The book is....Ravenna in Late Antiquity
By Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis
Cambridge, 444 pages,$95
The other picture is...
A groin-vault mosaic in the sixth-century Capella Arcivescovile (the chapel of St. Andrew) in Ravenna, Italy. Picture courtesy of
Dr. Urs Peschlow/Cambridge University Press
Where Kings and Emperors Once Lived
By STUART FERGUSON
Ravenna, along Italy's northeast coast, is in many ways a typically modern city, with tourist-welcoming hotels, outdoor cafés, Vespas zipping by and, a few miles away, populous beaches that ease their way down into the Adriatic Sea. But it is also a place with a fabled imperial history and a host of literary resonances: Boccaccio lived in Ravenna in the mid-14th century; Dante wrote the "Divine Comedy" there and is buried alongside one of the city's churches; and Byron spent a memorable several months in Ravenna in 1820-21 (with a mistress, naturally) while he composed parts of "Don Juan," his mock-epic about daring deeds and lost loves. Oscar Wilde later paid tribute to the city: "Mighty thy name when Rome's lean eagles flew . . . [but now] in ruined loveliness thou liest dead."
Dr. Urs Peschlow/Cambridge University Press A groin-vault mosaic in the sixth-century Capella Arcivescovile (the chapel of St. Andrew) in Ravenna, Italy.
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In fact, Ravenna's heyday— roughly the fifth century to the eighth—is anything but dead. It is alive in an array of churches, basilicas, baptisteries and tombs, many with evocative images on their surfaces and interiors. Other periods make themselves present in Ravenna, too. There are Roman ruins that reach back to the days of the republic and city gates from the late Middle Ages and Renaissance—and a 15th-century castle from the era of Venetian rule.
Ravenna was once the home of emperors, kings and viceroys, many of whom tried to leave behind a material legacy as grand as their aspirations to political glory. Poised between West and East, the city served as a major outpost for two empires: those of Rome and Byzantium. "Ravenna in Late Antiquity," by Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis, is both a narrative history of the city's ruling elites and a survey of its architectural and artistic treasures.
These treasures are worth pausing over. Staring down from the walls of the Basilica of San Vitale, for instance, are portraits in stone and glass tesserae of several figures. The Byzantine ruler Justinian (483-535) is shown wearing a halo and, well below, startling red and purple shoes; his archbishop Maximimian is wrapped in a white tunic and gold vestment, with the pallium draped over his shoulders, his "blazing blue eyes" staring from a "lean, intense face," as Ms. Deliyannis puts it; the Empress Theodora, for her part, stands among eunuchs and female attendants holding a gem-encrusted chalice. No visitor to the basilica in the early sixth century, peering up at such august notables, would have any doubts about who was in charge, in the earthly realm at least.
In fact, Justinian and Theodora never lived in Ravenna—and apparently never visited. But many other rulers made the city their home. For example: the Western Roman Emperor Honorius, who moved the seat of government there in 402; the Visigoth kings, who swooped down from the north in the fifth century and controlled, for a time, most of the Italian peninsula; and the so-called exarchs—the viceroys who governed Italy from Ravenna on behalf of the Byzantine emperor well into the eighth century, before the Franks and Lombards arrived from Gaul and the Danube Valley and the city became more a repository of architectural fragments than a thriving capital.
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It was in Ravenna that Honorius's half-sister—the devout, powerful empress and regent Galla Placidia (c. 388-450)—would sometimes spend her nights prostrate on the marble floor of Santa Croce (the Church of the Holy Cross) praying. Her purported tomb, the so-called "mausoleum of Galla Placidia," is still a chapel within the church. Its dark-blue domed ceiling is decorated with 567 eight-pointed gold stars that make the entire space seem like a magnificent jewel box.
Another striking space from Ravenna's years of imperial glory, the Capella Arcivescovile (the chapel of St. Andrew), was built by Bishop Peter II during the sixth century. At the apex of its groin vault are mosaics depicting a gold chrismon (a Christian symbol) against a blue background. Four angels hold the chrismon aloft, while at their feet lurk beasts of the Apocalypse. It is enough to make even the most blasé visitor pause and consider where he will spend eternity."
