#1 catacomb art - erwin r. good enough

Catacomb ArtAuthor(s): Erwin R. GoodenoughSource: Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 81, No. 2 (Jun., 1962), pp. 113-142Published by: The Society of Biblical LiteratureStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3264749Accessed: 16/09/2008 15:17

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CATACOMB ART

ERWIN R. GOODENOUGH

YALE UNIVERSITY

ONE of the most important modern discoveries for the history of early Christianity has been rather quickly made available, the

extraordinary new catacomb in the Via Latina of Rome, now most satisfactorily published by Father Antonio Ferrua.' The catacomb was discovered quite by chance early in 1955, when builders who wished to enlarge a superstructure sank deeper piles, and suddenly found themselves in its painted rooms. The Pontifical Institute made some preliminary announcements, and published a few of the most surprising new paintings. The world has still to learn, however, that here is a monument from early Christianity startlingly filled with new material. Fr. Ferrua has had the whole catacomb reinforced and well lighted, and it is to be hoped it will soon be open at least to all scholarly visitors.

This essay will describe the new catacomb and Fr. Ferrua's report of it, and then speak of catacomb art in general, and its place in Christian history. It is difficult to discuss paintings without reproducing them, and to describe so many within a relatively brief compass requires using a considerable number of technical terms not familiar to the general reader.2 But only when we have the details of the paintings in mind can we ask what they have to tell us about the lives, emotions, and objectives of the people who made them. We can study the theological writings of the church fathers, but probably few Christians of their time read such books, for few in any generation can think abstractly. Piety for the masses has always centered in sacred stories, laws, rituals, and symbols. The catacomb art has come from popular Christianity, and we can understand such Christianity only as we learn to understand its

'Antonia Ferrua, S. I., Le Pitture della Nuova Catacomba di Via Latina, Citta del Vaticano, 1960 (Monumenti di antichita cristiana, Ser. 2, Vol. 8). References to plates are to this publication. Before this paper went to press I presented a brief digest of it with a few slides at the annual meeting of the SBLE. The members made most helpful suggestions which I have incorporated here. Since I did not record the names, I can only thank the Society in general.

2 For the general reader a few terms should be defined. A loculus is a narrow hori- zontal niche cut into the wall the length of the body to be interred. The opening would be sealed after the body had been inserted. A cubiculum is a small room opening out of one of the long passages. Into its three walls (sometimes only into the wall opposite the door) an arcosolium would be cut. An arcosolium consists of a sort of shelf or table cut back into the wall. One or two bodies were usually buried under the surface of this table. Above the table a semicircular arch was cut into the wall. The rounded wall at the back above the table and beneath the arch is called a lunette.

? 1962, by the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis

JOURNAL OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE

art, since we have nothing else from it. But the art presents difficult problems. It began predominantly with OT figures and types. Why? Religious art, as Rowland has just defined it, is art for the sake of religion, art concerned to express and stimulate religious emotions. But at the very time when theologians were working most actively to formulate the distinctive beliefs of Christianity, the Christian people were content to represent their faith in art indirectly and circuitously by borrowed types. For centuries the early Christians rarely, if at all, depicted the Annunciation, the Virgin and Child, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrec- tion, the great themes of later Christian art. Why? We can hope to answer these essential questions only after we have painstakingly ex- amined what the paintings contain, and since the theologians did not design them, and we have no writings from those who did, we must learn to read the art itself. But here is a new language, one which the modern verbalist who runs cannot read.

The Catacomb

The first thing that strikes one about the new catacomb is that its rooms are all completely covered with paintings. Nothing could distinguish it more completely from the other catacombs, Jewish or Christian, for in them one must walk for hours and days through the dark intermin- able passages to see altogether not a great deal more painting than the Via Latina offers in its twelve or fourteen rooms. The great catacombs we have known hitherto contained mostly anonymous and unmarked graves, cut as loculi, one above the other, sometimes in tiers of nine burials. Here the bodies were deposited and their identity soon lost. Most of these loculi were opened by later grave pilferers, which is in itself significant, since valuable things must often enough have been interred with the corpses to make such pilfering profitable; but, as in the Catacomb Panfilo, hundreds of them still remain with their original seals intact. In these catacombs, I repeat, one must walk past many miles of such burials to discover their widely scattered paintings.

Quite otherwise, in the Via Latina one finds oneself in ornate rooms covered with vines and other decorative motifs, usually taken to be purely formal, which surround panels of biblical or mythological scenes. The whole rather suggests a picture gallery than the catacombs as we have hitherto known them, with the possible exception of the very small Catacomb Valentino. Ferrua was quite aware of this contrast, and came to the obvious conclusion that the Via Latina belonged to a few rich families who could afford such sepulture, as contrasted with the greater catacombs which, under the church's control, remained available for all comers.

