CHRISTIANITY AND THE VISUAL ARTS

ARNAB SARKAR
ABSTRACT- Christianity probably has the most abundant visual tradition among religions in the world. The
Christian faith has its paradoxical nature, namely, it lives in a tradition, yet in that tradition its followers must
always experience it as something new and personal. So do arts. Therefore, faith and arts have intimate
relationship in Christianity. Over the past thousands of years, Christianity has articulated, with various art forms,
both its historical narrative—Jesus Christ, his life, and ministry, and its theological cognitive claims constructed
out of this narrative. Therefore, arts are not unimportant in Christianity. Quite the contrary, they have been playing
a crucial role in liturgical practices, religious contemplation, and theologizing, etc. since the earliest stage of
Christianity. In addition to the scriptures, among the earliest traces of Christianity there are visual art products,
such as frescos in catacomb, reliefs on sarcophagus or small shrines, and manuscripts. In the following thousands
of years, Christian arts has become the foundation of the History of Art in both the Western and Eastern world.
The knowledge of Christian arts serves as the key to the appreciation and interpretation of some of the excellent
artworks in the world. The attitude towards Christian arts, especially the visual art, is quite diverse among various
denominations and traditions. To those iconophiles, Christian iconography grounds itself in at least two
theological beliefs: first, the incarnation of God points to a relation between the created materials and their
Creator; second, since God has created human being in his/her own image, contemplating on the invisible God
through His/Her imitations is possible. However, there are some contradictory movements in the history
concerning Christian iconography. For example, the Byzantium iconoclasm, the Reformation iconoclasm and the
Second Council of Nicaea. The debate about the legitimacy of using and venerating icons is still going on
nowadays. Christian Art does not categorize arts according to their particular style, origin, period, etc., but refers
to the arts for a particular range of purposes, which includes different styles and forms in those arts. That also
brings the difficulty of defining an artwork as belonging to the category of Christian Art. Some would say that
not all artworks that manifest Christian narratives, motifs, symbols and themes are Christian arts, but only those
sacred arts whose formal language originates from spiritual truth are Christian artworks proper. This point of view
considers artworks in the art forms developed out from traditions other than the Byzantium, such as those in
Renaissance and Baroque Art, are not sacred. Some might be more open in judging the relation between
Christianity and arts saying that it is normal and necessary that art forms and styles would change along with the
contexts where the faith lives. This latter view is more popular in the post-colonial world where Christians are
more prompt to embrace the hybridity nature of arts produced amidst different cultures, Christian traditions, and
their own experiences.
INTRODUCTION- THE history of art, especially in the West, has customarily paid marked, even excessive, attention to
both the Christ ian Church as patron and the relat ionship of art ists to religious institutions. Indeed, the
careers and artistic output of, for example, a Michelangelo, or Raphael, or even a Caravaggio, are often
presented as largely unintelligible outside such a context. Yet the same art-historical trajectory
also carries wit h it a part ially reversed process, whereby an artist's Christian identity, ideas, and personal
beliefs are themselves instrumental in shaping, even determining, artistic self-expression. Wit hin the Eastern
Orthodox tradit ion, for example, icons were originally
painted by monks, although not invariably so. Such work is customarily unsigned. Indeed, thereconvened
Second Council of Nicaea (787AD) specifically stated that "icons are in painting what the Holy Scriptures are in
writing: an aesthetic form of the truth, which is beyond the understanding of man and cannot be comprehended
by the senses." As a consequence, many of today's Eastern Orthodox icon painters have cont inued to
pro-duce the self-same figures, in the same style, acting out the same unvarying visual theology. Their order
books are reportedly
full. Nurtured within the same Orthodox tradition, but rapidly transcending it, bothaesthetically and visually, is
El Greco (1541-1641). Although born in Crete, and trained as an icon paint er, it is clear that the stringent
theological and st ylist ic constraints of the genre (and perhaps his own professional ambit ions)
prompted him to migrate to the West, and to re-invent himself within a less Orthodox, and more overtly
Catholic, cultural tradition. Although initially based in Venice and Rome, it was in Spain, and especially in
Toledo — where he remained for the rest of his life — that El Greco's per-sonal religious outlook
and its artist ic expression began to converge. It is not simply that, on the evidence of his altarpieces
alone, we can detect a fusion of visual and religious intensity. He also had a well-developed habit of personal
devotion, focused and deepened by t he influence of the Counter-Reformat ion in general and Ignat ian
spir itualit y in part icular. The pract ice of the Spiritual Exercises (probably more pervasive a mo n g
h i s p a t r o ns t h a n h i s f e l lo w a r t i s t s ) e nc o u r a g e d a n i m m e d i a c y o f e xp e r i e n c e and a
psychological participation in the events and details of the sufferings of Christ’s Passion, which clearly
quickened his art ist ic imaginat ion and invested his paint ing wit h an almost myst ical
intensit y. Nearly two generations earlier than El Greco, and more identifiably embeddedwit hin a well-
established Western monast ic tradit ion, was the Dominican Friar Giovanni di Fiesole, (known
posthumously as Fra Angelico). His decoration, between1438 and about 1452, of Convent of San Marco
in Florence is one of the acknowledged masterpieces of fifteenth-century religious art. However, it is less the oeuvre
itself has demands attention, than the credal mindset that informed it. For not only was FraAngelico that rarity in
Renaissance art an artist who was exclusively a religious painter he was also, equally rarely, a religious
professional and an artistic one. At San Marco, as William Hood meticulously documents, both roles converged,
and the artist's visuali magery (as much as Dominican ritual pract ice) served to enhance prayerfulness
in hisown inst itutional setting. Fra Angelico, as both artist and long-serving Dominican, was clearly
aware of his key role in transmitting, pictorially, the basic ideals of monastic spirituality from one generation of
friars to the next, and how his images could be
used programmatically to shape the religious imagination of those "fellow-professionals"whose task it was to
preach to the laity. Such "experiential familiarity" with Dominican theology, as much as his Christian faith, was
a major factor in Fra Angelico's work as both friar and artist. It also enabled him in the San Marco context at least
to articulate and communicate certain religious ideas and pract ices in a pictorial language o f
exceptional originality and power, albeit largely within the confines of his own order. Itis an experience happily
still available to the visitor today. Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-69) inhabited a profoundly different
Christ ian mindset from that of Fra Angelico. The child of Protestant Reformed Church parents, Rembrandt
was baptized, and later married, within the same, essentially Calvinist, tradition, which lacked any strongly
developed tradit ion of patronage for religious subject matter.
Yet by the end of his life Rembrandt had etched, drawn, or painted about eight hundred and fifty works, near all
on Biblical

