June 8, 1874
The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, ca. 1910.
I WRITE THESE LINES ON A COLD SWISS MOUNTAIN-TOP, SHUT in by an intense white mist from any glimpse of the underworld of lovely Italy; but as I jotted down the other day, in the ancient capital of Honorius and Theodoric, the few notes of which they are composed, I let the original date stand for local color’s sake. Its mere look, as I transcribe it, emits a grateful glow in the midst of the Alpine rawness, and gives a depressed imagination something tangible to grasp while awaiting the return of fine weather. For Ravenna was glowing, less than a week since, as I edged along the narrow strip of shadow binding one side of the empty, white streets. After a long, chilly spring, the summer this year descended upon Italy with a sudden jump and a terrible vehemence of purpose. I stole away from Florence in the night, and even on top of the Apennines, under the dull starlight and in the rushing train, one could but sit and pant perspiringly. At Bologna I found a festa, or rather two festas, a civil and a religious, going on in mutual mistrust and disparagement. The civil one was the now legal Italian holiday of the Statuto; the religious, a jubilee of certain local churches. The latter is observed by the Bolognese parishes in couples, and comes round for each couple but once in ten years—an arrangement by which the faithful at large ensure themselves a liberal recurrence of expensive processions. It was not my business to distinguish the sheep from the goats, the prayers from the scoffers; it was enough that, melting together under the scorching sun, they made the picturesque city doubly picturesque. The combination at one point was really dramatic. While a long procession of priests and young virgins in white veils bearing tapers was being organized in one of the streets, a review of the King’s troops was going on outside of the town. On its return, a large detachment of cavalry passed across the space where the incense was burning, the pictured banners swaying, and the litany being droned, and checked the advance of the little ecclesiastical troop. The long vista of the street, between the porticoes, was festooned with garlands and scarlet and tinsel; the robes and crosses and canopies of the priests, the clouds of perfumed smoke, and the white veils of the maidens, were resolved by the hot, bright air into a gorgeous medley of colors, across which the mounted soldiers went rattling and flashing like a conquering army trampling over an embassy of propitiation. It was, to tell the truth, the first time an Italian festa had worn to my eyes that warmth of coloring, that pictorial confusion, which tradition promises; and I confess that my eyes found more pleasure in it than they found an hour later in those masterpieces of the Bolognese school which hang in the Pinacotheca.
For Ravenna, however, I had nothing but smiles—grave, philosophic smiles, such as accord with the tranquil, melancholy interest of the place. I arrived there in the evening, before, even at drowsy Ravenna, the festa of the Statuto had altogether put itself to bed. I immediately strolled forth from the inn, and found it sitting up a while longer on the piazza, chiefly at the café door, listening to the band of the garrison by the light of a dozen or so of feeble tapers, fastened along the front of the palace of the Government. Before long, however, it had dispersed and departed, and I was left alone with the grey illumination and with an affable citizen, whose testimony as to the manners and customs of Ravenna I had aspired to obtain. I had already observed to sufficient purpose to borrow confidence to suggest deferentially that it was not the liveliest place in the world, and my friend admitted that in fact it was a trifle sluggish. But had I seen the Corso? Without seeing the Corso it was unfair to conclude against Ravenna. The Corso of Ravenna, of a hot summer night, had an air of surprising seclusion and repose. Here and there in an upper, closed window glimmered a light; my companion’s footsteps and my own were the only sounds; not a creature was within sight. The suffocating atmosphere helped me to believe for a moment that I was walking in the Italy of Boccaccio, hand-in-hand with the plague, through a city which had lost half its population by pestilence and the other half by flight. I turned back into my inn, profoundly satisfied. This at last was old-world dulness of a prime distillation; this at last was antiquity, history, repose.
