In the study of the visual arts, as in all other areas of historical and cultural research, the centuries between classical antiquity and the high Middle Ages are no longer dismissed as years of decline and darkness, but are open to increasing diversity of appreciation and subtlety of analysis. Many of the principal theories regarding the development of western European art were, however, largely predicated on the assumed existence of a ‘‘dark age’’ prior to the revival of classical culture in the Renaissance. It is not surprising, therefore, that the journey from the latter viewpoint to the former has been a complex one for historians of art. Particularly challenging has been the dismantling of the view that the emergence and development of Christianity in the Mediterranean world presented one of the main threats to the survival of classical art.
The paradigm of decline and fall continues to unravel in late Roman scholarship (Ward-Perkins 2005). The disparaging undertones traditionally attached to the terms ‘‘medieval’’ and ‘‘Byzantine’’ have increasingly lost their currency in art-historical research (Elsner 1998) and there has been a renewed engagement with the art of the early Christians. This chapter will highlight the importance of continuing and refining that engagement by further exposing the very close relationship between late Roman art and early Christian iconography. Drawing on the example of the representation of the Crucifixion and using the Maskell ivories, I hope to demonstrate that the role of Christianity as the purveyor and transformer of the classical artistic heritage was a key factor in its ability to develop a pictorial language of its own. Hence the essential question of early Christian art may well be: how did artists utilize the comprehensive pictorial language of Roman art to illustrate the events described in the Holy Scriptures (Kessler 1976)? In answering that question, we increase our appreciation of Late Antiquity as a period of artistic innovation and experimentation, and so of creativity.
A Companion to Late Antiquity. Edited by Philip Rousseau © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-11980-1
World History
