My project focuses on the fifth-century Orthodox Baptistery in Ravenna. Through consideration of the baptistery’s imagery and its exceptional variety of media, I investigate how images, inscriptions, materials, and liturgical performance acted in dialogue with one another and together helped enhanced the initiate’s rebirth and new found union with a Christian God. The baptistery’s rich combination of imagery, lavish materials, and prominent inscriptions reveals the sophisticated and compelling ways in which ecclesiastical patrons generated new members for an increasingly powerful Church and heightened the moment of conversion. Through study of this important monument, therefore, I explore issues of materiality, text-and-image relationships, liturgical experience, and episcopal power in fifth-century Italy. In so doing, I hope to offer new and more nuanced insights into the dynamic interaction between images, materials, and viewers within the baptistery itself and, by extension, the sacred spaces of early medieval Italy.