The Question of the Originality of Early Christian Art
Translated from F. Van der Meers "Christus' Oudste Gewaad", the first two chapters and the epilogue-summary.
INTRODUCTION
THE QUESTION OF ORIGINALITY
THE SCARCE REMNANTS - DISAPPOINTMENT ABOUT SO MUCH PROFANE - WHERE IS THE DISTINCTIVE?
Vox dicentis: clama. Et dixi: quid clamabo?
Isaiah 40:6
When one visits the material remnants of the ancient Christian world, seldom does one escape a feeling of disappointment. They are scarce, these remnants. A series of plundered parish cemeteries in the Roman countryside; a handful of small and sometimes precious artifacts; sculpted sarcophagi for wealthy individuals in Rome, Milan, and Arles; and finally, very numerous foundations of places of worship exposed throughout the countries of the Empire, usually with a fragment of the ancient mosaic floor. Illusion is impossible here: the reconstructions are all hypothetical, the final image uncertain, the evocation in textbooks suspect. What remains for us is a shadow of fragments. Etiam periere ruinae. And the few gifted monuments, like the incomparable San Vitale in Ravenna and the empty, heavily supported carcass of the Hagia Sophia, belong to the sixth century, which is to say outside the true ancient Christian period and within the secluded world of Byzantium. Even a city like Gerasa, the Christian Pompeii of Transjordan, largely belongs there. Even the ship of the Nativity Church in Bethlehem, until recently always cited as the only authentic relic from the days of Constantine the Great, turns out to date from the time of Justinian. The oldest miniatures in gospel manuscripts are no older. The last intact basilica from before 430, the unforgettable jewel above the tomb of Paul, outside the walls of Rome, founded under Theodosius and adorned under Leo the Great, was tragically destroyed in 1823, through the fault of plumbers; the best-preserved remnants are Syrian village churches.
Thus, from the heroic time of the martyrs, we have little more than graveyard art; from the two centuries of imperial Christianity, the fourth and fifth centuries, we have foundations, transformed and thus unrecognizable basilicas, eroded wall mosaics, and, once again, cemeteries and sarcophagi. Our overall picture is an enigma, and true Christian archaeology has become an art of not knowing; the bold assumptions about origin, derivability, and essence that gained currency thirty years ago have been modestly set aside. Yet it is not so much the scarcity that makes us feel disappointed. Other eras have sunk more profoundly: there is reason to be grateful for the much that has been preserved, the incredibly much that has been piously recovered. No, there is a deeper lack.
In those fragile, organically pieced together basilicas that stand in stark contrast to the massive baths, in front of those hastily carved and further worked with a drill to create sloppy black-and-white effects sarcophagi, behind the display case full of small luxury items with seemingly mechanically chosen and continually repeated biblical scenes, yes, even in the most beautiful mosaics of the fifth century in the nave of Santa Maria Maggiore or in the baptistery of Naples (a neglected chamber, incidentally, with a few patches on the vault) – one keeps asking oneself: Is this it then? The entirely different, the unheard-of new, the first glimpse of the new faith? Is it no more? And not clearer?
Everything seems rather Late Antique. It fits perfectly into the hybrid world from the beginning of the third century to the end of the fifth century. And one begins to compare. First with what came before. And anyone with a sensitivity to form will say: there is no question of a turning point here, but of decline; it is consistently worse and worse antiquity. They will likely exempt the mosaics and rightly so, for the pre-Christian antiquity hardly elevated this technique and certainly did not exploit its intrinsic possibilities, and today artists would unhesitatingly place the fifth-century mosaics from Antioch that stand together in the Louvre, a whole like the mausoleum interior of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, above any small masterpieces from the middle imperial period; but while the technique may be new, the figures are not: even in the baptistery of the Orthodox and on the triumphal arch of the Esquiline, we are struck by invariably Late Antique portraits, illusionistic silhouettes, and familiar gestures, figures from a tired, refined world, although here they seem elevated in a new austerity, and, to say it right away, calmer and more spiritual.
And if one compares with what is to come, I mean with medieval art, the absence of the utterly new becomes even more striking. The good news is first told in for us largely incomprehensible and ambiguous terms, later in recognizable but worn-out clichés. Conventional types - the youth, the old man, the matron of the classical era - now play a new role in an old way together with the shepherd, the fisherman, the philosopher, and other favorite figures of Hellenism: they are now apostles, prophets, Moses, believers, angels, even the Good Shepherd himself. On the oldest sarcophagi, the depictions are so completely built from old workshop clichés that the uninitiated cannot tell whether they are Christian, Neo-Platonic, or even purely secular. The artistic soul that hopes for immortality through intellectual pursuit, portrayed while reading or listening, subtly transforms into the practitioner of the true wisdom of Christ. The refrigerium, that often joyful depiction of the banquet of the blessed, identified with the old funerary meal of the family, is revealed to contain allusions to the mystical sustenance of the Eucharist and the refreshment of the heavenly paradise. The genre figure of the fisherman with his rod, his basket, and his workman's shirt slung over one shoulder, is revealed to be the Fisher of Men, and his catch to be the small Ichtus caught in baptismal water. One might say: this is understandable for the time of persecution; then we might expect nothing more than subtle and veiled indications, and what could be more likely than the adaptation of the widely disseminated, vaguely Neo-Platonic or Neo-Pythagorean fashionable themes that had penetrated even the workshops due to the prevailing symbolism? But no, even after the equating of Christianity with the old religion, after 311, the old clichés continue to dominate the stage. On the sarcophagi, Juno Pronuba raises her hands and is called Orante; the rhetoricians gather in their semicircular exedra and are called apostles; the somewhat soft, half-grown Eros from the Dionysian procession dons a noble robe and is called Christ - How far these figures are, at first inexperienced glance, from the archaic youth, from the certainty and purity, from the rugged pursuit of the not yet fully conquered form that enchants us around 1100, in Toulouse and Moissac and Vézelay and Chartres! Where, in the meantime, the never-forgotten antique form was also considered the highest?
Here, seemingly, there is no effort toward justified form. At least, it appears to us as a feeble antique travesty of unantique thoughts, a semi-biblical gnosis in old attire, and how threadbare, to the core! Above all, one wants much; one wants to exhibit; and one carves, builds, and tessellates at will. Jacob Burckhardt, with his keen eyes, was right again: the antique forms are adopted and rapidly consumed, applied to express things for which they were not made, for themes with which they did not grow up.
So, the same question arises repeatedly: what is original in these Christian monuments then? Where does the completely new, which one would expect coming from the earth-shattering and radiant liberating texts of the Church Fathers, reside? Is it purely the content, hidden like that? The Sun of Righteousness seems rather dim in the Late Antique sky.
That question is worthy of an answer. Let us attempt, after so many others who have tried in various ways, to find the delicate answer.
FIRST PART
THE CONTEMPORARY ATTIRE
And in whatever house you enter, first say: Peace be to this house – and eat what is set before you.
Luke 10:5, 8
THE NATURE OF THE ARTISTIC CRAFT
THE SELF-EVIDENT TRADITION 2. THE LOW POSITION OF THE ARTWORK - RESPONSES FROM GREGORY OF NYSSA, SIXTUS III, PRUDENTIUS, AND NILUS OF ANCYRA 3. THE NON-CULTIC CHARACTER OF REPRESENTATION - OBJECTIONS FROM EUSEBIUS AND EPIPHANIUS - A SERMON BY ASTERIUS OF AMASEIA.
The initial impression of lack of originality should not surprise anyone. It wasn't an archaic world that the first Christians inhabited. They lived in the autumn of the old civilization and were aware of it. Their communities were - at least in the Latin West - almost exclusively located in cities. Their faith had not emerged from ancient rural communities but was preached as a revolutionary ideology. It had ignited the world in a mysterious torch-passing from soul to soul, from person to person. It hadn't originated in numinous places; it had emerged in meeting halls; faith came from hearing. The people who listened and converted could reason about it before deciding; to surrender inwardly or resist. The quiet triumph of this faith was far from obvious. It cut through impressive walls, forms of imagination, poetry, and the widely spread philosophy of a mature urban civilization.
