Byzantine Mosaics and Their History

Introduction — Ravenna Revealed: Your Guide to Byzantine Mosaics Ravenna, a city of water and light on the Adriatic coast, is one of Europe’s best-preserved artistic treasures. Once an imperial capital during the Byzantine era, it boasts an extraordinary collection of monuments adorned with polychrome mosaics that impress with their finesse, emotional impact, and state of preservation. These panels of tesserae—tiny cubes of colored glass, stone and gold—tell religious stories, hagiographic episodes and political messages…

Introduction: Golden Secrets — the story behind Ravenna’s Byzantine mosaics Ravenna, a compact city at the crossroads of Mediterranean cultures, is a place where stone and glass tell the story of an empire. In the 5th and 6th centuries, as Rome faded, Ravenna rose to prominence as a political, religious and artistic hub: seat of the Byzantine Exarchate in Italy, it drew craftsmen and patrons who developed a new visual language — the Byzantine mosaic.…

Introduction — Ravenna’s Mosaic Light: Discovering Byzantine Masterpieces Ravenna, a small port town in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, holds some of the West’s greatest Byzantine art treasures. At the end of Antiquity and through the early Middle Ages, Ravenna became a political and religious crossroads where Eastern and Western artists met. The result is an exceptional concentration of buildings covered in polychrome mosaics of rare finesse, luminosity and state of preservation: gold leaf, colored glass tesserae,…