Paleochristian Archives - The Patroclus

December 26, 2023April 30, 2024

Paleochristian Churches Part V – The Basilica of Santa Sabina in Rome

Welcome to another article on paleochristian churches – buildings that survive from the early Christian era. In this case, the church is the Basilica of Santa Sabina all’Aventino, in Rome.

As I said in the introduction to this series,”paleochristian” is a somewhat elastic term; in some contexts it is used quite strictly to refer only to the very earliest periods, while in others it might apply more broadly to periods in the first millennium AD when Christian art, architecture and doctrine were all still evolving. I’m not a proper historian so I lean towards elasticity, selecting my examples on the basis of what they can show us that is different to the familiar architectural and artistic conventions of the Middle Ages and onwards, and also because really old things are very cool.

Since the Middle Ages the term “basilica” has meant a large church, granted special privileges by the Catholic Church. But in ancient Roman times, it referred simply to a large public building, used for various purposes including law courts, tax offices and so on; the colonnaded side aisles could be subdivided with curtains so a basilica might serve multiple purposes at the same time.

Basilicas were built to a standard plan, and after the establishment of Christianity as the state religion under Constantine, the basic plan – and the term – was adopted for large churches.

If you are a regular reader you will know that I am often disappointed to find that very old ecclesiastical art and architecture can be hard to find beneath later – often baroque, but also Renaissance – accretions. If you find yourself similarly disappointed, then I can recommend Santa Sabina, which is the oldest surviving basilica in Rome that retains its original appearance. While it did have some internal additions in the 16th Century, these were removed in the 20th.

Dating from 422 or so, the Basilica of Santa Sabina is a couple of decades older than the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore – but it is in something much closer to its original condition than the mighty basilica of Santa Maria.

Santa Sabina is also easy to get to if you are in Rome. It stands on the Aventine Hill – that’s the southernmost of the ancient seven hills, beside the Tiber, next to the Circus Maximus and across the river from Trastevere. There’s a pleasant park there called the Giardino degli Aranci (Garden of the Oranges) from which you get one of the better views of Rome.

Map of Aventine Hill — Map showing the Basilica of Santa Sabina in the lower left (click to open in Google Maps)

Unless you arrive there in a bus or a taxi, or on one of those blasted electric scooters, you will probably do what we have done each time and slog up the hill on foot from the Circus Maximus, or from the Lungotevere (the avenue beside the Tiber). If you take the former route you will see a pleasant rose garden on the way.

Via di Valle Murcia — The approach to the Aventine Hill through the rose garden. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)

When you get to Santa Sabina, in the car park you might see an immaculate old Lancia or Alfa Romeo with white ribbons on the bonnet, because the church is a very popular place for weddings.

In ancient republican Rome the hill was the site of several temples dedicated to deities associated with the plebeian classes, but by imperial times the hill seems to have become a very up-market suburban area, with luxurious houses owned by aristocratic families, and a temple of Juno. One of the houses is said to have belonged to a lady called Sabina, a Christian convert who was martyred in the 2nd Century and later canonised. I don’t know whether Sabina’s house became a church after her death, but in any case there would probably have been no continuity with the later basilica dedicated to Sabina, because in the early 400s the area is thought to have been completely destroyed when Alaric the Goth sacked Rome. That makes sense – Alaric ordered his troops to respect religious places, but private houses in a wealthy suburb would have had no such protection.

It must be said that even some Catholic sources are a bit dubious as to whether “Saint Sabina” even existed. One scholar argues that the real-life Sabina was likely to have been a wealthy 5th-Century donor of the land on which the basilica was to be built, and that the whole story about the 2nd-Century martyr was an early medieval invention. This is by no means impossible; in my post about Santa Costanza and Sant’Agnese we saw how two completely different Costanzas appear to have been postumously conflated into a single rather implausible saint. And it is not hard to imagine that “Sabina’s Church”, ie the church built on Sabina’s land, became “Saint Sabina’s Church” over time, creating the need for a confected hagiography to explain who the purported saint had been.

