San Vitale
An octagonal brick church, plain outside and overwhelming within. In the chancel the Emperor Justinian and the Empress Theodora stand with their retinues in mosaics on a gold ground, as if forever taking part in the Mass. The church became the model for Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen.
Construction began around 526 under Bishop Ecclesius, when Ravenna was still ruled by the Ostrogoths after Theodoric’s death. It was paid for by a wealthy man named Julianus Argentarius, whose name means roughly “the banker”. During construction the city was conquered by Byzantium, and when the church was consecrated around 547 by Archbishop Maximian it had become a monument to the emperor’s power in the West. The builder is unknown. The walls are of long, thin bricks with wide joints, a technique from Constantinople. The dome was ingeniously built of hollow clay tubes fitted into one another in a spiral. It was thus so light that it could be carried by thin walls without heavy supports.
The plan consists of two octagons, one inside the other. The inner one is carried by eight piers, and between them semicircular niches with columns in two storeys bulge outwards, so that the space seems to flow into the ambulatory and the galleries above. To the east extends the chancel with an apse. The narthex is set at an angle to the church, one of its mysteries. The capitals are deeply drilled like lace or basketwork. The chancel mosaics show Christ on the globe in the apse between angels, St Vitalis and Bishop Ecclesius holding a model of the church. All around are scenes from the Old Testament, with Abraham and Moses. Lower down stands Justinian with bread and Theodora with a chalice, surrounded by courtiers and clergy.
The church has stood largely unchanged for almost fifteen hundred years, but its surfaces have altered. The dome received Baroque ceiling paintings in the 18th century, and around 1900 extensive restorations of the mosaics and masonry were carried out, in which later additions were partly removed. Today San Vitale is part of the World Heritage Site of the Early Christian Monuments of Ravenna. Its importance lies both in the mosaics, which are among the best-preserved images of Byzantine emperors, and in its plan. Charlemagne had his Palatine Chapel at Aachen built after San Vitale around the year 800, and from there the octagonal centrally planned church spread to northern Europe. A line thus ran from Justinian’s court to the Carolingian and later medieval churches closer to home.