While nothing will take the place of going into the rooms and feeling

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GOODENOUGH: CATACOMB ART

the extraordinary effect at first hand of their chill remoteness under- ground, Ferrua has indeed earned our gratitude in giving us working reproductions, 29 of them in full color, 133 in black and white, which together show us almost every square inch of the paintings where recog- nizable traces survive. With them he has given succinct but adequate descriptions of the details, along with identifications of the scenes. He also describes the catacomb as a structure, along with the story of its discovery and the few inscriptions within it. At the end he discusses briefly but cogently the date and significance of the art. His text closes with indexes of the subjects and objects represented, which, while not complete, all workers will indeed welcome. Many of the paintings are amazingly well preserved, others have flaked off so that photographs tell us little about them, in which case we depend entirely upon Ferrua's short descriptions. A set of line drawings (which are always subjective, but not less so than descriptions) would have helped the student greatly with the badly preserved paintings.

a. Formal Decoration.

The so-called "formal" decorations which surround the painted panels present their own problem, and they may at the end contradict Ferrua's final conclusion about the whole catacomb that its art had no unitary principle, such as a general idea of salvation or of eternal happi- ness. Actually Ferrua himself has come through with a unitary principle when he says that the only motive of the painting was "a very general desire for religious decoration," (un intento molto generico di decorazione religiosa, p. 102). Ferrua would lead us to this conclusion by what the geometricians call the process of elimination. Here it may well be ques- tioned that the "formal" decorations which fill the spaces between and around the stated mythological or biblical scenes can all finally be called "mere" decoration. Sometimes a small space contains only a flowing scroll or a conventional form which has indeed all the appearance of pure space-filling. We can ascribe no symbolic value, for example, to palm- leaf frames which have become merely a series of lines. Yet in the matter of this very motif it is generally assumed that "palms of victory" had, as they still have, a deeply symbolic impact. Nothing but the hypothetical approach which Ferrua distrusts can suggest at what point symbolism dies in such ornament.

Most of the "formal" ornament is obviously alive to the point of being alert. Vases overflowing with flowers, or with plants growing from them, many of which appear throughout the catacomb, might seem only formal until we notice that they are quite interchangeable with similar vases from which spout fountains of water or wine, and that oriented toward them on either side are birds, peacocks, sheep,

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goats, and cattle. Many times birds come to eat or drink from these vases filled with fruit, flowers, or fluid. We know that sheep and goats had great symbolic meaning for early Christians, as witness the "Good Shepherd," and it has long been recognized that birds in a tree or vine, or eating fruit, especially grapes, also had such value. Jews and pagans used these forms, apparently with a symbolism which Christians had only slightly to adapt to make them express the hope of immortality in Christian terms. We seem to have come into active symbolism in a room which contains a considerable number of biblical scenes as well as some pagan figures (pls. 87 and 117). But in the lunette of one arcosolium of this room Victories present their crowns on either side of a little central niche, at the back of which, under a shell, stands a spread peacock to which cupids bring garlands (pl. 117). Above, birds peck at a long flowery garland. The obvious implication is that the peacock in the niche represents the glorified person buried beneath him, to whom the cupids and Victories bring loving tokens of his victory. If the vocabulary is the pagan one which Jews also found useful, it seems here to be telling of Christian hopes.

In the vaulted ceilings of many cubicula the artists used various presentations of what Lehmann taught us to call the heavenly ceiling. They show a series of panels grouped around a central panel, and in this usually appears the chief symbol of salvation. Jews used the pattern as did Christians. At Via Latina the panels contain leaping goats or sheep, each of which usually has a thyrsus at its back to indicate its symbolic value (pls. 44 and 68). It is indeed hypothetical that at this time in Rome a thyrsus-marked animal, thus prominently introduced (it appears elsewhere in panels in the catacomb) had lost meaning. We

may take it as assured that the form no longer referred specifically to Dionysus. It is also a hypothetical suggestion that it had taken on a more general meaning, as had Dionysus himself; but it seems to me a more likely hypothesis in view of all the facts than the hypothesis that it was meaningless. In the vaults of arches over arcosolia designs often

appear which vary in form but are basically identical, in that they divide the space into squares or hexagons with a rosette in each. I have dis- cussed this design in the forthcoming ninth volume of my Symbols, and given reason to suppose that it may well be another "heavenly ceiling" in which the rosettes represent stars. The matter is not especially important here either way, but the suggestion may prove interesting.

In all of this we cannot escape forming hypotheses if we would do more than describe brush strokes and colors. To indicate the relation of parts in such compositions is an inherent part of describing them. Perhaps these early Christians wanted only "decoration," and used formal motifs from mystic symbolism, mythology, and the Bible because these forms were familiar, but with no thought of their "religious"

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implications. Flat denial of meaning to such ancient designs as the great mass of what I have been calling the "formal" ornament actually involves a basic assumption, namely, that if the designs have no symbolic meaning for us, they could have had none for the ancient painters or those who ordered the decorations. It is always the other person's inferences, suggestions, and hypotheses which most need evidential defense. On this matter our hypotheses will become objectively probable not by our taste or predilections but through the history and ancient usage of those motifs as I have tried to trace them in my Symbols, and obviously cannot do here.

