The (Medieval Texts in Translation) book of pontiffs of the Church of Ravenna

Art and Architecture in the LPR

ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN THE LPR Agnellus is somewhat unusual among medieval authors in that he seems to have had a genuine, perhaps even professional, interest in art and architecture. This personal angle has captured the attention of modern art historians. Agnellus is looked upon as an unusually reliable recorder of such things, and the passages in the LPR about Ravenna’s monuments, objects, and topography have been extensively cited and analyzed. As with other information, the way Agnellus describes or mentions art and architecture depends on the reasons that they are included in the text and what his sources were.The terms he uses to describe these things are derived from a variety of sources and should not necessarily be interpreted literally. Moreover, because Agnellus wrote at least three centuries after the construction of most of these monuments, his accounts of the magnificent structures that were built in the fifth and sixth centuries are based on his experience of them, not necessarily on original sources. Let us examine the implications of these issues. What Agnellus describes Agnellus names fifty-seven churches, chapels, monasteries, baptistries , or other religious structures in Ravenna, Classe, and their immediate surroundings. Most of these were built between  and , although some construction and decoration activity went on until Agnellus’s time. A map with structures and topographical indications mentioned by Agnellus can be found on p. xv. The  structural, textual, and archaeological evidence for all of Agnellus’s churches are fully discussed by F. W. Deichmann in his fourvolume compendium, Ravenna, Hauptstadt des spätantiken Abendlandes, and many have been the subject of separate studies. Agnellus mentions more than just religious structures; he also includes the names of palaces, episcopia, private houses, public buildings, watercourses, bridges, and regions within the city. The topography of Ravenna and Classe has been extensively analyzed, beginning with Testi-Rasponi, who produced a map of early medieval Ravenna that is still widely consulted.1 Testi-Rasponi identified locations for most of Agnellus’s churches within Ravenna; later studies have focused on urban development, especially the locations of walls, gates, and waterways within the city, the identification of which has been refined by new archaeological evidence.2 Agnellus gives topographical information for most of the structures he mentions, except, as Cortesi pointed out, for the few that are themselves landmarks.3 Agnellus often describes the decoration of religious structures, although in many cases his descriptions are made up of formulaic phrases, as will be discussed below. On several occasions he describes decoration more precisely, either using very specific terms for decorative materials or mentioning pictures.4 In no case does he      ‘’  . Testi-Rasponi, CPER, between  and . See especially Bovini, “Le origini di Ravenna”; Mazzotti, “Note di antica topografia Ravennate”; Felletti Maj, “Una carta di Ravenna romana e bizantina”; Deichmann, Ravenna .:–; Farioli Campanati, “LaTopografia Imperiale di Ravenna”; and Farioli Campanati, “Ravenna, Constantinopoli .” . For example, Testi-Rasponi identified five phases in the city’s development, but it has been shown that there were only two such phases, the Roman oppidum and one expansion under Valentinian in the mid-fifth century (Christie, “The City Walls of Ravenna”). . Cortesi, “Andrea Agnello,” .These landmarks are generally the structures that survive today, such as San Vitale, the Ursiana cathedral, Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, etc. . Nauerth, Agnellus von Ravenna, Untersuchungen, has analyzed all the descriptions of pictures in the LPR, comparing them to surviving examples and minutely examining the structure and language of the descriptions. Although she does not compare Agnellus’s descriptions to descriptions of pictures, bishops, and patronage found in tell everything about a structure’s decoration, nor does he consistently mention any particular material whenever it occurs. For example , in the Neonian baptistry he mentions only “the images of the apostles and their names in mosaic and gold tesserae,” and not the scene of the baptism of Christ (c. ); he mentions the portraits of Maximian, Justinian, andTheodora in SanVitale, but not any other part of the decoration (c. ). If these two examples and others in which the pictures survive can be taken as a guide, Agnellus is accurate in his accounts of pictures, as far as what he does tell. As Nauerth points out, however, Agnellus’s accounts can not be assumed to mean anything more or less than exactly what they say, as the description of the imperial images in San Vitale makes clear: a similar account of pictures of Bishop Agnellus and...