And amid the comprehensive apparatus of ancient Hellenic literature and the Roman Orbis, the Christians still felt at home. The eschatological intensity of the first generation had naturally cooled down fairly quickly, and when the State allowed them a breath, they enjoyed the Pax Romana as a kind of way-paver for the gospel. They weren't revolutionary seekers of power. They were a people born of water and Spirit, a new people on an unprecedented plan, a third race alongside the older ones of Jews and Pagans. Their citizenship was in heaven, and their gaze, for a long time (even in their earliest spirits), was towards a distant millennium without demons. Their earthly activities, as far as necessary, naturally fit within the ordinary and far from primitive framework.
And then, probably during the course of the second century, the first Christian representations emerged, and around the beginning of the third century, the earliest ones known to us (in the oldest cores of some catacombs). What Christian artisan would have thought at that time to suddenly and decisively abandon the incomparable apparatus of representation forms that had become common throughout the Orbis? The barbarians themselves adopted it, even across the Indus, so that the Buddha of Gandhara sculpture could bear a resemblance in the distance to the Logos of Roman Christian sarcophagi. The craft was there, saturated with experience; fully differentiated, an unparalleled medium; the new faith naturally avoided a craft that had traditionally served idolatry. But when nature proved stronger than doctrine, and Christians could distinguish between well-tested routines in the making of useful items and the questionable origins of all that craftsmanship, they retained the craft and only avoided certain offensive or less suitable motifs.
Moreover, the artisan was a figure of everyday life, a very simple figure. The material arts were even more part of the craft than of higher intellectual life; even connoisseurs admired church decorations as naively (and accurately) in the 15th century as the mother of François Villon's in the Gothic church with its depiction of hell and paradise. Even among the humanists among the great church fathers, aesthetic appreciation didn't progress much beyond that of Pausanias and Pliny: they found something beautiful because it was so "real" or so "striking." An occasional poet might analyze a motif for its charm, and some rhetoricians might point out aesthetic catharsis in a painting. But this was rare. It usually remained with a sober description, occasionally expanded into a fine ekphrasis by the professional orators in the East, according to the old rules of Isocrates. What usually struck them was what was depicted and how accurately it was reproduced.
In a eulogy "on the righteous Abraham," and precisely at the climax of the dramatic evocation of the sacrifice on Mount Moriah, when little Isaac is already bound - a scene that would determine Kierkegaard's sense of life - Gregory of Nyssa suddenly recalls the painted representation (for it was seen everywhere: "depicted in so many places, sung by so many voices," as Augustine says) and writes:
"I have often seen a painted representation of this drama, and never could I pass by that spectacle without tears. Isaac lies before his father at the altar, crouched down, on one knee, hands clasped behind his back; however, the father stands right behind the crouched one, pulling the child's hair towards himself with his left hand, and bending forward towards that face that looks so pitifully up at him; and his right hand, armed with the sword, is already drawing back for the deadly blow: the point of the sword already touches the body - and only then does the call come from God that prevents the deed."
This is usually the case: Christians pay attention to what is represented, and not, unless in passing, to the technique. In buildings, they are struck by the preciousness of the marble or the stately space, in the depiction, the portrayal of passions or the fact that a spiritual situation is so grippingly depicted. Even the refined ones do not think of seeing a work of art as an expression of an attitude towards life or a cosmic feeling. As for their taste, it unconsciously changes with and within ancient art. The unconscious joy in the depiction, so characteristic of all Mediterranean people, regularly clashed with the seriousness of Christian life; rigorists were always opposed to mild humanists, Tertullian against Clement. But a true radical avoidance of all depictions has never been more than a temporary defensive measure. In the fourth century, and especially after Theodosius, when the official liquidation of paganism became a fact, the best still grumbled against idolatry, but they began to secretly admire the idols again. And this is not only true for literature, nor for the incorrigibly human, Cappadocian church fathers of those days educated in the Oxford-like Athens. Even in the austere West, the tide turns. The statements of the fierce Spaniard Prudentius are typical.
When he attacks Symmachus, the last and not the least of the pagan aristocrats who took up the challenge against Ambrose because of the image of Victoria in the Senate House, he vehemently and cheaply rages against the monsters with which the ancient art has contaminated the imagination: against the licentious goddesses and lascivious half-beasts, the ambiguous castrati, the stupid strongmen; is it, he asks, perhaps that Kenau with plumed bird wings, loose hair, and bare breasts (Victoria) which your right hand gave victory for centuries? and not the ancient Roman training and self-discipline? Why should we continue with these monstrosities? And, as expected, he concludes his tirade with the Egyptian animal gods "the barker Anubis" and the ragged bull Apis: this is a fixed schema, already found in ancient Jewish polemics, in the books of Wisdom and Jesus Sirach, and finally in the letter to the Romans. And the whole ancient art life, what do I say? the whole ancient civilization - thus he concludes - was in the service of deception and lies. All, painters, poets, religious founders followed the same path: and together they created a world of mere empty dreams: Homer, Numa, and the sharp Apelles; the same evil, in colors, in musical songs, in images, unitedly produced and strengthened the triple power of deceiving.
But the same Prudentius wants to preserve the old idols because they are so beautiful. Yes, in his hymn to Laurentius, he lets the saint see Theodosius in a vision from his glowing grill, the nearest to paganism, and predict to him:
I see in the distant future a God-fearing ruler,
who suddenly no longer tolerates that Rome
serves a filthy cult of delusion and error.
He closes the temples with trees
shuts the alabaster doors
strictly forbids the thresholds of shame
the iron bolts thud shut in the lock.
But then, oh wonder! and how strange that sounds from the mouth of a blood witness:
Then will, pure of all blood
at last the marbles stand shining,
also the guiltless bronzes
which are now revered idols.
How far we are from Tertullian here, and the primitive: that the world will perish, and our salvation will come! from the Didache. And as Prudentius desired, it has happened: the idols moved from the cobwebs of the enclosed temples to the pedestals on the forums, at least in the Latin West.
While the prestige of the ancient technique remained untouched, it also did not become a matter for ecclesiastical decisions. The hierarchy, it seems, only concerned itself with the liturgical regulations, the general spatial arrangements, and the expenses; and its involvement, in terms of the latter, often consisted of requesting and obtaining large, often imperial endowments. There is hardly any sign of pronounced interest in iconography: the older motifs seem to have arisen spontaneously; few were ever forbidden; some apocryphal ones were allowed and not even in minor positions. So we see on the triumphal arch mosaic of Santa Maria Maggiore, which Xystus III donated to the plebs dei of Rome, the solemn reception or apantesis of the little Logos at the gates of the Egyptian city Sotinen by King Aphrodisias and his court, priest, and people; a motif from the gospel of pseudo-Matthew; and this mosaic was placed immediately after the Council of Ephesus in 431, with the expressed intention of expressing the dogma of the Lord's divinity (even as a child, before his baptism) defined there.
