By the skin of our teeth

The golden stars winked and twinkled in the dull morning light. Placed as they were in concentric circles around a simple crucifix in the centre of the dome, the winged evangelical symbols floated like comets at each corner. The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna is one of the most evocatively beautiful buildings I have ever visited. It was like being in a jewel box.

The blue and gold tesserae, brushstrokes of gold leaf and lapis lazuli trapped forever in glass, find their apogee in the lunette depicting The Good Shepherd, a beardless Christ wearing imperial purple and gold reflecting the political statement upheld by this formidable lady Galla Placidia that Ravenna was, in fact, Nova Roma, the New Rome. It is difficult to imagine in the midst of such beauty that the Western Roman Empire as we knew it was at the time overrun by barbarians and its civilisation would, in the words of Sir Kenneth Clark, only survive, "by the skin of our teeth".

Being a guest participant of the University Study Tour organised by the Faculty of Arts, particularly the Department of History of Art, was a great privilege.

The subject was The Art And Architecture Of Emilia Romagna and was held in the memory of the late Noel Radmilli who was a great aficionado of these tours for reasons I can well understand.

Under the expert guidance of Prof. Mario Buhagiar, Fr Gino Gauci and Dr Keith Sciberras we explored churches and museums, baptisteries and basilicas, towers and palaces in an atmosphere of intellectual camaraderie that was at all times conducive to their full appreciation. We also visited Bologna, Parma, Faenza, Modena and Ferrara, however Ravenna is undoubtedly the jewel in the crown.

No words can convey the utterly stunning beauty of the church of San Vitale with its famous portraits of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and his even more famous or infamous wife Theodora.

Visiting Ravenna had long been on my wish list and I could not have done it in better company. Furthermore, no guide could have conveyed the history, symbolism and artistic poetry of the place better than Prof. Buhagiar, whose profound knowledge and aesthetic sensibility combined to make each exposé of every nook and cranny in the complex mosaic composition an adventure, a summation of early Christian beliefs and values combined with political expediency.

Had the court of Ravenna not existed I wonder whether Christianity would have existed as we know it today. Architecturally too, the graceful buildings of Ravenna were the blueprint for Charlemagne's architect, Odo of Metz, to work on when the Pope Leo III in the west, in defiance of an increasingly-decadent Eastern Empire, crowned this powerful Frankish chieftain as Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day of the year 800. Two and a half centuries later it was to Ravenna, the final swan song of the old Roman Empire, that Charlemagne looked to maintain his new image as the revived embodiment of an institution going back to Caesar Augustus.

As we visited one marvellous Romanesque church and gracious octagonal baptistery after another I could not help noticing that the imagery conveyed a very different brand of Christianity than the one that we are used to. Ravenna not only precedes but eschews the hellfire of Gothic art and the institutionalised goriness of the Counter Reformation. Apart from St Lawrence contemplating his fiery bed in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia there were no severed heads and disfigured naked bodies looking like pin-cushions. The procession of martyrs in San Apollinare Nuova are already in their glorified heavenly attire holding their diadems of virtue in their hands; the ladies on the left following the Phrygian capped Magi before The Madonna and Child and the gentlemen on the right before Christ the Redeemer.

We have here a gentler religion where the cross does not hold a suffering, bleeding and broken naked torso of a defeated Jesus but is golden and empty. Christ has risen making the cross a means to an end; a symbol of our redemption.

We can see in the apse of the lovely San Apollinare in Classis a Transfiguration on Mount Tabor that would I am sure flummox most of Lija. A hand in the stylised clouds at the apex of the apse holds the key. God the Father, never seen except as a hand, the Hand of God, is however ubiquitous. Flanked by rather youthful representations of Moses and Elijah, the huge roundel of blue dotted with golden stars contained a cross triumphant which is what a transfiguration is all about.

One must perforce read into the complex imagery and decipher the symbolism which is full of significance, most of which has been lost and abandoned as we in the West developed into a less intellectual, less cerebral but more proletariat, more encompassing cult that needed to be graphically explicit to propagate faith through pathos, a movement that would explode after the gentle paintings of the renaissance into the amazing splendours of Mannerist and Baroque art that epitomise a far different picture of what was understood by faith when these poetic outpourings of composition and colour were created, miracles of kaleidoscopic colour that survived, some by the skin of their teeth, in Ravenna.

kzt@onvol.net