As we saw in my post on A Return to Ravenna, when the Gothic army left Rome, one of their hostages was the young Galla Placidia, daughter of the Emperor Theodosius, who was later to marry one of her captors and later still became, as regent for her son, the last competent ruler of the Western Empire. As a wealthy Roman lady, might our possible real Sabina have moved in the same circles as Galla Placidia, and perhaps met her? It is an interesting but unprovable speculation.

What is known for certain is that in the 420s, not long after the sack of Rome by the Goths, a churchman called Peter of Illyria commissioned the basilica that when complete twelve years later would become known as Santa Sabina. I wondered what this area might have looked like then. Only a few years after the sack, Rome was already experiencing severe depopulation, and the wealthy people who had lived on the Aventine Hill before the sack (including Sabina?) may well have had country estates to which they could relocate. In my imagination the hill would still have been a place of ruins, perhaps with improvised market gardens or animals grazing where once there had been luxurious houses. (Note: I recently watched an interesting video on the role of population decline in the fall of the Western Empire. You can find it here.)

Looking north from the hilltop, what would one have seen? More ruins across the river in Trastevere, I suppose, and to the right on the Palatine Hill. But Rome was to suffer two more sackings in the next six decades, so it wasn’t yet as bad as it would get.

View from Giardino degli Aranci — A modern view looking north-west from the Giardini degli Aranci towards Trastevere and St Peter’s on the left. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens, two images stitched in Capture One software (click to enlarge).

Was the Temple of Juno still standing on the Aventine Hill? As a pagan structure it would not have been afforded any special protection by the Goths, but in any case, given the suppression of the old religion by now-dominant Christianity, it might already have fallen into a state in which it wasn’t worth looting.

The Interior

Inside the Basilica of Santa Sabina, the overwhelming impression is of an austere nobility. Whenever we have been there, there have been no seats in the nave, so you really feel the space. Lining the nave are columns that were taken from the Temple of Juno and re-used. That temple was built around 400 BC and then restored during the reign of Augustus. So you are standing in a building that is over 1600 years old, but the columns are even older – I’m not an expert, but I would guess that elaborate Corinthian capitals like this would date from the Augustan restoration, making them 400 years older than most of the church.

Above the door is a dedication in Latin hexameters, which I assume is the reason we know that Peter of Illyria commissioned the church.

The windows in the apse, and in the clerestory (that is, along the top of the walls of the nave), contain neither plain nor coloured glass, but shards of a translucent mineral called selenite, mounted in delicate stone tracery. This is apparently a very ancient practice – the first use of glass in windows is supposed to have been some decades after Santa Sabina was built. As far as I can find out, this is one of the very few ancient buildings (or perhaps the only one) where you can still see selenite windows.

The Doors

If you get excited about unlikely survivals of really old stuff, then a highlight of Santa Sabina is seeing the original doors of cypress wood, still in position. They are huge, and are easily the oldest large wooden artefacts that survive from antiquity. Despite their being made of wood, and despite their having been exposed to the open air for around 1,600 years, you can still look at the intricate carvings of biblical scenes.

Santa Sabina doors — Santa Sabina: the doors. The fact that most adults can walk through the opening upright gives an idea of the scale. I believe that the marble door frame, like the columns, started out in another, older, building. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)

Needless to say the carvings on the doors have been the subject of intense academic study – and the inevitable disagreements – but two things stood out to me. One is a small panel at the far top left, which was rather hard to photograph with the lens I had with me. It shows three figures with their arms outstretched, and while there are some alternative interpretations, it is hard to disagree with the conventional view that this is the earliest known representation of the crucifixion of Christ, with the other figures being the two thieves.

The second thing that stood out to me was the panel showing the adoration of the magi. Unfortunately I do not have a photograph with sufficient recoverable detail to show here, but as in Ravenna and in Santa Maria Maggiore, our three friends are wearing tights and Phrygian caps (or “smurf hats”, if you prefer). On some future visit to Rome I will try and get a reproducible image and update this post.

Another panel shows a figure being acclaimed by others, standing in front of a church and accompanied by an angel. While there have been various interpretations that this is a biblical event, another theory has it that the person’s costume would make him a Roman-Byzantine Emperor. If so, the most plausible candidate is Theodosius II, the Eastern Emperor at the time that Santa Sabina was built (and the nephew of Galla Placidia).

