Living in Italy as an art historian is extremely difficult. You see to much, you have still so much to visit, to study, to read. You can never cope with the quantity of historical and visual material that attacks you every day.
The biggest problem is that when you leave Italy and you go somewhere else you find any other place boring: there are no exhibitions of Italian Masters, there are no medieval churches at every corner, and there are no historical cities every 20 km. What you can do with you free time in this kind of places?
So, as I do not know how long my Italian stop will last, I try to visit as much as possible till I am here. When I do not work and when I can put a part my books for a day or two I take a train and I go to see something that I have been only reading about before.
It was like this with Ravenna. In April last year I went there to see THE mosaics.
I studied them during art history course so I though: OK, it will be nice, but I know what I should expect.
No bigger mistake!
Ravenna is a true treasure. Anything you read about the mosaics there can give you even a minimal idea of what you can see when you visit San Vitale, Mausoleo di Galla Placidia, Sant'Apollinare in Classe, Sant'Apollinare Nuovo or the Arian Baptistry. Colours, patterns, light surround you, flood you with their power.
Maybe it is because of the mosaics that I remember Ravenna as a city full of light.
Unfortunately I could not take pictures everywhere. In some churches it was to dark to take photos without a tripod and I was not allowed to use one.
But I did some pictures that I can share with you.
In Ravenna I had with me my 35mm camera with a black and white film. You will not see the colours of the mosaics but, thanks to the lack of colour on the photos, it is possible to notice other characteristic of mosaics: patterns. Mosaics are like carpets, they extend themselves over every surface: arches, walls, vaults. They spill over without showing any structural difference between elements that they decorate.
Beside figural representation they are full of floral and geometric ornaments that are repeated and repeated over and over.
When you look at them longer you risk a vertigo.
I found this decorative patterns so fascinating also because the pattern attracted also Renaissance public and artists. It is enough to mention the revival of the Cosmatesque floors or the relations between painting and the production of textiles and textiles patterns reproduced on Renaissance paintings.
Decorative fever, the fever of mosaics:
Mosaics in the Church of San Vitale, Ravenna 2011.
