The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Byzantine · a wall-mosaic programme in glass, stone and gold-glass tesserae on the vault, walls, arches and conch of a sanctuary · nineteen principal fields and an entrance arch of fifteen medallions · the presbytery and apse of San Vitale, Ravenna · c. 526–547, the church consecrated in 547 · never covered or detached; passages reset in the 1850s and 1860s
Mode
Wall-mosaic programme as eucharistic and imperial argument; typology, liturgy and portraiture in one sanctuary
Mythos
The gift brought and the crown given back; the sacrifice of the son, the strangers at the table who are God, the king who brings gold
Phase
Set c. 526–547, across the reconquest of Ravenna, the church consecrated in 547; one head and one name reset before the work was done
Presentation
Glass, stone and gold-glass tesserae on a cross-vaulted bay and an apse lit by their own windows; nineteen principal fields, two of them imperial panels, and an arch of fifteen medallions
Register
Cold and radiant; one register of elevation that moves with the light, with no terror but a raised sword
Scale
A court, two bishops, the patriarchs and the prophets, one bay and one conch
Governing Proposition
A sanctuary one bay deep is lined in lit glass with the offerings the Canon of the Mass names: Abel’s lamb, Melchizedek’s bread, Abraham’s calf and his son, with the Lamb among stars above them, and on the apse wall an emperor carrying the paten and an empress the chalice toward an altar in a city neither ever entered. The wager of the programme is that sovereignty is a matter of being seen, that an image can stand at the altar in place of a body for as long as the glass holds, and that the gifts of a living court belong in one sentence with the gifts of the patriarchs.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
San Vitale is a centrally planned church of brick in Ravenna: an octagon with an ambulatory and a gallery around it, a dome over the centre, and on its east side a single cross-vaulted bay, the presbytery, opening into an apse. It was begun about 526, the year Theodoric died, while Ravenna was the capital of the Ostrogothic kingdom, under Bishop Ecclesius, and it was paid for by the banker Julianus Argentarius. Belisarius took the city for Justinian in 540. The church was consecrated in 547 by Bishop Maximian, who finished it. The work on this page is the mosaic that lines the sanctuary, the presbytery and the apse together: glass, stone and gold-glass tesserae set in lime mortar over the vault, the walls, the arches and the conch, lit by the sanctuary’s own windows, at two levels in the bay and three in the apse.
No name survives for the designer or for any mosaicist, and none has been proposed on evidence. The work is credited to the tradition that made it, the court of Justinian and its workshop in Ravenna, as the desk credits the Comedy to Dante and this to no one. Three names bear on it, and all three are patrons’: Ecclesius, who began the church, is pictured in the apse with its model in his hands, and did not live to see it consecrated; Julianus, who paid; and Maximian, who finished it, and whose name is set over his own head. None of them is its author.
The programme has nineteen principal fields and an arch. On the arch from the octagon into the bay, fifteen medallions: Christ at the summit, the twelve apostles down the two sides, and the martyrs Gervasius and Protasius at the springing. On the vault, the Lamb in a wreathed medallion on a blue ground sown with gold stars, held up by four angels standing on blue globes among four webs of garland. On the two side walls, over the lower arcades, two lunettes, with Moses and the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah beside them; above each lunette two flying angels hold a cross in a medallion, and the walled cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem stand at the outer corners; at gallery level sit the four evangelists, each with his book in a rocky landscape and his creature over him. On the apse wall, either side of the three windows, the two imperial panels. In the conch, Christ on the globe between two angels, Saint Vitalis and Bishop Ecclesius. Every field but the arch is an offering or its witness.
Movement II
The lunettes face each other across the altar. In one, Abraham, in two scenes in one field. Under the oak of Mamre three identical young men sit at his table, three loaves marked with crosses before them; Sarah stands at the door of her hut, and Abraham, a tired old man in a short tunic, brings the calf (Genesis 18). Beside it, in the same field, he raises the sword over Isaac, the hand of God comes from the cloud, and the ram waits (Genesis 22). In the other lunette Abel holds out a lamb and Melchizedek bread at one altar, with the hand of God above them (Genesis 4, 14). The Roman Canon of the Mass names the sacrifices of Abel, Abraham and Melchizedek in a single sentence, asking that the offering on the altar be received as theirs were. The sentence is set in glass on the two sides of the altar where it was said.
