Agnellus, it is curious
that the subject of the Baptism should have been used for a church
which by his act had ceased to be a baptistery. The most reasonable
hypothesis would seem to be that the design and choice of subject is
in the main due to the Arians; that the central disc remains late work
of their time in so far as it is original at all. While the apostles
may be in the main the work of the Catholic restoration.
Theodoric was, as these works serve to show, a great builder of
churches in his capital. Not all of them have remained to our day. Dr.
Ricci has thought that we see something of one of them in the Portico
Antico of the Piazza Maggiore where there are eight columns of granite
upon the left of the Palazzo del Comune with late Roman capitals, four
of which have the monogram of the Gothic king. The church of S.
Andrea,[1] according to Dr Ricci, stood by the city wall, near where
the Venetians in the fifteenth century built their Rocca, destroying
the church to make room for it. Dr. Ricci suggests that when they
began to construct the Portico of the Piazza they used, as indeed they
more than any other people were wont to do, the material of the
demolished church in their new building and among it these great
columns with their Roman capitals and strange monograms.
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