Download PDF | Beth Williamson - Christian Art._ A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press 2004.
145 Pages
Introduction
Unlike other terms that might be used to categorize art, ‘Christian art’ is unusual in that it does not describe art of a particular style, period, or region, but art for a particular range of purposes, which encompasses a wide range of forms and styles. Because of this the range of material that could be covered in a book on the subject is potentially vast. I have chosen to focus only on pictorial art – paintings, prints, manuscripts and printed books – not on architecture, nor on sculpture, nor ‘applied arts’ such as metalwork or textiles.
The choice as to how to limit such a large range of material will inevitably be somewhat arbitrary and personal, and the particular examples discussed here are not even selected qualitatively: this book does not attempt to delineate a range of the ‘greatest masterpieces’ of Christian art. Instead, some central themes have been chosen, which allow certain important ideas and concepts relating to Christian art to be considered. The examples selected allow those themes, ideas, and concepts to be explored in a variety of ways: the same ideas could almost certainly be discussed using an entirely different set of examples. A particularly fascinating aspect of the study of Christian art is that it touches upon such a wide range of other subjects: history, politics, theology, philosophy, to name but a few. Christian art began within the restricted confines of minority communities, initially persecuted for their beliefs. Over its two millennia of existence it 1 developed into having an almost universal presence in the public buildings and private spaces across what was known as ‘Christendom’, the territories in which Christianity held sway. Christian art would be seen in cathedrals, abbeys, and great churches, royal palaces, government buildings and public spaces, as well as in smaller parish churches, private homes, and even in apparently secular spaces such as shops and markets.
Christian imagery could be seen in great cycles of wall-paintings and mosaics on church walls, which told the universal stories of Christian history. It could be seen on smaller paintings on wood panels, or cloth, designed to be set up in churches, or carried in processions. Books, for church services, and for private reading and prayer, carried illustrations of the Christian texts included, and Christian images appeared on many of the other accoutrements of Christian worship and devotion, such as the vestments of churchmen, the precious metalwork vessels used in church services, and the reliquaries and shrines in which the remains of holy men and women were venerated. Kings and rulers used Christian imagery to bolster their own ideologies and political rhetoric, and groups of ordinary citizens rallied around favoured examples of Christian art, objects that were regarded as miraculous or in other ways particularly special to a local community or social group. During the late Middle Ages, Christian art was part of an expression of an apparently universal world-view.
Then, with changes and developments to the theology and practice of Christianity itself, and the formal emergence of different denominations or groupings under the wider umbrella of Christianity, more specific types and forms of Christian art became associated with the variant views of Christianity promoted by different groups, with Christian art even being rejected entirely in some circles. It will be seen, throughout this book, that Christian art, besides offering ‘illustrations’ of biblical stories and theological messages, is often also used to express particular political views, philosophical ideas, and cultural identities, and that in some contexts the very existence, or not, of Christian art – let alone the specific aspects of particular objects and images – can become an explicitly political or ideological statement.
The status of images in early Christianity Looking back at the history of Christian art through the prism of its very ubiquity in the Middle Ages, and its diversity in the early modern and modern world, it is sometimes hard to remember that the very development of Christian art itself was not inevitable or unproblematic. Christianity developed out of the religious culture of Judaism, and availed itself of Judaic theology and prophecy in what became the Old Testament, the first part of the Christian Bible. The Jewish holy scriptures recounted the creation of the world, the stories of Adam and Eve, and Moses, who received the Ten Commandments from God, and who led the Jews out of slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land. These stories, together with the later Greek writings that told of the life of Jesus Christ and of his followers, the Apostles, came to form the source material for much Christian art. However, Judaism had prohibited the pictorial representation of God, and was deeply suspicious of representational religious art because of a fear of idolatry.
Old Testament writings defined idols as objects made by man, which contain no divine essence and which are not, therefore, appropriate to represent the divine. But Christianity as it developed in Europe, from Rome, also took much from Graeco-Roman social and artistic culture, where images of divinities, and their deeds, were not proscribed in the same way. This affected one crucial way in which Christianity differed from Judaism, namely the centrality of artistic representations of the Christian God. In adapting Graeco-Roman pagan imagery to form images of Christ, and in developing and multiplying images of Christ, the emergent Christian church went against Judaism’s prohibition regarding images and idols, and this helped to mark out the developing church as distinct from the religious and theological culture of Judaism. The very existence of Christian art is therefore one of the things that makes up the specific and fundamental character of Christianity
Catacomb paintings The earliest surviving Christian art is found in Rome, in the catacombs – the elaborate underground tomb chambers in which the Christian communities buried their dead. There is some uncertainty as to the date of the earliest catacomb paintings, but according to current opinion, it would seem that the earliest Christian catacombs, and their wall-paintings – carried out in fresco and tempera – probably date from the 3rd century. This visual material is relatively small-scale and private, occurring as it does in a funereal context, and the subjects chosen for representation tend to be those appropriate to private tombs, with an emphasis on hope and comfort. Perhaps surprisingly, images of Christ’s death at the Crucifixion, which later became such a fundamental subject of Christian art, are rare in the catacombs.
Perhaps at this point in the development of the emerging Christian church, direct portrayals of Christ’s own violent death seemed less immediately or obviously redolent of hope than other images that more generally symbolized protection and deliverance. The image of the shepherd is a particularly popular one in early Christian art, occurring over 100 times in the catacombs as a whole. The shepherd symbolizes care and protection, as prefigured in the 23rd Psalm (‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me to lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul.’) The shepherd had already appeared in Greek art, with the god Hermes sometimes being portrayed carrying a sheep or a ram. Pagan imagery of Hermes in this aspect was adapted by Christians to form the image of Christ the Good Shepherd (Fig. 1).
Besides Old and New Testament images referring to deliverance, and representations of the Good Shepherd, the catacombs also contain depictions of New Testament narratives, such as the Annunciation and the Breaking of Bread at the Last Supper, both of which images will be considered later in this book. Episodes of deliverance from death and triumph over death are also represented many times throughout the catacombs, such as Daniel in the Lion’s Den, or the Three Men in the Furnace, from the Book of Daniel. In the miracle of the Raising of Lazarus, from the Gospel of John, a man who had already been dead for several days was brought back to life by Christ. This miracle was an important and concrete demonstration of the triumph over death, and was, therefore, an obvious one for the emergent Christian church to use in its visual rhetoric.
The character of Christian art changed, or expanded, after the official recognition of Christianity by the Roman Emperor Constantine, in 313 ce, and the later establishment of Christianity as the sole state religion within the Empire. The state that developed under these early Christian emperors was a continuation of the Roman Empire, but centred on the city of Constantinople (now the Turkish city of Istanbul), founded by Constantine in 324. The original name of Constantinople was Byzantium, which gives the state and its rulers the name by which scholars refer to it today: Byzantium, or the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantine emperors in fact regarded their state as ‘the Roman Empire’, and in its early years the area they ruled embraced most of the territory of the former Roman Empire right around the Mediterranean. Changing political events and the personal circumstances of successive emperors meant that the administrative centre of the Empire shifted several times during the early phases of the development of Byzantium, with the result that the major monuments of early Christian art from this period are found in several centres besides Constantinople, including the Italian cities of Milan and Ravenna.
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