Beside the lunettes stand the Law and the prophets. Moses loosens his sandal before the burning bush, with Moses keeping Jethro’s flock below him; Moses on Sinai receives the Law with the people beneath (Exodus 3, 19–24); Isaiah and Jeremiah hold their scrolls. Above, two angels on each side fly up holding a medallion with a cross, and at the outer corners stand the two walled cities, Jerusalem and Bethlehem, the city of the Passion and the city of the birth. At gallery level the four evangelists sit writing in their rocky gardens, among water, plants and birds, each creature overhead. The bay is built in facing pairs: Abraham faces Abel and Melchizedek, the prophets face each other, Jerusalem faces Bethlehem, because the altar has two sides.
Over the altar, at the crown of the vault, is the Lamb (John 1:29; Revelation 5), in a wreath on blue sown with gold stars, held up by four angels who stand on blue globes, among four webs of garland heavy with leaves, fruit, birds and beasts. The sacrifices below have their end above them, and the altar stands under it. The threshold is the arch from the octagon: Christ at its summit, the twelve apostles in medallions down its sides, and Gervasius and Protasius at the springing, the Church’s witnesses at the door of the sanctuary. Christ appears twice in the one room, here among the apostles and in the conch on the globe, and the conch’s Christ is young.
Movement III
On the apse wall, on the north side of the three windows, the emperor stands against gold with no setting but a strip of green under his feet. He is frontal, crowned and haloed, in purple with a jewelled fibula, and holds a gold paten in both hands. On one side of him are the clergy: the bishop, a deacon with the gospel book, a deacon with the censer. On the other, two officials in white chlamydes with purple tablia, and beyond them the guard, with spears, and a shield bearing the Chi-Rho at the end of the line, the army of the reconquest marked as Constantine’s. Nobody moves. Nobody is shown doing anything but holding what he carries and looking out. Each face is turned to whoever stands before it.
The order of precedence is written at ground level. The emperor’s foot overlaps the bishop’s, and the official’s stands behind the emperor’s. Of all the people in the two panels, one is named: “MAXIMIANVS”, in capitals over the bishop’s head. The emperor and the empress carry no name. Technical study has found that the bishop’s head and his name are set in a different mortar bed from the rest of the panel: they were put in after the first setting, in the place of another head. Whose head, and why, is not settled. The panels were set after 540, because they show the reconquest’s emperor, and before 547, because the church was finished then. The one man named in the sanctuary wrote himself in, over a place first made for someone else.
Justinian never came to Ravenna. He stands in its sanctuary with his gift in his hands, looking at whoever enters, and has for 1,479 years. The image does not kneel, as a donor kneels. It takes part in the rite, bringing the bread, and the rite went on with it present. Dante, in the heaven of Mercury, gave the emperor a canto in his own voice: “Cesare fui e son Iustinïano, / che, per voler del primo amor ch’i’ sento, / d’entro le leggi trassi il troppo e ’l vano.”
“Caesar I was, and am Justinian, / Who, by the will of primal Love I feel, / Took from the laws the useless and redundant” (Par. VI.10–12). A few lines on he names the general who took the city in which his image stands: “e al mio Belisar commendai l’armi” (“And to my Belisarius I commended / The arms”, Par. VI.25–26). In the poem the emperor speaks of the laws; on the wall he holds a dish.
Movement IV
On the south side of the windows the empress stands within an architecture. A niche with a shell head is over her; there are columns, a doorway with a curtain that a man at her side draws back, and a fountain. She is crowned, under long pendilia of pearls, with a jewelled collar over the purple, and holds a gold chalice in both hands. Her women follow her. At the hem of her purple, in gold, three Magi carry their gifts (Matthew 2). The emperor’s company stands in a void; the empress is given a place, a threshold and a curtain drawn for her. Theodora died in 548, the year after the consecration.
