Part 12 (1/2)
At the request of the people, the words of Theodoric's harangue on his entrance into the City were engraved on a brazen tablet, which was fixed in a place of public resort, perhaps the Roundian duke into Brussels confirood subjects the citizens of Brabant Upon the whole, there can be little doubt that the half-year which Theodoric spent in Rome was really a time of joyfulness both to prince and people, and that the tiles which are still occasionally turned up by the spade in Ro the inscription ”Domino Nostro Theodorico Felix Roma”, were not merely the work of official flatterers, but did truly express the joy of a well-governed nation After sixthe last thirty years of his life, he probably regarded as his hohted the heart of his subjects by the pageants which celebrated theof the distant Thuringians This young prince, whoht of arms” [118] had sent to his future kinsman a team of cream-coloured horses of a rare breed,[119]
and Theodoric sent in return horses, swords and shi+elds, and other instrureatest requital that we e to a wo beauty as our niece”
[Footnote 118: Filius per arht be safe to call these horses cobs; but let Cassiodorus describe their points They were ”horses of a silvery colour, as nuptial horses ought to be Their chests and thighs are adorned in a beco manner with spheres of flesh Their ribs are expanded to a certain breadth; their bellies are short and narrow Their heads have a likeness to the stag's, and they ientle froness, pleasant to look upon, yet entle paces and do not fatigue their riders with insane curvetings To ride thehtfully steady pace, they have great staying power and lasting activity” These sleek and easy-paced cobs are not at all the ideal present froh barbarian of the North to his ”father in arothic princess who thus rated from Ravenna to the banks of the Elbe were not happy A proud and ambitious woman, she is said to have stimulated her husband toof the Thuringians The help of one of the sons of Clovis had been unwisely invoked for this operation So long as the Ostrogothic hero lived, Thuringia was safe under his protection, but soon after his death dissensions arose between Franks and Thuringians; a claim of payment was ia was invaded, (531) her king defeated, and after a while treacherously slain Ae with her kindred at Ravenna, and after the collapse of their fortunes retired to Constantinople, where her son entered the Imperial service In after years that son, ”Aenerals of Justinian The broad lands between the Elbe and the Danube, over which the Thuringians had wandered, were added to the dodom of Austrasia
I have had occasion es to write the nans of the sinking Empire, and now the hoive some faint idea of the impression which this city, a boulder-stone left by the icedrift of the dissolving Ereen fields of modern civilisation, produces on the reat alluvial plain between the Apennines, the Adriatic, and the Po The fine mud, which has been for centuries poured over the land by the strea from the mountains, has now silted up her harbour, and Classis, the maritime suburb of Ravenna, which, in the days of Odovacar and Theodoric, was a busy sea port on the Adriatic, now consists of one desolate church--s standing in the midst of a lonely and fever-haunted rice-swalorious pine-forest, now alas! cruelly maimed by the hands of Nature and of Man, by the frost of one severe winter and by the spades of the builders of a railway, but still preserving some traces of its ancient beauty Here it was that Theodoric pitched his camp when for three weary years he blockaded his rival's last stronghold, and here by the deep trench (_fossatuht the last and not the least deadly of his fights, when Odovacar made his desperate sortie froentler kind, but still not wanting in sadness, now cluster round the solemn avenues of the Pineta There we still see his lay of the ”selva oscura”, through which lay his path to the unseen world, and ever looking in vain for the arrival of the rateful Florence There, in Boccaccio's story, a h the woods by ”the spectre-huntsman”, Guido Cavalcanti, whom her cruelty had driven to suicide And there, in our fathers' days, rode Byron, like Dante, an exile, if self-exiled, fro on bitter rehtly bestowed by his country rice-fields, we cross over the sluggish streams--Ronco and Montone--and we stand in the streets of historic Ravenna Our first thoughts are all of disappointment There is none of the trim beauty of a modern city, nor, as we at first think, is there any of the endless picturesqueness of a well-preservedlike Giotto's Campanile at Florence, for any space like that noble, crescent-shaped Forues, the Piazzo del Caether beautiful bell-towers and one or two brown cupolas breaking the sky-line, but that see as I have said, is one of disappointment But e enter the churches, if we have leisure to study, thele with our spirits, if we can quietly ask them what they have to tell us of the Past, all disappointment vanishes For Ravenna is to those ill study her attentively a very Po those years of the falling E Medival Church as Pompeii can tell us of the social life of the Roanism