Nowhere do we find a trace of a pronounced will for a new style in the sense of a conscious intention; the Christian craftsmen as well as their patrons seem to have simply incorporated the hybrid apparatus of the fourth and fifth centuries as far as it suited them, that is to say, according to a kind of natural selection, which we will discuss shortly. We seldom hear of anyone theorizing about technical matters of style. In terms of form, everything seems to arise by chance, or if one prefers, solely from the immanent development of late antique sensibility. Among the writers known to us, there are some, including bishops, who prescribe what should be depicted in a church or courtyard, but not how it should be done: that is the concern of the tested craft. The well-known correspondence between Paulinus of Nola and Sulpicius Severus from around 410, and that between Nilus of Ancyra and the eparch Olympiodorus from the same time, both deal with the subjects. Paulinus devises his own repertoire with many allegorical motifs that are surprising in their combination, but individually are already long traditional: paradise mountain, four rivers, cross, shining clouds, the hand of the Father, the Lamb, the Dove of the Spirit, choirs of doves." Nilus argues only that it is preferable to depict sacred histories rather than the usual hunting scenes and Alexandrian landscapes that traditionally adorn the floors and walls of wealthy buildings in an expensive basilica:
“You write to me - he responds to the official - that, since you are planning to build a very large sanctuary in honor of the holy martyrs, you are wondering if it is appropriate to place images in the sacred space and fill the walls with the usual variety of hunting scenes featuring large game, on the left and right, so that one can see nets laid out on the ground, hares, gazelles, and other fleeing animals, along with galloping hunters chasing them with their hounds at their heels; and furthermore, in the sea, the cast-out fishing nets and various kinds of fish caught in them, drawn dry by the hands of the fishermen. Additionally, there will be stucco work displaying various figures, a visual delight in the house of God. Lastly, in the communal house (probably the coenobium next to the martyrium), numerous crafted crosses, and again, motifs of birds and cattle, crawling creatures and plants.
Well, for my part, I would like to respond to that by saying that it would be childish, even infantile, to amuse the eyes of the believers with things as you have suggested. No! A strong and mature mind would rather find it fitting to place a single cross in the most sacred area, on the eastern side of the sanctuary (the apse): for it is through one Cross that we all are redeemed, and this is our hope. And to fill the sacred nave on both sides with scenes from the Old and New Testaments, executed by an excellent painter, so that those who do not know letters and cannot read the divine Scriptures may become enriched in memory through the contemplation of the paintings, with a reminder of the virtuous deeds of those who truly served the real God, thus being encouraged to emulation. Moreover, the individual cells should be consecrated by a single cross, and all superfluities must be omitted.”
If anything can be deduced from this document, it is that a devout and generous early Byzantine official still perceived the decoration of a grandly designed martyrium-with-monastery as a secular matter, that no fixed rules applied, and on the other hand, he deemed it advisable to consult an initiate about something better. That no one took offense at the remnants of the Alexandrian style is evident from the fact that all the floors and baseboards preserved from the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries are teeming with birds, fish, domestic animals, wildlife, vases, garlands, and flowers: apparently, the essential fillings for otherwise overly geometric patterns; and though the animals sometimes become symbols, and eventually the shapeless mosaics triumph brilliantly, the old fauna never completely vanishes: it only dies out in the corners of the last icons.
It was precisely this innocent delight in pleasing genre that prevented Christians from taking images too seriously for a long time. They looked at them with pleasure, with emotion, and if necessary, with edification. But nothing more.
Because the material artwork had no cultic place in the Christian church. Unlike in archaic periods, it lacked consecration or symbolic value, it wasn't even considered sacred. A sacramental conception of icons, as found in the theory of Sergei Bulgakov, understandable after a thousand years of icon veneration and at a distance of twelve hundred years from the iconoclasm and the Second Council of Nicaea, would have certainly been misunderstood and rejected by the ancients. When a sister of the emperor, the staunchly Arian-leaning Constantia, asked Bishop Eusebius in the mid-4th century for a portable portrait of Christ, he responded in writing that it was not fitting for Christians to carry around their God like pagans; that he did not want them to cause offense to pagans by having portraits of Christ and Paul; he himself had taken such images from a woman; furthermore, he asked, do you want an image of His true Divinity, or one that depicts His servile form? Both are impossible. He disapproves of the woman who was healed of her issue of blood setting up an image column to Christ in Paneas, but he finds it understandable, because that woman was a pagan.
Meanwhile, Eusebius confirms that icons of Paul and the Lord existed; he also recounts that the emperor adorned a nymphacum in Constantinople with gilded bronze statues of the Good Shepherd and Daniel between the two lions. His disapproval reveals the same Arian mistrust in the consequences of the Incarnation that will later characterize Byzantine iconoclasm and Islam. However, even a thoroughly orthodox man like Epiphanius of Cyprus, a notorious critic and heresy hunter, tore a curtain to shreds in a Palestinian village church at the end of the same century, in which an image was woven: he hadn't even seen whether it was an image of the Lord or of a saint, and to our great satisfaction, he had to pay for the damage to the local community. Furthermore, he found that woven fabrics could better serve to cover naked arms, a motif that other bishops also liked to voice.
And here, perhaps, it is fitting to include the homily of Bishop Asterius of Amaseia, which is often cited by both friends and foes of images, as well as in the councils of 754 and 787. This homily sheds excellent light on the relationship between luxury craftsmanship, sacred representations, and Christian innocence. It's an extraordinary text that deserves more than a reference to Mansi, and fragmented quotes in art history books. The Pontic bishop preaches about Lazarus and the rich man, towards the end of the fourth century; he lives in Amaseia, where it is bitterly cold in winter and scorching hot in summer, and close to the realm of luxury and ostentation: Sassanid Persia; and when he reaches the words:
Once there was a wealthy man, dressed in purple and fine linen...
then he gathers all his artifices in a brilliant ekphrasis on the extravagance of his parishioners:
"God has given the sheep thick coats and made flax grow to provide you with wool for warmth against the cold and the scorching sun; linen, on the other hand, to lightly cover and refresh you in the summer. But if you now, instead of desiring wool and linen..., are eager for fine linen and gather the silk of Persian worms to weave an airy cobweb: and if it still has to go to the dyer, to whom you pay a fee to hunt purple snails at sea to smear your garment with the blood of those creatures, then you act like a drunkard, squandering your wealth, not knowing how to waste your excess!"
And that's not even the end of the folly, because
"a certain worthless weaving technique has been invented, which imitates the effects of painting through the interlacing of the weft through the warp and depicts the forms of all living creatures on clothes: through a highly intricate technique, they then make a flowery and multicolored garment with thousands of little figures, for themselves, for their wives, and for their children: that is play, no longer a serious craft: a misuse of life time as a result of boundless riches, and not its use! Precisely contrary to Paul, and directly in contradiction to the divinely inspired voices (the inspired Scripture): if not in words, then certainly in deeds. For what he solemnly prohibited with words, they stubbornly endorse as lawful, through actions.
When they thus appear in gala attire, they are looked upon by passersby like painted walls. Yes, sometimes mischievous boys stand around them, grinning at each other, pointing with their fingers at the images on their cloaks, and they follow them, quite a distance, and can't let go of them. Then you see lions and panthers, bears, bulls, and dogs; forests and rocks and people on hunts, in short, the entire repertoire of painted nature imitation. For it seems absolutely necessary not only to adorn their walls and houses but also their shirts and the cloaks on top of them.
And the wealthy gentlemen and ladies who pass for very pious make a selection from the stories of the Gospel and order them from the weavers: yes, what am I saying? Our Lord himself with all his disciples and each of his miracles as recounted there. You see the wedding in Galilee with the water jars; the lame man carrying his bed on his shoulders; the blind man healed with a bit of mud; the woman with the issue of blood touching the hem of the garment; the sinful woman falling at Jesus's feet, and Lazarus returning to life from the grave.
And by doing this, they imagine they are acting piously and wearing clothes pleasing to God. But if they will heed my advice, let them sell those things, and rather honor the living icons of God!
Do not depict Christ - His unique humiliation in taking on His body voluntarily for our sake is certainly grievous enough - but rather, cherish in a manner that can only be grasped in thought, the incorporeal Logos in your soul, and walk with it! Do not carry the lame on your clothes, but visit the sick in their bed; do not constantly study the woman with the issue of blood, but have compassion for the grieving widow; do not gaze so eagerly at how the sinful woman falls at the Lord's knees, but rather contemplate your own mistakes with dismay and shed tears over them; do not sketch Lazarus, raised from the dead: but ensure that your plea for your own resurrection is in order; do not parade the blind man on your clothes, but uplift the living man who lacks sight by treating him kindly; do not depict the baskets with the leftovers, but feed the hungry; do not carry the jars that He filled at Cana on your clothes, but give the thirsty something to drink!
