Within this increasing tendency to trace an evolutionary iconographical development from the earliest Christian images to later monumental art, there was a stress on how imperial imagery superseded iconography first seen in the catacombs, portraying Christ as philosopher and teacher. As I have already said, the gesture of instruction, made by the two figures on the far left of the ‘‘amateur philosopher’’ sarcophagus fragment (fig. 21.4) and by the Ostian man, was taken by the Christians and given to their teacher (for we assume this was the gesture made by Christ on the front of the Junius Bassus sarcophagus). In time, of course, it became a gesture of blessing: even in the apse of the church of Santa Pudenziana in Rome (fig. 21.6), where the scroll has become a codex, open to display specific text (the dedication of the church), the gesture implies something more than speech.
The identification of an evolving portrait type for Christ, from philosopher to emperor, was designed in part to explain the transition of Christian art from the catacombs to the basilicas where, in mosaics of the fourth century, Christ is clearly distinguished from his retinue by the use of various pictorial conventions, such as scale, strict frontality of presentation, expression (Christ looking directly at the viewer), posture, and dress (enthroned in regal, imperial fashion), all associated with imperial representations. That imagery was also taken to suggest that early Christian art and its iconography had an inextricable thematic relationship with Roman imperial iconographic schemes of victory and triumph (Grabar 1936; L’Orange 1965). But not all scholars have since agreed. The extent to which imperial prototypes were sought and used by early Christians became a point of particular contention with the publication of Thomas Mathews’ forceful rejection of what he dubbed the Kaisermystik theory (Mathews 1993). Using the Santa Pudenziana apse mosaic as an example (fig. 21.6), Mathews argued that the late antique iconography of the philosopher, and with it the concept of the divine ‘‘holy man,’’ received more emphasis in early Christian art than did the imperial imagery appealed to by Grabar and others.
While Mathews asserted a vital point about the multivalent nature of artistic influence on the representation of Christ, a point communicated in the ‘‘Age of Spirituality’’ exhibition and the symposium papers (Weitzmann 1979 and 1980), there should be no doubt about the influence of imperial iconography on early Christian art. This fact has been argued most cogently in more recent times by, among others, Paul Zanker. Through a meticulous study of sculpture in the ancient world, he has demonstrated that what we find on early Christian sarcophagi is in fact a highly nuanced blending of the received traditions of both imperial imagery and the iconography of the intellectual. Zanker argues that this blending had in fact begun on pagan Roman sarcophagi, but was continued by Christians for the depiction of Christ precisely because they needed a visual language that would express not simply the wisdom but also the divinity of the Son of God (Zanker 1996: 304-5). The Santa Pudenziana apse mosaic, dated to c. ad 390 and one of the earliest apses to be designed for a Roman church, in fact illustrates this very point.
If we look closely at the mosaic, we do find Christ enthroned, arrayed in golden garments, in a setting redolent of imperial splendor. Yet the attributes of throne and material riches are not merely indicative of imperial status, or peculiar to the pretensions of the later Roman emperors to universal dominion, as expressed in imperial art. Here is unmistakable evidence that, rather than a straightforward and intentional progression from philosopher to emperor (or a vacillation between the two), the philosopher type coexisted in Christian art of the fourth and fifth centuries alongside the new imperial image of Christ. The nimbus around the head of Christ might evoke the pagan gods, who were sometimes shown thus in Roman and late antique art, but so were philosophers (witness the Ostian man). What is new in the later period is the use of gesture: the gestures given to and the attitudes struck by Christ and each of the apostles in that mosaic are participatory in a way that they had not been before, and draw the viewer into the image in a way that the Constantinian friezes, for example, or those assemblies of the apostles around Christ on third-century sarcophagi or catacomb frescoes, do not. That had not been their intention. But now, the distance between the protagonists of the Santa Pudenziana mosaic and the onlooker are energetically erased, and the congregation becomes part of the philosophical assembly, part of this celestial setting, and so beholders of the heavenly, enthroned Christ.
World History
