The heart of medieval Ravenna beats in the convent of San Giovanni Evangelista. If not exactly the heart, it is undoubtedly the crossroads of the pulsations that agitate Ravenna in the “middle” age. Perhaps Abbot William was unable to understand it in full: what is certain is that his mosaics truly tell of a new Middle Ages. Above all, they sing about the Fourth Crusade and the glory that would come forever from this undertaking to the church of Ravenna and its monastery.
Overall, it is not difficult to perceive the new breath that politics, religiosity, morality, family relationships and common feeling itself are experiencing. The “courtly” Europe, in fact, which appears in the Middle Ages with the heroes of courtly love, the fables of the time, the obsession with original sin, the mystical and monstrous zoology of oriental derivation.
Courtly love
In the mosaic in San Giovanni Evangelista here are the two sparse scenes which seem to be descended from the collection of courtly romances by Chrétien de Troyes and in particular to the first of those novels (Erec et Enide) in which the protagonists make their relationship grow towards an astonishing maturity: the presence of the lady on the tower who stands out in an equal and symmetrical position with respect to the knight, as an overcoming of the serious marital crisis caused by the difficulty of reconciling the attraction for the bride with the duties of the knight, until the final reconciliation.
The legend of Eve and the tree of life
When Eve picks the apple (perhaps a pomegranate), she also breaks off a branch and hands it to Adam. After the expulsion from Paradise, Eve realizes that she is still holding the branch and she is astonished. Plant the branch and it takes root and becomes a snow-white tree. When Cain kills Abel the tree turns blood red. The second representation refers to the immense upside-down tree of oriental tradition which has its roots in the sky and grows towards the earth representing, in this union of sky and earth, the mystery of creation.
The fox Renart
Among the panels with animals, two are certainly inspired by the novel by Renart the fox: that of the two cockerels holding a stick from which the fox pretending to be dead hangs, tied to a rope. The other stages the comical procession of farmyard animals that participate in the funeral honors: the duck with the thurible in its beak and the pigeon with the palm branch. Renart is the fox who deceives the whole world, who does not respect agreements or oaths, who commits a hundred crimes and escapes unpunished from every trial. He is the medieval embodiment of the trickster and the forerunner of the knaves and libertines of modern literature.
Real, fantastic and monstrous animals: lvampire Lamia and the two-tailed mermaid
All the animals are still represented according to naturalistic canons, with the additional intention of expressing the single and most important characteristics, even of a moral nature, which make up the immense “mystical zoology” of the Middle Ages. The deer is uncertain and fearful, the wolf is aggressive and dry, the goose is clumsy and defenseless, the cow is tame and careless. The panther becomes docile and almost seems to move at a dance pace. Together with these animals, the unicorn of oriental legends and the griffin also appear, whose highly decorative silhouette implies a long iconographic tradition widely spread in fabrics.
In fact Lamia is the most noble vampire of classical antiquity: she was the daughter of the king of Libya and had the misfortune of being loved by Jupiter, to whom she fathered many children. Hera, jealous of her husband, had all her children strangled, except Scylla, the monster of the Strait of Messina. Lamia hid in a cave and became a horrible monster, deprived even of sleep, jealous of other mothers whose children she spied on and then kidnapped them. Jupiter granted her the privilege of being able to remove her eyes and place them inside a vase to rest. When she Lamia was eyeless she was not dangerous. Lamia was soon associated with the figure of the witch who especially affected children at night, whose fat and blood the witches sought to prepare ointments. The creature in our mosaic is similar to both witches and vampires due to their ability to transform into nocturnal birds.
The other monstrous creature is the mermaid, who finds her full expression only in the two great travel epics of Greek mythology. In the Odyssey, Ulysses, tied to the mast of the ship, was able to listen to the lethal song of the sirens and learn about their seductive weapons, based not on sex, but on the lure of a limitless knowledge that their song offered. Only thanks to this physical constraint Ulysses manages to escape the danger against which even his lively intellect would have disastrously succumbed.
Perhaps it is precisely to these fabulous monsters that the last fragment can be linked, given the synthetic character of certain sculptures. In our mosaic the artist has “dissolved” the warrior who kills the beast from the acrobat for reasons of space, with the result of making the latter even more clumsy and demented. The warrior who pierces the beast deserves special observation, whose clothing reproduces iconography of Byzantine silk knights.
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