Not that the record is by any means perfect Many leaves have been torn out of the book by the childish conceit of recent centuries, which vainly i instead, which anyhand of the so-called _Renaissance_ has passed over these churches, defacing sometimes the chancel, so of the churches of Ravenna[120] has ”the cupola disfigured by wretched paintings which ” Another[121]
has its apse covered with those gilt spangles and clouds and cherubs which were the eighteenth century's ideal of iious art
The Duo of all the monuments of Ravenna, was almost entirely rebuilt in the last century, and is now scarcely worth visiting Still, enough remains in the un-restored churches of Ravenna to captivate the attention of every student of history and every lover of early Christian art It is only necessary to shut our eyes to the vapid and tasteless work of recent embellishers, as we should close our ears to the whispers of vulgar gossipers while listening to so piece of sacred music
[Footnote 120: S Vitale The quotation is from Prof Freeman, ”Historical and Architectural Sketches”, p 53]
[Footnote 121: S Apollinare Dentro]
Thus concentrating our attention on that which is really interesting and venerable in these churches, while we ad colonnades, their skilful use of ancient columns--some of which may probably have adorned the temples of Olyly rich and beautiful new forn quite unknown to Vitruvius, which the genius of Romanesque artists has invented, we find that our chief interest is derived from the mosaics hich these churches were once so lavishly adorned
Mosaic, as is well-known, is the most permanent of all the processes of decorative art Fresco must fade sooner or later, and where there is any tendency to daes its tone in the long course of years, and the boundary line between cleaning and repainting is difficult to observe But the frag been already passed through the fire, will keep their colour for centuries, we ht probably say forthe cement hich they are fastened to the wall, and therefore when restore tion of a mosaic picture becomes necessary, a really conscientious restorer can always reproduce the picture with precisely the same form and colour which it had when the last stone was inserted by the original artist And thus, e visit Ravenna, we have the satisfaction of feeling that we are (in azed upon by the contemporaries of Theodoric Portraits of Theodoric himself, unfortunately we have none; but we have two absolutely contedom, and one of Justinian's wife, the celebrated Theodora These pictures, it is interesting to remember, were considerably older when Ci sheep upon a tile, than any picture of Cimabue's or Giotto's is at the present time
Let us enter the church which is now called ”S Apollinare within the Walls”, but which in the time of Theodoric was called the Church of S
Martin, often with the addition ”de Clo Aureo”, on account of the beautiful gilded ceiling which distinguished it from the other basilicas of Ravenna This church was built by order of Theodoric, who apparently intended it to be his own royal chapel Probably, therefore, the great Ostrogoth many a time saw ”the Divine mysteries” celebrated here by bishops and priests of the Arian co colonnades fill the nave of the church The columns are classical, with Corinthian capitals, and are perhaps brought fro A peculiarity of the architecture consists in the high abacus--a frustum of an inverted pyramid--which is interposed between the capital of the colureater height than the columns alone would afford Such in its main features was the Church of ”St
Martin of the Golden Heaven”, when Theodoric worshi+pped under its gorgeous roof But its chief adornment, the feature whichelse in Ravenna, was added after Theodoric's death, yet not so long after but that it may be suitably alluded to here as a specimen of the style of decoration which his eyes must have been wont to look upon About the year 560, after the downfall of the Gothic nellus, the Catholic Bishop of Ravenna, ”reconciled” this church, that is, re-consecrated it for the perfor so adorned the attics of the nave immediately above the colonnades with two re procession
