Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/674

622 I could distinguish the exact shades of color, certain purples and reds and bluish yellows, which I had seen in the mosaics of S. Vitale, in the birds and beasts and fruits in the central roof of the choir there. I have seen, at sunset, the subtlest green of S. Apollinare in Classe, the malachite and lapis lazuli of the Baptistery of the Orthodox, alive and momentary in the sky above Ravenna.

Ravenna is a city clothed in hard substances: marble, and the metallic brightness of mosaic. And these hard substances have become ductile and luminous, a garment of Oriental stuffs and jewels, colored in infinite gradations. Its splendor is sepulchral, and to walk in it is to walk in a buried city, where the earth has been heaped for centuries over rich treasures, never quite lost, nor ever wholly recovered. To enter S. Vitale is like entering an excavation, and one has almost the sensation that these columns of white marble, with their exquisite and severe capitals, so precise and delicate, these veined marbles which paint the walls, these domes and arches over which fields and skies of mosaic flame and blossom, are now being dug up out of the earth. Everywhere there is a covering of rough red brick, a mere shell, over these temples, which are still, after the devastations of fourteen hundred years, the most royal palaces built for God and the saints.

Sigismondo Malatesta stripped the marble from the walls of S. Apollinare in Classe, but the twenty-four columns of grayish-white marble, resting on their square, carved, white marble bases, still stand in their place, twelve on either side, and lead up to the broad circular steps of the tribuna, where, in the dome, color begins. If the mosaics of the nave of S. Apollinare Nuovo could but be transferred to the walls of the nave of S. Apollinare in Classe, we should have, under one roof, an all but perfect sixth-century basilica, clothed in colors as naming and imperishable as jewels. In the choir of S. Vitale there is a column of green marble veined with more colors than I have ever seen in marble: agate, porphyry, malachite, and I know not how many other precious substances. Looked at against the light it is like a great mottled green snake, dully alive, and standing rigid. Overhead, in the dome, there is a sky which is like the neck of a peacock, flowered over with patterns of leaves and beasts and birds, in the fixed, fiery, and gentle illumination of mosaic.

It is always the green of grass and the blue of the sky that are burnt into these colored spaces like flames. And, as one might remember certain flowers among the flowers of a great garden, or certain jewels from a cabinet of jewels, I remember chiefly, and with most of separate pleasure, the gold stars on the blue nocturnal sky of the dome of the mausoleum of Galla Placidia; the birds of all species and all colors, the ducks and hens, among red disks, trefoliated outwards in white, which make the inner ceiling of the Cappella di S. Pier Crisologo; the lapis lazuli which makes a sky in the dome of the. Baptistery, against which the twelve Apostles walk in gold and white robes, with jewelled crowns in their hands, and the green grass, on which a shadow turns and darkens with their feet, as the circle goes round with the sun; the smooth green carpet of grass in the heavenly meadow which curtains the whole dome of S. Apollinare in Classe like a sky; the peacocks at the four corners of the roof of the tribuna of S. Vitale, and the globes of burning blue under the feet of the four angels who point to the central Lamb; and, in S. Apollinare Nuovo, the Eastern shawls and jewels and the points of the red slippers of the women who carry crowns to the Virgin, and the white and gold curtains looped back from the windows of the royal palace of Ravenna.

But, in Ravenna, there is another charm besides this visible one. It is to be loved for its sternness, the barriers to its beauty, what is tragic and unyielding in it, its still and silent attitude of fixed meditation and remembrance, its stoniness, its mists and winter color, its reticent, unwilling, and mysterious response to a mood of the sky or of the hour. It broods among memories, forgetting nothing. The heroic and unhappy queen, Galla Placidia, has still her place there, outside her mausoleum, empty now of all but the beauty which she created about her, fifteen centuries ago. The peasants, as they pass the rocky tomb standing in the midst of fields, with