Beneath within the tribune of the apse we see Our Lord, “beautiful as Apollo,” enthroned upon the orb of the world, an angel upon either hand, while to his right stands S. Vitalis to whom He hands a crown, to His left S. Ecclesius bearing the model of this church in his hand.

Beneath upon either side stand the two great mosaic pictures, the most marvellous works of the sixth century that have come down to us and perhaps the most glorious and splendid works of art which that age was able to achieve, and it is needless to say that there is nothing like them anywhere in the world.

Upon the left we see the great emperor, perhaps the greatest of all the Caesars, Justinian, bearing in his hands a golden dish; beside him stands the archbishop of Ravenna, S. 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.  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,