Indeed, all of this is aided by the vain clothing of that rich man...”
This extraordinary text leads us to three conclusions. First and foremost, that Asterius, in his sermons as evocative as no one else (as he conjures the image elsewhere in a single line of the city's poor huddling against the warm walls of the rich's bathhouses and burying themselves in manure piles to spend the night), was more concerned about his destitute wretches than outraged about the holy representation, which he, as we will see shortly, masterfully analyzes. Secondly, that the usual depictions of the miracles of Christ on the borders of Anatolia apparently were the very same as those we encounter in the contemporary sarcophagi of Rome and Arles, in later catacomb frescoes, on Egyptian pyxides and Italic gold glasses, and the five-part ivory diptychs; we find them together again and described in the Apotheosis of Prudentius, the Carmen Paschale, and the abecedarian hymn of Sedulius, and they remain together as a consistent group well into Western medieval art; any initiate will immediately recognize them in all their features: the bearer of the bed, the man born blind, the crouching hemorrhaging woman, Lazarus in his tomb with his sister - the sinful Magdalene - kneeling small and humble at the feet of the Lord, the seven baskets lined up, the six standing jars touched by the thaumaturge staff of the Lord, and finally the Lord Himself teaching amidst the twelve like a rhetorician; merely from this testimony, we can be fairly certain that the common repertoire of the West was also present in the far East. Finally, these concise images that adorn nearly all devotional objects from antiquity had become a series of ubiquitous clichés, unchanging and familiar like a set of pictures from a catechism; perhaps they originated from a primitive catechesis schema, and don't we find all these scenes in the pericope books of the liturgies? And the pious show-offs from Pontus had them placed on the orbiculi of their clothes (meaning those small round decorative disks worn above the lower edge of tunic and cloak, clearly visible in the miniatures of the Vienna Genesis), further proving how little sacred the conventional histories had become, how much they were clichés, and, if you will, a new kind of Christian genre.
These factors: the richness and excellence of the prevailing figurative and architectural system, the craft nature of material arts, and the reluctance to place an image alongside the Word in worship, when taken together, can make the rarity of an entirely new creation more plausible.
II. CONSCIOUS DENIAL
IN ARCHITECTURE: THE END OF THE PERIPTERAL TEMPLE - THE DEMONISM OF ANCIENT SACRA - THE FATE OF THE COLONNADES VAULT AND COFFERED CEILING 2. IN FIGURATION: THE GREAT AVOIDANCE - CLEMENS' VIEW - THE DETHRONEMENT OF IDOLS AND THE DIMINUTION OF FULL PLASTICITY - THE ABANDONMENT OF MYTHOLOGY AND EROTICS 3. THE WEAKENING OF PLASTIC SENSE,
In viam gentium ne abieritis Quoniam omnes dii gentium daemonia
What strikes anyone observing the rise of early Christian art is the deliberate denial of the beloved motifs of classical Hellenism, which could, in a sense, be viewed as a kind of negative originality.
Certain things are rejected and avoided with great decisiveness, and even after 311, when the Christian isolation ended, they were no longer pursued. In response to the question of what Christians did with the legacy of ancient art, one can broadly answer: partly consciously denied, partly unconsciously continued and renewed. But primarily consciously denied.
They conspicuously omitted anything related to the ancient worship and old eroticism.
Regarding architecture, its relevance truly emerged only after the legal parity of the old and new worship. The fundamental change was mainly in the fact that Christians no longer built temples but interior spaces. The liquidation of paganism, which began with temple closures, soon led to the cessation of temple construction throughout the Empire. Thus, after Theodosius, the peripteral temple, that unparalleled mantle motif, vanished from architecture for many centuries; only the French classicism of Perrault and the purism of the Empire would artificially revive it in somewhat uninspiring buildings like the Madeleine. The most beautiful creation of Greece essentially disappeared from the repertoire forever. Christianity (that Bápßapov тоλμημа), which did not dare to deal with those small richly-mantled cellae, needed columns for interiors. Thus, the colonnades moved indoors, and soon the production ceased, and basilicas survived on the colonnades of demolished temples. Especially in the East, the infinite suggestion emanating from the old temples seemed intolerable to the Christians; since the confiscation of temple properties, they didn't even wait for the inevitable decay but began to tear down the buildings without any piety, which no one maintained anymore now that the State had closed its purse, or quickly and radically transform them into Christian basilicas. We know of the unpleasant temple invasions in Canopus, Alexandria, Apamea, Lampsacus, and Caesarea in Cappadocia; even today, we can see in many regions of Asia Minor the remarkable floor plans of temples hastily but not always urgently converted into churches; however, mostly, the dens of demons were considered too dangerous, and they were cleared out: Bishop Nicholas of Myra in Lycia – our Santa Claus – even had the foundations of the temple of Artemis Eleuthera hewn away. And so, we still find ruins of Christian cathedral complexes here and there, which, since the wave of Islam swept over them, have literally sunk back into their own quarries: the original temple ruins of an acropolis. However, since the older premises of Christians were naturally not located in densely populated city centers, mostly far from the agora and the main temples, in the suburbs, the fourth-century basilicas mostly arose on the outside of the cities, and even the transfer of spolia was not always delayed until a church arose in the heart of the city. But either way, the greatest wonders of the ancient East – the Didymaeum of Miletus, the Artemis Temple of Ephesus, the Serapeum of Alexandria – disappeared without a trace, and we often don't even know when and how. There is likely much truth in Theodoret of Cyrus's statement around 437, addressed to the last pagans of the East: "The temples of your gods have been destroyed without a trace, one doesn't even know what an altar looked like anymore. The material has been used for the shrines of the martyrs... instead of the Pandia, the Diasia, the Dionysia, and other festivals, we now celebrate those of Peter, Paul, Thomas, Sergius, Marcellus, Leontius, Antoninus, Mauritius... and instead of the old processions with their various obscenities, we celebrate modest festivals, without drunkenness, roaring laughter, and noisy merriment, but with religious hymns, devout speeches, and prayers mixed with tears."
The West presents a spectacle of greater reserve: there, the suggestion of the past is rather gently muted by time. In the critical years of Symmachus and Ambrose, we hear of removed statues, closed temples, and the demolition of dilapidated sanctuaries. It is known that during the last grotesque attempt to restore the old state service in 393, the usurper Eugenius, by law, ordered the restitution of all alienated or stolen temple columns, but there were no monks and therefore, it seems, no temple riots. While a law of Arcadius in the East ordered even the rural temples to be demolished, Honorius in the West only seized the revenues, and the intact temples mostly remained as useless yet still admired monuments. Rome, in particular, remained largely intact for a long time. Everything was still there, alternately in the shadow of the towering Palatine Hill and then again in the blazing sun: that marble heart of the world, that chaos of temples, heroons, archives, basilicas, the House of the Vestal Virgins, and the Curia, packed tightly between the Arch of Titus and the Temple of Saturn, with that disorderly forest of statue columns and inscriptions, archaic, classical, and brand new, all mixed together, some sparkling with golden acroterions, and, steep in the northwest, the Capitoline Hill.
It was still there, but it was dead. From time to time, a procession still echoed through the Via Sacra, an incomprehensibly famous orator still stood on the rostra, on the cothurni of the most artificial rhetoric. Now and then, a statue column still rose with a pompous inscription in degenerate capitals, but they are strange frontal figures, with a sad, to our eyes already somewhat Byzantine majesty. The colonnade of the Temple of Saturn, a practically civil building that served as the treasury of the Empire, was still restored, but it was done with hastily gathered fragments, uneven bases, and roughly assembled, mismatched column drums. The Rome that even the fervently Christian Emperor Constantius II, who profoundly despised the pagan Senate (and was a kind of prototype for my brother, the sacristan Joseph II), could not help but admire during his obligatory splendid visit in 357 (he made an entry in the style of the Sassanids, amidst a forest of dragon banners; he didn't look left or right, says Ammianus Marcellinus, and didn't blow his nose once, standing like a jewel-studded doll rigidly in his carriage; but later he looked at the temples, read the monumental dedications, and at the end expressed his admiration for the glory of Roman monuments, particularly praising the Pantheon, the Temple of Venus and Roma, and the Capitoline Hill); that same Rome that Theodosius, while residing intentionally in Milan, still wanted to show to his eldest son, Rome had become an immense and fragile museum.
