Murals at Ravenna

[stitchwhich]

As I approach San Vitale, a small brick building, squat and clumsy before its tall domed neighbor, like an X in some architectural tick-tack-toe, catches my eye. This will be the tomb of Galla Placidia, where the oldest mosaics are to be found. One may as well begin at the beginning; I go in.

Nothing has prepared me for what I see: a midnight-blue dome, an old skull thick with gold stars; in the vaults, more stars, precise as snowflakes and as big as streetlights enlarged by the mist. The space, effortlessly anthropomorphic, has been created, it seems, to dramatize the inner life of a seer or a sibyl, the miracles hidden beneath weathered, baked-brick features, upraised in thought. The means to this lavish end are simple durable, anonymous—nothing of the "personal" brushwork that marks a square inch of canvas as the work of such-and-such a master. Yet instinct and initiative are everywhere at play. Thousands upon thousands of glass-paste dice—each by itself dull and worthless as a drawn tooth—have been shrewdly cast to embed a texture now matte, now coruscant, with colors fifteen hundred years have failed to dim.

Through narrow alabaster panels, their art-deco patterns lymph-washed and bloodless, like human tissue on a slide, comes a glow I try to resist, if I am going to make out . . . Look! There's the buon Pastore seated among his lambs. But this young shepherd hasn't yet evolved into a Christian savior. Cross held upright like a primitive bass viol about to be played, he is still Orpheus, or Apollo; and I recall from my dictionary that "mosaic" derives from a Greek word meaning the work of the Muses.

I step outside, gasping, as if having run up three flights of stairs.
Tomorrow at leisure I can take it all in more sensibly; now is the time for rapid impressions. I enter San Vitale. Here is greater splendor yet, placed higher up. No night sky overhead. The old astronomer's heavenly vision gives way to quadrants of a cupola where green foliage on gold alternates with gold foliage on green, like sun filtering into a rain forest. I stand as though in the mind of some young, wide-eyed god, extravagantly in love with detail, and grieved by nothing under the sun, not even the bigotries he has already begun to foster or the self-determined faces in those two imperial retinues above my head. Here gender confronts gender, and gaze, gaze. Real people are being caught in this act; the emperor needs a shave, one of Theodora's ladies twiddles her ring. But reality throws no lasting wrench into works of such sumptuous invention. Round each panel runs a border, no, a series of borders, each a decorative idée fixe of the utmost plainness, which notwithstanding, when put together, become steps in an argument so daring yet so crucial to the rest of my life that I know I must get it by heart—not now, though. I have glimpsed peacocks. I've noticed that the motif of counterpoised sheaves or horns of plenty in an archway is being echoed, on pilasters elsewhere, by one of paired dolphins. The dolphins have black-and-white eye-shadow, red mouths and crests and tails. Their tails are linked and their heads thrown back, as on the last chord of some ecstatic universal tango.

I walk out into sunlight. Sarcophagi lie about the churchyard, carelessly, their contents turned to tall grass; and it is true—death doesn't matter. An old coachman, recognizing my symptoms, proposes a ride to Sant' Apollinare in Classe. Here I see a mosaic meadow full of sheep; in Sant' Apollinare Nuovo, the sages whom Yeats called "the singing masters of my soul." By evening next to nothing remains unseen. I have taken not a single photograph. I sit by myself in the hotel dining room, brimming with insights, free associations that sparkle my way from remote crevices of the past: a forest scene composed of butterfly wings from Brazil; sun rising over fish-scale wavelets; a richly iced gingerbread cottage; my grandmother's beaded evening purse, turned inside out. "Childhood is health," said Herbert, and here is mine, along with Christianity's. Merely to know that these early, glistening states are still attainable . . . ! Had Ravenna been a psychiatrist, today's hours alone would have cured me.

The next day I fill in gaps and go back to the places that struck me most. Morning light in the starry vaults of Galla Placidia show up textures piteously withered; it is like gazing upon the mummy of Ptolemy. In San Vitale, by contrast, Jesus stands waist-deep in ripples. His genitals are visible through the lucid warp. I open my notebook and begin to sketch a section of the decorative borders that, like an idealized circulatory system, here tracing a groin, there confining some pious vision to a lintel's brow, link quite a number of structural elements. Its central nerve, one golden tessera in width, bisects this blood-red passe-partout, branching at fixed intervals to create a run of alternating ovals and oblongs. These enclose perhaps a dozen tesserae apiece, just enough for the nice gradation of greens in the oblongs, blues in the ovals, to convey depth—so many gold-framed, kohl-rimmed swimming pools reduced to snuffbox size. Punctuating the spaces between pool and pool, big pearl-white colons invite the eye to pause, then move on. A second border, which parallels or diverges from this one at whim, resembles an awning of white flounces, each blazoned with a squat black cross. A third—but no matter. The profusion of motifs, their vigor by now a reflex long past thought, gives out a sense of peace and plenty in the lee of history's howling gale. It isn't the creeds or the crusades they tell of, but the relative eternity of villas, interior decoration, artisans, the centuries of intelligence in fingers not twenty years old. While empires fell offstage, these happy solutions to the timeless problems of scale and coherence stretched, like flowers to the light, wherever a patron beckoned. Palmyra lies in one direction, Addison Mizner's Palm Beach ( for better or worse) in the other. Or Tiffany glass. There is no limit to the life encoded by my anthology of mosaic borders. For this morning hour in San Vitale I feel like the aborigine who can describe all the people and animals who have traveled a road, just from whatever grows along its edge.

Back in Rome, I telephoned Claude. "I'm so proud of myself," I said.
"I did it!"—no sooner realizing that he might be hurt by what I was about to imply than not caring if he was. He of course, I went on, had been living that way most of his life. And while even I had been known to go to the opera by myself—did that explain why I loved it so?—I'd never believed, never trusted, never been told what rapture solitude could be in a place like Ravenna. The sheer hours on end of seeing, of never having to exchange remarks or keep looking around in case one's companion was bored—why, it made all the difference in the world.
"Like a note struck once." I finished, "that turns suddenly into a trill. To be alive and alone....!

"I know," said Claude gently. "It's so sad."