In such study the garlands, wreaths, birds, Victories, starry ceilings, and the like, seem by no means to have lost their symbolic value in the ancient world. They rarely are organized as in the arcosolium I have just described. They were often space-fillers, as were the Winged Vic- tories in the spandrels of triumphal arches. But the comparison carries us further. For Victories on arches of triumph are more than space- fillers, and, I think, they are more here. Similarly, the devices used again and again to fill the spaces in the catacomb create an atmosphere, express a hope, but atmosphere and hope, while not specific, are the deepest meaning we know. In Symbols I gave reasons for supposing that vines and baskets with animals or birds drinking and eating still expressed hope of life here and hereafter from eating and drinking, and that with Christians they had eucharistic implications.

b. Traditional Catacomb Scenes.

The pictorial panels, in which we are most interested, look out at us from a rich setting of such "formal" ornament. But before describing these scenes I must stop to explain for the general reader the terms used for the clothing worn by persons in the paintings. The most important is the term "Robe," an invention of my own used in Symbols to indicate what is usually called the pallium. Pallium is the Latin word for the Greek himation, a long outer shawl sometimes hard to distinguish from the toga, but much less voluminous. It is familiar from statues of Greek orators. A palliatus was a man wearing a pallium. In itself, however, palliatus does not distinguish between those who do or do not wear a tunic or chiton under this shawl, and there is no ancient term which designates one wearing both the himation (or pallium: I prefer the Greek term for a Greek garment) and the chiton (or tunic). Hence here and in Symbols I call the combination the Robe. In the Robe the chiton has normally two stripes which run down one from each shoulder to the hem. The himation has usually a mark (various forms appear) at the bottom corner, or, as at Dura, at some place usually lower than the person's waist. A person wearing the chiton without a himation is

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marked as being distinctly lower in rank than one in the Robe. The dalmatic was a full loose gown with wide sleeves; it falls nearly to the ground, and is usually marked by stripes as described for the chiton. The dalmatic was ordinarily a woman's garment, but appears on Noah emerging from the sarcophagus-ark.

Many of our old friends in catacomb art reappear at Via Latina. Jonah is twice thrown into the mouth of the sea monster (pls. 7 and 70); three times is vomited up (pls. 7, 40, and p. 74); three times lies under the arbor (pls. 8, 40, and 71); and twice appears "aroused" (pls. 6 and 71), a scene which Ferrua follows tradition in thinking represents him in anger because his prophecy of doom had not been fulfilled. In the catacombs a man is often represented, wearing only a chiton and sitting on a rock (perhaps a dunghill, and so thought to be Job). The man appears here three times, but each time with a woman who holds out something to him on a stick and averts her head; once, says Ferrua, she holds her nose (pls. 6, 58, and 100). The seated man in one instance has red blotches on his legs, so that Job seems the most likely identification, though Job's wife plays so small a part in the story that I am not happy with it.

The three boys in the furnace appear twice. In one panel they are badly preserved, and Ferrua describes them inadequately. He tells us their clothing was green, but not what form it took (pl. 13). This is the more important, since these boys usually have Persian dress, but quite uniquely in the other representation at Via Latina (pl. 89) they wear women's clothing, such as the artist put elsewhere in the catacomb on Victories. This dress was very often used for the three nymphs, as I illustrate in my forthcoming volumes. Thus dressed, the three boys stand in the flames, in a way strikingly to recall the three nymphs. The change of dress could by no means have been inadvertent, for the ancients distinguished carefully the clothing they put on men and women. While both sexes might wear a himation, only a woman elsewhere can wear this female dress. We begin at once to wonder what is going on.

Many other familiar scenes are here from the OT, with no new features of note: the temptation of Adam and Eve (pls. 5, 39, and 68); Noah emerging as an orant from the sarcophagus-ark (pl. 118 and p. 49); the sacrifice of Isaac, (pls. 67 and 99); Daniel with lions (pls. 10 and 116); and Balaam pointing to the star (pl. 86).3 Similarly we recognize old friends also from the NT in the Adoration of the Magi (pl. 1); the Multi- plication of the Loaves (pl. 89); and the Raising of Lazarus (pls. 85 and 97). Ferrua also lists as NT scenes the Good Shepherd (p. 41); pastoral scenes which apparently here as elsewhere are variants of the Good Shepherd (pls. 38 and 69); orants (pls. 39, 66, and 86); and saints

3 See J. Danielou, Les Symboles chretiens primitifs, p. 130. Many of his conclusions, however, as that the Jews in the "Greek" synagogues of Acts 6 1 and 9 were Essenes seem to me to have little foundation.

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who wear the Robe and hold a scroll (pls. 33, 60-62, 66); though I would rather call these early Christian than NT scenes. To them we shall return.

With the old favorites are 27-30 new scenes from the OT, new, that is, to catacomb art, several of which appear more than once. The number is uncertain because a few of them are not clearly identifiable.

