Ravenna is where a doctrinal dispute is legible in brick and glass. For a few decades it had two Christian hierarchies at once, and each of them built.
Why there are two baptisteries
Theodoric the Great, who ruled Italy from Ravenna from 493, was an Arian Christian, as were the Ostrogoths generally. Arianism held that the Son was created by the Father and subordinate to him, the position condemned at Nicaea in 325, and by the sixth century the confession of most of the Germanic peoples who had entered the empire.
The Roman population of Ravenna was Nicene. Theodoric did not attempt to convert them; the two communities were left to their own churches, clergy and rites. So Ravenna acquired:
- an Arian cathedral and the Arian Baptistery
- a Nicene cathedral and the Neonian Baptistery
The two baptisteries stand a short walk apart and both survive. Both have a domed mosaic of the baptism of Christ. Comparing them is the most direct encounter with the Arian controversy available anywhere, because Arian church art was almost entirely destroyed after the reconquest and this is very nearly all that is left of it.
The erasure
Justinian reconquered Ravenna in 540. Arian worship was suppressed and the Arian churches were transferred to the Nicene church, including Theodoric's palace church, rededicated as Sant'Apollinare Nuovo.
Its nave mosaics had shown Theodoric's palace with the king and his court standing in procession between the columns. Rather than destroy the mosaic, the new authorities edited it: the figures were picked out and replaced with plain hanging curtains.
The work was not quite complete. The hands of the erased courtiers were left behind on the columns, disembodied fingers still gripping, visible from the nave floor. It is the most eloquent surviving trace of a defeated Christianity in Europe, and it survives because somebody was careless.
Justinian and Theodora
The apse panels at San Vitale, consecrated in 547, show Justinian and Theodora in procession with their courts, bearing offerings. They are the defining images of Byzantine imperial ideology: the emperor haloed, standing among clergy, occupying a position that is neither quite lay nor quite priestly.
Neither Justinian nor Theodora ever set foot in Ravenna. The panels are a statement of authority made to a city that had just changed hands, addressed to people who would never see the originals.
The rest of the group
The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, small and cruciform, holds the deep blue vault of stars that is probably the most reproduced mosaic in the world. Sant'Apollinare in Classe, out at the former port, has the great apse of Apollinaris among sheep in a green paradise. Theodoric's Mausoleum is roofed with a single slab of Istrian limestone weighing several hundred tonnes, moved and lifted by means nobody has satisfactorily explained.
The eight monuments were inscribed by UNESCO in 1996. Several remain working churches, so the mosaics are lit for the liturgy before they are lit for anyone else.