Or: how to try and describe something visually overwhelming in 500 words or fewer.
During our tours I have been trying to train myself to take more photos in order to tell the story of our travels, but more importantly, what we felt when we were there.
In Ravenna the trick is really to stop yourself taking photos, and take the time to simply look at the buildings and think about the mosaicists decorating them. How did they design their pictures, how did they build them out of small glass tiles, how did they consider the lighting levels that would be in these buildings, and how did they work with the glassworkers in order to get all the colours that they would need. Who commissioned the mosaics and what stories were they trying to tell.
Several years ago I read Guy Gavriel Kay’s book Sailing to Sarantium, and its successor Lord of Emperors. GGK’s writing style is not to everyone’s taste, but the pair of books tell a loosely-interpreted story of the man who made these mosaics and the sponsors who commissioned them, ending with the decorating of the small sanctuary in Ravenna which is where our tour started.
I have no idea how crowded these places usually are; when we visited they had limits of 10 people a time in the smaller buildings and about 30 in the larger ones so you really were pretty well on your own.
Many of the people look like real portraits even when they are intended to be pictures of saints etc. In one of the museums they had put some mosaics of faces on a handy low wall so you could see how the mosaicist is showing age, fatness etc.
I’m not going to provide any commentary, I don’t think it will help.