One of the most interesting new scenes combines the OT and NT. It presents in the foreground the familiar composition for the raising of Lazarus. In it Christ wears the Robe and holds out a rod toward the little templelike structure used in this art for the tomb. The scene is twice represented, once with Lazarus as usual standing in the doorway (pl. 85), and once with that space empty (pl. 98). In both cases seven steps lead up to the tomb, an important feature in pagan and Jewish symbolic art. But the interesting novelty is that in the sky of both paintings Moses kneels to receive the Law, and a column with fire on it seems to represent the "pillar of fire" beside him. With two examples it becomes probable that the OT and NT elements had meaningful association. I should tentatively suggest that the artist may be presenting the Light of the Law as revealed in the Old Covenant, in contrast to, or as a preliminary for, the power of the New to give life, immortality.

c. New OT Scenes.

The new scenes safely identified from the OT are: God expels Adam and Eve from the Garden (pl. 29). The same pair sit on a rock mourning their desolation while Abel

(in the Robe) brings them a lamb and Cain (in a chiton only) brings his fruits (pl. 95).

God squeezes a sponge from a square window in heaven to make the flood (pl. 93).

A man in the Robe lies drinking on a couch. Ferrua suggests that this is Noah getting drunk (pl. 9).

Abraham in the Robe sits under the oak as the three men, all in the Robe, approach him (pl. 24). It is very reminiscent of the same scene at Santa Maria Maggiore, except that the central figure is not emphasized at Via Latina.

Lot, in the Robe, flees from Sodom with his two daughters in dalmatics, while his wife, presumably turned to salt, stands in the background (pl. 30).

Isaac, wearing the Robe, lies on the banqueting couch. This scene appears twice, quite differently composed (pls. 12 and 27); in both, Jacob also wears the Robe and Esau does not, but in one Rebecca stands behind or beside Jacob.

Jacob dreams at Bethel (pl. 97).

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A man stands before a seated woman (pl. 3). Ferrua at first thought it the Annunciation, but later inclined to call it Judah with Tamar. I should simply call it unidentified.

The dreams of Joseph are presented in a single panel (pl. 96), in which he is twice shown lying on a bed and wearing the Robe. Sol and Luna are above him as he lies on one couch, and six sheaves of wheat bow to three sheaves above him on the other couch.

Jacob lies on the usual bed and crosses his hands to bless Ephraim and Manasseh (pl. 25). All three figures wear the Robe. The painting recalls the similar scene at Dura where Joseph is added and the two boys wear only the chiton, but the design is otherwise much the same, in- cluding the crossed hands. A common ancestor seems most likely.

The baby Moses floats in his little ark which has a gabled end (pl. 94). The river is a band of water across the bottom of the panel, and on its far bank stand three women. The first, in a white dress with richly embroidered stripes, seems to be the princess; the two in dalmatics with her are her attendants. At the left, much larger, sits a female wrapped in her cloak or palla, with high reeds about her, a person whom Ferrua naturally identifies with Miriam. This painting seems also to have come from an ancestor in common with the Dura painting of the same scene. At Dura the little ark is empty but has the same gabled end, and shows itself clearly as a little sarcophagus from which the baby has risen. The river is again a band across the bottom of the scene, with three women standing on the farther bank. At Dura, however, the women have become identified with the three nymphs by bearing their tokens, and we recall that the nymphs were semi-divinities who nursed divine and royal- divine babies. In addition, at Dura a naked figure of Aphrodite-Anahita holds Moses up as for adoration. He also appears in the arms of women, here two of them, at the left, one with the same bent-kneed outline as Miriam has in the catacomb. So many common features require a common original, to which the catacomb scene is much closer, though it is later than the one at Dura. The new elements at Dura, since they are all departures from the biblical narrative, seem to be interpretative additions to that original to show the true nature of the Wunderkind.

In two scenes Moses, wearing the Robe, kneels on one knee to remove his shoes while he looks back over his shoulder to the hand of God coming down from the sky and proffering him the Law as a scroll (pls. 33 and 64). At Dura he climbs the mountain toward the hand of God which holds out to him the table of the Law, and his shoes stand conspicuously beside him. The design is quite different, but the common element that Moses took off his shoes for Sinai as well as for the burning bush is a conspicuous addition to the biblical story.

We have already spoken of Moses getting the law above the raising of Lazarus as another new representation for catacomb art.

Two large and elaborate paintings show us the crossing of the Red

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Sea for the first time in the catacombs (pls. 37 and 115). They clearly have ancestral relations with the scene as depicted both in the mosaic at Santa Maria Maggiore and in the painting at Dura. The river in all of them runs up the center with hosts at either side. In both the Dura and catacomb versions a column of parallel lines may well indicate the dry paths on which the Israelites crossed. Moses in all of them wears the Robe and touches the water with his rod. In the Christian scenes the hosts of Pharaoh are massed on one side or in the water, and the Israelites stand safely on the farther bank. At Dura, however, the scheme is adapted so that a lower row of Israelites in short chitons approach the water with the rest of the hosts of Israel, and they are the persons drowned in the sea while Pharaoh and his hosts appear nowhere in the painting at all. Also the slender rod which Moses usually carries has at Dura become the club of Hercules. At Dura we are certainly seeing the work of men not content with the older and more literal presentation which we see more clearly in the Christian panels; for in this scene too we can see that the Dura painters again have altered the original to introduce interpretative ideas.

