Tag Archives: Church of San Vitale

To Photograph or Not

One afternoon in August 1973, I jumped off a train with two friends to see the mosaics of Byzantine Ravenna. I first saw the resplendent images  formed with glass cubes depicting the Emperor Justinian, Empress Theodora, and the starry vaults in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia (Regent of the Western Empire, on behalf of her son Valentinian III, AD 423-427, daughter, half-sister and wife of Emperors), projected on a large screen in ART 100.  At that time, there were few books on Byzantine mosaics with color pictures. I wanted to see them in person and take photographs.

We visited the mosaics in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, and took a bus to Sant’Apollinare in Classe (consecrated AD 549) six miles from town.  The apse offered a synopsis of Byzantine cosmology.  Apollinaris, the first bishop of Ravenna, stands facing the viewer, his arms raised, with palms up, in prayer against an intricate backdrop. A green field dotted with trees, rocks, and a few small birds and sheep in rows, lies below a gold sky with floating breadstick–like clouds and two half-archangels to either side of a jeweled cross within a star-filled orb, all below a tiny hand of God at the very apex.

The next morning, we took the bus back to Ravenna breakfastless. A raccoon, chewing through a cotton backpack, had eaten our breakfast peaches as we slumbered, leaving a gooey mess that I did not photograph. Traveling without a telephoto lens, I was hopeful that we would have a closer view of the mosaics in the smaller Mausoleum of Galla Placidia because the floor had been raised five feet from its 5th century level to protect it from rising Adriatic coast water.

We went first to the octagonal Church of San Vitale to see the mosaic panels of Justinian and Theodora in their official robes, crowns and jewels, offering bread and wine, respectively, for the Eucharist.  Like worshippers, we stood looking up at them, to the left and right of the windows below the mosaic-filled apse, engaged by the intense eyes of the weightless figures and rich colors set off against gold fields.  A large, youthful Christ on a blue orb flanked by two archangels, San Vitale and the founder of the church, Bishop Ecclesius, offering a model of the church, filled the conch. In the camera viewfinder, they looked small. The story continued over all the walls, the Lamb of God presiding in the apex of the center vault. I bought postcards.

At last we circled the brick exterior of blind arcades and entered into the ‘porch’ of the cruciform Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, now the admissions desk and gift shop. It was built in AD 425, on the south end of the narthex of a church, Santa Croce, which is no longer there.  Passing stacks of books and glossy postcards, we entered the chapel ready to be amazed. I was amazed. It didn’t look quite like the pictures, which focused on the mosaics. Not everything was illuminated and the lower half was covered with marble revetment. The light filtering through alabaster windowpanes was soft with a yellow cast. I walked around and my eyes adjusted. I could get closer to some of the mosaics and see the slight, tipping of tesserae to enhance the reflection of light. In the dome, golden asterisk stars circled, filling the space around a golden cross, the pattern adjusting to the increasing dome circumference.  Some visitors snapped pictures when a guard flipped some spotlights on and then off.   Again it took some time for my eyes to adjust.  Someone flicked a cigarette lighter and I could picture how the chapel would look lit by Byzantine lanterns.  Amazing, but impossible to photograph.  In one moment, the professional glossies seemed deceptive, somehow insufficient.  Abandoning my camera eye, I continued looking.

Instead of a picture from Galla Placida, here is a photograph taken in downtown Northampton, March 1971.  During a photo class critique, the professor decided that it was not a photograph, but maybe a snapshot, mostly because there is no focal element.  Nonetheless, it has a subject, everything recorded by a certain amount of light acting on film in the camera at the moment when the shutter was activated.  There is nothing dramatic, no element has more importance than any other but the image is not a random snapshot.  I had been walking, on the lookout for a photograph and almost had taken one or two that had not struck me as interesting. Suddenly this scene was interesting. I took the picture.  

 

vess_2016-02-08-author-imageClaudia Vess ’72 has used the Minolta 101 carried in Ravenna as a paperweight for many years because it needs repairs. She prefers to carry a lightweight digital camera (Cannon SX280HS or G1-X) to use in her work as an artist, gallerist, archivist and Alexander Technique teacher. She has worked in museums as a curatorial researcher and photo-archivist, in galleries and with community art organizations and exhibits globally. Her work is in private collections and a few museums too. (Smith ’72, American University, MFA ’76).

 

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