It's that isolation that has struck the great ones among the Christians the most. Prudentius:
The ancient Capitol within the City sadly beholds
How Christ, even the very princes, shines like God:
How the temples have fallen at their imperial decree;
How Aeneas' royal descendants cast in the dust
Before Christ's humble abode the purple fringes,
And the highest lord worships the banner of the cross.
And when, after the fall of Eugenius, the Capitol gates closed for the first time, Jerome smirked in a letter about the faded gilding and the grass between the stones. He thought that owls and spiders should now keep the company of the gods, yet he no longer took offense at the building's continued existence. It was no longer necessary; the temples had already died inwardly.
Nevertheless, a world of architectural motifs had been denied, and furthermore, in the East, erased. We can hardly imagine what this meant. Let us not forget that the monumental harvest of paganism had also left the Christians indescribably impressed. For perhaps the world never saw a more evocative ensemble than the spectacle of the withered yet still intact Antiquity. No reconstructions can evoke how the cities, how the noblest landscapes were filled and crowned by the colonnades of temples. They reflected in the lakes, rose white against the black Greek rocks. On the ancient acropolises, the archaic sanctuaries still stood amidst a forest of statues, obelisks, votive offerings, altars; the rich smoke still wafted over the temenos; the clamor of processions filled the streets, trees hung with swathes, straw bundles, and wreaths; the country roads wound past sacred stones, herms, tombs, mysterious springs, rustling sacred groves, and the countless small chapels. The ancient world-sea counted more sanctuaries of the gods on its islands and shores than today's houses of worship for saints. Every house had its household gods, every hall its smoking censer before a niche with a deity, everyone their amulets. And while the mystery cults concealed their assemblies among the barracks of the city, the serene gods of Greece gradually became unrecognizable under Near Eastern attributes and in barbaric disguises themselves; Jupiter Dolichenus and Serapis, Isis and Astarte, Mithras and the Cabiri left the gods of yore in the open air but themselves filled the deeply revered reliefs within the inner chambers. And the worship of the great rarities museum, Egypt, still shone forth in perfect completeness: the pink inhabitants of Ibisland perpetually lingered beside pylons inscribed with hieroglyphs repeated for two millennia; the sacred bulls, cats, and snakes lay in half darkness with their golden collars, and the mosaic of Palestrina has preserved for us how the Nile still flowed past intact temples, fish farms, and jackal statues of Anubis; white doves fluttered on the baroque cornices of the Syrian giant temples, and in the morning, the plump hierodules carried their sacred fish...
The Christians knew that the enchantment emanating from those mysterious walls and the columns that fraternally and radiantly leveled everything belonged to the trickery of demons. For nearly three centuries, they had braved that infinite suggestion with nearly closed eyes, crossing themselves upon seeing it, spitting at it as they passed, blowing towards it to ward off the evil spirits that dwelled there. They had experienced firsthand that the temple demons were not imaginary but could incite street crowds, priesthood, philosophers, and the State against them from their colossal and renowned abodes. Sometimes, instead of being attracted to the smoke and the sacrificial fat, they seemed to covet the blood of martyrs. And yet, that suspicious contraption, infected with demons, must have seemed to the Christians as a pinnacle of architecture.
They left it where it belonged: in the past. And when they could build at the expense of the treasury, after 313, they didn't consider imitating the peripteral temples with slight modifications. They already had their own tradition; their sanctuaries were houses and interiors. Besides, the pagans themselves were no longer constructing peripteral temples; the Romans had a tendency to limit themselves to an impressive façade, and that was it, especially because so many temples were embedded within the heart of the cities. The Christians, who continued the general practice of lining main streets with modest colonnades, and also continued to surround all their courtyards with columns within their own complexes, and linked all their annexes with airy galleries, abolished the old temple façade. With a few exceptions (like the Theodosian façade of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, where the figurative sculptures in the pediment were naturally replaced by an archivolt, as seen in the Palace of Salona), the motif of tympanum-on-columns, which once covered all facades from top to bottom, only persisted on a small scale. We see it, for example, in the simplified architrave, forming a small porch, prothuron, on two column wall pilasters, with an ornamental pediment above, serving as a decorative entrance before the doors adorned with draperies of the basilica. But not only the Greek peripteros, even the massive, typically Roman vaulted construction disappeared. Since the Christian emperors left the Palatine for the Bosphorus and the Lombard plains, the era of the grand baths seemed over, and the colossal vaulted architecture fell out of favor. And that masterpiece of Roman engineering, the Basilica of Maxentius, covered entirely with concrete cross vaults and cassetted transverse barrel vaults placed over the side aisles, marked the farewell of imperial monumental architecture. The three enormous bare barrel vaults, which we still measure with our eyes today, and which truly span three meters in height (that's the width of the Cathedral of Mirepoix, the widest nave in Gothic architecture), and which we keep forgetting only form the side aisles, are indeed the last of their kind. It took more than a thousand years before Michelangelo studied them and, at twice the height, incorporated them across the nave of the new St. Peter's Basilica. However, the architects of Constantine left the work of their colleagues on the Forum as it was and built the enormous, equally grand, and, according to recent excavations, thick-walled basilica of old St. Peter's a few decades after Maxentius's, but without vaults, as a subtle, enduring, simple box. Why? We can no longer penetrate their thoughts, but here deliberate negation seems to be at play. It's striking that precisely in the most expensive and largest basilicas of East and West throughout the fourth and fifth centuries, only the apse vault was executed in the old vaulting technique (and much lighter than, for example, the apses we still see today in the ruins of the Temple of Venus and Roma from the third century, right next to the Basilica of Maxentius), and the nave was always covered with a grand coffered ceiling. This sometimes heavily gilded ceiling formed the showpiece of the building; it is, therefore, celebrated by all contemporaries who describe a basilican interior.
In the meantime, it seems that people associated the diverse, heavily sculptural vaults that supported each other with profane spaces: baths, assembly halls, throne rooms, mausoleums, cellars, and who knows, perhaps even fornices! - and found the expansively solemn coffered ceilings more appropriate and perhaps more sacred. The Basilica of Maxentius immediately reminds us of a church interior: it resembles a kind of low-legged and overly immense Baroque church on a coarse Romanesque plan. To the ancients, it likely appeared more as a typical imperial structure, a secular showpiece, a covered parade hall filled with polished statues and ostentatious gilding. With the modest coffered ceilings of their basilicas, the Christians returned to the sacred tradition of the horizontal temple roof, as the Greeks had applied it in the cellae of their sanctuaries.
The rejection of the cast monolithic vault represented a weakening of the sense of plasticity in construction. The focus shifted: from robust divisions to linearly arranged surfaces; from a structure that remained organic albeit heavily adorned with columns and capitals to a more ethereal, concealed framework, often clever and sober but less noble in terms of material, then hidden behind plaster and inlay. The fine connection and flawlessly hewn block also lost ground in the Greek East: as early as 380, Gregory of Nyssa specifically and naturally requested craftsmen for his martyrion (a small cross-shaped central building with four semicircular and four projecting apses, an octagonal dome section, ambulatory, and surrounding colonnade) who could build in a non-Hellenistic manner; craftsmen who could build in brick, he says, and who could span a dome without formwork because that method is stronger. And in the Roman construction huts where brick had been dominant for generations, the type of bipedal tegulae, two-foot-wide bricks, became increasingly sloppy in form, the bond less carefully attended to; we also see the measurements becoming smaller, the windows narrower, the elements simpler, just as the Empire became weaker and life as a whole became more meager. But this was less the fault of the Christians than the collapse of the old society. We will see shortly how, nevertheless, vaulted construction in the East and West was continually refined on a smaller scale; however, the emphasis was no longer on the colossal, and the entire technique virtually disappeared in the West, and in Byzantine East, it advanced in refinement but retreated in scale.
