Finding Jesus...
...in the Ravenna mosaics
Now I’m back in slightly foggy Yorkshire (though it is a privilege to live somewhere that still looks gorgeous in mizzling rain), it seems like a good time to indulge in some reminiscence from the end of my recent trip to Venice.
Specifically, on the last, I started early with a bus ride to Ravenna. These days, Ravenna is a smallish port on the west coast of the Adriatic. It has a rich cultural scene and is generally pretty rich, but that is a lot to do with its past. It is now further from the sea than it was 1500 years ago and could easily have become just a small town that used to be a big deal.
And it really was a big deal. It had been settled since prehistory, and was a decent-sized pre-Roman town, which was incorporated into the Roman Empire in 89 CE. Its real moment in the sun, though, was a few centuries later than that, in what is often called Late Antiquity (or the bit between what is conventionally labelled Antiquity and what is generally termed the Middle Ages), so from around 300 to around 700.
Specifically, between c. 400 and c. 600, Ravenna became a key strategic port in northern Italy and a centre of government for Roman authorities, then briefly in the sixth century, for Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, a leader of a tribe the Romans considered barbarians, but who they preferred to the barbarians who had recently declared themselves to be more or less independent from Roman power in Italy.
The arrangement was that, if Theodoric and his Ostrogoths could take Italy back from those other barbarians, they could rule it as loyal subordinates of the Roman Empire, and would stop looking an awful lot like a large barbarian army sampled right outside the real centre of Roman power, now in Constantinople (Istanbul).
It worked pretty well. Theodoric took over Italy, made Ravenna his capital and basically ruled like a Roman but called himself ‘king’ and played nice with the authorities in Constantinople. He was interested in doing Roman-like things, including sponsoring fancy buildings and making Roman-like laws. When he died, though, the arrangement began to fall apart, and for about twenty years of the mid-6th century, the Roman Empire spent a lot of money reconquering Italy from the Ostrogoths (destroying huge areas and causing famine along the way). The new Roman government also made Ravenna its capital in Italy. And put up more fancy buildings.
And that is why Ravenna is worth a visit, if you are ever up in northeast Italy, and a lot of why it is so wealthy today.
The buildings are pretty nice. The mosaics are…
It’s hard to explain. I could just list some superlatives. I could say that the first time I saw them for real, I gave myself a days-long crick in the neck from staring upwards.
They are, without doubt, the finest and best preserved collection of mosaics anywhere in the world, spread over seven buildings - all churches or chapels of some sort - and commissioned by some of the richest and most powerful people in the Mediterranean at a time when mosaic art was perhaps at the height of its popularity.
Today I want to share a few highlights around a specific theme, because looking for Jesus in the Ravenna mosaics isn’t just pretty easy to do (he’s everywhere), and pretty stunning (understandably, his image was the focus of really quite a lot of mosaicist effort), but also a fascinating insight into the way Late Antique Christians understood Christ as a real person and as a set of symbols, encapsulating almost everything it meant to be human, and God, and Christian.
It makes sense to start here: Christ as a child. This image of Jesus will be familiar to Christians worldwide and to anybody who has ever spent any time looking at Christian art. The mosaics of Ravenna show an early stage in the development of what are often now called memes - images that transmit their meaning, by repetition, throughout a culture, without needing to be translated or expanded every time.
Looking at this mosaic image, the infant Christ is instantly recognisable because he is always depicted sitting in his mother’s lap and she is always depicted in dark robes and the angle of their bodies is almost always the same and Jesus and Mary both have haloes showing they are holy, and Jesus is usually holding his hand out in a sign of blessing.
They are not just recognisable though. They also carry a whole story with them: the infant Christ was the symbol of the birth in Bethlehem, the coming down of God to Earth in human form, vulnerable as a child, the signs around his birth, of wise men and shepherds and all the other details of the Christmas story.
What is interesting, though, is that all of that is wrapped up in this image and yet, it isn’t in this image. In the standard Late Antique and medieval depiction of Jesus, like this one, Mary and Jesus sit on a throne, almost certainly a copy of the imperial throne, encrusted with jewels and on a plump red cushion. They wear robes that were also modelled on the robes of emperors. Here, Mary wears ‘imperial purple’, a colour of cloth made from a dye only found in the shells of particular molluscs off the coast of Portugal, and restricted to use by the Roman elite. Their clothes are trimmed with gold. This is Christ and the Virgin, enthroned for all time in Heaven, but at the same time, Christ and the Virgin symbolising the poverty and danger of the nativity in the stable and the persecution of Herod.
