the Eastern Roman Empire, and became the seat of the Byzantine governor of Italy, known as the Exarch of Ravenna, until the mid-8th century. Several Christian monuments survive from this period, including two churches dedicated to St Apollinaris. The older of these is not in Ravenna itself, but the nearby city of Classe, an important commercial and military port; in antiquity, Classe was directly on the sea, but due to the silting-up of the Adriatic coast, it is now more than 5½ miles inland.

The façade and bell-tower.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Gerd Eichmann, CC BY-SA 4.0

The apsidal mosaic of the church is one of the best preserved examples of early Byzantine work in Italy, dating to the mid-6th century. St Apollinaris is represented in the lower middle, wearing a stole and with his hands raised in prayer. At the very top, Christ Himself is shown, as He is in many early Christian images, with six sheep to either side of Him, emerging from the holy cities of Bethlehem and Jerusalem. These represent the twelve Apostles, of course, and the representation of Apollinaris in similar company is probably intended to remind the viewer of his close connection to the Apostolic era, and therefore also of the antiquity of the see of Ravenna. (Click to enlarge.)

Image from Wikimedia Commons by José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro; CC BY-SA 4.0

The face of Christ is placed at the center of the Cross, with Moses and Elijah to either side; the three sheep (two to the right, one to the left) represent the Apostles Peter, James and John. This is therefore a symbolic representation of the Transfiguration, the moment at which Christ revealed His Divinity to His Apostles for the first time, foreshadowing the glory of His Resurrection, which can only come through the suffering of the Cross.

Image from Wikimedia Commons by Pequod 76, CC BY-SA 3.0

A closer view of St Apollinaris.

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The Basilica of Saint Vitalis in Ravenna

After a pause of over a month, we finally conclude our series of Nicola’s photographs from his visit to Ravenna at the beginning of the summer; in the meantime, he has recently been traveling again, and before this series is over, he will undoubtedly have many more pictures of beautiful Italian churches to share with us.

St Vitalis was the father of the Milanese martyrs Gervasius and Protasius, and said to have suffered martyrdom at Ravenna; he is named in the Communicantes of the Ambrosian Canon, right after St Apollinaris, the founder of the church of Ravenna and its patron Saint. The church which bears his name is one of the most important early Christian churches in Italy, particularly because of the magnificent mosaics in the main sanctuary, which are not only very well-preserved, but also contain a very precious testimony to the early history of the Roman liturgy. Founded by a man named Julianus Argentarius, who was both a banker and an architect, the building was begun in 526 under the bishop of Ravenna Ecclesius, and consecrated in 548 his third successor, Maximian. The main body of the church is octagonal (a shape normally used in that era for baptisteries), surmounted by a cupola.

A view of the external ring of the basilica and its mosaic pavement.

The main sanctuary; the various parts of the mosaics are shown in detail in the photos below.

The main apse: a young and beardless Christ is accompanied by two angels, and on the left, St Vitalis, on the right, bishop Ecclesius, who offers the church to Christ. The naturalistic representation of the ground, with greenery, rocks and flowers, is typical of the older tradition of Roman mosaics, while the gold background, which represents heaven, and gives the viewer the sense of looking into the sacred place where Christ dwells with his Saints, is more in keeping with the then-emergent conventions of Byzantine art.

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The Basilica of St Francis in Ravenna, and the Tomb of Dante

For the feast of St Clare, we continue our series on the Christian monuments of Ravenna with the basilica of her friend and founder of her order, St Francis. A church dedicated to Ss Peter and Paul was built on its site ca. 450 by the bishop Neon (the successor of St Peter Chysologus), who also constructed the Orthodox Baptistery, which we saw earlier this month. This was demolished and rebuilt over the course of the 9th and 10 centuries, giving us the basic form of both the building and belltower as we have them to day; it was subsequently rededicated to St Francis after the friars of his order took it over in 1261. Like all of the older buildings of Ravenna, it has subsided considerably, and one of the photos below shows a rather surprising result of this. The complex also includes the tomb of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri, who died in Ravenna in 1321, making this the 7th centenary year of his death. (Photos by Nicola de’ Grandi.)

The brick façade is punctuated by several holes, regularly distributed; this multiplicity of minor stress points helps to diffuse the force of its weight, so that it doesn’t crush itself, a technique copied from the ancient Romans. The belltower is over 100 feet tall, and mostly original, although extensively restored in the 1920s.

