Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

It is lovely, and some of the best lamb I've ever had....

Is that a sophisticated theological joke, or a culinary observation?

I hope it is a culinary observation! Ravenna is one of the places in Italy where the Eastern and Western Churches collided. So we'd better stay away from attempts at sophisticated theological jokes, we'll soon be in way over our heads and getting into heresies.

That is a beautiful picture. It would be intereting to know who built what, and how all the iconography was interpreted by the builders (who were mostly Byzantine??) and by the Western Church when it took over.

Anyone one out there have a good source for the religious history of those wonderful buildings and mosaics?

Some years ago I read an excellent essay on the Ravenna mosaics in an Art & Archaeology library, but don't remember the bibliographic details. Google produced the following which seems to be a good starting point:

http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth212/san_vitale.html

That's San Vitale, yes? Whatever you think of Pound's politics, he noticed it:

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/pound/canto9.htm

Ravenna was the capital of the Goths after they conquered the Roman Empire. It is the home of one of the few true Gothic churches in Europe, built by Theodoric/ Dietrich in the early sixth century. The other so-called Gothic cathedrals are fakes built half a millenium later, and no one should pay them any heed.

http://www.uni-potsdam.de/u/slavistik/vc/nfranz/Archiv/Werke/MBaLuftbilder/RavennaSanVitaleLuftbild.html

That is a shockingly pretty photo, Brad. Kind of comes across as a holy peacock.

what, no photo credit?

Beautiful Byzantine-style mosaics can also been seen in
Saint Prassede in Rome, although the scale is not nearly so dramatic and impressive. http://www2.siba.fi/~kkoskim/rooma/pages/SPRASSED.HTM for photos.

It's also interesting to read Guy Gavriel Kay's Sarantine Mosaic novels, which are alternate history/universe about a mosaicist working in the equivalent of Ravenna who travels to the equivalent of Constantinople to decorate the emperor's grand new church...

Nick, it is indeed St. Vitale; but that is only one of the numerous Ravenna churches with wonderful Byzantine mosaics.
Zizka, a term like "Gothic" can have various meanings, depending on the subject. Theodoric was indeed a Goth (specifically an Ostrogoth), but of the 5th c. cathedral hardly anything survives (it was practically all destroyed in the 18th c.). Also the History of Architecture is perfectly justified to call the architecture of the time of the Goths pre-Romanesque, and that of the period from the St. Denis abbey church north of Paris (cca. 1120) to the Renaissance as Gothic. Such names are rooted in customs, not science. To call the Gothic churches "fakes" is ridiculous; they did not try to imitate any other style. They were a revolutionary step forward, and their practitioners were fully aware of this fact. Later the Renaissance art historians called the style "Gothic", meaning barbarous, which it certainly was not.