Mention has already been made of the pillar with fire on its top to represent the "pillar of fire." While not at all the same in rendition, this pillar tends to justify the impression of scholars that two strange pillars in the Exodus scene at Dura, one red and one black, represent the pillars of flame and cloud.

Two scenes (pls. 26 and 104) are obviously adaptations of a single basic design. They show a bearded figure, wearing the marked Robe and brandishing a sword before another man (also in the Robe, I should judge from the photographs), who rides an ass and points a rod. Details differ in the two, but no one could dispute Ferrua's calling both of them the angel stopping Balaam. Incidentally, in one of the scenes Balaam has a beard, in another not, which strengthens my suspicion that we should not lay much stress upon the presence or absence of beards in identifying traditions of art.

One of the most extraordinary scenes (pl. 92) shows a warrior walk- ing toward the observer with a long spear on his shoulder. Impaled on the spear are two figures, a man and woman, the man with the dangling arm of death familiar at Dura and on sarcophagi. We recognize with Ferrua that the warrior is Phinehas carrying Zimri and Cozbi out of the tent on his spear, according to a story preserved in several rabbinic writings.4 Philo regarded Phinehas as a great hero and deeply allegorized him; he gives several of the details of this story, but does not record what the rabbis called the "miracle of the spear." The painting strongly suggests that it was designed under Jewish inspiration.

It is quite unexpected that the paintings should show three separate

4 See L. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 3, pp. 386-88; 6, p. 137, n. 798.

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events in the life of Samson, his throttling of the lion, sending the foxes into the Philistines' grain fields, and slaying the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. In all of these he wears the Robe, inappropriate as was such a garb for these exploits. One painting, beautifully preserved, shows him throttling the lion (pl. 109). The identification is unmistakable, for in it the lion appears twice, once in the death struggle, and once lying dead with the bees flying about him. Of a second similar painting (pl. 17) only the bottom third remains. In it we see the lower leg of a hero in the Robe who faces a lion attacking him, much as in the other scene, though only the beast's rear legs are left. But the space where the dead lion lies with the bees in the other scene is empty in this case, so that perhaps the painting represents David in his similar heroic en- counter. With so little of the painting left, we can say nothing more

positive. In the scene with the jaw-bone (pl. 105) Samson stands hero- ically in the center brandishing his weapon, and the Philistines in short chitons are dead or fleeing at the left, but at the right stands the same little open-ended form of a temple used as the tomb in scenes of the raising of Lazarus. A curtain is draped back from across the entrance to show some object within, but I cannot identify it in the reproduction, and Ferrua does not mention it. Perhaps interpretation depends upon this object. The painting with the foxes (pl. 31) shows only three of them, but I do not doubt the identification.

In a badly preserved scene Absalom, wearing the chlamys of a soldier, hangs by the hair from a tree (pl. 17). The horse runs out from under him with the saddle empty.

In the lunette of an acrosolium (pl. 23) Elijah in the Robe stands in a

quadriga and rides up in the sky. He throws something down which should be his cloak but is certainly not the symbolic himation, for this he has plainly wrapped about him. Elisha on the ground at the left reaches up his hands to catch what Elijah is tossing to him. In the center foreground two cattle drag a plow. They are much smaller than a large peasant who sits on a rock at the right beside what Ferrua calls another plow. The river Jordan flows from a rock beside Elisha, who wears only a leopard skin, which Ferrua identifies with the tunica pellicea, the cloak of skins, of a prophet. The two oxen plowing at the center, and the resting plowman at the right, recall that Elisha was plowing with oxen when Elijah first called him, I Kings 19 19. Interpretation of this composition as a whole is difficult, however, because the large plowman is so unlike the small Elisha in the leopard skin who receives the mantel of Elijah. Considerable allegory has apparently prompted the design, but I have no suggestions as to the meaning of the whole. Dani61ou's new chapter on the chariot of Elijah shows how important a symbol of baptism, resurrection, and immortality this incident had become in the church at this time.5

s Danielou, pp. 77-93.

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A very badly preserved painting shows Tobias holding out his fish, Ferrua tells us (pl. 18). He does not mark it as a new scene in catacomb art, but I do not recall it.

A few scenes are of less certain identification. In one so badly preserved a scene that no conclusions can be drawn from its photograph (pl. 3) a large woman sits on a chair. A much smaller man stands before her, who seems to hold up a rod in his left hand and to stretch out his right toward the woman. Another man, barely visible, stands behind this one. Two suggestions have been made; that it represents Judah coming to Tamar, and that it shows the Wise Men with the Virgin. But both suggestions have difficulties; I would call this one quite unidentified.