subjects.
The reasons for such productivity are relat ively clear. Rembrandt was very well aware that etchings
were particularly suit ed to those fellow-Protestants who wanted to install works of art in their homes relatively
inexpensively, and for whom meditation in front of them was quite acceptable, whereas their liturgical use in
churches was not. But there was far more to Rembrandt's choice of etchings as the
primary genre for his religious art than mere entrepreneurial sleight of hand. For one thing, his was rarely art
created for a church setting. It was rather a medit at ive art, one that centered on the individual
consciousness, on the states of the soul in themselves and then on their relat ion or non-relat ion to
others. Its emphasis, in any case, was on the difference that grace makes in specific situations
a mirror of the gospel message. As Willem Visser Hooft (himself a dist inguished twent ieth-century
Dutch Protestant) puts it, "Rembrandt was a painter of the grace of God, exhibited to the unworthy,
the unimportant, those without merit, in such a way that only the grace of God mattered

ST Paul’s Cathedral London

Although there are other identifiable components of Rembrandt's religious formation his, associations and friendships with
Mennonites, his sympathetic acquaintance with the Jewish community, his links, in later life, with an informal Calvinist
celldevoted to Christian meditation and poetry--and its aesthetic expression one other powerful feature is crucial to our
understanding of his art. It is his personal encounter with the Bible. We know that his mother read the Scriptures to him as a
boy, that his fel-low students at the Latin school in Leiden read the Bible daily, and that as an adult he was nourished by his reading of
it. All this reinforced both his religious and his artistic identity, and largely accounts for the overwhelming proportion of biblical themes
in his entire output. These not only document Rembrandt's uncomplicated piety, and testify tohis intimate knowledge of Bible stories.
They also focus on the humanity of Christ. Here, as Christopher Toby has argued, Rembrandt "uses his craftsmanship to suggest also the
transcendental nature of Christ, and he tries, as far as is possible on a two-dimensional plane, to represent both the human and
the divine natures of Christ."In these deeply personal exercises in visual Christology, we are invariably presented
with a Christ very much of this world, but also, through the use of light, a Christ whose divine nature is equally clear. This
preoccupation with depicting the corporeal yet transcendent nature of Christ, (especially in a world where some scholars were
beginning to challenge both His his-toricity and His divinity), was central to the Victorian Pre-Raphaelite painter, William Holman
Hunt (1827-1910). Indeed his capacity for personal religious reflection was even by mid-Victorian standards, prodigious. "My
belief;" he wrote in 1870 (with Darwin clearly on his mind), is that as man was a new development in animal life,
so was Christ to us."' Unsurprisingly, he agonized continually over whether his own art "could effectively serve as an auxiliary of the Protestant
religion" or ever attain "real religious feeling." His artistic response was essentially twofold. One was a high-profile commit-ment to
topographical and emotional realism, acted out in regular visits to the Middle East, "to make moretangible Jesus Christ's historyand teaching."
The other was to use symbolism as well as realism. Here, as George Landow' has clearly shown, Hunt (likeRuskin) believed that a
symbolism based on scriptural typology the method of find-ing anticipations ofChrist in Hebrew historywould produce a religious art that would
simultaneously avoid the danger of materialism inherent in realism and the accompany-ing perils of mere academicism or gross
sentimentality. How successfully Hunt avoided all three of these dangers remains open to question. Elsewhere in nineteenth-century
Europe, "Christian" art, exemplified by both the German Nazarenes and the "bondieuserie" of such Frenchmen as Paul
Delarocheand Puvis de Chavannes, showed precisely these weaknesses, and it took two outsiders to break the mold. Vincent van
Gogh, the son of a Protestant pastor from Brabant, described by his sister as "groggy with piety" in his youth, was a failed
candidate for theministry,thenanunsuccessfullaypreacherintheminingvillagessouthofMons. Nonetheless he retained a fixation, even
a self-identification, with the Christ whom, he once remarked, "lived serenely as an artist, greater than all artists, disdaining
marble and clayand colour,working in living flesh."'Yet ironically, when, atthe ageoftwenty-seven, he finally became aware of his vocation as an
artist, he realized (to judge from both his letters and his art) that he would never be able to achieve the biblical compositions of whichhe
hadlongdreamed.Instead,hesoughttoinfusesecularmotifswithreligioussignificance through the very language of painting itself. "I want:' he told
his brother Theo, "to paint men and women with that something of eternal which the halo used tosymbolize,butwhichwe
now seektoconfer throughthe actualradiance ofourcolour vibrations:' One consequence, supremely exemplified in his Potato Eaters (1885),
was not onlyVanGogh's ownredefinitionofhis vocationas a "Christian" artist, but acrucial mutation in the historical development of Christian art
itself. In September, 1888, three years after Potato Eaters, Paul Gauguin wrote to van Gogh fromPont-AversinBrittany:"Ihave justpainteda
