Painting in the Shadow

The almost invisible images of a hitherto unknown painter called Eusebius, who worked in San Vitale Ravenna and in Vivarium, are a gallery of portraits of his famous contemporaries such as Theodoric, Vitiges, Amalasunta and a visual commentary of Justinian's tyrannical behaviour. Living between two ages, without belonging to either, this solitary man represents the fullest embodiment of a type of cultural "e;hybridisation"e; that is well attested throughout history. Eusebius is a spiritual brother of those "e;hybrid"e; artists, who have left extraordinary examples of "e;grotesques"e; populated by fantastic beings. After having embodied for so long the unbiased tolerance which had been the core of his own life and those of his companions in Ravenna: that mixture of confidentiality, intelligence, pointed irony, fantasy, and - why not? - touch of madness which had helped him to navigate through the troubled waters of his age, always leaving at the margins the demons who haunted him.