Looking further at the figurative decoration, there is every reason to be astonished by the obstinacy of the Christians. With the temples disappearing, as could be expected, the idols vanish, their production suddenly ceases. However, it's not just the idols that disappear, but the entire rounded plastic art is abandoned as a religious theme, along with incense. The Christian basilica is the only late antique interior without statues. Moreover, the entire iconography of the Christians, which naturally begins much earlier than overt construction, starts in a negative manner, with a great silence. For a while, their presence is almost betrayed only by an avoidance of figurative art, by empty spaces in the mythological bazaar. One senses their contempt, one only hears protest and mockery. Until the middle of the third century, what reaches us is mainly the mockery of the apologists against the makers of images; on a house altar of Alexander Severus, alongside images of Paul, Homer, Pythagoras, Abraham, Orpheus, and Apollonius of Tyana, there are images of Christ. How they hate that world of beautiful gods with no room for God! More than that, they fear it as the possessed inner sanctum of pandemonium. Artisans must bid farewell to their profession when they seek baptism: they are ranked with swordsmen, gigolos, pimps, and harlots. The curse from the Book of Revelation against all who make images in Babylon is not yet faded. Words and symbols are their realm; some they share with another group of apocalyptic image-haters, the Jews: the greeting of peace, certain objects of worship, perhaps the small cycle of salvation from mortal danger, to which Jonas' rescue from the sea monster and Daniel among the lions belonged, representations that both Justinus and Celsus, Origen's opponent, seem to be familiar with.
For we know that a distinction persisted between representation and idol, and that over time, the Word could not continue to be pitted against every representation. Even Tertullian's well-known quip against the Good Shepherd on chalices was not aimed at engraving the bottoms of gold glasses, but rather at what he believed to be a symbol of the lenient doctrine of second remission, an invention of the lax orthodox Catholics. And the late antique nature, somatic and always inclined toward visuality, took the liberty of the children of God where the rigorist drew back. And thus, representation emerged, spontaneous, unconscious, documentary; much like the liberal Jews, who also depicted their seven-branched candelabrum, their lulav and etrog, their holy Ark and small temple insignia on their grave tiles and drinking vessel bases; who around 200 CE allowed the Ark to appear as an image-bearer on coins of Apamea, and later in the somewhat secular Galilee, even occasionally depicted Daniel among the lions, Abraham's sacrifice (which incidentally looks like a child's drawing), and the sun god in his four-horse chariot amidst the signs of the zodiac, the Jewish names of the months, and the seasons on the mosaic floors of their synagogues; and around 240 CE, they painted an entire synagogue interior with scenes rich in figures in Dura on the Euphrates.
However, the Christians chose their images with the utmost caution. Their first humanist, Clement of Alexandria, around 180 CE, still preferred inconspicuous signs, genuine sigils. Speaking about useless adornment, and touching upon the wearing of rings in his treatise on frugality, he opines that a man could wear a signet ring even on the little finger, but it matters greatly what is engraved on the stone: "Our signets should be a dove, or a fish, or a ship running before the wind, or the musical lyre used by Polycrates, or the anchor which Seleucus had engraved on his cameo. If a fisherman is shown, he will remind one of the Apostle and the little children drawn out of the water. For be it far from us even to think of being willing to carry about such forms as our Lord's passion. Moreover, no sword or bow for us, the weapons of war; nor drinking-cups for banqueters; nor a harp for minstrels; nor can we condone any other such thing for the apostle says, 'take no thought for the flesh to fulfill the lust thereof.'" - and certainly no portraits of handsome young men and courtesans.
When that caution was no longer necessary, the aversion to the rounded image persisted: the entire genre smelled of idolatry. The abhorrence of idols proved more enduring than the pull of statues. The older Christians often used contemptuous mockery against the images, mostly highlighting their massive helplessness: they are good for temple robbers, have no soul, are dumb and deaf, are dirtied by swallows and greasy smoke, are made of the same material as unclean vessels, and crafted by indifferent men. Many also believed that the demons would not depart from the beautifully shaped godly forms even when broken into pieces. "Ultimately, they are icons of sin," wrote Tatian, who adds, "Besides, I am about to yawn at those images." And Clement, much more sincere and reasonable, says, "The greater the deception, the greater the craftsmanship." The same Clement, who in a well-known passage derides Priapus and fills half of his Protreptikos with a diatribe against the contamination of imagination by myths, also speaks elsewhere of the "quiet satisfaction without gesture" (he refers to the absence of the usual hand-kiss with thumb and forefinger) that Christians should also feel for a beautiful statue. However, two centuries later, the scornful ridicule of Prudentius against the old myths, as we have seen, went surprisingly hand in hand with care for the old monuments. Were not even the Cappadocian Fathers, who in their youth sat at the feet of the last champion of the old sanctuaries, Libanius, later bishops who were good Hellenes, and even in their most zealous utterances far from being iconoclasts? In general, the Christian intellectuals of 390 left the toppling of statues to the hordes of monks who sometimes behaved like the Spanish stormtroopers of 1936, swarming over the sanctuaries to destroy them - their admiration for which seems to burn down quite easily. They lamented the disappearance of all that plastic beauty, which was no longer a danger, although their appreciation appears to have been more of a conventional literary than a visual nature (Libanius' defense of the temples might remind some of Maurice Barrès' speech on la grande pitié des églises de France, after the separation laws, in the Chamber of Deputies).
Meanwhile, no Christian, and after the laws of Theodosius and Honorius, no sculptor dared to create an idol anymore. Free plastic art continued to exist, but its training ground and main purpose had vanished. In the Christian milieu, during the time of Constantine and his successors, a few statuettes of the Good Shepherd appeared, possibly replicas of a statue in Constantinople, and otherwise not differing from an ordinary bucolic figure. Christian reliefs appeared on sarcophagi, capitals, and even on ambos and cancelli, but the latter were never numerous and remained extremely inconspicuous, getting lost among the ubiquitous purely ornamental motifs. The rounded image found no place within the spaces of worship. Even purely religious sculptures in outdoor settings, like the Shepherd and the Daniel group in the Bosporus, the columns of the evangelists on the Arcadian Street in Ephesus – we can count them on our fingers.
The loose plastic art seems to have been reduced to the display apparatus of the city and the Empire. In Constantinople, which had to rival ancient Rome, numerous statues of emperors, officials, and rhetoricians are erected. Some stand on tall hollow columns, with curious reliefs around the base and spiraling up the shaft, following the model of Trajan's and Marcus Aurelius's triumphal columns. On the drawings of the base of the Arcadius column—the only thing that remains to us—we are surprised to see the old attributes of the gloria augustorum: trophies, Victories writing on shields, piles of war booty, kneeling and hair-pulled barbarians, defeated and tribute-bearing, and conquerors crowded in the circus box with their spouses and young caesars. Naturally linked with the trophy that bears the victory-wrought Cross, raised by geniuses within a laurel wreath. For Theodosius and Arcadius were fervent Christians, and thus the Cross, through the theater of the Empire, became intertwined with the attributes of imperial prosperity and found its place on the forums and the hippodrome. Conversely, a statue becomes a purely worldly thing. In the sixth century, when Justinian has a bronze equestrian statue placed for himself as Marcus Aurelius once had (only atop a column and with a bizarre plume on his helmet), and statues for magistrates are still erected on forums even in provincial towns like Ephesus, people outside the major centers no longer remember how the old god-images looked. Those who today contemplate the meager honor statues of early Byzantine officials in the museum of Istanbul witness before their eyes how a great civic genre slowly died. And those who want to know what people in a Christian milieu still remembered about idols in the early sixth century should closely examine the representations of idols in a manuscript like the Vienna Genesis: they are white larvae on poles, sinisterly adorned puppets. Not much better are the caricatures that later Byzantine monks will draw in their menologia: small statues on columns, with a pitch-black naked little man—the demon!—escaping from the bronze mouth. Thus, the beautiful ancient gods ended their odyssey in the Greek imagination.