religiouspicture,veryclumsily,butitinterested me, and I like it. I wanted to give it to the Church here. Naturally they don’twant The painting
is Vision after the Sermon Jacob Wrestling with the Angel. This, too, is far more than a religious genre painting. For this
seminary-educated Christian skeptic’s own religious beliefs went far beyond the conventional anti-clericalism and apologetics of
his time. He wanted, instead, to overcome the prevailing, Comptean, positivist approach to reality, by deploying a new
arsenal of visual forms through which to seek transcendence and to point himself, and us, toward an ideal,
supernatural realm extending beyond everyday perceptual experience. InVision after the Sermon, we see Gauguin boldly
entering such territory for himself. Hence the painting is nota picturesque rendition of folk Christianity
It is rather, in Debora Silverman's phrase, “a composite meditation on states of consciousness and levels of reality" a mirac-
ulous mutation from folk piety to interior vision that surely challenges H. W. Janson’s well-aired art-historical judgment that Paul
Gauguin "could paint pictures about faith, but not from faith ‘With the twentieth century, it is clear that two World Wars, the
Holocaust, the Cold War, globalization, mass communication, secularization, even modernity itself, had a profound effect not
only upon the traditional relationship of art to Christianity and Christianity to art but more specifically upon that of
Christian faith to artistic practice. Here there are several complex, yet identifiable, configurations. One is that, perhaps forthe
first time in history, major aesthetic movements notably Post-Impressionism, as wellasGermanandAmericanExpressionism largelydeveloped
without at anypoint making contact with organized religion, and the leading artists of these movements rarely professed
even nominal Christian identities. Picasso's Guernica (once described by Anthony Blunt as "the major religious work of
the twentieth century")" and Dali's ChristofSt.JohnoftheCross areperhapsprimeexamples. Therewere,ofcourse,exceptions. OttoDix,oneof
the greatest German Expressionist artists of the twentieth century, consciously reverted from secular social realism to biblically based
religious themes in the aftermath of World War II. His thirty-three lithographs based on the Book of Matthew
(196o) are an immensely powerful fusion of Expressionist technique and Christian narrative. Similarly, Henri
Matisse's relatively conventional objectives for his 1951 chapel at Vence ("the creation of religious space. I want those who will
come into my chapel to feel purified and relieved of their burdens") also carried a more explicitly Christian sub-text. "From
a certain moment on," he told Father Couturier, "it isn't me anymore, it s a revelat ion; all I have to
do is give myself." His Stations, in the Chapel, marked, he said, "the encounter of the artist with the great
tragedy o f Christ, which makes the impassioned spirit of the art ist flow out over the chapel."" This
does not, of course, make Matisse a "Christian" artist, but thence project, late in life, clearly served
to crystallize his personal religious identit y if not his faith. O ne t w e nt i e t h - c e nt u r y a r t i s t
s u p r e m e l y s e c u r e i n bo t h w a s G e o r g e s R o u a u lt (1871-1958). Although we cannot, as William
Dyrness advises, "measure Rouault's artistry by his faith, the relationship between the two is nevertheless
important." Indeed, that faith, Dyrness suggests, very perceptively, "was the personal and emotional expression
of his painful vision of human depravity and suffering. It was an emotional refuge rather than a reasoned
apologetic.... It was precisely t his lived-through qualit y of his fait h that gave his paint ings
their tender, sympathet ic profundit y."" Sadly, such qualit ies did not impress the Church, which
Rouault (a devout Catholic) had long hoped to serve through his art. At Assy, in Eastern France, where
he had contributed to an ambitious decorative scheme commissioned by t he remarkable Father
Couturier (which included work by Chagall, Richier, Mat isse, Lipchitz and Leger), his stained-
glass Christ of the Passion (1949) was described by Vatican officials (no less!) as "itself so ugly that it would evoke
in the pious observer a disturbing sense of the body in its deformation rather than transmit a spiritual message."
Note here that Rouault, one of the few really
gifted painters of the twentieth century who remained a practicing Christian, and whocontinuously represented
religious themes, especially from the life of Christ, never received any formal recognition whatsoever from his
own church, except from isolated individuals.
EARLY CHRISTIAN VISUAL ART- Early Christian pictorial art arose within a Greco-Roman cultural
environment, instinctively adapting the visual vocabulary of the world in which it appeared and developed. Yet,
even while surviving examples of identifiably Christian art objects appear to have much in common with those
made for polytheists, they also reveal differences that reflect evident and distinctively Christian practices of
composing and viewing images. This involved more than transforming earlier pagan models, it signaled an
intentional rejection of their form, content, and style. The results also aligned with certain exegetical strategies
evident in early Christian sermons, commentaries, and catecheses and reflected the emergence of a
characteristically Christian social identity that emphasized shared religious commitments and broadly understood
interpretive approaches to biblical narratives.

