The mosaics of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, created in the early 6th century during the reign of Theodoric the Great and subsequently modified under Byzantine rule, include among their nave frieze a series of scenes from the ministry of Christ that constitute some of the earliest surviving visualizations of the Gospel narratives in the history of Christian art. Among these, an early depiction of the Good Samaritan parable (Luke 10:30-37) established iconographic conventions for this beloved story that would persist throughout the subsequent history of Christian imagery.
The Good Samaritan parable is one of Jesus's most complex narrative constructions, at once a straightforward story of compassionate assistance and a radical deconstruction of religious and ethnic boundaries. Luke 10:30-37 frames the parable as Jesus's answer to a lawyer who asks 'And who is my neighbor?' The lawyer intends the question as a legal boundary-drawing exercise: to whom does the obligation of neighborly love extend? Jesus's answer refuses the boundary entirely. The priest and the Levite - the most religiously qualified observers of the victim on the Jericho road - pass by. The Samaritan - member of a mixed-heritage group held in contempt by mainline Judean society - stops, tends the wounds with oil and wine, carries the victim to safety, and pays for his continued care.
The early Christian tradition, from Origen in the 3rd century through John Chrysostom in the 4th, developed an allegorical reading of the parable that identified the Samaritan with Christ himself. In this reading, humanity is the traveler who has been stripped and beaten by sin and left half-dead on the road. The priest and Levite represent the Law and the Prophets, which cannot heal but can only identify the condition. The Samaritan is Christ, who comes from outside the established religious structure, who uses his own resources to heal, who bears the cost of restoration himself. The inn becomes the Church; the innkeeper, the pastor; the two coins, the two Testaments or the two sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist.
The Ravenna mosaic works within this allegorical framework without abandoning the narrative clarity of the parable itself. The visual conventions of Byzantine mosaic - the frontal or three-quarter figures, the gold ground, the hieratic spatial arrangement - create an image that is simultaneously a narrative depiction of the parable and an icon of the theological truth the parable embodies. To show the Samaritan binding the wounds of the beaten man is to show Christ binding the wounds of wounded humanity: the acts are identical.
Sant'Apollinare Nuovo was originally built as a palatial chapel by Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king who ruled Ravenna as an Arian Christian. The subsequent Byzantine reconquest under Justinian resulted in modifications to the mosaics - some figures were replaced, others altered - creating a complex archaeological palimpsest in which different theological and political agendas can be traced. The nave frieze featuring the Gospel scenes is generally attributed to the Byzantine reworking of the earlier Theodoric-period iconography.
Ravenna as a whole is the most important surviving site of early Christian mosaic art in the Western world. The mosaics of San Vitale, the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, and Sant'Apollinare Nuovo together constitute an unparalleled record of how early Byzantine Christianity visualized its faith in narrative and iconic form. The Good Samaritan mosaic, though less celebrated than the imperial mosaics of San Vitale, is a crucial document in the history of the parable's visual tradition - the beginning of a pictorial conversation about neighborly love that continued for fifteen centuries.