In another (pl. 21) a man sits on a throne. His dress cannot be identified in the photograph of the badly preserved painting, and Ferrua does not describe it. He lifts his right hand with the first two fingers extended, a gesture which Ferrua throughout calls the gesture of speaking. Before him stand four men in ungirt striped chitons with a garment that is not wrapped like the himation; they also raise their hands as in speaking, but perhaps do so in salutation. Ferrua calls this Joseph re- ceiving his brothers in Egypt, but questions his own identification. Nothing in the scene seems to make an identification certain.

Again (plates 15 and 91), a woman wearing a tunic or dalmatic, with the usual veil on her head, stands between two men. A loculus was cut into both pictures after they were painted, and so the three figures are preserved only as busts in one, and with the lower legs and feet in the other. Ferrua assures us that the two men wear the tunic and pallium, what we are calling the Robe. In that case I doubt very much that he is right in calling the scene "Susannah Tempted by the Elders." The facial expressions are by no means so distinctive and identifying as he supposes. The scene seems to me to represent a female saint between two male saints, though there are difficulties with this also. I have to judge finally that this is another unidentified scene.

Such an amazing number of OT incidents have here appeared for the first time in catacomb representation that I believe we should usually look to the OT for explanation of dubious scenes, and ascribe to Christian inspiration only those whose character seems definitely indicated.

Accordingly three more scenes seem to me to belong rather to the OT group than to Christian origin.

The first (pl. 103) shows a man standing in the Robe on one side of a well; a woman in dalmatic and with a water jug stands on the other. Ferrua calls the man Jesus, and the other the woman of Samaria. But it could just as appropriately represent the servant of Abraham finding Rebekah for Isaac, or the meeting of Moses and Zipporah; and I should prefer to associate it with the search for Rebekah, in which Philo found profound meaning. The water jug beside the woman has the long slender

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neck and small round handles which appear so much in Jewish art that scholars have tended to identify Jewish objects by it.

Secondly, a lunette (pl. 14) shows a large scene of a man wearing the Robe and standing on a rocky projection from a hill. He addresses a crowd whose costumes Ferrua does not describe. They seem in the photograph to wear only the chiton; there is at least no indication of a himation in the usual form. Since one of the commoner pictures in later Christian illuminations shows Moses giving the Law to the people after his descent from Sinai, I should judge this to be the more likely identification here.

A third scene shows two soldiers on either side of a peculiar machine like a well top (pls. 72 and 73). Above it is a wooden frame with a cross- bar like a windlass, and on this where one would have expected a water bucket, is an inverted jar out of which fall two little objects. A temple with seven steps stands at the back. Ferrua suggests that the painting represents the soldiers casting lots for Jesus' garment, which I consider interesting and possible but not at all convincing. Among all the events in the NT which Christians would presumably have been interested in

illustrating, and have been interested in depicting to this day, the soldiers casting lots ranks very low indeed. In particular, the absence of the

garment in dispute seems to make the suggestion dubious. When one looks elsewhere for an incident of casting lots, it becomes more probable that this scene represents Saul and Jonathan casting the Urim and Thummim to find the guilty cause of God's displeasure which was impeding the success of their army (I Sam 14 41-42). While I would not

suggest any precise meaning for the temple in the background of the

painting, it would serve as a setting for the Urim and Thummim much more appropriately than for Roman soldiers.

As over against all these OT illustrations, only three paintings can certainly be ascribed to NT inspiration, the Adoration of the Magi (pl. 1), the Multiplication of the Loaves (pl. 89), and the Raising of Lazarus (pls. 85 and 96), the scenes which have Moses in the sky getting the Law as an antetype. Only one conclusion seems possible to me from the popularity and diversity of OT themes at Via Latina, namely, that the Christians at this time had a reservoir of OT painting, but had no

comparable one for the NT. To this we shall return.

d. Christian Scenes.

Early Christian art in the sense of creations by Christian symbolists appears in the catacomb not only with these NT scenes proper, however, but in scenes that more generally reflect the Christian faith.

In one panel (pl. 36), a person sits with an open book in his hands and a box of scrolls at his feet. The figure is almost entirely destroyed.