Renewed scholarly interest in the visual and material evidence for late antique religious movements has generated
a reconsideration of many longstanding judgments about the distinct character and quality of early Christian art.
In particular, it has undermined earlier assumptions that works of art from this period could be grouped into more-
or-less exclusive categories according to recognizable and discrete cultic identities (i.e., polytheist, Christian, and
Jewish). The trend now is to perceive more continuities than discontinuities in the visual culture of the various
religious groups. For example, in an essay titled “Archaeologies and Agendas: Reflections on Late Ancient Jewish
Art and Early Christian Art,” Jas; Elsner expresses his “doubts about the traditional art-historical focus on Jewish
and Christian art in Late Antiquity to the exclusion of the parallel religious arts of the Graeco-Roman
environment.” Elsner insists that historians instead need to see a more “fluid set of relationships between Jews
and Christians, and the numerous varieties of pagans.” Leonard Rutgers likewise emphasizes the similarities in
style and motif among artifacts produced for Rome’s diverse religious communities by arguing that they would
have been produced in the same workshops. Rutgers, like Elsner, acknowledges that different groups tended to
prefer iconography suited to their own religious convictions, even when they selected objects that were fabricated
to suit a broad religious market. While no one articulating this attention to commonalities among the artworks of
Christians, Jews, and polytheists denies the existence of a genuine body of material that might be labeled “early
Christian art,” they nevertheless, view it more as part of a comprehensive Greco-Roman visual culture than as
something decidedly innovative, intrinsically distinct, or specifically, and consistently resonant with early
Christian dogma. They, like other historians of late antiquity who have encouraged reconsideration of exclusive
religious identities, want to blur the boundaries and undermine older paradigms that treat Christianity as if in
isolation from its surrounding cultures and cults, or Christian art as a byproduct of a unique movement. In other
words, they prefer to consider early Christian art as more properly a sub-category of Greco-Roman art rather than
as something decidedly separate from the broad material and social context in which it arose.
The subsuming of early Christian art under this more inclusive umbrella is bolstered by examples of iconographic
themes and motifs that were shared among different religious communities, even across great distances. If only
to allow their own iconography to be initially comprehensible, Christians adopted certain figures from the existing
motifs of Greco-Roman art, while assigning new religious meaning or purpose to them. For example, the Christian
Good Shepherd was borrowed from standard bucolic tableaux, the nude Daniel resembles any number of heroes
including Hercules performing his labors, and the rescued and reclining Jonah mirrors the posture of the
mythological hero Endymion. The discoveries of gold glasses depicting Torah arks and menorahs in Christian
tombs or the adaption of the figures of Helios or Orpheus for Christ likewise complicate and challenge perceptions
that these communities were thoroughly exclusive. Similarities in styles and techniques in a wide variety of media
have, as mentioned, convinced most art historians that Christians patronized the same workshops as their non-
Christian neighbors. Tertullian’s famous query, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”now seems to be
answered: “Quite a bit.”

