But here is something outside the classical
tradition, outside what imperial Rome with its philistinism and its
puritanism has made of the art of Greece and thrust perhaps for ever
upon Europe. Here we are free from the overwhelming common-place of
Roman art, its mediocrity and respectable endeavour.
It is, however, not in the gorgeous mosaics alone that we find the
delight and originality of S. Vitale. The whole church is amazingly
different from anything else to be seen in Italy, for it is altogether
outside the Roman tradition, an absolutely Byzantine building as well
in its construction as in its decoration. It must be compared with the
later S. Sophia and SS Sergius and Bacchus of Constantinople. These,
however, are works more assured and more gracious than S. Vitale, and
yet in its plan at least S. Vitale is a masterpiece, and altogether
the one great sanctuary of Byzantine art of the time of Justinian that
we have in the West. Every part of it is worthy of the strictest and
most eager attention, from the ambulatory, which was covered in 1902
with old marble slabs and where there are two early Christian
sarcophagi, to the restored Cappella Sancta Sanctorum with its
fifth-century sarcophagus, the tomb of the exarch Isaac, and the lofty
_Matronaeum_, the women's gallery, from which the best view of the
mosaics and the marvellously carved Byzantine capitals may be had.
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