Later History

The basilica survived subsequent sackings of Rome and the rest of the Dark Ages. In 1216, when the Order of the Dominicans was established, Pope Honorius granted Santa Sabina to them to use as their headquarters. Some internal redecoration occurred in the Renaissance, but the building avoided the worst indignities of the period, especially that of having an entirely inappropriate Renaissance or baroque facade stuck on the front. At one point due to fears for the integrity of the structure most of the windows were bricked in, which must have made the interior very dark.

In the half-dome of the apse there was once an original 5th-Century mosaic, which was replaced in the 16th Century by a mediocre fresco. I have not managed to find a description of the original, but it is suggested that the composition of the replacement mimics that of the original.

During Napoleon’s occupation of Rome the Dominicans were expelled, but returned afterwards. Then when the Kingdom of Italy took Rome from the Papacy in 1870 they were expelled again, and the Italian Government converted the church to a quarantine station, of all things. These days the basilica is again a consecrated church of the Dominicans.

There were two separate restorations during the 20th Century, the first of which was criticised for some of the aesthetic decisions made, including the installation of a rather bizarre pagoda-like ciborium, baldacchino or altar canopy, which was removed, along with other accretions, in the second restoration. At that time the windows were re-opened, with the stone tracery recreated based on the remains of the 5th-Century originals which had been discovered during excavations.

However if you would like to see the ciborium, and you live in California, you can do so. Someone bought it, shipped it to America and reassembled it in the grounds of the Los Angeles Forest Lawn cemetery.

July 21, 2023April 1, 2024

Paleochristian Churches III – Three Umbrian Gems

Welcome to the third episode in my series on paleochristian churches (from, as always, a purely secular perspective). The preceding two are about Santa Costanza and Sant’Agnese in Rome and Ravenna. This time I propose to show you three paleochristian churches in Umbria, two of which, despite not being in Rome, have been described as among the oldest examples to survive in Italy.

Sant’Angelo, Perugia

This church (also referred to, more correctly, as San Michele Arcangelo) lies a few hundred metres northwest of the Etruscan/Roman walls of Perugia. It sits just inside the medieval walls, but since the church dates from the fifth or sixth century, it predates those walls and would originally have been outside the town.

It is an easy walk up a gentle slope from the Porta Etrusca to the church, past the Università per Stranieri (university for foreigners) and passing a few Chinese restaurants on the way.

The church sits in a little park, the main users of which, the last time I was there, were sunbathing locals and their dogs. The only other visitors to the actual church were a young tourist couple, who obviously had similarly nerdy interests to mine, as we later encountered each other in the otherwise deserted archaeological museum, and exchanged conspiratorial smiles.

Depending on when in the fifth or sixth centuries it was built, the church would have seen its first use before the fall of the empire, or later during the period of Ostrogothic rule, or later still during the ruinous Gothic Wars in which the Eastern Empire sought to re-establish its rule over Italy but ended up fatally weakening that rule. Or it possibly even dates from the period of the Lombard conquest of Italy. Yes, it was a pretty busy time. If you want to read more about this tumultuous period, I recommend my posts on Ravenna at the Fall of the Empire, A Return to Ravenna, and The Lombard Invasion and the Byzantine Corridor.

The church itself, being circular, is more typical of the late Roman period than of medieval times when the cross-shaped plan became ubiquitous. In fact, with its ambulatory vault it is reminiscent of the 4^th-Century Basilica of Santa Costanza in Rome, of which I wrote in the first post of this series.

The central dome is supported on a ring of sixteen columns – one source I have says that these were scavenged from multiple Roman sites, another says they were all from the same pagan temple, possibly on the same site. While I am not an expert, it seems to me that there are too many differences in style and execution for them to have come from the same original building. But whatever their provenance they are clearly of higher-quality craftsmanship than the rest of the church.

Sante'Angelo, Perugia — Sant’Angelo, Perugia. Interior showing column capitals. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

There are traces of 14^th-Century frescoes on the walls – 700 years ago may seem pretty old to you and me, but when they were put there the church was already eight or nine hundred years old.