This stress on continuity has encouraged critical attention to context and provided needed balance—even
correction—in how we assess the character of early Christian art. Here, however, I want to call attention to certain
dimensions of early Christian art that I believe distinguish it from that produced by non-Christians and that reflect
distinctively Christian religious sensibilities. Beyond an obvious change in its subject matter, I contend that early
Christian art in fact diverges, first in aspects of formal style and technique from other religious iconography of
late antiquity, and secondly in the strategies by which Christians selected and composed this new subject matter.
The first represents a different aesthetic, the second a shift in visual hermeneutic. The former may be a question
of perception or taste, while the latter was informed by a tradition of typological interpretation that was markedly
different from that of their non- Christian neighbors and specifically evident in early Christian literature. Overall,I
believe these changes in form, content, and purpose demonstrate a significant transformation in how visual images
functioned for the early Christian community.
EARLY CHRISTIAN ATTITUDES TOWARD GRECO-ROMAN ART- Most scholars now contest the idea
that Christians were ever thoroughly aniconic, much less iconophobic. Instead of seeing its production as an
abandonment of some core theological principle or the degenerate influence of a polytheistic culture, it is now
more common to attribute the notably late emergence of identifiably Christian material culture (ca. 200 c.e.) to
the community’s political, social, and economic insecurity. At least one historian suggests that insecurity could
also explain the relatively low quality and limited corpus of the earliest Christian art. Generally, early Christian
writers were not opposed to pictorial art as such. Rather, they objected to images and cultic practices that they
perceived as idolatrous. The apologetic literature is filled with long-standing satirical references to polytheists
worshipping inanimate, human-made statues, fabricated from base materials and thereby subject to natural erosion
or even destruction. Yet, those apologists’ ridicule of polytheists for worshiping senseless objects was probably
more rhetorical than genuine they acknowledged that the gods’ statues were merely representations of the deities
for whom their devotees’ proffered veneration was intended. Consequently, Christian critique of Greco-Roman
art tended to be less about art per se, or even about superstitious or foolish attribution of life and power to mere
sticks and stones than about the stories told about the gods’ immoral and irrational behavior. Thus, Christian
condemnation was aimed as much at the myths as at the objects of art that portrayed them. For example, Clement
of Alexandria contrasts the truth of Christian scripture with the “deceptive mysteries” or “tragic misfortunes”
recounted by classical poets and playwrights. “Clement rails against foolish stories about the gods’ births and
deaths, condemns their licentiousness, and decries their capricious and wrathful behavior. He also insists—
following Euhemerus’s theory that gods were merely deified human rulers and heroes—that their myths were
useless stories of long-dead men and women, filled with errors and superstition

In addition to their verbal retelling in plays, songs, and literature,

Clement specifically denounces the myths’ visual depictions. He declares that painted panels or finger rings that
portray the amorous adventures of Aphrodite or the labors of Hercules drag viewers to their doom.10 Thus the
Christian apologists’ condemnation of Greco-Roman art, while tendentiously grounded in the absurdity of
believing that human-made artifacts could possess life or power, was as much or more aimed at the aggravat soul
destroying myths of the gods and the ubiquitous images that represented them. The problem with the images was

their content, not their form, let alone their existence.

Digital museum
THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT OF EMERGING CHRISTIAN ART- In the second and third
centuries, Christian objections to myths or images of the gods would have had little impact on the visual
environment. Most Christians lived in surroundings filled with such things, whether they were regarded mainly
as beautiful adornments or—more problematically—associated with Greco-Roman religious cults. They could
not have avoided them. From monumental to diminutive, sculpted in the round or painted on walls, as portraits
or in narrative scenes, the gods were displayed everywhere, from public buildings to private gardens. Christians
would have found it virtually impossible to avoid them while conducting daily business. Moreover, during the
second and third centuries, images of the gods, and particularly their representation in mythological narratives,
underwent a revival of classicizing styles. Concurrent with Christian apologists’ attacks on myths and images was
the blossoming of a kind of Hellenophilia that came to be called the Second Sophistic. At this time, visual art,
like literature and philosophy, drew its inspiration from ancient Greek models and mythological subjects, albeit
adapted in a Romanized form. These were especially admired for funerary monuments. The incorporation of these
mythical subjects in sepulchral contexts would have added to their meaning, to the extent that they addressed
existential questions of life, death, and the afterlife. In their recent book, Living with Myths, Paul Zanker and
Björn Ewald
analyze this revival of mythological subjects as it appears on Roman sarcophagi. They argue that this radical
change in aesthetics was prompted by “a new cult of feeling.” Eschewing cremation in favor of inhumation,
wealthy Romans began to commission stone coffins decorated with stories of the gods and heroes. Beyond
displaying the family’s cultural heritage, wealth, elite status, and education, mythological subjects linked the
deceased to an exemplary classical past and served “to illustrate and explain something about the order of the
world and the relationship of gods and men.” Especially in a funerary context, these visual narratives “spoke of
the joys of life, of happiness and sorrow, of ineluctable fate, and of death.” Zanker and Ewald identify three
general types of mythological cycles that were most prevalent on Greco-Roman sarcophagi: 1) discourses about
dying, lamentation, and grief; 2) visions of felicity or pleasure, perhaps in the afterlife; and 3) recognition of the
character, virtues, accomplishments, or social prestige of the deceased. An example of the first type—
sarcophagiM portraying ideas about dying, lamentation, and grief—is the portrayal of the mourning of Meleager.
Another is Alcestis’ heroic willingness to die in place of her husband, Admetus, and Hercules’ intervention to
bring her back from Hades. As a tale of conjugal devotion, loss, and happy reunion with a dead spouse, its
inclusion on a funerary monument alludes to undying martial love, and—perhaps—its triumph over death. The
sarcophagus of Metilia Acte and Caius Junius Euhodus (ca. 160 ostensibly shows Alcestis on her deathbed,
mourned by her husband (in the center), and returning from the underworld (on the right, accompanied by
Hercules). In this instance the depictions of the myth’s two main actors apparently bear the facial features of the
deceased couple, one of them a recognizably older woman. Insofar as the subject matter itself reflects on the
individual circumstances, aspirations, or vague postmortem hopes of the individuals who commissioned the piece,
the addition of actual facial portraits only reinforces the personal identification of Metilia Acte and Euhodus with
Alcestis and Admetus In the late second and into the early third century, the second type— depictions of felicity
or pleasure—such as scenes of joyous processions, playful scenes with sea creatures, or amorous encounters,
began to be more popular than those that alluded to grief and mourning. Among these are sarcophagi that depict
the moon goddess Selene and her nocturnal visits to the eternally sleeping Endymion and the triumphant
procession of Dionysus and his companions: satyrs and maenads, Ariadne, and Silenus. Scholars once surmised
that such images alluded to hopes for the afterlife, but that theory has fallen out of favor because the imagery
could equally depict the pleasures of this life as those enjoyed in the next. Nevertheless, the context of the tomb
allows the possibility that the imagery was intended to inspire hope or reassurance in the dying and the mourning
alike

