Ravenna in Late Antiquity (review)

Presses are encouraged to submit books dealing with Late Antiquity for consideration for review to any of JLA’s four Book Review Editors: Michael Kulikowski (mek31@psu.edu); Richard Lim (rlim333@comcast.net); Hagith Sivan (helenasivan@yahoo.com); and Dennis Trout (troutd@missouri.edu).

Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis begins her study of fifth and sixth-century Ravenna by explaining how the city could be called the “capital” city of the western Roman Empire in Late Antiquity. The chronicler Agnellus gave it this title in the ninth century and it was applied again in the twentieth by the art historian Friedrich Deichmann, author of the monumental four-volume study, Ravenna, Hauptstadt des spätantiken Abendlandes (1969–1989). Setting this matter before the reader from the outset is crucial to any study of Ravenna’s political, architectural, and religious history because, even though the span of years when Ravenna rightfully possessed that title (400–751) were relatively few in comparison to Rome or Constantinople, those three and a half centuries were marked by dramatic dynastic shifts, theological and ecclesiological struggles, and stupendous architectural and artistic achievements. These shifts and struggles were born of Ravenna’s particular straddling of Gothic and Roman identities, Arian and Nicene theologies, and eastern and western cultures. Yet, today one would hardly recognize the almost sleepy modern university town and tourist destination as having briefly been a center of world power, a place where many divergent traditions met and blended. Deliyannis’s project is to make that obscure identity apparent to her readers and bring the late antique cities back to life.

In most respects she accomplishes this goal. More importantly, however, she provides a thoroughly researched and richly documented study that guides her reader through a daunting mountain of archaeological and analytical studies that comprises the Ravenna scholarly corpus, much of it inaccessible to English-only readers. Because she has so much material to manage, the book ultimately becomes more a study of the city’s political history by way of a presentation of its monumental buildings and their interior decoration, weaving the political, social, and ecclesial history in as she goes. This is slightly disappointing, given that Deliyannis, an editor and translator of Agnellus’ history and undoubtedly steeped in the sermons of Peter Chrysologus, might also have presented an equally valuable analysis of the complex intellectual, cultural, and even liturgical side of the story. Nevertheless, her decision to organize materials in this form is difficult to fault, mainly because it makes the book particularly useful to art and architectural historians. Should the present work appear in paperback, it will serve as a helpful guidebook for highly motivated tourists.

In the midst of sometimes plodding descriptions of buildings and their decoration, Deliyannis’s prose remains lucid and occasionally sparkles. Small details are given appealing significance, such as the discussion of the mustachioed apostle in the Arian baptistery procession (p.187). She is crucially attentive to the question of later modifications of the mosaics—a matter that makes discussions of their interpretation extremely vexing. She provides her own hypothetical interpretations of compositional programs, as in her thoughtful analysis of the iconographic scheme in the San Vitale presbytery (pp. 243–50). In this instance, she offers her own insight into the potential meaning of the whole, a move that makes this book rise above merely reporting (and sometimes critiquing) what other historians have proposed. A book on Ravenna deserves to be lavish so the presence of a mere handful of color plates is regrettable. Yet, I suppose, that color photos of nearly all of the monuments discussed in the book are readily available on the Internet is a consolation. Thankfully, black and white photos as well as drawings are appropriately placed within the text itself.

In conclusion, I highly recommend this book and am grateful to the author for its publication.