Ms. Deliyannis's narrative is at its most fascinating and dense when she enters the sixth century, when Ravenna served as the capital for the Visigoth king Theodoric. He had come to power memorably. After years of war with his rival Odoacer, he proposed a "reconciliation" banquet in Ravenna in 493. To quote from John Julius Norwich's "The Middle Sea" (2006): "As his guest took his place in the seat of honor, Theodoric stepped forward and, with one tremendous stroke of his sword, clove through the body of Odoacer from collarbone to thigh."
DetailsRavenna in Late Antiquity
By Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis
Cambridge, 444 pages, $95
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Theodoric reigned for the next three decades, and Ravenna became, Ms. Deliyannis writes, "a center of Arian Christianity." The city churned with rival Christian sects. The Arians believed Jesus to be a fully human, unequal member of the Trinity, an idea that put them at odds with other contending movements, including the Nestorians (who said Christ had two separate persons, one human and one divine) and the Eutychians (for whom Christ's divine nature subsumed his human one).
In the sixth century, rivalrous believers argued and worshiped in Ravenna, though only the Arians and the members of the official Rome-led church had their own places of worship. The Arians, it should be said, eventually lost out in the struggle for doctrinal supremacy. Arian figures originally portrayed on the south wall of the great church of Sant'Apolllinare Nuovo in Ravenna were "disappeared" a century later, tessera by tessera, like disgraced leaders in Stalinist-era photographs. Only images of their hands were left intact—most likely to remind viewers that dissenters had challenged Orthodox views and lost.
For all its future pre-eminence, Ravenna was considered great even in the first century, as Ms. Deliyannis reminds us. It was then that the geographer Strabo first described the city: "Situated in the marshes is the great Ravenna, built entirely on piles, and traversed by canals, which you cross by bridges or ferry-boats. At the full tides it is washed by a considerable quantity of sea-water, as well as by the river, and thus the sewage is carried off. And the air purified; in fact, the district is considered so salubrious that the governors have selected it a spot to bring up and exercise the gladiators in."
Ravenna was a major base for the Roman navy, and Julius Caesar spent the night in the city before he crossed the Rubicon in 49 B.C. The epigram-writer Martial complained that potable water was so rare that when he ordered wine mixed with it, he got his drink neat and thus was cheated.
After the Gallo-Roman aristocrat Sidonius Apollinaris visited Ravenna in 467, he too groused about the soggy conditions but remarked on the decline in morals brought about by the city's new status as a capital: "Ravenna is a mere marsh where all the conditions of life are reversed, where walls fall and waters stand . . . the clergy lend money while the Syrian merchants sing psalms, the elderly apply themselves to ball games, the youths to dice, the eunuchs to weapons and the federate troops to letters."
The city's natural defenses and access to the sea helped it to achieve prominence: As the western Roman Empire began to crumble in the late fourth century, its emperors sought a strategic refuge that could be easily re-supplied by sea and easily reached by their imperial counterparts in Constantinople. Ravenna, in short, was not as vulnerable as Rome, and its population of only 10,000 was easier to overawe than the Roman mob.
From the research of historians and from imperial decrees we know that Ravenna housed a vast bureaucracy (with accountants, registrars, secretaries, clerks and notaries) and that its rulers left behind "marvelous" palaces, theaters, aqueducts and a mint, but none of these structures is in evidence today. Still, the "surviving works of art and architecture," Ms. Deliyannis says, allow us still to "experience Ravenna, if only in fragments, as did its inhabitants."
The illustrations and diagrams in "Ravenna in Late Antiquity" add to our understanding of the city's history and iconography—and can even serve as a kind of guidebook to an ambitious tourist. Because of the marshy setting and the passage of time, the original ground floors of some of Ravenna's existing monuments are below the modern-day street level, giving some a more squat appearance than they originally had. But step inside and time has seemingly stood still.
— Mr. Ferguson is a Rossetter House Foundation Scholar of the Florida Historical Society.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703630404575053701579423056.html?KEYWORDS=Kings+and+Emperors
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