Whereas the first two types of images arguably illuminate beliefs about death and expectations for a life beyond
it, images of the third type, emerging in the mid- to later-third-century, tended to deemphasize mythological
themes in favor of alluding to the virtues and social status of the deceased. These include depictions of the
departed as a general leading his troops in a victorious battle or as a learned man reading one of his scrolls,
surrounded by companions and family members. Women were typically presented as modestly veiled wives,
attended by their servants, daughters, or female friends. This move away from mythological iconography is also
evident in the popularity of hunting scenes, personifications of the four seasons, bucolic tableaux of shepherds,
putti harvesting grapes and making wine, nautical themes of sailors or fishers, and depictions of rustic feasts.
Zanker and Ewald, noticing this “demythologization,” speculate that it might have been prompted by Romans
beginning to distance themselves from the Hellenism of the Second Sophistic, or might even reveal the influence
of Christianity on a changing Roman sense of core identity.
They perceive the myths as having been “emptied of their religious significance” by the beginning of the fourth
century. They also suggest that aristocratic Romans, many of them Christian converts, preserved certain images
of the gods primarily in order to preserve an honored, cultural heritage.To the extent that they were reduced to
mere indications of social class, refined taste, and personal wealth, the myths seemingly no longer threatened
Christian sensibilities or teachings.

Visitor’s Guide To the Medici Palaces in Florence Italy

THE CHARACTER OF CHRISTIAN ART- During the third century—the time that witnessed both the
appearance and decline of the mythological cycles on Roman funerary monuments—Christian art emerged and
developed its own canon of narrative images, based on its own principal myths. Through the accidents of survival,
the majority of preserved examples from this period come from a Roman funerary context: catacomb paintings
and sarcophagus reliefs. Thus, at least initially, early Christian art as bequeathed to us displays the guiding
narratives and afterlife desires of a minority group contending with a sometimes-hostile society. At this stage,
Christian art was dominated by symbolic motifs that had little obvious—or exclusively Christian—narrative
content. Birds (doves and peacocks), praying figures (orants), fish, ships, and anchors were especially popular for
epitaphs and were not dramatically distinct from those found on their pagan counterparts. Soon, however, biblical
themes appeared and began to dominate the decorative schemes. Among the earliest were depictions of the Good
Shepherd, Noah and a series of Jonah episodes: Jonah being tossed overboard and swallowed by the sea monster,
Jonah being spit up by the creature, and Jonah reclining on dry land under his gourd vine. By the end of the third
century, the standard catalog of Christian motifs had expanded to encompass biblical scenes that had no obvious
antecedents in Greco-Roman art. Some of the most popular were drawn from the Hebrew Scriptures or Christian
Old Testament. Joining Jonah and Noah were Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac, Daniel and his lions, the three
Babylonian youths in the fiery furnace, Susanna, and Moses striking the rock in the wilderness. A few of these
figures had polytheist parallels (e.g.,the Good Shepherd, Daniel, and Jonah), but most appear to have been created
sui generis. New Testament stories also emerged and mingled with those from the Hebrew Scriptures. The
favorites seem to be based on miracle or healing stories in Jesus’ ministry, particularly those drawn from the
Fourth Gospel: Jesus changing water to wine, giving sight to the man born blind, healing the invalid, and raising
Lazarus. The multiplication of loaves was also popular. Depictions of Jesus’ baptism appeared earlier than other
episodes from his life, while portrayals of his nativity, and scenes related to the Passion were gradual additions
throughout the fourth century. Apart from many characters’ proper Roman garb, these compositions have no
discernable counterparts in earlier or contemporary Greco-Roman art. Because so much surviving early Christian
art is found on sarcophagus friezes, we may contrast them profitably with those slightly earlier mythological
sarcophagi. As already noted, the biblical narratives emerged around the mid-third century, just as the
mythological scenes were disappearing. This coincidence is suggestive, but a clear cause-and-effect relationship
is not obvious. In addition to Zanker and Ewald’s theory that the trend toward “de-mythologization” coincided
with Christianity’s beginning to “infiltrate into the core sense of contemporary identity,” they also note the
continuing influence of philosophical monotheism and a revived emphasis on living an “ethically more rigorous
way of life.” Whatever the motivating factors, one suspects that the Christian apologists would have seen this
transition as a sign that they were succeeding in their case against the polytheists’ myths and in proving the
superiority of the Christian narrative. In addition to displaying biblical subjects at a time when the representations
of Greco-Roman myths were beginning to disappear, Christian sarcophagi also reveal certain key differences in
style and composition from their non-Christian counterparts. First, the Christian images are episodic rather than
continuous. In the manner of a synecdoche, a single figure represents or evokes the whole story. Second, instead
of a series of episodes from a more expansive narrative, a number of these shorth and images are juxtaposed or
even jumbled together in a seemingly haphazard composition. Third, in contrast to the cultivated naturalism of
most of the mythological sarcophagi, the figures are executed in a rough and even crude style.

