The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna
The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia was built between the years 425 and 450 and has been preserved largely intact. From the outside, it is a small, geometric, unpretentious brick building, as was customary in the early days of church architecture (Figure 1). The exterior belonged to the outside world and gave no hint of the brilliant and gemlike interior; even the interior dome is concealed inside a square tower.
On the inside, the mausoleum is built on a symmetrical centralized plan, with four equal, barrel-vaulted arms extending outward from under a central dome. The end of each arm is decorated with a mosaic lunette, each with a theme of the Christian triumph of life over death. In the lunette above the entrance, for instance, a young beardless Jesus, the Good Shepherd, tends his flock (Figure 2); iconography had not yet settled on the image of the bearded Jesus, and this mosaic invokes a picture of Christ’s eternal youth.
Surrounding the lunettes are decorative mosaics in patterns of leaves, scrolls, flowers, and geometric forms of a quality rivalling those that will adorn Hagia Sophia at a later date. The glass tiles, the tesserae, are all set at slight angles, so that shifting candle- or lantern-light would set them shimmering. Below the mosaics, the walls are inlaid with marble in the Roman fashion. Over the centuries, the floor has had to be raised nearly five feet with the rise of the Adriatic Sea.
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Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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