he smaller relief techniques in wood, ivory, and precious metals fared somewhat better. Even in Christian compositions, a residue of sensualistic routine persisted for a long time. However, since around 300, the entire decorative arts had been more focused on solid richness and intricate details than on plastic fullness and loose, spacious harmony. Whole regions—Mesopotamia, Armenia, the Syrian hinterland—where undoubtedly objects with images were owned, took a sort of revenge of imagelessness in their churches: these churches were as bare as mosques. There was nothing to see except hanging lamps, candlesticks, curtains, and the occasional decorative cross. This austerity of decoration probably persisted the longest in churches outside the Roman Empire and Orthodoxy, such as among the Nestorians in Persia and Turkestan. Those who visit the small basilicas of the woodless Hauran and mentally envision those interiors with sharply-cut vault arches using Butler's drawings might sense that an entirely non-Mediterranean spirit pervaded this atmosphere; this was an art for the hinterlands. Yet they may also wonder if, in terms of the poverty of figures, these interiors truly differed from the fantastic stucco work in the great churches of Antioch and the fourth-century Holy Land martyria. And when they make an unbiased comparison with the fully painted pagan temples and synagogues, such as the one at Dura-Europos, which was not so far away, they might have a rough idea of how much the practice of depicting images had been renounced by Christians.
The entire realm of figuration, both plastic and non-plastic, lost its best themes through the abandonment of mythology and eroticism. Physical situations were inherent in ancient art; what remained was the least lively: meaningless allegories, the city-crowning Tyches with their walls—more or less derived from Eutychides' masterpiece of the Fortune of Antioch—Roma and Constantinopolis with their helmets and victories on celestial spheres, Nike gradually transforming into angels, the seasons with Sun and Moon and sky and earth and sea—all that half-pagan and entirely neutral troop adorned with halos, rays, starry orbs, and other astrological accessories as we see them assembled in the incomparable historical document of 354, the Roman Chronographer. However, the Christians after 400 seem even to hasten to clear away their own innocent symbols from the two preceding centuries—Orpheus and the seasons, the grape harvest, Cupid and Psyche, and finally the Good Shepherd and the entire Arcadian masquerade. They resolutely rename the ancient Nile as the Jordan and banish the old Alexandrian genre to plinths and inlaid floors. The only comical and somewhat unsettling exception is found in Coptic decorative art in Christian Egypt. There, amidst the finely ornate cornices and frontons, as well as on the colorful decorative fabrics, thrives a heavily distorted and sometimes nearly formless, but to our eyes strikingly obscene, revival of the erotic genre of old. Whether this emphasis on the physical is purely reducible to naive stylization or can be associated with an unhealthy interest (as has also been observed in apocryphal stories of the virgin birth where a midwife confirms the Virgin Mother's intactness, only to be punished for her audacity with a lame hand), lies beyond our scope. Nevertheless, the Coptic crudeness signifies little more than an exception that confirms the extremely strict rule.
Very little of the beloved themes of antiquity remained. Even the noblest motifs disappeared without a trace. Some were artificially resurrected during the Byzantine Renaissance and are then seen again on the ivory caskets of the iconoclast era and in certain aristocratic psalters intended for connoisseurs. A small series of very neutral motifs, all from the era of illusionistic book illumination, managed to survive meagerly in the illustrations of some ancient texts. Others found their way relatively coincidentally into the Christian iconography before 600 and were thus, copied with reverence and considered extremely significant, incorporated into Carolingian ivories and manuscripts, on the ivories of the Meuse region, in the metalwork of Saint-Denis, and who knows through which pathways into the Hortus deliciarum of Herrad of Landsberg. We then see the Sun and Moon taking the form of two clipei with Phoebus and Diana on either side of the Crucified; Coelus with his heavenly veil of orbs above his rugged head crouching under the feet of the Lord; the Water Bearer of the Zodiac merging with the reclining river god into a paradise stream; Oceanus and Tellus transforming from self-aware gods into childlike satellites, humbly looking up to their ruler Christ, who sits in majesty within his mandorla. However, the figures of complete humanity, the deep intuitions of a once-wise nature cult, the profound allegories of time-honored myths, no longer engaged anyone.
What this deliberate renunciation meant in technical terms could be described as a significant loss of static harmony and plastic fullness. The essential and once most ideal effect of the old sensualistic art vanished. The act of "depicting" took a step back. Taste, sensibility, even eyesight had changed. People no longer "saw" it. The most Attic ivory work from the fourth century, the diptych known as the "Nicomachi and Symmachi," with its two noble figures and one subordinate figure, and luckily, finally, an uncomplicated composition, turns out to be a reflection of its time: the rendering is just a touch unsteady, the two priestesses don't stand firmly on their feet, everything seems poised to waver. The Olympic tranquility has vanished from the earth. What the Christians consciously renounced was paganism.
What they undoubtedly, unconsciously abandoned was the essence of ancient art. They relinquished the genres that had long framed the pure Atticism: the freestanding plastic figure, the finely balanced architecture of column and entablature, the masterpiece displayed in isolation, the somatic theme, the ancient Eros. But these are also the genres that had degenerated the most around 300 and attracted the least interest.
What the Christians no longer produced were the excessively elegant sculptures, the hollow personifications, the colossal city and state temples with mechanically carved monstrous capitals – all those ambivalent creations that melded Attic pretensions with non-Attic effects. What the Christian sculptors scorned was the painful and soulless copying of classical showpieces that had consumed the best efforts for so many centuries. The display of clichéd physicality, all those wholly or partially naked heroes with an official's or an emperor's head attached – people had finally grown weary of it.
And when suddenly temple construction ceased and the mythological emporium stood unstocked, only the stubborn romantics who lived in a fictional past mourned. Today, we view their images with nostalgic sympathy: the pointed and delicate goat's head of Julian the Apostate on the Antioch solidus coin fills us with contemplation rather than annoyance; with a certain reverence, we read the lengthy epitaph on the Capitol, where Aconia Fabia Paulina and her husband, Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, praefectus praetorio Italiae in 384 and therefore still during the time of Theodosius, narrate to future generations how both of them had been initiated into all the mysteries: those of Liber, the Eleusinian, and of Mithras, and where both list their priesthoods with the desperate piety of devoted followers. But how infinitely distant was their theurgy from the religion of Homer. And how far removed, in those days, was the small radiant acropolis of Greek art!
Would the people of the fourth century not have felt how little relevance remained in their colossal Atticizing artistic apparatus? What even remained in the craftsmanship, the gauge of skill and mirror of taste, of the old and not even Hellenistic but let us say Augustan refinement? Where are the noble cameos, the exquisitely minted coins, the graceful glassware? All interest seems focused on color and material. Everything is precious, much more than truly beautiful. The porphyries, the tetrarchs embracing each other on the corner of San Marco in Venice, were already wielding swords with grips shaped like bird heads, inlaid with red stones, before 300: even then, Sarmatian art was being admired. Barbarian buckles with motifs from Scythia now fasten the chlamyses on the right shoulders of generals and magistri sacri palatii.
What the Christians renounced with the liquidation of temples and idols was a meager remnant of a dead past. It was something worse than academic routine art; it was a world that had become deadly dull, sometimes still clever and always expensive rubbish. The unparalleled craftsmanship of Ancient Greece had quietly died centuries ago. Not by the barbarians, nor by the Christians (who were not yet present), but as it should, due to its own exhaustion.