This impression was largely confirmed and enriched on the following day; but it was obliged, at an early stage of my explorations, to give precedence to another—the lively realization, namely, of my imperfect acquaintance with Gibbon and other cognate authorities. At Ravenna, the waiter at the café and the coachman who drives you to the Pine-Forest allude to Galla Placidia and Justinian as to any attractive topic of the hour; wherever you turn you encounter some peremptory challenge to your accomplishments in chronology. For myself, I could only attune my intellect vaguely to the intensely historical character of the place—I could only feel that I was breathing an atmosphere of records and relics. I conned my guide-book and looked up at the great mosaics, and then fumbled at poor Murray again for some intenser light on the court of Justinian; but I can imagine that to a visitor more intimate with the originals of the various great almond-eyed mosaic portraits in the vaults of the churches, these extremely curious works of art may have a really formidable interest. I found Ravenna looking by daylight like a vast, straggling, depopulated village. The streets with hardly an exception are grass-grown, and though I walked about all day I failed to perceive a single wheeled vehicle. I remember no shop but the little establishment of an urbane photographer, whose views of the Pine-Forest gave me an irresistible desire to transport myself thither. There is no architecture to speak of, and though there are a great many large domiciles with aristocratic names, they stand cracking and baking in the sun in no very comfortable fashion. The houses for the most part have a half-rustic look; they are low and meagre and shabby and interspersed with high garden walls, over which the long arms of tangled vines hang motionless into the stagnant streets. Here and there in all this dreariness, in some particularly silent and grassy corner, rises an old brick church with a façade more or less spoiled by cheap modernization, and a strange cylindrical campanile, pierced with small arched windows and extremely suggestive of the fifth century. These churches constitute the palpable interest of Ravenna, and their own principal interest, after thirteen centuries of well-intentioned spoliation, resides in their unequalled collection of early Christian mosaics. It is in a certain sense a curiously simple interest, and it leads one’s reflections along a narrow and definite channel. There are older churches in Rome, and churches which, looked at as museums, are more variously and richly entertaining; but in Rome you stumble at every step upon some curious pagan memorial, often beautiful enough to lead your thoughts wandering far from the primitive rigidities of the Christian faith.
Ravenna, on the other hand, began with the church, and all its monuments and relics are harmoniously rigid. By the middle of the first century it possessed an exemplary saint—Apollinaris, a disciple of Peter—to whom its two finest churches are dedicated. It was to one of these, jocosely entitled the “new” one, that I first directed my steps. I lingered outside a while and looked at the great red, barrel-shaped bell-towers, so rusty, so crumbling, so archaic, and yet so resolute to ring in another century or two, and then went in to the coolness, the shining marble columns, the queer old sculptured slabs and sarcophagi, and the long mosaics, scintillating under the roof, along the wall of the nave. San Apollinare Nuovo, like most of its companions, is a magazine of early Christian odds and ends; of fragments of yellow marble encrusted with quaint sculptured emblems of primitive dogma; great rough troughs, containing the bones of old bishops; episcopal chairs with the marble worn narrow with centuries of pressure from the solid episcopal person; slabs from the fronts of old pulpits, covered with carven hieroglyphics of an almost Egyptian abstruseness—lambs, and stags, and fishes, and beasts of theological affinities even less apparent. Upon all these strange things the strange figures in the great mosaic panorama look down, with colored cheeks and staring eyes, lifelike enough to speak to you and answer your wonderment, and tell you in bad Latin of the decadence that it was in such and such a fashion they believed and worshipped. First, on each side, near the door, are houses and ships and various old landmarks of Ravenna; then begins a long procession, on one side, of twenty-two white-robed virgins and three obsequious magi, terminating in a throne bearing the Madonna and Child, surrounded by four angels; on the other side, of an equal number of male saints (twenty-five, that is) holding crowns in their hands and leading to the Saviour, enthroned between angels of singular expressiveness. What it is these long, slim seraphs express I cannot quite say, but they have an odd, knowing, sidelong look out of the narrow ovals of their eyes which, though not without sweetness, would certainly make me feel like murmuring a defensive prayer or so if I were to find myself alone in the church toward dusk. All this work is of the latter part of the sixth century and brilliantly preserved. The gold backgrounds twinkle as if they had been inserted yesterday, and here and there a figure is executed almost too much in the