Between 1918 and 1921, as part of the preparations for Dante’s 6th centenary celebrations, the church was despoiled of a great many decorations added in the Baroque period, leaving an excessively sparse interior. These decorations were, of course, not original, and “not original” was in the early 20th century a pair of words to conjure with; more specifically, a pair of words to make things vanish with. Unfortunately, the restorers of the early 20th century mistakenly believed that Romanesque churches were “originally” mostly void of decoration, and stripped more than one such building bare in the light of this belief, replacing one mistake with another. Most or all of the surface of the clerestory and the walls of the side aisles would have been decorated with frescoes shortly after the church was completed.

In many Romanesque churches, especially in northern Italy, the sanctuary is elevated above the level of the pavement of the nave, and has a crypt underneath it, which in this case, is entered through the arch beneath the altar. (We have previously shown a magnificent example of this, the cathedral of St Geminianus in Modena.)

The subsiding of the building has now brought the crypt down below the level of the water-table, and it is therefore always full of water, although the level varies depending on the season and the rain-fall. Some remains of the mosaic from the original 5th century basilica are preserved within it, and, as you can see below, the friars keep goldfish in the water.

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The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna

Since today is the feast of St Lawrence, we continue our series on the early Christian monuments of Ravenna with the mausoleum of Galla Placidia, which contains one of the most famous ancient images of him. Galla Placidia was the daughter of the Emperor Theodosius, who reigned from 379 until his death in 395; she was born sometime between 388 and 393. For most of her life, she lived in the thick of the very complex dynastic politics of the decaying Roman Empire, married first to Ataulf, the king of the Visigoths, who was assassinated less than two years later (in September of 415), then to the Emperor Constantius III in 417, who died after four years and the birth of their two children. She then remained a widow for the rest of her life, acting as regent for her son, Valentinian III, in the earliest years of his reign, and living in Ravenna, then the de facto capital of the Western Roman Empire. She was also a great and devout benefactor of the Church, and a close collaborator of the bishop of Ravenna, St Peter Chrysologus.

The small building which has long been known as her mausoleum was in point of fact most likely not built as such, but rather as a chapel dedicated to St Lawrence; it is not at all certain that either of the sarcophagi still kept within it (shown below) was originally hers. One of the most interesting signs of the shift from Roman paganism to Christianity is the lack of external decoration, and the concomitant focus on the interior, where pagan religious structures were often very beautifully decorated on the outside, but had a very plain interior. (Photos by Nicola de’ Grandi.)

Most of the upper part of the interior is decorated with extremely high quality mosaics which are in a very good state of preservation. This is the view from just inside the door; the mosaic of St Lawrence is at the bottom of this photo, and shown more closely below.

The view from the entrance corridor, looking back towards the door; the mosaic of Christ as the Good Shepherd is also shown below more closely.

At the back wall of the chapel, we see St Lawrence dressed as an upper-class Roman, holding the Cross, and an unidentified book. In the middle, we see his gridiron with the flames underneath it, and at the left, an open armoire with the four books of the Gospels, which he as a deacon would use during the celebration of the Mass. In ancient times, books of any sort were rare and extremely precious, and generally kept under lock and key; all the more so books of the Gospels and other Scriptures, which tended to be lavishly decorated, and have covers made of all kinds of precious materials. Also note the translucent alabaster windows here and on the other walls.

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The Arian Baptistery of Ravenna, and the Mausoleum of Theoderic

Following up on yesterday’s post about the Orthodox Baptistery of Ravenna, today we look at its Arian counterpart, and the mausoleum of the Gothic king who built the latter, Theoderic. As leader of the Ostrogoths, it was he who established their rule over most of Italy in the later 5th century, under the nominal suzerainty of Byzantium. For much of his reign, he kept his capital at Ravenna, where he engaged in a number of important building projects, including a cathedral and a baptistery for the use of his Gothic subjects, the vast majority of whom were Arians. (For the most part, orthodox Christians were allowed to live peaceably under his reign.) Fourteen years after his death in 526, Ravenna was retaken by the Byzantines under the Emperor Justinian, whose policy was to take over Arian buildings and convert them to Catholic worship. Under the archbishop of Ravenna St Agnellus (556-69), the Arian baptistery was converted into an oratory dedicated to the Virgin Mary. In the wake of numerous other interventions in the following centuries, what remains today is essentially a fragment of the original, the central part, which preserves a large mosaic in its central cupola very similar to that of the Orthodox Baptistery. As with the other ancient buildings of Ravenna, the subsiding of the ground has brought the structure more than 7 feet beneath its original level. (Photos by Nicola de’ Grandi.)