The two panels are one offering in two halves. The paten is on one side of the windows and the chalice on the other: bread and wine, carried by the two highest persons in the world toward an altar in a city neither of them entered, at the height of the altar, in the sanctuary, where the laity did not stand. The Magi on the hem say what the empress is doing there: she is a fourth king bringing a gift. Whether she is shown entering her doorway or standing at it, barred, has been asked for a long time, and the panel does not answer. Whether she was alive when the glass was set is not known. She is present in the sanctuary by image, at a threshold, with a curtain drawn, in a space her sex did not enter.
Above the windows, in the half-dome, the exchange is completed. Christ sits on a blue globe, young and beardless, in purple, holding the scroll with seven seals in his left hand, in a gold sky with coloured clouds over a flowered green ground; from the rock beneath the globe the four rivers of paradise run out (Genesis 2:10). With his right hand he holds out a jewelled crown to Saint Vitalis, the martyr of the dedication, who receives it in veiled hands and is presented by an angel. On the other side a second angel presents Bishop Ecclesius, who holds out a model of the church, the octagon in his hands. The gifts come up from below, lamb and loaf and calf, bread and wine, a building; what comes back down is a crown.
Movement V
The medium is light before it is colour. The tesserae are coloured glass, gold leaf sealed between glass, and marble and limestone for the flesh; the faces are built of small stone tesserae with glass in the shadows and the lips, the robes of larger glass. In the conch the gold is set at angles, so that it catches the light of the windows beside it and the figures stand in a luminous field rather than against a flat one. The sanctuary has its own windows, at two levels in the bay and three in the apse, so it is lit independently of the dark ambulatory around it, and the gold moves through the day; when the sun is in the apse windows the conch lights from below. Glass does not fade. The colour on these walls is the sixth century’s.
The mosaics were never covered and never detached: the surface has been visible without a break since 547. It has outlived the regime it declares, since the Lombards took Ravenna in 751; the empire it serves, which ended in 1453; and the language of the liturgy it illustrates. The rest of the church’s sixth-century decoration is largely gone, the dome was painted with frescoes in the eighteenth century, and the programme is now met through a bare octagon under another age’s ceiling. In the 1850s and 1860s Felice Kibel restored the mosaics, resetting passages with new tesserae; the vault, the borders of the lunettes, the cities and the outer parts of the two panels, the soldiers at the end of Justinian’s line and the last of Theodora’s women, are the places most touched. The church came through the bombing of 1944. In 1996 it was inscribed on the World Heritage list among the early Christian monuments of Ravenna. No figure and no field is lost.
Dante died in Ravenna in 1321 and is buried there. In the Inferno he gives the city one line: “Ravenna sta come stata è molt’ anni” (“Ravenna stands as it long years has stood”, Inf. XXVII.40). Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen was modelled on this church, and carried the octagon and its idea of a ruler’s church north. Klimt came to Ravenna in 1903, and the gold of his next five years answers Theodora’s. Yeats, who had seen Ravenna, set his Byzantium in its glass: “O sages standing in God’s holy fire / As in the gold mosaic of a wall.” In every survey of art since, the two panels are the illustration of Byzantium. The regime, the empire and the liturgy’s language have gone. The emperor who never came is still at the altar with the bread, the empress with the wine, and the one name in the sanctuary is still the bishop’s.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. Run the subtractive test field by field. Remove the lunettes and the Lamb has no history; remove the Lamb and the sacrifices have no end; remove the panels and the gifts are never brought; remove the conch and nothing is given back. The programme is one sentence, the Canon’s. The imperial panels are what a hostile reader would cut as propaganda, and they are what the logic needs most: without an offerer the sanctuary shows types with no antitype in the present, and Theodora’s chalice answers Justinian’s paten. What yields: the arch’s fifteen medallions, which are inventory; the vault’s garlands; a third Moses scene where two would witness; the cities, which are emblems; and a scale the building fixed.