Ravenna, crucible of western Christianity

Christopher Howse on how the Western Roman Empire’s glittering capital absorbed the new barbarism

TRAVENNA by Judith Herrin 576pp, Allen Lane, £30, ebook £12.99

wo doves on the edge of a fountain of water was the picture postcard selling best when I visited one of the showplaces of Ravenna, the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia.

The inside of this church, in the shape of a Greek cross 40ft across, is entirely covered with mosaics. Their tesserae were pressed into place in the second quarter of the fifth century – nearly 1,600 years ago. They astonish with their bright colours (unlike most scrubbed statuary and faded wall-painting from late antiquity).

The surface of a high central dome is sown with golden stars on blue, with a cross in the centre. On one wall the Good Shepherd sits amid his sheep, on another St Lawrence strides cheerfully to his martyrdom on a gridiron above a fiery furnace. And beyond modern-looking geometric borders of blue, green and yellow, the two doves, one sipping the water, the other turning its head, look so charming that they bridge the centuries.

Know-all travellers tell you that it is not really the mausoleum of Galla Placidia. True enough, Judith Herrin confirms that she was buried in Rome (after an astonishing life as an emperor’s daughter, a hostage of the Goths for years, a Gothic queen, the wife of an emperor and regent for another). She must have made space for piety, for she did build the so-called mausoleum, once part of the vanished church of the Holy Cross.

It would be worth travelling to

Ravenna to see this alone. But half a dozen more churches of the fifth and sixth century glow with mosaics. Why were they built here, and how have they survived? Judith Herrin’s book explains by recounting the city’s life from 402, when it became the capital of the Roman Empire in the West, to 751, when the Lombards took over.

The story is not, she emphasises, one of decline, but of rebirth, for Ravenna established what European Christendom could become. Eventually

Ravenna became marginalised, letting those stupendous buildings survive without being rebuilt. But it served as a physical model for Charlemagne to imitate after he got himself crowned Emperor by the Pope on Christmas Day 800. He visited Ravenna three times and sent precious marble monolithic columns from here to Aachen, his chosen centre of control. You can see them still in the palace church there, which escaped Allied bombing.

That church at Aachen is tall and octagonal because it imitates San Vitale at Ravenna. San Vitale’s shape, deriving ultimately from Jerusalem, was unusual in its time, the mid-sixth century, when its patron the Emperor Justinian was simultaneously building in the Eastern imperial capital of Constantinople a church of the same design, Sts Sergius and Bacchus, just downhill from the vast Hagia Sophia, also taking shape in those years.

You can see what is missing in the bare Sts Sergius and Bacchus (after more than four centuries under image-hating Islam) by looking at San Vitale. The biblical scenes in mosaic with which it is covered relate to the Eucharistic liturgy that took place within its walls. A wonderfully expressive scene shows Abel standing on the green grass and holding up a lamb, with Melchizedek the mysterious priest from nowhere on the other side of a square altar raising up bread in offering, with the hand of God descending from the sky that breaks open above them.

San Vitale is the “epitome of early Christendom” in the judgment of Judith Herrin, who has spent a distinguished career elucidating the developments of late antiquity. This is not just because its religious art (which I happen to like) reflects the beliefs of the rulers who commissioned it.

More than that, the political power of the day was inserting itself into the heart of a building where, in the belief of the time, Christ became really present in the daily liturgy. Although the Emperor Justinian and Theodora the Empress never went to Ravenna, the panels of mosaic that portray them, crowned and jewelled among their guards and clergy, powerfully underwrote the Christian polity that was developing in the city.

The glories of San Vitale might suggest that Ravenna sailed quietly on under Byzantine patronage from the times of the last Emperor in the West, Romulus Augustulus, deposed aged 16 in 476. But the 350 years of its ascendancy saw one damned thing after another. It had been to hold off the Goths that the Roman capital was moved to waterway-defended Ravenna in 402. Not all of its problems were brought by barbarians – there are barbarians and barbarians.

One rebarbative piece of architecture memorialises the barbarian most identified with Ravenna. This was Theoderic, whose mausoleum built in 520 on the edge of the city is a rotunda of marble capped with a 230-ton monolith in the shape of a shallow dome 35ft across. It looks to me as lovable as a Dalek.

The great crime of Theoderic, to my eyes, was his unjust execution of the great philosopher Boethius, whose works were translated by both King Alfred and Queen Elizabeth I. His murder was not literally barbaric, for it was only too like the behaviour of rivals for the imperial throne in Constantinople, where Theoderic had spent the years of his youth. On graduating as a man of action, he was soon at the head of 20,000 warriors and 80,000 dependants determined to settle in Italy.

Theoderic’s people were by an historical accident Arian heretics, demoting the divinity of Jesus. If Theoderic, once established in Ravenna as king of Italy and beyond, tolerated Catholic as well as Arian practice, it was not out of liberal sensibility but from the pragmatic realisation that his

The mausoleum of Theoderic, with its 230-ton monolith, is as lovable as a Dalek

fellow Gothic Arians were in the minority.

It has left us with two domed baptisteries in Ravenna, one once Arian. Theoderic’s mosaic portrait on the wall of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo was chipped off (leaving disembodied hands accidentally visible) not because he was a barbarian, but because he was an Arian and by the 560s the church polity was wholly orthodox.

Ravenna often faced two ways. It escaped the wholesale iconoclasm that in 730 smashed images in Constantinople because, though it was then ruled politically as an exarchy from Constantinople, it looked religiously to Rome, where the Pope opposed the destruction of images. But Constantinople protected Ravenna from the explosive expansion of the

Islamic empire at this period. It was a close call.

Herrin spent nine years researching her narrative of the three and a half centuries of Ravenna’s ascendancy. If the reader is awake enough to avoid confusing the Emperor Leo and Pope Leo, Agnellus the archbishop and Agnellus the historian, all is made clear. The author is right not to wander too far into the quaking ground of heresies, compared to which Conan Doyle’s Grimpen Mire was a new-mown lawn (though I suspect she does not quite mean what she appears to say on page 57 about Galla Placidia’s attitude towards the council of Ephesus).

When the Long Beards or Lombards put paid to Ravenna’s imperium, the people of the upper Adriatic sought refuge in the lagoons and founded Venice. That brings home the antiquity of the place. By the time we can easily visit Ravenna the city again it should be with the advantage of having read Ravenna the book.

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