The ritual and use of the Baptistery

The Baptistery would have been one of most prominent buildings erected in 6th-century AD Butrint, an imposing solitary structure, apparently 100 metres distant from the nearest large church. In its heyday this was one of the grandest baptisteries of the late antique world, vying in its architecture and ornamentation with the most magnificent examples in Ravenna, Nocera Inferiore and Rome in Italy. The baptistery was constructed within one of the rooms of an earlier Roman bath-complex. Indeed, the presence of a praefurnium, a simple water-heating apparatus, constructed within one of the four little triangular corner rooms, may have conveyed water via an underground pipe directly to the font. Butrint may have functioned as something of a spa town in the period, and it would appear that the Church thought to cater for the comfort of a leisured congregation that might be put off at the prospect of christening in cold water.

Two rings each of eight columns form inner and outer aisles circling a cruciform font at the centre. The principal axis of the building ran from the entrance with its large mosaic panels to the baptismal font and, beyond, to a small fountain bubbling within an arched aedicule. The fountain must have had a purely symbolic function, as an image of the Fountain of Life, the fountain in Paradise, referred to in the first book of Genesis, identified with Christ, and central to the iconography of baptism.

The floor was clearly the principal scheme of imagery in the building, designed to provide an appropriate setting for the ritual and to articulate the liturgical functions of the space. The other cardinal axis, running transversely through the building, is also emphasised. To the southeast, to the right of the font, a medallion with a magnificent water-plant with three red blossoms may have marked the spot where the bishop stood – or sat on his throne – during the ritual. To the northwest, or left of the font, a door led into an adjoining room. The design of the mosaic floor in this room suggests that it was designed to be entered principally from the Baptistery and to function as a secondary subordinate space to this. The function of the room is hard to determine. It may have been designed as the consignatorium, the room in which neophytes were anointed and confirmed by the bishop immediately after their baptism, or the catechumeneum, the hall in which the bishop instructed candidates before baptism. Perhaps the most likely explanation is that it served as an adjunct room, in which the candidates for baptism could divest themselves of their wordly garments, before putting on the pure white robes marking their spiritual rebirth after baptism.

The Baptistery was designed and decorated with great care. One of its chief purposes was to define and subtly articulate its interior space as a theatre in which considerable numbers of participants – the bishop, the clergy, the baptisands and their relatives and sponsors – all had parts to play in an elaborate ceremony.

 

• The Baptistery and Early Christian Butrint
• The iconography of the mosaic pavement
• The pavement and ritual space
• QTVR of the baptistery
• The mosaic pavement in detail