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Two disclosures can be stated that hold without the doctrine. First, a condition of power: sovereignty is a matter of being seen, and an image can stand in for a body indefinitely. Justinian never came to Ravenna. He has stood in its sanctuary for 1,479 years, frontal, haloed, his gift still in his hands. Second, a condition of hierarchy: the sacred procession is also a contest of rank, recorded in the image’s own fabric. The emperor’s foot overlaps the bishop’s; the bishop, alone named, had his head set into another man’s place; the empress stands at a doorway with a curtain drawn for her. Held off the top: the typology is the Church’s, and the panels disclose by what they do more than by what they show.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Elevation is cold and radiant, and continuous rather than recurrent: the sanctuary is one field of it, and it moves with the light. A young Christ in purple on a blue globe against gold, under coloured clouds; Theodora’s pendilia of pearls, the chalice, the shell over her head; Justinian’s stare; the Chi-Rho on the guard’s shield; the Lamb among gold stars on blue, held by four white angels; three identical young men at Abraham’s table; the gold itself, lit from below when the sun is in the apse windows. Height is high. Held from the top by register and scale: one radiance, with no terror but a raised sword; one bay; an elevation that stops at the arch, where a painted dome begins.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Myth built, in one structure around one table. The archetypes bear load: the gift, seven offerings converging on an altar that is also real; the sacrifice of the son, Isaac and the Lamb; the strangers at the table who are God; the crown given back to the martyr. What is built rather than inherited is the placing of the living court inside the type: three Magi on Theodora’s hem make the empress a fourth, and the emperor’s paten makes the reconquest an offertory. Every figure stays particular: a heavy jaw, one woman’s face, a gaunt bald bishop, a tired old man serving at table. Held below the top because the spine, Abel to Melchizedek to Abraham to the Lamb, is the Canon’s, taken whole.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The inheritance is the Roman apse of Christ among saints with a donor and his model, as at Santi Cosma e Damiano; Ravenna’s own century of mosaic; and the court art of Constantinople. The departure: two living rulers set on the sanctuary wall as participants in the rite, frontal against gold, with no event; a whole chancel built as one eucharistic argument. The stake was political: a church begun under the Goths declared for the emperor in its holiest place, and the panel altered to make it stick. What holds the axis lowest: the style was the court’s, the apse type Rome’s, the hieratic turn under way across the empire; this is the turn’s greatest surviving instance more than its author.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The work knows what it knows through glass and light in a closed bay. An image of light rather than pigment: the conch brightens from the windows beside it. The frontal figures look at the viewer wherever he stands; the emperor’s presence is the medium’s property. The panels stand at the altar’s height, so the gifts are permanently arriving, and the pairs are the room’s: bread one side, wine the other, because the altar has two sides. Substitute fresco and the light dies; a narrative and the presence goes. Held below the top: the panels are seen square on only from inside the chancel, garden and gold are two geometries meeting at an arch, and the programme is now met through a bare octagon under a painted dome.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence over promise: fourteen centuries of return, with meaning as well as fact still open. What the panels show: the offertory, a dedication, or a procession fixed as an icon. Who stands beside the emperor; Belisarius, Narses and the banker Julianus have all been proposed. Why Maximian’s head was reset, and whose it replaced. Whether Theodora is entering her doorway or barred at it, and whether she was alive when her panel was finished. Why there are two Christs. Readers have found here an icon of kingship, a theology of the imperial church, a document of the reconquest, a surface for Klimt and a vision for Yeats. Held a step below because more of the open questions concern fact and identity than meaning, which has stayed legible.
