Theodoric the Great
Ravenna

Theodoric devoted most of his architectural attention to his capital, Ravenna. He restored Ravenna's water supply by repairing an aqueduct originally built by Trajan. According to the chronicles of Cassiodorus, a number of cities were renewed by Theodoric's building enterprises, some of which even surpassed the ancient wonders. Historian Jonathan J. Arnold quips:

Northern cities like Ravenna, Verona, Pavia, Milan, Parma, Como, Aquileia, and still others received new or improved walls, palaces, aqueducts, churches, baths, and a host of other impressive and glorious buildings, all reiterating to their respective inhabitants their own importance within a newly revived and reinvigorated Roman Empire and connecting such ideas with the intervention of a caring and devoted princeps, Theodoric.

He constructed a "Great Basilica of Hercules " next to a colossal statue of the hero himself. To promote Arianism, the king commissioned a small Arian cathedral, the Hagia Anastasis, which contains the Arian Baptistery. Three more churches built by Theodoric in Ravenna and its suburbs, S. Andrea dei Goti, S. Giorgio and S. Eusebio, were destroyed in the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. Theodoric built the Palace of Theodoric for himself in Ravenna, modeled on the Great Palace of Constantinople. It was an expansion of an earlier Roman structure. The palace church of Christ the Redeemer survives and is known today as the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo. It was Theodoric's personal church of worship and was modeled specifically according to his tastes. An equestrian statue of Theodoric was erected in the square in front of the palace. Statues like these were symbols of the ancient world, and Theodoric's equestrian likeness was meant to convey his status as the undisputed ruler of the western empire.

Theodoric the Great was interred in Ravenna, but his bones were scattered and his mausoleum was converted to a church after Belisarius conquered the city in 540. His mausoleum is one of the finest monuments in Ravenna. Unlike all the other contemporary buildings in Ravenna, which were made of brick, the Mausoleum of Theodoric was built completely from fine quality stone ashlars. Possibly as a reference to the Goths' tradition of an origin in Scandinavia, the architect decorated the frieze with a pattern found in 5th- and 6th-century Scandinavian metal adornments.
punctuation:no_comma, change_case:english_lowercase, startend:quotation