Apparently in the 15^th Century, the church was converted into a small fort. I don’t know whether that would have required deconsecration, but it is certainly back in use as a church today. This may date from a restoration that occurred in the late 1940s.

San Salvatore, Spoleto

If you have read some of the related posts on this site you will know that after the Gothic Wars, the Langobards (Lombards), a displaced Germanic people, entered a weakened Italy from the north-east and quickly overran the peninsula, with the exception of Rome, Ravenna and the “Byzantine Corridor” which linked them. One of the main centres of Lombard power was the Duchy of Spoleto.

Just outside the old town of Spoleto, you will find the church of San Salvatore. At the time of writing (2023) it is unfortunately closed to allow the building to be strengthened against earthquakes. The authorities have however placed a sheet of toughened glass in the main doorway so you can peer into the interior. We previously visited there in 2015 and I took some pictures on my phone – some of those are reproduced here, and in due course I will return and take some better ones.

San Salvatore, Spoleto. Nexus 6P phone camera (click to enlarge).

According to Professor Ian Campbell Ross in his Umbria: A Cultural Guide (Oxford, 2013), the Lombards built little in stone themselves, having only a few years before been footloose wanderers through Europe with their cattle and wagons. This makes any survivals from their period all the more precious. Also according to Ross, the date of the original church on this site (and how much of that original remains) is the subject of scholarly dispute, but it may have been as early as the 4^th Century, well before the fall of the Empire and the arrival of the Lombards.

What is not disputed is that the Lombards rebuilt or renovated the church in the 8^th Century, and also that the internal structure makes use of columns and architraves that were originally part of Roman temples. Whether these were incorporated in the original building, or during the renovations, is I believe unknown. My dilettante observation is that the pillars appear to be load-bearing, in which case they are integral to the building’s structure. So if they were incorporated in the 8^th Century, then it must have been a complete rebuild. If it was only a renovation, then they may date from earlier and have been part of the original building.

Roman remnants are also incorporated in the façade – since this is not integral to the main structure they could definitely have been added at the time of the Lombard renovation in the 700s.

These days San Salvatore is the chapel of the municipal cemetery; by definition a quiet and reflective place. It seems that over the course of the 20th Century a series of restorations removed various internal baroque accretions and restored the dignity and austerity of the original, for which we must be grateful.

The Little Temple of Clitumnus

Let us finish with what is probably the oldest of these three examples. The Tempietto sul Clitunno is truly a remarkable survival, located near the Springs of Clitumnus (Fonti di Clitunno). That name would ring a bell to classically-minded readers, and also to others perhaps, as it crops up in later literature.

These days Clitunno is the name given to a little river that runs south through the Valle Umbra, one of several which, since the medieval draining of the valley, run in largely artificial channels. In ancient times though, Clitumnus was a river god whose shrine was located where a series of springs burst forth from the base of the hills. It was apparently a very sacred and beautiful place, where the cold, clear and pure waters were used to purify the white oxen being prepared for sacrifice. The poets Propertius and Virgil celebrated it in verse, and Pliny the Younger wrote an extensive description in one of his many letters. Later, Byron devoted several lines of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage to it, in which – not untypically – he manages to work in a reference to a naked nymph.

The Fonti del Clitunno. The springs issue from the rocks in the centre of the photograph. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Nowadays the fame of the springs, at least among Italians, is due to their having been the subject of a 19^th-Century poem by the nationalist poet Giosuè Carducci in which he hails “green Umbria”, (although he never called it the “green heart of Italy”, as the poem is universally misquoted in tourism material).

Carducci memorial — Fonti del Clitunno, early 20th-Century memorial to Giosuè Carducci. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

And it must be said that it is hard to feel any echoes of ancient sanctity as the place now has the feel of a pleasant urban park, accentuated by the main road running past and the mothers with young children who know that the cold spring waters cool the air and make it an excellent place to come and stroll on a hot day. The poplar trees described by Pliny have been replaced by willows. Perhaps early on a misty autumn morning the atmosphere might be more evocative.