Key to a viewer’s discerning any purpose to these collections is first recognizing these
abbreviated figures (and their narrative sources) and then associating them with the various ways their stories
were deployed in the literary or oral tradition. In other words, this kind of economic visual communication
required observers to have some level of literacy, probably mainly through hearing sermons or catechetical
lectures, so that they could connect the dots as it were. Fortunately, the figures’ routine recurrence, complemented
by recognizable attributes, help to identify them, even if some of these details may strike modern viewers as
bewildering. For example, Daniel is depicted as a nude, standing in prayer. His two flanking lions point to his
identity yet one might wonder why he is shown so starkly naked. Jesus, typically a beardless youth, points a staff
at a group of jars. This refers to his miracle of the wine at Cana, but lacks any further visual cues: mother, servants,
or the bridal party. Lazarus shows up as a diminutive mummy in a little house-like tomb instead of a rock-sealed
cave, while Jesus is shown as a small child at his baptism, rather than as an adult, as asserted in scripture More
complicated than identifying the episodes that these stock images represent is discerning why certain stories were
selected and constantly repeated while others were overlooked. Scholars have often explained both the choices
and their predictable repetition as derived from ancient prayers for the commendation of the deceased’s soul that
summoned stories of deliverance from danger or death, as in “God save me as you saved Isaac, Daniel, the blind
man, Lazarus, etc Yet, while Jesus raising Lazarus makes perfect sense on a funerary monument, the fall of Adam
and Eve, Jesus multiplying loaves and changing water to wine, or Peter’s denial of Christ do not so clearly fit this
theory

Christian Art uses themes and imagery from Christianity. Most Christian groups have used art to some
extent, although some have had objections to religious images. There have also been many periods of iconoclasm
in which icons and other images or monuments were deliberately destroyed. Images of Jesus and narrative scenes
from the Life of Christ are the most common subjects, and scenes from the Old Testament have played a part in
the art of most denominations. Images of the Virgin Mary and saints are more prominent in Roman Catholicism
and Eastern Orthodoxy Art. However, there is also an important history of aniconism in Christianity during
various periods. Christianity makes far more extensive use of images than other religions, in which figurative
representations are forbidden, such as Islam and Judaism.
Moses parts the red sea
David and Goliath
Adam and eve
Second, instead of illustrating a scene or even several scenes from a single narrative (as in the mythological
sarcophagi), most Christian compositions assemble an apparently arbitrary assortment of these emblematic
images. Old and New Testament scenes alternate, healing scenes jostle with depictions of Peter’s arrest, Adam
and Eve, and Jesus’ multiplication of loaves, often compressed into a tightly composed row of stock characters.
While many of the mythological sarcophagi were similarly filled with figures, they were normally composed with
more evident attention to composition. The emergence of double-register sarcophagi in the early fourth century
only increases the possibility of iconographic chaos. The overall result was often visually cluttered and
compositionally unsophisticated. Exceptions exist, of course. Certain fourth-century sarcophagi display their
scenes within niches or decorative columns that separate and frame them. One of these, the famed Junius Bassus
sarcophagus, made for a high-ranking Christian Roman nobleman, was especially well crafted. Others balance
figures with strigillated panels, which may reflect some cost cutting since lesser-skilled artists could have been
assigned to produce those. But even while such techniques avoid a crowded and visually tedious mishmash of
episodes, the results still mingle Old Testament with New Testament stories and prompt art historians to find some
rationale for their composition Whether or not their exact placement is significant, those who are familiar with
popular exegetical techniques will recognize, from both Testaments, have symbolic value insofar as they refer to
some other event in the Christian story of salvation, including sacraments like baptism and eucharist. This kind
of visual discourse has rhetorical and literary parallels in the sermons, prayers, and biblical commentaries of the
early Christian preachers and writers, who likewise related one biblical episode to another in the exegetical
strategy of type and antitype. Already employed in the New Testament, this tactic became standard for early
proofs or demonstrations of the Gospel. For example, the First Epistle of Peter cites the saving of Noah and his
family as a figure of baptism, an association picked up by catechetical teachers and depicted in visual art. The
artistic composition of these sarcophagi would have been a visual form of this hermeneutical technique.

