In his Commentari, written in Florence c. 1450, the sculptor and goldsmith Lorenzo Ghiberti divided the history of art into three main epochs: the classical, medieval, and modern. As part of this radical partitioning between one historical period and another, Ghiberti put forward critical judgments about the value of the art that was produced in each. So, the perfection of the classical period was celebrated on the one hand, while the artistic integrity of Ghiberti’s own ‘‘modern’’ period was endorsed and lauded on the other. The gulf intervening between the two was characterized by the artist as a regrettable period of decline. The ancient Greco-Roman models of artistic perfection were lost, preserved only in written descriptions by Pliny and Vitruvius (the sole surviving Roman authors on ancient art and architecture). Their revival in the modern period came at the hands of great artists like Raphael, who found natural prototypes for Christian heroes and stories in pagan themes and iconography. In the story of the dying hero Meleager, for instance, whose fated death was mourned by his companions but especially by his sorrowing mother, a model was found for the scene of the Deposition of Christ.
The notion of a long period of artistic decline between the classical and Renaissance periods was present in Florence a century earlier, as seen in Giovanni Boccaccio’s mid-fourteenth-century collection of novellas, The Decameron. Drawing on an already established legend, Boccaccio portrayed Giotto as having brought back to light (ritornata in luce) that art of antiquity that for centuries had been buried (Day VI, Story 5, Falaschi 1998: 114-15). Yet, in explicitly portraying the years intervening between the classical and modern as an extended period of utter stagnation, it was Ghiberti who effectively gave the first categorical description of what was afterward called the ‘‘Middle Ages’’ (Buddensieg 1965: 44). And he posed the critical question: why had Roman art come to such a reprehensible end, only to be spectacularly revived in fifteenth-century Italy?
Ghiberti himself answered by locating a specific date and naming the culprits. The year was ad 312, the date of Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. Although the Church would come to laud this as a critical moment in Christian history, Ghiberti and others saw the events of the fourth century as aesthetic apostasy:
At the time of Emperor Constantine and Pope Sylvester, the Christian faith gained ascendancy. Idolatry being violently persecuted, all the statues and pictures, adorned with so much nobility as well as ancient and perfect dignity, were dismembered and mutilated; ... Since art was finished, the sanctuaries remained bare for about six hundred years. Then the Greeks made a very feeble beginning in the art of painting and practiced it with great clumsiness: they were as rude and clumsy in this age as the ancient [Greeks] had been competent in theirs. (Quoted in Panofsky 1960: 25)
For the history of Christian art, Ghiberti makes a new and pivotal point. Its novelty lies not in the ascription of guilt to early Christianity and the papacy for the collapse of antiquity - since the downfall of the art and literature of antiquity had already, by the middle of the twelfth century, been blamed on the sixth-century pope, Gregory the Great - but rather in Ghiberti’s accusatory tone (Buddensieg 1965: 45-7). His voice of condemnation was to be adopted, along with the theory of Constantine’s culpability, by other writers, artists, and commentators, including Leone Battista Alberti and the artist and historiographer of Renaissance Florence, Georgio Vasari.
Perhaps the most powerful accusation leveled against Christianity was that of the Nuremberg artist Albrecht Durer, who, according to Gombrich, ‘‘saw himself both as a pupil of the Italian Renaissance and as its missionary’’ (Gombrich 1976: 112). In notes he made for the introduction to his Treatise on Painting, written in 1512, Durer described the early Christians as ‘‘brutal oppressors of art’’ and as taking the visual arts for ‘‘black magic.’’ In what can only be described as a personal and moving lament, Durer wrote that had he been present in the time of Constantine, he would have addressed the early Christians thus:
Oh my beloved holy Lords and Fathers! Do not, for the sake of the evil they can wreak, lamentably kill the noble inventions of art which have been gained by so much labour and sweat... Because the same proportions the heathens assigned to their idol Apollo, we shall use for Christ the Lord, the fairest of them all. (Quoted in Gombrich 1976: 114)
DUrer would have known the Apollo Belvedere, a marble sculpture possibly made in the reign of Hadrian (ad 117-38) and rediscovered just outside Rome in the late fifteenth century (now in the Belvedere Courtyard of the Musei Vaticani). The sculpture was revered throughout the Renaissance as epitomizing the ideal of classical antiquity. Durer himself had used it as a model, borrowing the pose and reversing it for his representation of Adam in a 1504 engraving of Adam and Eve.
What Durer may not have known was that the early Christians had themselves been influenced by classical representations of Apollo, and used them as models for Christ. This was demonstrated in April 1595, when an extraordinary white marble sarcophagus was discovered in the confessional of the old church of St. Peter in Rome during work undertaken by the then pope, Clement VII, for the erection of a new high altar (fig. 21.1). The large two-register column-sarcophagus survives as a truly magnificent piece of early Christian carving, remarkable not simply because of its superior quality (being highly polished and finely carved in a technically assured classical style) but also for its indication that the classical style was adopted in the fourth century for the expression of Christian subjects and emerging Christian iconographic types.
Following its excavation, the sarcophagus was displayed adjacent to the site in which it was discovered - that is, in the grottos of St. Peter, where it remained until 1936. It was included by Antonio Bosio in the group of forty-three sarcophagi that were exquisitely illustrated in his pioneering study of early Christian catacombs, Roma sotteranea (Bosio 1632, ii: 44-6). Given the active interest in the recovery of classical and late antique material culture within an elite stratum of Roman ecclesiastical society in seventeenth-century baroque Rome, the impact of the sarcophagus’ discovery must have been profound.
The sarcophagus belonged to Junius Bassus, prefect of Rome in ad 359. At the center of its top register, the sculptor depicted Christ enthroned in glory. Portrayed as
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Figure 21.1 Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, c. ad 359. Marble. Detail. Museo Storico Artis-tico Tesoro, Basilica di San Pietro in Vaticano. akg-images/Erich Lessing.
A radiant youth, with curls of hair gently lapping about his face and at the base of his neck, this Christ-figure embodied those facial characteristics familiar to viewers as belonging to the divine Apollo, but simultaneously reminiscent of other types: idealized portraits of long-haired young men that had such Greek heroes as Achilles as their models, and - particularly popular in the later third century - romanticized images of pagan philosophers, who were recalled in literature as not only wise but also beautiful (Zanker 1996: 299). All of these thematic strands may be seen in the polished marble surface of Christ’s cheek: turned slightly to the viewer, the smooth marble surface is contrasted with the woolly beards of both Peter and Paul, the disciples between whom the young Christ is seated.
The Christ-figure on the sarcophagus is presented to command the viewer’s attention in other ways: with his left hand he clasps a scroll, attribute of his wisdom
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Figure 21.2 Maskell Passion Ivories. c. ad 420-30. Italy. ©The Trustees of the British Museum.
And authority; and with his right he serenely reaches forward to strike the ancient gesture of instruction (the lower limb now lost). Over the next centuries, countless other examples of this beardless, quietly poised but commanding Christ-figure would be found in various media, including fresco, sculpture, and mosaic, testifying to its wide use across the early Christian and medieval periods in a range of visual contexts. Indeed, it is this face (to be discussed further below) that c. ad 420-30 an ivory carver in Rome would choose to accompany the body of Christ shown triumphantly nailed to the cross in what is the earliest surviving depiction of the Crucifixion in a narrative context (fig. 21.2).
World History