A few hundred metres up the road is a small building built on classical lines, the tempietto or little temple. For a long time it was misidentified as one of the ancient temples and shrines mentioned by Pliny, but it is quite far away from the springs, and in any case even a superficial examination reveals it to be a coarsely-built late Roman structure incorporating parts scavenged from earlier Roman temples. I have seen suggestions that those parts came from the original precinct of Clitumnus, and it seems plausible – why carry such things any further than you need to?

Tempietto sul Clitunno. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

In fact, to me this pretty little building is almost as interesting as an actual pagan temple, not least because it is not really all that much newer than a pagan temple would be. The central part, a barrel-vaulted chapel, dates from the late 4^th Century, which makes it seriously old, a hundred years or so before the traditional date of the fall of the western Empire.

A couple of hundred years later, a façade assembled from the scavenged Roman material was added, giving it the appearance it retains today. This was during the period of Lombard rule, leading to the tempietto having been declared part of a series of UNESCO sites in Italy associated with the Lombards (San Salvatore in Spoleto, above, is another).

According to the information displayed at the site, the outer pairs of columns are from the Imperial era (2^nd Century AD) while the inner pair and the tympanum – the triangular bit – are from the Augustan era (1^st Century AD).

In the picture below you can see how the finer work of the re-used earlier Roman elements contrasts with the rougher work of the late-imperial building, particularly where the decoration under the eaves continues around from the front to the side.

Inside, in the apse behind the altar, there are frescoes of Christ and Saints Peter and Paul that have been dated to the 8^th Century, so they are pretty damn old really, despite being four hundred years later than the building itself.

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As I said in the first in this series of articles, one of the attractions of these buildings is the sheer implausibility of their survival – from wars, earthquakes, misguided redecorations or simply falling apart through old age. All three of these Umbrian churches are miraculous in that way; and all three snooze away in their respective settings – Sant’Angelo on the edge of Perugia, in its park with the sunbathers and dog walkers, San Salvatore in Spoleto’s municipal cemetery, and the tempietto nestled inconspicuously beside the main road from Spoleto to Trevi. Go there and lay your hands on the stones – and touch history.

June 30, 2023April 1, 2024

Paleochristian Churches II – A Return to Ravenna

More photography of the UNESCO sites in Ravenna, and an introduction to an intriguing lady – Galla Placidia.

Back in 2020 I posted this article on Ravenna at the Fall of the Empire and illustrated it with photographs I had taken in 2008. I won’t repeat too much of that content here, so I do recommend you have a look at that article if you are interested in the history of Ravenna, and how it came to contain so much extraordinary late-Roman art.

But for those who don’t want to, here is a very short version: Ravenna became the capital of the Western Roman Empire shortly before it fell. It was ruled by the Goths for a while, then retaken by the Eastern Empire, under the Emperor Justinian and his general Belisarius.

There are some new historical subjects covered in this post, so feel free to scroll past the photographic stuff.

Photography Stuff (feel free to skip)

Those 2008 photographs were taken with a Hasselblad 501C/M camera with a 120 rollfilm back, on slow ISO 50 Fujichrome Velvia film. When I got back to Australia I scanned the 6x6cm positives on a Nikon Coolscan 9000 film scanner. All of that presented some challenges, due mainly to the slow film in dark indoor settings. I needed to use exposures that were on the long side for hand-held photography (tripods are of course not permitted in the Ravenna UNESCO sites), which limited me to places where I could brace the camera, for example against a column. It also tended to produce colour casts, as Velvia is a film that was developed for outdoor light conditions.

Recently (June 2023) we revisited Ravenna, and this was an opportunity to re-take some of those photographs, and to take new ones in places where photography had been impossible last time due to the slow film and poor light. This time I took my Fujifilm GFX 50R medium-format digital camera, which gave me some advantages. One is that, unlike with a roll of film, one can change the ISO with every image, thus being able to shoot in low light. And while high ISO will produce electrical noise (a bit like grain in film, but in this case variation between adjacent pixels), the large sensor reduces the effect of that, simply by having smaller and more numerous pixels relative to the image size. I also used software called Topaz DeNoise AI to reduce the amount of noise further. In post-processing I was also better able to manage the colour balance.