Third, the rendering of the majority of the figures in these sarcophagi is

undeniably awkward. Again, exceptions exist. But while some Christian monuments do replicate the highly
polished and classicizing forms seen on the mythological sarcophagi, most of the biblical sarcophagi typically
display a radically different aesthetic. They tend toward shallow relief, inferior renderings, and minimal
background detail. Simple lines often indicate drapery folds, and drilled holes delineate curls or other details.
Bodies are oddly—even clumsily—proportioned. Historians have noted that Christian catacomb paintings exhibit
similar issues. In his once-standard text, H. W. Janson explains that, while early Christian art showed its descent
from the “Roman idiom” insofar as it adapted certain formal aspects of pre-Christian wall paintings, “here, in the
hands of an artist of very modest ability,” it “became debased by endless repetition.”
Yet, while these repeated, abbreviated, and somewhat crudely carved objects were given as evidence for the
decline of art in the early Christian era, Janson himself suggests that this visual vocabulary was intended to convey
a new, symbolic content.This explanation has been expanded, and now some art historians regard this change of
style and technique as a deliberate choice—a rejection of mimetic naturalism or even a move toward abstract
expressionism—rather than indicating the mediocre abilities of the artists, their patrons’ lack of taste, or clients
working with limited budgets. As this stylistic shift also shows up on major, contemporary public monuments,
such as the Arch of Constantine, more than a few scholars have proposed that it demonstrates a purposeful move
toward more frontality, a preference for expressive, angular figures, repudiation of patrician values, and even the
advent of anti-naturalistic abstraction. According to Ross Holloway, this unrefined new style epitomized the art
of action, without the pretensions of the Greek past, a new art for new themes Zanker and Ewald offer a somewhat
less positive assessment, judging that the style of the Christian sarcophagi give the impression that beautiful
forms, let alone classical ones, are of absolutely no importance, and all that matters is the message put across by
the images, which should be read like a set of keywords.
CONCLUSION- Understandably, Christians needed to repudiate many aspects of Greco Roman art, as the gods
and their stories were the very essence of polytheistic idolatry. Nevertheless, they did not reject visual art in
general. As the surviving evidence demonstrates, at least by the third century, Christians had begun to produce
pictorial depictions of their own sacred stories. Yet, even as they did this, Christians did not simply adapt pre-
existing motifs or styles, or merely exchange their biblical narratives for classical mythological cycles. I do not
think they were, as Elsner contends, simply a new kind of Roman with a new mythology, a “new past.” This new
visual hermeneutic is perhaps most evident in the way the Christian sarcophagi string together series of figures in
order to create a meta-narrative. Instead of assessing them merely as a pastiche of disconnected and fragmentary
scenes, drawn from both Old and New Testaments. than the sum of its parts. Even though each element may refer
to a discrete instance of divine deliverance, and piling them up reinforces the theme of individual salvation, these
images also interact with one another to create a cumulative message that was intertextual and typological. Their
message thus transcends the strictly personal. Rather than illustrating episodes from a single myth, chosen to be
a commentary on a specific person’s life, circumstances, affections, virtues, or post-mortem aspirations (as on the
mythological sarcophagi), the frieze compositions on Christian sarcophagi reflect the religiously shared
commitments of the whole Christian community. These are more than reassuring depictions of favorite Bible
stories or examples of individual liberation only insofar as they express commonly held beliefs about the divine
purpose. Hence, the biblical scenes on Christian sarcophagi were not just Christian equivalents of classical myths,
because Christians interpreted their sacred stories differently from the ways non-Christians interpreted theirs.
Theirs were not illustrations of some personally meaningful tale as narrated by ancient poets or playwrights.
Instead, Christian compositions depicted historically grounded events that were symbolically linked in a system
of prophecy and fulfillment that revealed the divine plan for salvation. Although they may look jumbled and even
crude to modern eyes, in so far as they aimed less at praising the dead than catechizing the living, their patrons
may have been primarily intent on pictorially reinforcing certain basic beliefs. Considered in this way, an
overarching structure or purpose becomes apparent. Viewers needed to be familiar with the stories and ways they
were connected to understand this type of visual exegesis. This did not require reading literacy, as most Christians
regularly would have heard these links made in sermons, lessons, and prayers. No doubt the broad social and
cultural context had significant bearing on the very existence of Christian visual art and influenced many aspects
of its construction. Nevertheless, I hope that I have pointed out significant contrasts in certain formal features,
especially in style and composition, that make this art different and even characteristically Christian. Furthermore,
I contend that its pictorial rhetoric evinces certain principles that guided third- and fourth-century Christians as
they marshaled and interpreted their sacred stories in general. In other words, the features that make Christian
narrative art distinctive were grounded in core theological or dogmatic principles that influenced the ways that
early Christians visually told their story, not only by creating new iconographic content, but also by influencing
the ways that artists designed, composed, and crafted that new content. In doing so, they created a new art form
that established their characteristic way of picturing, and thereby interpreting, their Bible.
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