modern manner to be interesting; for the charm of mosaic work is, to my sense, confined altogether to the infancy of the art. The great Christ, in the series of which I speak, is quite an elaborate picture, and yet he retains enough of the orthodox stiffness to make him impressive in the simpler, elder sense. He is clad in a purple robe, like an emperor, his hair and beard are artfully curled, his eyebrows arched, his complexion brilliant, his whole aspect such a one as the popular mind may have attributed to Honorius or Valentinian. It is all very Byzantine, and yet I found in it much of that interest which is inseparable, to a facile imagination, from all early representations of the Saviour. Practically, they are no more authentic than the more or less plausible inventions of Ary Scheffer and Holman Hunt; but they borrow a certain value, factitious perhaps but irresistible, from the mere fact that they are twelve or thirteen centuries less distant from the original. It is something that this is the way people in the sixth century imagined Jesus to have looked; the image is by so much the less complex. The great purple-robed monarch on the wall at Ravenna is at least a very potent and positive Christ, and the only objection I have to make to him is that, though in this character he must have had a full apportionment of divine foreknowledge, he betrays no apprehension of Dr. Channing and M. Renan. If one’s preference lies, for distinctness’ sake, between the old narrowness and the modern complexity, one must admit that the narrowness here has a very grand outline.
I spent the rest of the morning in picturesque transition between the hot, yellow streets and the cool, grey interiors of the churches. The greyness everywhere was lighted up by the scintillation, on vault and entablature, of mosaics more or less archaic, but always brilliant and elaborate, and everywhere, too, by the same keen wonderment that, while centuries had worn themselves away and empires risen and fallen, these little cubes of colored glass had stuck in their allotted places and kept their freshness. I have no space to enumerate the Ravennese churches one by one, and, to tell the truth, my memory of them has already become a sort of hazy confusion and formless meditation. The total aspect of Ravenna, its sepulchral stillness, its absorbing perfume of evanescence and decay and mortality, confounds the distinctions and blurs the details. The cathedral, which is very vast and high, has been excessively modernized, and was being still more so by a lavish application of tinsel and cotton-velvet in preparation for the centenary feast of St. Apollinaris, which befalls next month. Things on this occasion are to be done handsomely, and a fair Ravennese informed me that a single family had contributed three thousand francs towards a month’s vesper-music. It seemed to me hereupon that I should like in the August twilight to wander into the quiet nave of San Apollinare, and look up at the great mosaics through the resonance of some fine chanting. I remember distinctly enough, however, the tall basilica of San Vitale, of octagonal shape, like an exchange or a custom-house—modelled, I believe, upon St. Sophia at Constantinople. It is very lofty, very solemn, and, as to the choir, densely pictured over on arch and apse with mosaics of the time of Justinian. These are regular pictures, full of movement, gesture, and perspective, and just enough sobered in hue by time to look historic and venerable. In the middle of the church, under the great dome, sat an artist whom I envied, making at an effective angle a picture of the choir and its broken lights, its decorated altar, and its encrusted, twinkling walls. The picture, when it is finished, will hang, I suppose, on the library wall of some person of taste; but even if it is much better than is probable (I didn’t look at it), all his taste will not tell the owner, unless he has been there, in just what a soundless, mouldering, out-of-the-way corner of old Italy it was painted. An even better place for an artist fond of dusky architectural works, except that here the dusk is excessive and he would hardly be able to tell his green from his red, is the extraordinary little church of the Santi Nazaro e Celso, otherwise known as the mausoleum of Galla Placidia. This, perhaps, on the whole, is the most impressive and picturesque spot in Ravenna. It consists of a sort of narrow, low-browed cave, shaped like a Latin cross, every inch of which, except the floor, is covered with dense symbolic mosaics. Before you and on each side, through the thick, brown light, loom three enormous barbaric sarcophagi, containing the remains of potentates of the Lower Empire. It is as if history had burrowed underground to escape from research, and you had fairly run it to earth. On the right lie the ashes of the Emperor Honorius, and in the middle those of his sister, Galla Placidia, a lady who I believe had great adventures. On the other side rest the bones of Constantius III. The place is like a little natural grotto lined with glimmering mineral substances, and there is something quite tremendous in being shut up so closely with these three imperial ghosts. The shadow of the great Roman name seems to tread upon the huge sepulchres and abide for ever within the narrow walls.
