page_title: Santa Maria del Canneto (Pula, Croatia)
section_title: Surviving chapel
hierarchical_section_title: Santa Maria del Canneto (Pula, Croatia) / Surviving chapel
caption_attribution_description: English: Mosaic fragment from the Church of Santa Maria del Canneto in Pula, Croatia
context_page_description: The Basilica of Santa Maria del Canneto, or Santa Maria Formosa, was a sixth-century Byzantine church erected in Pola under the patronage of Maximianus, bishop of Ravenna. The structure was damaged at the time of the Venetian sack of Pola in 1243, and building material was subsequently taken from the ruins and primarily incorporated into the Marciana Library and the Basilica of Saint Mark in Venice. Of the large, triple-nave church, comparable in splendour to the Euphrasian Basilica in Parenzo, only one of the lateral chapels survives. It constitutes the sole construction in Pola dating to the Byzantine period.
context_section_description: As late as the mid-nineteenth century, the apse, the prothesis and the diaconicon, the bases of the columns, and a portion of the perimeter wall of the original basilica were still reasonably intact as was one of the adjoining lateral chapels. But little remains today with the exception of a reduced section of the perimeter wall, parts of the prothesis and the diaconicon, and the chapel.  Given its form and relationship to the principal basilica, as well as the similarities with the fifth-century Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, it is believed that this chapel was probably built as a tomb: a seventeenth-century description records the presence of the sarcophagus of a bishop.
  The chapel, constructed in rough stone with brick vaults, is in the form of a Latin cross with an apse that is polygonal on the exterior and semi-circular within. Its principal façade has been modified over time, only the arch above the central window being original to the early structure. But the remaining exterior walls are preserved. These are ornamented with blind arches and pilasters on the corners, unlike the exterior walls of most of the contemporary churches in Ravenna which are plain. The interior of the chapel is lit by wide-arched windows in the central tower and small windows in the transepts and the nave. Three of these windows have their original pierced stone screens.
  Inside the chapel, the conch of the apse was originally covered with a golden mosaic which, as with many early depictions, showed Jesus as a beardless youth. The scene may have depicted the traditio legis. The subject, common in Paleochristian art, concerns the transmission of the gospel message and typically shows Christ, holding a scroll, with Saint Peter and Saint Paul on either side. At Santa Maria del Canneto, the heads of Christ and one of the two saints survive in a fragment now located in the nearby achaeological museum. Alternatively, the scene may have been a traditio clavium, showing Christ giving the keys to Saint Peter. This would be more appropriate for a funerary chapel and would not be incompatible with the compresence of Saint Paul receiving the law. Below the conch was a border in stucco with a repeat design of paired birds holding garlands of flowers and fruit. Of this, fragments survive. The freize below the border contained the apostles and John the Baptist within illusionistic niches.
  While the mosaics in the older churches in Ravenna, which date to the Ostrogothic Kingdom, show a strong Western influence, the mosaics in Santa Maria del Canneto are stylistically closer to contemporary mosaics in Constantinople and demonstrate the greater ties to the East and the resulting artistic influence that characterized the period of Byzantine rule. Significantly, the inscriptions in the mural mosaics of the main basilica were in Greek, unlike the churches in Ravenna where the inscriptions were in Latin. This is consistent with the tradition that the mosaicists who worked at Santa Maria del Canneto actually came from Constantinople.
caption: Mosaic fragment from the side chapel of Santa Maria del Canneto (Arheološki Muzej Istre)
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