The cupola mosaic consists of a central tondo of the Baptism of Christ, surrounded by an outer ring in which the Twelve Apostles process towards a royal throne with an empty Cross on it, the latter being a motif known as an etimasia.

As in the Orthodox Baptistery, Christ and St John the Baptist are accompanied by the dove of the Holy Spirit, and a third male figure, the personification of the River Jordan. Various attempts have been made to explain specific aspects of the image as expressions of the beliefs of the Arians; all of these run aground on the more basic fact that the Catholics who took over the building in 540 clearly did not perceive them as such, and left them alone.

The etimasia, which celebrates the majesty of Christ as revealed through His victory over death on the Cross. Note how the line of the Cross’ upright points directly through the Holy Spirit to the figure of Christ in the scene of the Baptism, indicating that the Son of God was revealed to us by the Father as our Redeemer. The Apostles closest to the throne are Ss Peter and Paul; the others are not labelled, and have no distinctive attributes.

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The Orthodox Baptistery of Ravenna

Until the early 5th century, the cathedral of Ravenna was at the nearby port city of Classe, where we saw the basilica of St Apollinaris last month. At the very end of the 4th century, St Ursus (399-426), the predecessor of St Peter Chrysologus, began building a new cathedral in Ravenna itself, some remains of which are incorporated into the current cathedral. He also began a new baptistery, which is generally known as the “orthodox” baptistery, since it was used by those who professed the orthodox Nicene faith, as opposed to that of the Arians. It is also known the Neonian Baptistery from St Neon (451-68), St Peter’s successor, who completed it by replacing the original flat roof with a cupola, richly decorated with mosaics. In common with many early baptisteries, the structure is octagonal, the eight sides representing the eight persons who were saved on Noah’s ark, a symbol of the Church, and the cycle of creation and new creation, with Sunday, the day of the Resurrection, being the first and the eighth day. Like many buildings in Ravenna, it has subsided considerably since its original construction, and is now over 6 feet below its original level. The small apses were added in the tenth century, but the rest of the walls are original. (Photos by Nicola de’ Grandi.)

The baptismal font is relatively new, from the 16th century, but the raised platform from which the priest performed the baptisms is original, from the 5th century.

The mosaic cupola

In the tondo at the center, the Baptism of Christ; the brighter area in the upper part of it, including the faces of both Christ and John the Baptist, and the dove of the Holy Spirit, are restorations of the 18th century. The figure behind the Lord, labelled as the personification of the River Jordan, is original. In the blu eband around them are the Twelve Apostles, each of whom is dressed as a Roman senator, and holding a crown.

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The Chapel of St Peter Chrysologus in Ravenna

On the calendar of the post-Conciliar rite, today is the feast of St Peter Chrysologus, who was bishop of Ravenna from around 433 until his death in 450; in 1729, Pope Benedict XIII made him the 13th Doctor of the Church. Within the palace of the archbishops of Ravenna is a chapel dedicated to him jointly with St Andrew the Apostle; he is traditionally said to have built it, but it is actually the work of his namesake Peter II, who held the see from 494-519. The chapel is quite small, a cruciform space with a small atrium leading into it. The upper part of both the chapel and the atrium is covered with some very beautiful mosaic work, although it has been heavily restored several times, and some parts are completely lost. (Photos by Nicola de’ Grandi.)

In the apse, the Cross on a starry background. As noted recently, the Cross was generally shown empty in this period to emphasize the Resurrection, which took place after Christ’s body had been removed from it. Above it we see Peter II’s monogram on a background of vines.

Following an older convention, which at the end of the 5th century had already become rare in the most important center of western Christianity, Rome, Christ is shown young and beardless, to indicate that He is a different person from God the Father. (The heresy that God the Son IS God the Father under a different guise, known as “Patripassianism”, was the great scare-heresy of the pre-Nicene period, and Arianism, which made the Son a creation of the Father, was the over-reaction to it.) He wears the purple of the Roman Emperors, and has a decorated halo, as signs of His divinity. To the right are the Apostles Peter, Andrew, and Philip; to the left, Paul, James and John

In the center of the vault, four angels support a stylized XP monogram; between them are the symbols of the four Evangelists, which are shown below in greater detail.

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