A fictitious dedication in the novel, imbuing its artist-narrator with an almost godly omnivision, although he doesn’t portray himself as being more than a financially successful society artist, painting pictures of grand aristocratic homes at a time when their owners were often struggling to keep them up.
‘… to Charles Ryder, with the aid of whose all-seeing eyes I first saw the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia …’
Source: Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968 (1945)), p. 45