Score: 9.3 / 10
On view since 547, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the panels are the canonical statement of the hieratic imperial image, and the sanctuary is the earliest surviving whole programme to build a chancel as one eucharistic argument. The discount is for the lost centre: what Ravenna shows is in part what the capital invented, and the ruler image descended through Byzantine, Ottonian and Norman Sicilian art by way of the capital. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen, modelled on this church; Klimt, who came in 1903, and whose gold of the next five years answers Theodora’s; Yeats’s Byzantium, “the gold mosaic of a wall”; the panels as the illustration of Byzantium in every survey since.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over 1,479 years, the longest on the visual desk: through the fall of the regime the panels declare, when the Lombards took Ravenna in 751; of the empire they serve, in 1453; of the liturgy’s language; the resetting of the 1850s and 1860s; the bombing of 1944. The surface is the most topical imaginable, a reigning emperor and empress, one court’s uniforms in one decade, and it reads now as the type of a court. Glass does not fade: the colour seen is the sixth century’s. Charged in proportion: the restorer’s tesserae in the vault, the borders and the panels’ edges, and a shell stripped of the rest of its decoration. No figure or field is lost.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Judged as command of wall mosaic at the scale of a sanctuary. Light: the gold of the conch set at angles, so that the figures stand in a field lit from the windows rather than against a flat one. Faces: Theodora’s, Justinian’s and Maximian’s, built of small stone tesserae with glass in the shadows, the finest portrait heads in mosaic that survive from the century. Material: the pearls, the purple graded through several tones, the sealed scroll. Range: narrative lunettes and the flat gold of the panels, in one technique. The costs: feet laid flat on a green strip, a fountain whose perspective is a diagram, soldiers’ heads by formula, stiff anatomy at Sinai, and bodies far coarser than the faces they carry.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The two most distant elements are Abraham carrying a calf to a table under a tree and Justinian motionless against gold. They obey one law: everything in the sanctuary is an offering brought into the light of the altar, and everything is the same lit glass. Abel’s lamb, the emperor’s paten and the bishop’s church are one act in three registers, and the hand that accepts below is the hand that crowns above. The range runs from pastoral narrative to a court and a globe. What resists is real: two Christs; two spaces in the panels, a void and a room; the lunettes’ older naturalism and the panels’ flat stillness, two grammars under one roof. The law holds; the physics changes from wall to wall.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Many orders are held in one structure: the sacred, in Christ twice, the Lamb, angels and martyrs; the state, in an emperor, his empress and her court; the church, in two bishops and a building offered as a model; history, from Abel to a court of the 540s; the family, in Abraham, Sarah and the son; labour and hospitality, in a flock kept and a table served; the natural order, in a garden of fruit and birds; the city, in Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Ravenna in a bishop’s hands; the economy, in the gifts and the banker who paid. The altar integrates them. What holds the axis lowest: consciousness is nearly absent, the faces masks of rank but for three; the ordinary world is a hut and a flock; no crowd.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable and The Made at 9.4, with The Sublime, The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 9.3. The work is scored highest for what it is made of and how long it has lasted: gold set at angles to the light, three portrait heads built of stone, and a topical surface visible without a break for 1,479 years, outliving the regime, the empire and the liturgy’s language it records.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve and The Encompassed at 8.9: the turn was the court’s and the capital’s, so the sanctuary is the greatest surviving instance of it more than its author, and the world it holds is a sanctuary’s, with no crowd and almost no consciousness. A tenth above them, The Unconcealment and The Inner Law at 9.0, where the typology is the Church’s and two grammars share one roof.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 9.4, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, The Swerve at 8.9, The Archetypal Deep at 9.1, The Imperishable at 9.4 and The Unconcealment at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met, since no axis falls below 8.9 against 7.5, and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.9. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the sanctuary as it stands, and of how it was made and what was done to it afterwards: the mosaic programme of the presbytery and apse of San Vitale, set c. 526–547, the church consecrated in 547 under Bishop Maximian (some give 548). No image or written source on the church was consulted. The church’s architecture is the programme’s support and condition, not a work scored here; the eighteenth-century frescoes of the dome, the marble revetment and floor of the presbytery, the carved capitals and the other mosaics of Ravenna are outside the unit, and later hands are neither credited nor charged. The resetting of Maximian’s head and name before the work was finished is read as the work’s own making, not as damage. The restored surface is read as the best available evidence of the original, and the readings of the faces rest on the heads as they stand. One painted word is quoted, the bishop’s name, as the desk is certain of it; no other inscription in the sanctuary is quoted. Dante is quoted from the Italian of Project Gutenberg e-text #1012, with Longfellow’s line-for-line translation (1867), e-text #1004, beneath; Yeats from Sailing to Byzantium (1927), as reception only and not scored. The Roman Canon is paraphrased. Figures that could not be verified, among them the dimensions of the panels, the number of soldiers and women in them, and the proportion of restored surface, are not given.