II.vii. Tesserae

"Let us not speak of them; but look, and pass on."
- Dante Aleghieri

Unlikely heroes uncover the past. In 1902 schoolchildren playing with colourful dice led to the discovery of the finest mosaics in Northern Europe, which had lain hidden beneath three hundred years of plaster on the vaults above them. The place was Gémigny-des-Près, and what those youngsters discovered was the private chapel of a Byzantine princess, created by artists fleeing the iconoclasm of Asia Minor some eleven hundred years prior.
    Ravenna never suffered the insult of being plastered over by later tastes; it died a slower, more painful death, gradually forgotten as its link to the sea silted up irrevocably. The glory that carpets the walls of Ravenna was always plain to see, and that is perhaps what makes it most haunting. This was the great port of Classis, that Caesar Augustus had built in order to defend Rome’s Adriatic hegemony, this was where Theodoric, a barbarian, asserted himself over a Latin people, and this was where Justinian the Great, all dressed in purple and gold, set out to reconquer a lost empire. This was once the greatest city in the west, a port that opened up to worlds beyond the horizon, to North Africa, to Greece, to Constantinople. But this is Italy, that is a common epitaph, and forgotten babylons are everywhere. It is difficult to escape them.
    The mosaics of Ravenna aren’t just Italy, though. They are the Known World, a microcosm of civilization like New York or San Francisco are today. They are extraordinary because in them are not only the Goths, the Romans, the Byzantines, but anyone else who had ever dipped a toe into the Mediterranean or scaled the Alps southwards. All these artistic heritages blend together here into millions of fragments of stone and glass coloured like a peacock’s plume. The mosaics are exotic; they delight in depicting palm trees, tigers, oranges, lemons, ferns, birch trees, snow, sand, silk curtains, jews, gentiles, orange domes and golden skies. They are an encyclopaedia of the pre-modern world.
    And all this is surprising, if for a moment it is possible to suspend the disbelief and awe at seeing these blazing walls of colour and speculate on how these things came to be. Italy, which now seems so homogenous and enclosed, perhaps even xenophobic, was once a paragon of multiculturalism, embracing the other to the point of laying patterns on walls that, one and a half millennia later, are still as bright as the day their scaffolding was taken down. Seeing the mosaics at Ravenna is a bit like seeing the stained glass windows at Chartres; they are glorious because they are pristine. They have not faded with time and light like paintings do, they have not been covered over in centuries of soot and grime, and they have not been ripped out of their contexts by greedy museums and hung in hallways that hide their truths. Unlike Chartres, though, the mosaics don't vie with other artist's trades. There is no fantastic sculpture, no awe-inspiring architecture to compete with the singular glory of the brilliant walls. The churches and chapels in Ravenna, indeed the whole city, are plain and stark as can be from the outside. Ravenna is dead, in several senses of the word. But the mosaics are still brilliant, complete, and watchful, with those round Byzantine eyes. I stared them down in the Baptistery of the Arians (so named after an early Christian sect), where for nearly half an hour I was alone. I laid myself down on the floor, using my knapsack as a pillow, and gazed upwards.
    Seeing an iconic picture in mosaic is different from seeing a famous work of art for the first time. Reproductions of canvases can often be better than the real thing. There is no glare, no shifting spots of light, no reflection. But those are what mosaics are designed for. Their nature shifts with the viewer's pace, and each miniscule cube, each tessera is purposely inserted unevenly to catch the light of the passing day, or better yet of the flickering candles on an altar. But they have done away with candles in Ravenna these days. They have been replaced with throngs of British, Germans, and Japanese.
    Still, I was alone for thirty minutes. I could even have lit my own candles; they sell good ones at the Euro Store.



A view of the Mosaics in the church of San Vitale, Ravenna


View number two


View number three


View number four


And finally, the apse mosaics of Sant Apollinare in Classe, a few kilometres outside of Ravenna