ls between the pillars are partly filled with curtains looped up
in a curious fashion and with bright purple spots upon them. An
inscription on this building tells us that it is PALATIUM, that is
Theodoric's palace at Ravenna.

In both these processions the representation is, of course, far from the
perfection of Art. Both the faces and the figures have a certain
stiffness, partly due to the very nature of mosaic-work. There is also a
sort of child-like simplicity in the treatment, especially of the female
figures, which an unsympathetic critic would call grotesque. But, I
think, most beholders feel that there is something indescribably solemn
in these two great mosaic pictures in S. Apollinare Dentro. From the
glaring, commonplace Italian town with its police-notices and its
proclamation of the number of votes given to the government of Vittorio
Emmanuele, you step into the grateful shade of the church and find
yourself transported into the sixth century after Christ. You are
looking on the faces of the men and maidens who suffered death with
torture rather than deny their Lord. For thirteen centuries those two
processions have seemed to be moving on upon the walls of the basilica,
and another ceaseless procession of worshippers, Goths, Byzantines,
Lombards, Franks, Italians, has been in reality moving on beneath them
to the grave. And then you remind yourself that when the artist sketched
those figures on the walls, he was separated by no longer interval than
three long lives would have bridged over, from the days of the
persecution itself, that there were still men living on the earth who
worshipped the Olympian Jupiter, and that the name of Mohammed, son of
Abdallah, was unknown in the world. So, as you gaze, the telescope of
the historic imagination does its work, and the far-off centuries become
near.

One or two other Arian churches built during Theodoric's reign in the
northern suburb of the city have now entirely disappeared. There still
remains, however, the church which Theodoric seems to have built as the
cathedral of the Arian community, while leaving the old metropolitan
church (Ecclesia Ursiana, now the Duomo) as the cathedral of the
Catholics. This Arian cathedral was dedicated to St. Theodore, but has
in later ages been better known as the church of the Holy Spirit.
Tasteless restoration has robbed it of the mosaics which it doubtless
once possessed, but it has preserved its fine colonnade consisting o