It is impossible to imagine European art without the procession of Crucifixions and Madonnas, Baptisms of Christ and Christs in Majesty that have been produced over the centuries; nor to imagine a European city without at least one building that testifies to the overawing power and wealth of the medieval church: a Durham or Cologne cathedral, a Hagia Sophia. Western art and Christianity go hand in hand.
So it comes as a shock to discover that there is another Christian art; one that took almost two centuries to get going (no securely dated Christian art predates 200CE); one which did not create architecture – it had no churches, as we would understand them – and in which the imagery is altogether unfamiliar. A world in which Christianity is delicate, humane, created by relatively marginal communities practising a new faith. A world in which Jonah and the Whale and the Good Shepherd are central images; a world, indeed, from which barely a single definite example of a Madonna or a Crucifixion has survived.
And to discover that – just as many credit St Paul with taking the words of Jesus and refashioning them to create the religion we know today – so the Emperor Constantine turned the emerging art of the Christians into something extraordinary, radical, ambitious and new: indeed, that Constantine and his craftsmen created, apparently in a single leap and over a couple of decades in the 310s and 20s, a template for the art of the new faith that is still with us. We are all living with the consequences of Pauline Christianity: much the same could be said of Constantinian art.
Getting (Happily) Lost in the Words and Pictures
This is the story told by the essays in Picturing the Bible, the sumptuously-produced catalogue to an exhibition held at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas between November 18, 2007 and March 30, 2008. The book functions excellently as a standalone introduction to this fascinating art, the only health warning being that it is a detailed and thorough one, and thus not for the novice.
Even the non-academically minded, however, may be swayed by the pictures: take, for example, the extraordinary late third-century double statuette from Asia Minor of Jonah being swallowed by (or rather, diving rather elegantly into) the sea monster and then disgorged by the same dog-headed beast (p.191); or the beautiful cacophony of animals surrounding Adam in an early fifth-century pair of bone or ivory panels, probably from Rome (p.264). Or – and here we see the impact of Constantine, creating monumental images where previously there had only been small-scale ones, creating something new rather than a subset of Roman art in general – the mosaics from Santa Pudenziana, Rome (c.400; p.113) or Sant’Apollinare in Classe, Rome (549; p.129), with their beguiling images of a heaven that is at once civic and bucolic.
Other images are sketchy or strange, a reminder that it took a while for there to be many Christians with the resources to create any kinds of artwork at all. The wall paintings in the Roman catacombs where many early members of the faith were buried are fascinating and important, but often apparently created by jobbing craftsmen in a hurry to move on to their next mural, struggling to respond to the strange requests of their sponsors and their curious cult from the eastern edge of the Empire. Witness, for example the joke-Jonah from the mid-fourth century on p.177, or the spooky little magical amulet depicting a Crucifixion, the earliest depiction of the event known, from the eastern Mediterranean and the late second century CE or later (p.228).
Good Variety and Expert Analysis
The essays, each of which is by a leading specialist on their subject, are well-edited, with little repetition and a logical progression from subject to subject. Perhaps that by Robin M. Jensen (‘Early Christian images and exegesis’ pp.65-85) could have done with some cutting: the first six pages are basically a preamble, and some of the explanations of biblical analogies throughout the book (for example in the essay by Herbert L. Kessler, ‘The word made flesh in early decorated bibles’, pp.141-167) could perhaps have been put a little more simply.
All this, however, is partly an illustration of the specialised nature of the writing, which while always clear would be hard to follow without a reasonably good prior knowledge of the Bible or the key concepts in Christianity, Judaism and their arts.
The only lack I felt was something that discussed architecture in its own right rather than as an adjunct to the decorative arts: was there any interaction between the early synagogues mentioned in passing by Jeffrey Spier on p.29 and Constantine’s churches? Just how radical was the architectural form of the latter, in which the Roman basilica and mausoleum were reinvented as architecturally-ambitious places of worship almost overnight? Indeed, do we know anything about the reaction of ordinary Romans to the novel idea, made law in 395 that there should be an official religion, let alone this official religion?
Here, Sir, is Your New religion!
Particularly striking was the extent to which the pre-Constantine Christians focused their art on the theme of personal resurrection – explaining the interest in Jonah, a Biblical symbol of rebirth, for example – and on demonstrating the differences between their faith and that of the Jews of whom they were basically an offshoot; one wonders, in the context of the times, how many knotted brows that question caused the ordinary pagan Roman-in-the-street.
This is an artistic question, too: we discover the extraordinary third-century painted synagogue from Dura Europos, Syria, now in the national museum in Damascus, and the equally remarkable baptistery from a Christian home (the nearest thing such communities would have had to a church), from the same location, and now in the art gallery at Yale University. The question of the extent to which religious texts should be illustrated where an issue for both faiths, and the art and architecture of Judaism itself was struggling to come to terms with the consequences of its great diaspora following the fall of Jerusalem in 70CE.
Later on, it is the extent of the Constantinian revolution that excites. It is not only the church as a building that was invented now; it was the idea that such buildings should be sumptuously decorated, built on a grand scale, evocations of a Heavenly Jerusalem. The extent to which Roman imperial iconography suffused and created the Christian art of the times is extraordinary: it is, in effect, Roman imperial paganism that is everywhere in Christianity – all those nimbed throned figures are really emperors, not saints – rather than any more earthy European traditions. And this step from sidelined-and-controversial to official-faith-of-the-Emperors helped fuel not only the birth of the great mosaic-enriched basilicas from which all church architecture (but particularly that in the East) is descended; it also helped create a new kind of way of presenting text: the codex – or ‘book’, as we now call it.
This was because Christianity had inherited from Judaism a profound concern with texts as the sources of authority, and these texts needed codifying, cross-referencing, indexing, drawing together. But also because the resulting objects could be every bit as sumptuous as a church, a sarcophagus or a mosaic: for example the sixth-century Codex Brixianus, now in Brescia (p.147), written in gold and silver on purple vellum.
This is the art with which we are familiar, an art in which religious and secular power is fused, and in which there is a creative tension between image and text. An art that is the key to much of the succeeding 1,700 years of western culture. Perhaps the greatest privilege this book offers, albeit in sometimes daunting detail, is the opportunity it affords to peak behind this art to something very different, something more provisional, more gentle, more intimate – and to modern eyes, also more strange.