Thus, the renunciation of the old art seems less tragic than Goethe and Gibbon believed: hardly more tragic than, for example, the flamboyant Gothic around fifteen hundred. Those seeking tragedy may find it more in Christianity, which had to start in a time of decay, with an inheritance already spilling and half-decayed.
Chapters continue, demonstrating the unconscious continuity of early Christian art, then comes the question, wherein lies the originality then?
It is not difficult to see what disappoints us. The Christians, it seems, find no other style than that of their time. And that is the style of a refined but outdated world, everywhere is autumn, and the barbarian winter is close. Much is deteriorating in that world, and Christianity does not halt that decline; much continues unchanged in that world, and spoils the brilliance of the new for our sense.
We can now roughly formulate in what the originality of the material Christian monuments does not lie. It does not lie in creating new forms of representation, nor in introducing new genres, nor in renouncing some old ones, nor in reversing decline, nor in an abrupt turn towards a style foreign to its time.
So, what does it consist of? Because it remains a fact that most of these monuments fascinate us like no other.
Epilogue and summary of the remaining argument:
EPILOGUE
CHRISTIAN ORIGINALITY
NOT TENDING TOWARDS AN ANACHRONISTIC STYLE, NOR IN HIERATICISM, BUT IN THE FAITH'S VISION. 2. THE QUESTION OF THE ORIGIN OF EARLY CHRISTIAN ART. 3. TWO CONCLUSIONS: ICONOLOGY IS THE KEY TO CHRISTIAN ART HISTORY, THE CONTEMPORARY STYLE NOTHING MORE THAN A TEMPORAL FEATURE.
The outcome of these reflections can be summarized as follows. The originality of early Christian monuments shines slightly less on the surface than we might have expected. It does not consist of creating archaic or even new forms of representation, nor of introducing new genres, nor of a sudden shift to an anachronistic style. It is not bound to Hellenism or hieraticism, although it holds an inner connection with both. It does not flee from Hellas to Iran, from image to word, or from image to arabesque, from the city to the hinterland, or from the body to the soul. It is at home everywhere, remaining true to itself. It is something that unites the most distant churches and can be expressed in opposing viewpoints.
It is something inherent to Christianity itself. And it is not a rejection of the world, nor the creation of a new culture: it begins by infusing the old with a new spirit. It is where the consciousness of God's plan, the knowledge of Christ, the respect for humanity in its worth as children of God become visible. To understand where this begins, one must turn to the primary source and read the Scripture and the ancient liturgies. Everything else is a consequence, arising later and indirectly or in interaction; it is secondary or at least transient.
There was a time when the question of the origin of Christian art remained a question of place and civilization phase. Today, we see again that it must first and foremost be a question of Christianity itself.
In a groundbreaking book from 1901, the authentic Christian art was removed from the presumed Roman cradle and placed in hypothetical cribs in Antioch, Alexandria, and even farther East; the author pointed out that the list of peoples on Pentecost began with the Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, and that those of Rome and Cyrene were at the end, a sequence of evangelization that likely wasn't followed solely in the legends of apostolic martyrs; undoubtedly, the focal point of the Early Church was in the East; and with splendid examples, the non-Italian origin of a series of early motifs was proven. In a book by the same author, published in 1920, the same Christian art, at least the true one, was described as anti-Mediterranean, anti-hierarchical, and northern. Perhaps it might have been all those things in some sense, but in the focal points of the Early Christian world, it was almost the opposite: however, everywhere it was biblical, liturgical, and devotional. This hybrid world of transitional monuments is only connected by the one Christian life. What does the changing taste, the variations of the provinces, the Sassanid decorative style, the court's fashion, even the decline of craftsmanship mean in comparison?
Ultimately, the originality of Early Christian art precedes the fine crafts, architecture, and poetry; it was born on its own territory: from the secret womb of divine Revelation. It is a light from above that cultural streams can reflect, but it itself is not of this world. As we saw earlier, even through the Late Antique chaos, the Sun of Righteousness broke through and gave a different appearance to the stream of stylistic changes. The reason for our initial disappointment is evident: we tend to see the small aspects and forget the spirit; we often see the same murky water and forget that the color of a river can come from the sky above. Encountering Christ in flesh and form, we might fixate on His contemporary garments; alternatively, we might first recognize the new Adam in Him. Is the body not more than clothing? The best of all is to first worship the theandric man in Him and then indulge in His noble ancient attire. After all, we can honor all the beauties in Him, but we can only believe in one, in Himself.
From the above, two conclusions follow. The first concerns the science that deals with Early Christian artworks. Much criticism has been directed at how these artworks were approached, understood, and made understandable to non-experts. Yet, the ultimate assessment depended solely on the initial perspective. If this perspective was incorrect, meaning different from the mindset from which these artworks derived their essential features at that ancient time, then even the most astute analyses would touch only on the incidental and often contingent aspects. Those who seek to confine themselves to comparative morphology and, here as elsewhere, strive to write a priori superior art history, run the risk of overlooking the intention of the creative will in almost all of these artworks. Two great masters have warned against this in difficult words. "Studying this art," wrote Emile Mâle in 1898, "as has sometimes been done, without delving into the subjects and solely focusing on the progression of techniques, is a mistake; it confuses one period with another." And elsewhere, "I admit without hesitation that the study of forms would be almost as interesting as that of the guiding ideas. Ultimately, the slightest line is essentially spiritual... Whatever problem art history tries to solve, it must always encounter the spirit." And François Cumont warned in his last book: beautiful morphological analyses should never make us forget that we are dealing with symbolic artwork. Creations based on ulterior motives should not be evaluated based on something else that happens to be present. Our intense and immediate interest in expressive details, striking color effects, and, in general, everything that goes against academic conventions, is related to our modern-trained eyes, not to the essence and meaning of those ancient artworks. We should not focus primarily on what can be seen in them as unconscious, derived, and thus inauthentic elements; noticing these might amuse us, but it won't bring us closer to their true beauty.
A second inference concerns the artistry of our own time. There is a sporadic longing for a new Christian style in the arts as well as in life. Some want to forge it, immediately and in sharp contrast to the contemporary lifestyle. Some would want to bind it to a specific form of civilization. Yet, the Ancients can teach us where to look and where not. Their monuments tell us: link the Christian idea of the church, of sacred representation, freely to any motif of your time, regardless of its origin, and you will see that it filters, works, and makes dead matter come alive. Nothing makes it more original than this lack of originality, using everything openly and interchangeably. These old masters anticipate the naivety of the medieval era, when everything seemed to be copied and their most splendid discoveries were made.
They had preferences, but no prejudices. If they saw something they liked, it was: "If only you were ours." They applied old counterpositions alongside new frontality; they moved without the theory of the stamp concrete of apse domes to the brick walls of the clerestory and vice versa; they liked decoration; they certainly did not seek the beautiful in deliberate primitivism, but rather in a classicism in the broadest sense, almost synonymous with a sense of harmony.
Their way of doing things intrigues us more than that of craftsmen from later periods: because things are clearest when they begin, and they began near the Source. What a wonder that we sense their freshness! It's true, they built a new temple and didn't have to think back to a thousand cathedrals and two thousand abbeys like we do. But did they live in a less worn-out, less built-up, and less exhausted world than we do? No, those people took away that great worry of our all-too-rich tradition. They too had to deal with a neutral, indispensable, and sometimes hostile civilization and they looked beyond it with superiority, loving it with a kind of higher concern. They used it with cautious selection, but otherwise openly, generously, and already inwardly freed from it. They lived in a world like ours, just as late and overripe, full of monstrous proportions, and with the same bitter religiosity; and they had a similar taste to ours - a sense of refined sobriety and a slight yearning for the precious and exotic. However, from within their old, collapsing world, they left us monuments that still passionately testify to the glory that since Easter morning can sometimes momentarily renew this creation as well.