Maximianus. A little behind these
two figures and on either side stand five attendant priests, and on
the extreme left of the picture is a group of soldiers.
[Illustration: Capital from S. Vitale]
In the mosaic upon the right we see the empress Theodora, straight
browed, most gorgeously arrayed, very beautiful and a little sinister,
bearing a golden chalice, attended by her splendid ladies and two
priests. Upon the extreme left of the picture stands a little fountain
before an open doorway hung with a curtain.
What can be said of these gorgeous and astonishingly lovely works?
Nothing. They speak too eloquently for themselves. Not there do we see
the mere realism of Rome, the careful and often too careful
arrangement that Roman art, able to speak but incapable of song,
always gives us. Here we have something at once more gorgeous and more
mysterious and more artistic, a symbolical and hieratic art, the gift
of the Orient, of Byzantium. In the best Roman art of the best period
there is always something of the street, something too close to life,
too mere a transcription and a copy of actual things, a mere imitation
without life of its own.
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