But there are other memories attached to Ravenna beside those of primitive bishops and degenerate emperors. Byron lived here and Dante died here, and the tomb of the one poet and the dwelling of the other are among the regular objects of interest. The grave of Dante, it must be said, is anything but Dantesque, and the whole precinct is disposed with that curious vulgarity of taste which distinguishes most modern Italian tributes to greatness. Dante memorialized in stucco, even in a slumbering corner of Ravenna, is not a satisfactory spectacle. Fortunately, of all poets he least needs a monument, as he was pre-eminently an architect in diction, and built himself his memorial in verses more solid than Cyclopean blocks. If Dante’s tomb is not Dantesque, neither is Byron’s house Byronic, being a homely, shabby, two-storied dwelling, directly on the street, with as little as possible of isolation and mystery. In Byron’s time it was an inn, and it is rather a curious reflection that “Cain” and the “Vision of Judgment” should have been written at a hotel. Here is a commanding precedent as to self-abstraction for tourists who are at once sentimental and literary. I must declare, indeed, that my acquaintance with Ravenna considerably increased my esteem for Byron and helped to renew my faith in the sincerity of his inspiration. A man so much de son temps as Byron was, can have spent two long years in this profoundly stagnant city only by the help of taking a great deal of disinterested pleasure in his own genius. He had indeed a notable pastime (the various churches, by the way, are adorned with monuments of ancestral Guicciolis); but it is none the less obvious that Ravenna, fifty years ago, would have been an intolerably dull residence to a foreigner of distinction unprovided with a real intellectual passion. The hour one spends with Byron’s memory, then, is a charitable one. After all, one says to one’s self, as one turns away from the grandiloquent little slab in the front of his house and looks down the deadly provincial vista of the empty, sunny street, the author of so many superb stanzas asked less from the world than he gave to it. One of his diversions was to ride in the Pineta, which, beginning a couple of miles from the city, extends for some twenty-five miles along the sands of the Adriatic. I drove out to it for Byron’s sake, and Dante’s, and Boccaccio’s, all of whom have interwoven it with their fictions, and for that of a possible whiff of coolness from the sea. Between the city and the forest, in the midst of malarious rice-swamps, stands the finest of the Ravenna churches, the stately temple of San Apollinare in Classe. The Emperor Augustus constructed hereabouts a harbor for fleets, which the ages have choked up, and which survives only in the title of this ancient church. Its extreme loneliness makes it doubly impressive. They opened the great doors for me, and let a shaft of heated air go wander up the beautiful nave, between the twenty-four lustrous, pearly columns of cipollino marble, and mount the wide staircase of the choir, and spend itself beneath the mosaics of the vault. I passed a delicious half-hour sitting there in this wave of tempered light, looking down the cool, grey avenue of the nave, out of the open door at the vivid green swamps, listening to the melancholy stillness. I rambled for an hour in the Pineta, between the tall, smooth, silvery stems of the pines, beside a creek which led me to the outer edge of the wood and a view of white sails, gleaming and gliding behind the sandhills. It was infinitely picturesque; but, as the trees stand at wide intervals, and bear far aloft in the blue air but a little parasol of foliage, I suppose that, of a glaring summer day, the forest was only the more Italian for being perfectly shadeless.