On the north wall of the church we behold a procession of Virgin Martyrs They are twenty-four in nuer than life, and are chiefly those maidens who suffered in the terrible persecution of Diocletian The place fro the harbour, do over the walls of the city An inscription tells us that we have here represented the city of Classis, the seaport of Ravenna By the ti procession we are alin-lory with the infant Jesus on her lap, and two angels on each side of her
But between the procession and the throne is interposed the group of the three Wise Men, in bright-coloured rai forward as if with eager haste[122] to present their various oblations to the Divine Child
[Footnote 122: So Milton in his ”Ode on the Nativity”:
”See how fro the Eastern road, The star-led wizards haste with odours sweet
Oh run, present them with thy humble ode, And lay it lowly at His blessed feet”]
On the right, or south wall of the church, a similar procession of , in all thetheir crowns of s to the Redeerown man, the Man of Sorrows, His head encircled with a ni on either side The , with pedi upon pillars below The intervals between the pillars are partly filled with curtains looped up in a curious fashi+on and with bright purple spots upon the tells us that it is PALATIUM, that is Theodoric's palace at Ravenna
In both these processions the representation is, of course, far froures have a certain stiffness, partly due to the very nature of mosaic-work There is also a sort of child-like siures, which an unsyrotesque But, I think,indescribably solereat , commonplace Italian toith its police-notices and its proclaovernrateful shade of the church and find yourself transported into the sixth century after Christ You are looking on the faces of the men and maidens who suffered death with torture rather than deny their Lord For thirteen centuries those two processions have see on upon the walls of the basilica, and another ceaseless procession of worshi+ppers, Goths, Byzantines, Lo on beneath therave And then you reures on the walls, he was separated by no longer interval than three long lives would have bridged over, from the days of the persecution itself, that there were stillon the earth orshi+pped the Olympian Jupiter, and that the name of Mohaaze, the telescope of the historic iination does its work, and the far-off centuries beco Theodoric's reign in the northern suburb of the city have now entirely disappeared There still remains, however, the church which Theodoric seems to have built as the cathedral of the Arian co the old metropolitan church (Ecclesia Ursiana, now the Duomo) as the cathedral of the Catholics This Arian cathedral was dedicated to St Theodore, but has in later ages been better known as the church of the Holy Spirit
Tasteless restoration has robbed it of the mosaics which it doubtless once possessed, but it has preserved its fine colonnade consisting of fourteen colureen ht seems to show that they, like so ht fro, where they have once perhaps served other Gods
Through the court-yard of the Church of San Spirito, we approach a little octagonal building known both as the Oratory of S Maria in Cosonal font, which once stood in the centre of the building, has disappeared, but we can easily reconstruct it in our iinations from the similar one which still remains in the Catholic Baptistery The interest of this building consists in the mosaics of its cupola On the disk, in the centre, is represented the Baptism of Christ The Saviour stands, i past Him is depicted with a quaint realism The Baptist stands on His left side and holds one hand over His head On the right of the Saviour stands an old enerally said to represent the River-God, and the reed in his hand, the urn, froushes, under his arms, certainly seee a ested that the figure may be meant for Moses, and in confirht they perceived the sy from each side of the old ures of the twelve Apostles
They are divided into two bands of six each, who see, with crowns in their hands, towards a throne covered with a veil and a cushi+on, on which rests a cross blazing with jewels St Peter stands on the right of the throne, St Paul on the left; and these two Apostles carry instead of crowns, the one the usual keys, and the other two rolls of parchh they have so of the stern majesty of early mosaic-work, is soone considerable restoration It is suggested, I know not whether on sufficient grounds, that the figures of the Apostles were added when the Baptistery was ”reconciled” to the Catholic worshi+p after the overthrow of the Gothic dos at Ravenna which are connected with the name of Theodoric require to be noticed by us,--his Palace and his Tomb The story of his Ton is ended