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It is probably Jesus teaching, as Ferrua suggests, but the painting itself could as well represent Moses expounding the Law. If it had been this originally, I am sure the Christians would have seen Christ represented in it. Again we recall the figure which I think represents Moses at Dura, standing to read from a scroll with a box for scrolls at his feet, a scene whose mystic pagan origin I have shown in my forthcoming volumes of Symbols. It seems a Christian expansion of this when in pl. 11 twelve figures who wear the Robe hold scrolls in one hand and lift the other hand as though they were speaking, and sit on long benches six on either side of Christ in the same pose. The box of scrolls is again at Christ's feet. Or, as Christ was presented alone, the saints with him could appear alone also. In each of five panels (pls. 33, 60-62, 106) a man stands holding a scroll and wearing the Robe as though in a full-length portrait. The panels reflect the many similar portraits and figures on pagan sarcophagi, but they may have been inherited by Christians through Jewish usages no longer extant. In the catacomb one may call them "prophets" or Christian saints or disciples at one's pleasure. Another such man similarly clothed but without the scroll appears in the position of an orant (pl. 66), but three female orants in the familiar dalmatics also lift their hands in the usual way (pls. 39, 66, 86). So far as we know, these latter come directly from pagan art; they abound in the Basilica of the Porta Maggiore. I do not see why Ferrua lists any of these types as from the NT. A similar painting (pl. 108), much better preserved, shows Christ enthroned between Peter and Paul, all three in the Robe. The two apostles stand facing Christ and holding a scroll. Jesus holds an open scroll in the left hand and makes the two-finger gesture. In Room I there are three bust figures preserved, with the lower part of what Ferrua takes to be a fourth (pls. 55, 56, 57, 59). Two of them wear only the himation, the other also the chiton. All have scrolls in their hands or beside them, open or closed, and between two of them is a panel with a box of scrolls. I see no reason to consider these items ideologically distinct from the others; clearly the painters and their patrons liked figures full length or bust who hold scrolls, open or closed, and they may be with Christ or not. I suggest that the teacher with scrolls, or the people with them, had a special significance for mystic hopes, which Christians have taken over to represent their new-old mystery of salvation.

e. Pagan Scenes.

In two rooms, N and 0, striking pagan novelties appear. One lunette (pl. 76) shows a man lying on a couch in the foreground while a woman wearing a dalmatic bends over him from behind. A row of figures stand behind her, five men in chitons and one woman in a dalmatic with the

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pose of an orant. Ferrua suggests that the painting shows Alcestis offering her life to the dying Admetus, a most surprising notion until one sees in the lunette opposite (pl. 79) the unmistakable Hercules, nimbed, holding the many-headed Cerberus with one hand while he leads a woman forward with the other. He seems to be presenting her to a naked young man, seated with his cloak across his lap and a lance (or thin rod) in his hand. It is extremely likely that here Hercules is bringing Alcestis back to Admetus, so that Ferrua's identification of the first scene cannot be disputed. At the bottom of the arches over these lunettes are four scenes of Hercules: he kills the hydra and he gets the apples of Hesperides, both in the arcosolium with the dying Admetus; he kills an unidentified adversary and shakes hands with Athena beside the scene of his restoring Alcestis. Ferrua does not like the close paralleling of Hercules with Christ as Simon has recently presented it,6 but this group of scenes is far from mere decoration. They show human love and the savior who banishes evil and is an ally of Wisdom, Athena, and also conquers death, a most appropriate group of pictures to express one's hope of resurrection and immortality. In the arch over the dying Admetus is a gorgoneum, and a pair of peacocks confront a vase on the parapet of each of the arcosolia, pagan motifs taken over by both Jews and Christians to indicate hope of immortality (if not fetishes to help secure it). Ferrua's suggestion that some widower planned all this only to commemorate his wife's beautiful character seems to me to recall early nineteenth- century romanticism rather than late Roman days. Whatever the motive, however, the symbolism is clearly that of hope for the future life. Who- ever did this was a rich man, for only two burials (without inscriptions) were made in the whole room.

If Room N seems thus purely pagan in symbolic motifs, Room O combines pagan and biblical scenes. One goes into it from Room N through a little passage with a handsome full-length figure of Ceres- Demeter on either side (pls. 82 and 114). In one she has the pose of an orant and holds grain in each hand. In the other, more elaborately dressed and with a strange veil on her head that looks like a rayed nimbus, she has grain in one hand, a torch in the other, and water or wine jars beside her at the right, a box of grain at the left. We should be more impelled to say a pagan must have done this if we did not have such figures in the Jewish catacomb Randanini, and if we did not pass through to so many biblical paintings in the next room. For in Room O we have nine of our most important biblical paintings, with, as an utter anomaly, a nimbed portrait bust in one of the ceiling patterns (pl. 119), and two other figures of pagan goddesses (pl. 83).

The two most extraordinary pagan paintings are in quite "Christian"

6 Marcel Simon, Hercule et le Christianisme.

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rooms. The first (pls. 101 and 102) shows a woman lying on the ground in a field of flowers, which usually indicates the Elysian fields, or heaven. Her position specifically recalls that of Ariadne in her many appearances on pagan sarcophagi when she is discovered by Dionysus. She rests back upon a basket of flowers and wears a palla or cloak which, as often with Ariadne, is draped low to show her groin. She is nimbed, a most interesting fact because otherwise in the entire catacomb the nimbus appears only in the portrait just mentioned, on Christ enthroned, and on the figures of Hercules. In pagan art the nimbus seems to have been the prerogative of Helios, and then to have gone over to appear on kings to show their divinity. We should thus suppose that the person on the couch was a goddess or queen, except that we have already seen the halo on a portrait, and hence it may only indicate her immortality. Beside her is a snake, the details of which I cannot make out from Ferrua's reproduction. He says: "Under her left arms twists an asp that stretches its body down to the ground, and strikes its open mouth toward her right breast." In calling the snake an asp Ferrua has certainly gone beyond the evidence, but the snake is clear, if its species and the identity of the woman are not.