All that being said, there are some very interesting historical things to talk about in this post, so let’s get started.

The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia

On your way into the Basilica of San Vitale, you pass a small rather nondescript building which might have passed for a public lavatory or electricity substation, had they had such things in the 420s. It is the “Mausoleum” of Galla Placidia, although her body never lay here.

Mausoleo di Galla Placidia — The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

In my earlier post on Ravenna I made a comment that a lot of the late emperors were gormless nonentities. That was a bit of a generalisation, but quite a few of them were. One of the stronger characters of this era, though, was not an emperor but the daughter of one, the half-sister of two others, the wife of a fourth and the mother of a fifth, in whose name she ruled the Western Empire as regent during his childhood. Her name was Galla Placidia.

Placidia’s father was the emperor Theodosius I, who was not gormless, He was the last to rule both the western and eastern halves of the empire, and did a creditable job militarily despite having been given a very challenging strategic environment to work in.

Born in Constantinople, as a young teenager Placidia was summoned to her father’s court in Mediolanum (Milan), shortly before his death.

On Theodosius’s death, the empire was divided in two and he was succeeded in the west by his son Honorius, who was definitely one of the gormless ones. Faced with a military situation as bad as that faced by his father, Honorius managed to make it worse by falling out with and then executing his most competent general, Stilicho. That left Alaric, king of the Goths, as the main military force in the West. Alaric could have ended up as Rome’s greatest ally and its saviour – all he wanted was land for his people and to command Rome’s armies, which on the evidence he would have done very well. But Honorius managed the relationship so badly that Alaric ended up as its implacable enemy.

Alaric invaded Italy and laid siege to Rome, where the eighteen-year-old Placidia was then living. Somehow – perhaps while trying to escape – she was captured by the Goths and kept as a hostage in their camp. Alaric then besieged Ravenna, where, during a truce for negotiations, Honorius treacherously ordered an attack. Alaric, clearly deciding that he had had enough, returned to Rome, where he captured and sacked the city. Then, loaded with booty and even more hostages – but still including Placidia – the Goths continued south, hoping to settle in Sicily.

That would have had momentous consequences for Italian history, but instead Alaric soon fell ill and died, and was replaced by his brother-in-law Athaulf (or Ataulf). Athaulf decided instead to leave Italy and led his army, hostages and all, into what is now France and Spain where in one of the more surprising developments in an age of surprises, Placidia married him.

Why? Was it a forced marriage? It does not appear so. Was she a headstrong young woman following her heart? Was it a negotiated arrangement between Athaulf and Honorius to create a dynastic link? It seems unlikely. Was she, as an emperor’s daughter, placing herself in a position of power? History is frustratingly silent, which of course has allowed some modern writers to project their own preferences onto that partly-blank canvas.

Placidia and Athaulf had a son, who died in infancy – another fascinating what-if, for what might have become of a child with Roman imperial and Gothic royal blood? Before long Athaulf himself was murdered, and after a period of turmoil she was lucky to survive, his widow was returned to Honorius under the terms of a treaty. Honorius forced her into a marriage with his general Constantius, who shortly after was raised to the status of co-emperor. Placidia bore him two children, a girl and a boy, but was soon widowed again.

In due course her son Valentinian was declared Emperor of the West, and Galla Placidia became regent until he came of age, ruling skilfully. Indeed she has been described as the last competent ruler of the Western Empire (Valentinian having inherited the gormless gene). Her daughter Honoria became notorious in her own right for opening a correspondence with Attila the Hun (and even possibly contemplating marriage with him).

In her later years Placidia was known for commissioning churches, and one of those, of course, was the little chapel in Ravenna, now known incorrectly as her mausoleum.

What is beyond doubt is that inside the modest exterior is a little jewel box. The ceiling is covered in stars with the symbols of the four evangelists in the corners, there is a youthful beardless Christ (typical of the 5^th Century) as a shepherd, and an image of St Lawrence, to whom the chapel was probably dedicated, with his gridiron.