It is very common in churches in Late Antiquity (and, indeed, in Catholic and Orthodox churches today) to see Jesus depicted at various different points in his life cycle, and one of the images that became hugely popular in this Late Antique period was the figure usually called by Art Historians ‘Christ Pantokrator’, meaning ‘Christ, the Ruler of All’. This isn’t so much Christ as an adult on Earth but the adult Christ (the beard shows he is fully grown), reigning eternally in Heaven, his hand held in blessing over the Earth, the cross in his halo recalling his death by crucifixion. the robes, again, are gold trimmed and, this time, Christ wears the purple, too, like Mary in the previous image and like an emperor on his throne.
(As an aside, check out the gold background. This is one of the most amazing features of the Ravenna mosaics: an apparently ‘flat’ background of just gold tesserae (= mosaic pieces) is made to glitter and sparkle by placing the tesserae at subtly different angles in so that they catch the light and reflect other colours around them differently.)
Christ Pantokrator was not the only way to depict Christ in heaven, though. Here he is again, from the slightly later church of San Vitale (built 548 CE), shown unbearded, so a young man, not quite full grown, sitting on a blue sphere, probably representing the world. The robes this time look more brown in this image, but are actually that same imperial purple again.
The unbearded image of Jesus seems to have been quite popular around Late Antique Ravenna, perhaps because it was how Christ was imagined to have spent most of his life on Earth - not as an infant and not quite as the fully grown man in his thirties who would be crucified outside Jerusalem. Whatever the reason, we can see the beardless Christ in all sorts of forms, representing all sorts of people.
The image above comes from the only surviving mosaics from an archbishop’s palace from anywhere in the Late Antique or medieval world, and we might imagine an archbishop, at private prayer imagining himself as a warrior against sin, inspired by a Jesus here dressed as a Roman soldier (ironically, therefore, dressed very much like one of the soldiers who oversaw his execution).
And here is the beardless Christ again, this time from the so-called Mausoleum of Galla Placidia (except that it isn’t. She was a Roman empress of the right period, c. 430, but is actually buried in Rome. We don’t know who was buried here, but they warranted some seriously fancy mosaic art. For sheer virtuosity and crazy, intense, incredible colour, this is probably my favourite of the buildings in Ravenna. The ceiling is ALL like the carpet of white flowers on dark blue that you can see at the edges of this image.)
This time, Christ is shown as the good shepherd, surrounded by six sheep, probably representing his twelve disciples (because 6 is half of 12 and Late Antique Christianity was really into its complex numerology: basically, if you can divide it by 3, it is probably a hint at the Holy Trinity, if it goes into 4 it is the Trinity plus the Oneness of God, if it is a fraction of 12 it is a reference to the disciplines, plus, possibly also a reference to the Holy Trinity…).
And here is the beardless Jesus one more time, being baptised in the River Jordan, in the ceiling of a building in which new Christians would be baptised. The imagery just of the throne at the top, representing the three parts of the Trinity, transmitting heaven down to Earth in the person of Jesus, is mind-expandingly complex when you start looking at it closely. Plus, the apostles bringing crowns to the throne is a reference to a line from the New Testament Book of Revelation that is referencing an Old Testament reference to crowns being brought to God.
Just one more Jesus for now: this time in a form that was very popular in early Christianity, including back before the fourth century when Christianity was an underground religion, persecuted by the Roman authorities. It served as a kind of code, as well as a symbol. Here, Jesus is shown as a lamb, wearing a halo and held up in the heavens by four angels (so you know it isn’t just, you know, a lamb!).
Hopefully you’re enjoying the wonderful, exuberant colours, the incredible craftsmanship that has gone into these mosaics and the weaving together of decoration, story-telling and symbolism.
Beyond their visual luxury and artisanal excellence, the wonder of these mosaics is the insight they give into a thought world that was bursting with complexity and figuring out, within only a couple of centuries of Christianity becoming legal and then the preferred religion of the Roman emperors, how to represent the core ideas of the religion.
The symbols intersect and interweave. Jesus can be both the shepherd and the sheep, the infant who is always and forever enthroned in heaven, the soldier killing the symbols of evil dressed exactly like the soldiers who executed Jesus himself. The figures and furniture around each image tie the stories of Jesus into an even broader and deeper matrix of Old Testament prophecy and New Testament revelation. Numbers can be several messages at once and a solid gold background shimmers and glitters because of tiny choices about how to lay a piece of gold and glass the size of a fingernail, that collectively embody the world outside time.
And through it all runs that imperial purple and the imperial throne, and that was another message again, about how the court of Jesus in heaven was the model for the court of the Roman emperors on Earth, who in turn imagined the court in heaven in terms of the trappings of their own imperial palaces.
The most exciting thing about this images is that I could go on and on and on and on. They were designed to draw the viewer in, deeper and deeper, to lead them through theology and wonder, the past and the future. So I’ll stop, but wherever you are, and whatever it is about these images that strikes you most forcefully, may they cheer up your weekend and keep your thinking long after you have finished reading!