Saxl noted in his 1944 lecture that the earliest Christian works developed in pagan surroundings but that, by the fourth century, what he termed ‘‘truly religious’’ Christian groups of sculpture were created. He was referring to two groups of early Christian sarcophagi: those illustrating episodes from the Passion narratives; and those illustrating the institution of the Church, with the apostles pictured assembled around Christ, shown holding an open codex or scroll, instructing them in the new law. Both themes are presented in the apse at Santa Pudenziana: Christ is shown in the process of discourse, giving the law to the apostles, schooling them as they gather around him in what is probably intended to be a celestial setting, the heavenly Jerusalem, depicted by what are arguably Constantinian buildings in Jerusalem at the time. A glorious jeweled cross rises behind him, and the symbol of the sacrificial lamb was originally shown at his feet (Mathews 1993: fig. 72). This compositional type - Christ at the apex of his assembled apostles - could be experimented with easily, the central figure changed slightly without altering the general meaning of the scene.
The bulk of the evidence for such experimentation survives from sarcophagi, as Saxl was aware, and includes the series of so-called ‘‘star and wreath’’ sarcophagi - on the friezes of which the apostles approach the cross, bearing wreaths or raising their hands in veneration. A contemporary variant saw the cross replaced with the figure of Christ seated (as he is on the Junius Bassus sarcophagus and in the apse mosaic of Santa Pudenziana) or standing to deliver the new law, the traditio legis. An important example is now in the Musc-e Reattu, Arles, and is dated c. ad 380. It shows the apostles processing toward the cross, scrolls in hand, stars above their heads; and upon the cross the apostles Peter and Paul place a large victory wreath (Mathews 1993: fig. 126). The Pudenziana mosaic might in fact present a development of this theme for a public, monumental context, as opposed to a private, funerary one. Yet, experimentation with the compositional format and with the theme of celestial acclaim offered by the apostles either to the aniconic representation of Christ as victor (in the form of the triumphal cross) or to Christ himself, evidently took place in other contexts within the minor arts at an earlier date, and in unexpected ways. This is attested in the case of a rare carnelian gemstone, now in the British Museum, which can be dated to the middle of the fourth century (fig. 21.7), and about which more will be said below. Yet here we must note that with a small change to the central iconographic unit, the acclaim of Christ the philosopher or eternal ruler becomes the acclaim of the crucified but triumphant Christ - a defiant figure standing against his cross and depicted twice the size of his apostles.
In the fourth century, therefore, when new modes of visual narration were supposedly arising and thus facilitating the depiction of narrative stories in Christian art, it was often the old modes and pagan iconographic types that were reused and adapted to say something new. Particular compositional formats, such as the emperor flanked by his retinue and in the act of distributing largesse to his people, ultimately provided Christians with a key template for their own experimentation with the visual representation of Christ himself, with more complex theological themes, and even text-based subjects. Critically, this includes those subjects that previously, scholars have argued, were omitted from early Christian art, precisely because artists had no iconographic precedents for them. This is nowhere more evident than in the still controversial case ofthe Crucifixion, an image famously central to Christian devotion, yet strikingly rare in early Christian art. Indeed, the London Crucifixion gem furnishes a remarkably fine instance that illustrates definitively both continuity and change, both the survival of pagan iconography and the paradoxically concurrent emergence of Christian innovation.
World History