St Lawrence, Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

It is not known who was buried there, but it certainly wasn’t her – she died and was buried in Rome. Nonetheless the medieval tradition that she was buried there was very strong. Someone even invented a story to explain the lack of her body in any of the sarcophagi – supposedly some children accidentally set fire to it! But the chapel definitely has a connection with her, and so we can think about her as we contemplate it.

Mausoluem of Galla Placidia — Christ as Shepherd, Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

There is no artificial light, and very little light enters – the tiny windows are covered in sheets of translucent stone – alabaster, I read somewhere. It takes a while for your eyes to become accustomed to the darkness, and even pushing the GFX50R to ISO 12800 produced some very marginal images that required a lot of post-processing. But at least I got some photographs – it was far too dark for my ISO 50 Velvia film back in 2008.

Apparently there is archaeological evidence that the little chapel was once part of a larger complex of religious buildings associated with the imperial palace.

The Basilica of San Vitale

Emerging blinking into the sunlight, I had a brief conversation with the attendant who, it turned out, was a camera enthusiast and another Fuji user. From there it was a very short walk to San Vitale – built more than a hundred years after Galla Placidia’s Mausoleum.

I don’t propose to repeat everything I said in the original article but the very short version is that the building of the basilica was funded by a wealthy Ravennate starting in 526, by which time the Western Roman Empire had gone, never to be restored. It contains many extraordinary mosaics, but the two most important historically are one of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and his retinue, and on the opposite wall one of the Empress Theodora, and hers.

San Vitale Justinian — San Vitale; Emperor Justinan and his retinue. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens, colour balance and perspective corrected in Capture One software (click to enlarge).

We know that the bald chap is Bishop (later Saint) Maximianus, because it says so. It is also believed that the bearded fellow with the mod haircut to Justinian’s left is the great general Belisarius, hero of the first Gothic War. I have seen a few illustrations of Belisarius, doubtless all based on this mosaic, and they always manage to make him look a bit like Pete Townshend from The Who. According to the Wikipedia article, the wealthy Ravennate who funded the building of San Vitale – one Julius Argentarius – may appear as one of the courtiers in the Justinian mosaic. If that is true, then my bet, based on no research whatsoever, is that he is the thickset fellow with a five-o’-clock shadow between Justinian and Maximianus. I have also seen this described as a portrait of Justinian’s other general Narses, but find that a bit implausible, because Narses was a eunuch and unlikely to have a moustache.

San Vitale Theodora — San Vitale; Empress Theodora and her retinue. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens, colour balance and perspective corrected in Capture One software (click to enlarge).

I can’t remember seeing anything that suggests identifications for Theodora’s attendants, but looking at them it seems likely that the two men and two women on either side of her are intended to be actual people, given the individuality of their portraits, while the ladies off to the right are all a bit generic.

Congratulations to Lou for noticing that on the hem of Theodora’s cloak you can see a version of the Three Kings from the Church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo (see below). I had not noticed that before.

One thing that I hadn’t really thought through before was the chronology of the building of San Vitale relative to that of the Gothic Wars. When the building was commissioned, Ravenna (and indeed most of Italy) was ruled by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, albeit notionally as a fief of the Eastern Empire. By the time that the mosaics of Justinian and Theodora were created, the first Gothic War was over and direct imperial rule had been established in the form of the Exarchate of Ravenna. Justinian was now the actual rather than the nominal ruler, and it was all thanks to Belisarius, so it is no surprise to see them both commemorated in this way. Nor is it a surprise to see Theodora there as well, as she added quite a bit of steel to Justinian’s already fairly hardline regime.

Alas, the Goths revived under the leadership of Totila, and as I have described elsewhere, the Second Gothic War, along with a couple of natural disasters, saw the complete devastation and impoverishment of Italy.

Compared to my 2008 pictures, these show the advantages of having been shot with higher ISO, and better colour balancing.

