THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 308
Early Christian Art
21.1. Early Christian Art
Not many years ago Greek art seemed to be marked off from Roman, and Roman from Early Christian by wide intervals. The art of Greece was typified by the buildings of the Athenian Acropolis, Roman art by those of the imperial Forum and the Palatine, and Christian art by the catacombs. Unceasing exploration and fruitful discoveries have since brought to light so many works of the transitional periods that art history has become rather the account of a continuous process than of clearly defined epochs and schools.
The art of Rome itself under the new light appears rather as one of the many later Hellenistic schools, than as purely indigenous. Part of the transition from Classical Greek may be traced in the art centres of Asia Minor, and part, again, in the non-Roman city of Pompeii. As to the latter, it is held that the sequences of style which have been distinguished in its wall-paintings were probably fashions imported from Alexandria. The covering of internal walls with thin slabs of rare coloured-marbles and porphyries, and the incrustation of vaults with mosaics of gilt and coloured glass, had the same origin.
This process of change in classical art carries us to some point in the early centuries of Christianity, and many groups of facts shew that it was long continued. Not only did Egypt and the East export their porphyry, ivory, glass, bronze, and textiles, but craftsmen were drawn to the Roman capital from every Hellenistic city.
The works used or made by the Early Christians could at first have been differentiated in no obvious way from the current classical works of the time. When anything emerges which we can entitle Christian Art, the change is, for the most part, manifest in a new spirit dealing with old forms. The art was necessarily shaped externally by the modes and codes of expression of the time. In many cases new ideas were expressed under old forms; thus the winged angel derives from the antique Victory; the nimbus is classical as well as Christian; the story of Orpheus is interpreted as a type of Christ; and Amor and Psyche are adopted as symbols of the Divine Love and the soul.
In so far as there was novelty it is clear that, as Christianity itself was from the East, so the changed forms must themselves have held in them much that was oriental. Early Christian art is Roman art in the widest sense, purified, orientalised, and informed with a new and epical content which held as seed the possibilities of the mighty cycle of Byzantine and Medieval art. It is still in Rome and in the catacombs that the best connected series of works of the first three or four centuries of this early art is found.
The great roads of approach to Rome were lined by countless tombs of every degree of magnificence: rotundas, pyramids, cellae, and sarcophagi. Amongst them stood vestibules to underground tomb-chambers where large numbers were buried in common. Along their walls, tier upon tier, urns of ashes were packed like vases in a museum. The Jews and other oriental peoples followed the custom of burying the unburnt body in subterranean galleries, and appropriate sites for these also were obtained round about Rome. The Christians, following the same usage, at first shared such catacombs, and in other cases formed groups of their own. The catacombs were primarily not places of hiding, however much they may have been so used. Frequently there was a space above ground planted as a garden, and made use of as a cemetery. In some were small burial chapels from which access was obtained to the catacombs beneath. The ruins of two or three such chapels have been discovered and described. They agree in having had a central apse and two lateral apses grouped together at one end.
There were also subterranean chapels, the most famous of which is the Capella Graeca of the Catacomb of Priscilla. It has, roughly, the form of a small nave or body, 8 by 25 ft., ended by an apse with lateral apses on each side of it. It opens from a long vaulted apartment or atrium. The walls are decorated with paintings of the usual subjects — Daniel, and Lazarus, Moses, Susannah, and the Adoration of the Magi. On the vault over the nave are four heads representing the seasons. Above the central apse is represented the Eucharistic repast. This recently-discovered Fractio Panis is not only one of the most interesting, it is also one of the most beautiful of the catacomb paintings, as may be seen in the large photogravure published by Wilpert.
The forms and features of the seven participants are classic and gracious. It is painted in a masterly way in a few simple colours on a vermilion ground. The inscriptions on the walls are in Greek, hence the name of the chapel. In the apse was an altar-tomb. It belongs to the second century.
Another catacomb church is probably of the third century, and a third, the largest, in the catacomb of St Hermes is probably of the fourth. The catacombs themselves are complexes of subterranean passages and galleries excavated for the disposal of the dead, who rested one above another along the sides. The chambers, more or less square, were roughly vaulted above, and the vaults and walls were for the most part decorated with painting, and occasionally with stucco reliefs. This ornamentation was a branch of the ordinary house and tomb decorator's work of the time, and the painted subjects were clearly executed with the swift mastery which came of long practice in repeating a limited stock of ideas. The vaulted ceilings were usually decorated by some geometrical arrangement of panels, radiating from the centre and bounded by a large circle. In these panels were little figures, groups, birds, and foliage. The colours were reds, greens, and ochres, and a little blue, the whole mellow yet bright.
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