Sant’Apollinare Nuovo

From San Vitale we walked to the great church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo. Again, I won’t repeat the full description in the earlier article but this large church, like San Vitale, was started under Ostrogothic rule and was probably attached to the palace of Theodoric. As such it contained various portraits of Theodoric and churchmen who, like the rest of the Goths, adhered to the Arian version of Christianity which was later suppressed as heretical by the Catholic Church (the argument was over just how human or divine Christ actually was). At that time the “heretical” portraits in Sant’Apollinare were covered over, although they missed a few bits.

The glory of Sant’Apollinare is the two long mosaics down either side of the nave. On one side a procession of female martyrs leads to an adoration of the magi, but this is nothing like the Three Kings we are used to from later ages. They are in extraordinary exotic garments, and by some accounts are actually dressed like contemporary Gothic nobles.

I had thought that this picture of the Three Kings with their fancy tights and their Phrygian caps was unique, but I was wrong, as I discovered on visits to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore and the Basilica of Santa Sabina in Rome.

On the other side is a procession of male martyrs, leading to an enthroned Christ. Leading the procession is St Martin of Tours, a vociferous opponent of Arianism, to whom the church was rededicated after the suppression of Arianism under Justinian. St Martin’s portrait must therefore have been added as part of the other redecorations, which explains his different costume.

Sant'Apillinare Nuovo — Male Martyrs, St Martin of Tours, enthroned Christ. Sant’Apollinare Nuvo, Ravenna. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens, perspective corrected in Capture One software (click to enlarge).

One can only speculate how glorious the apse decoration behind the altar must have been, given that this was where they usually put the best bits. Apparently though this too was subject to redecoration under Justinian. But in any case the area was later disastrously redecorated in a 17^th-Century wedding-cake style, so we will never know.

The Neonian (Orthodox) Baptistery

This is one place we didn’t get to in 2008. There are two ancient baptisteries in Ravenna. One, featured in my earlier article, is the “Arian Baptistery” which was built by Theodoric for the use of his fellow Arians. The other, known as the Neonian (after a bishop Neon) or “Orthodox” Baptistery is about fifty years older, from the end of the 300s or beginning of the 400s. This makes it older even than Galla Placidia’s mausoleum, predating the fall of the Western Empire by seventy years or so.

Battistero Neoniano — Neonian Baptistery, Ravenna. It is the small hexagonal building to the right of the centre. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Inside, in the centre of the dome, is Christ being baptised. The River Jordan is represented as a sort of pagan river-god, and Christ himself is shown as youthful and blond, although bearded, unlike the clean-shaven Christ of the Arian Baptistery.

Around the dome are the twelve apostles, and beneath them are what look like classical buildings, with seats and tables, which in the case of the evangelists are bearing their gospels.

The quality of these depictions of the apostles is extraordinary, better even than the near-contemporary mosaics in the Mausoleum of Santa Costanza in Rome. It is dangerous to generalise about an era from the work of (presumably) a single artist, but based on what has survived, stuff as good as this would not be seen again for many hundreds of years.

The Chapel of Sant’Andrea

Our final visit was to the little chapel of Sant’Andrea, part of a complex of ancient buildings which is now the archiepiscopal museum. There is not as much information available as for the other Ravenna UNESCO sites, but I have found that it dates from the time of Ostrogothic rule in Ravenna. It was not however Arian. As I observed in my earlier post on Ravenna, the Goths were a tolerant lot and were happy to allow the orthodox Catholics to worship unmolested – a tolerance that Justinian’s regime obviously did not reciprocate when he took over again.

Like the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, it is very dark inside, so one has to push the ISO a bit, and do some corrective work in post-processing.

Cappello di Sant'Andrea — Chapel of Sant’Andrea, Ravenna. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

The association with Saint Andrew is due to the fact that the saint’s alleged remains were relocated to Ravenna from Constantinople in the 6^th Century. Possession of such remains by a city was both prestigious and lucrative, so people went to a lot of trouble to acquire them, and if that failed, then a convenient miracle often occurred to reveal a substitute set.

Two things are memorable about this chapel. One is that Christ is represented dressed in late-Roman military costume (indeed at first I assumed the picture was of the Archangel Michael). The other is a ceiling covered in cheerful-looking birds. Birds are a feature of early Christian art, but these ones seem to have more character than most.

Category: Paleochristian