Ferrua confidently calls her Cleopatra, because he takes the snake's open mouth to indicate that it is striking, but I see no reason to suppose that Cleopatra, who must have been utterly foreign to third- or fourth- century Christians, has entered Christian art. Her exposed groin would suggest that the snake had quite another mission than killing her. In pl. 68 and on amulets the snake of Eden is opening its mouth toward Eve, and this is usually interpreted as talking or kissing.7 The snake which kisses would strengthen the argument of other scholars (Ferrua gives the references) that we have here the divine snake impregnating, as when Zeus in the form of a snake begat Dionysus-Zagreus by Persephone, or when Olympias conceived Alexander in this way, or when the mother of Plato was thus visited by Apollo. The idea got into ecstatic cults, for Clement tells us that the women initiates in the mys- teries of Sabazius wrapped snakes about them and called the act "God in the bosom." The great popularity of Leda and the Swan on con- temporary pagan sarcophagi (and on one Jewish sarcophagus in Pal- estine) shows that scenes of divine impregnation had a place in ancient hopes for future life. The snake itself in such a connection is not un- known. My pupil Allan Ludwig called my attention to an early third- century lenos sarcophagus in the Metropolitan Museum.8 Its chief

7 See my "A Jewish-Gnostic Amulet of the Roman Period," Greek and Byzantine Studies, 1 (1958), pp. 71-80.

8 It is their number 47.100.4a, b. See Marion Lawrence, "Three Pagan Themes in Christian Art," De Artibus Opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky (1961), p. 324. Miss Lawrence does not mention the women with snakes.

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decoration is an elaborate scene of the discovery of the sleeping Endymion by Selene, a favorite design for sarcophagi because even in his endless sleep Endymion remained so potent that Selene conceived fifty daughters by him. He lies in the pose of the sleeping Ariadne, again with his gar- ments dropped to expose his genitals. Under one of Selene's horses lies a female figure holding a snake. Along the edge of the lid runs a decorative frieze made up of a series of arched panels, in each of which a relief is carved. In one of them a woman sits, nude except for a palla thrown across her left thigh. She faces a tree, two cupids float beside her, while a third stands between her knees. She holds a snake to her bosom. It is with this sort of figure we must associate the "Ariadne" (to call her something) of the catacomb. In publishing the amulet just mentioned, I concluded that it came from a Jewish Naasene sect, because there was considerable "magical writing" in Hebrew characters on the stone, and because the snake appeared prominently on both of its larger faces. The catacomb, on the contrary, shows no such preoccupation with snakes, so that I see no more reason to suppose that the snake we are considering indicates Naasene Gnosticism than that the Hercules panels indicate a Hercules-Christian heresy. But we must admit it as a fact that to the Christians who made this catacomb such scenes were acceptable as part of their total symbolism.

The painting which has already aroused more comment than any other in the catacomb shows a large bearded man wearing only a himation and sandals, who sits at the center of a group of men, all in the full Robe, but without gams (pl. 107). Their hands are lifted as in conversa- tion, and one of them turns with index finger extended to his neighbor as though making a special point. Their number cannot be counted definitely because behind the heads of several are shadowy indications of what may or may not be more heads. The maximum is 15, the mini- mum is 12. I myself think the artist really intended 12. The central man of the 3 at the right in the front row holds a long slender wand with which he points to a naked man lying across the feet of the group. The one arm of this prostrate man which we can see lies stiff at his side, but he seems to be lifting his head, and his eyes are open. His stomach is a red blotch which looks as though it had been cut wide open, or burst. Is the man dead, and the lecture one in anatomy over a corpse? The alert head and eyes make that difficult to believe. Or is he alive and listening eagerly to the comments of the surgeons who have ripped his belly open? Ferrua concludes that the painting marks the grave of a famous surgeon whose skill is being thus celebrated. He even suggests that other figures wearing the Robe and holding the scroll in this cubiculum were pupils of this surgeon.

Most discussions of the scene have debated whether the class is studying anatomy over a corpse, or surgery over a living person. Hempel

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has suggested that what is represented is the cremation of man by God in the company of his angels. When Professor Enslin saw the picture, however, it recalled to him the fate of Judas, "whose body burst open in the middle and all his vitals poured out" (Acts 1 18). It may well be, then, that the painting represents the glorified Christ and Twelve, in contrast to the fate of the traitor. That the group essentially shows the glory of the church seems to me the more likely because scenes in facing lunettes at Via Latina often balance or supplement each other in meaning, and opposite this scene is one of Christ sitting enthroned between Peter and Paul, certainly a symbol of the Church of Rome. Ferrua cites several scholars who have thought that the painting of the "surgeon" is a resurrection scene, which is another possibility. The man on the ground, as Ferrua correctly points out, is alive, but Ferrua does not indicate that the convention of lifting the head is a very old one, going back to Etruscan sarcophagi, for rising from the dead.9 That the man on the ground is returning to life after death makes sense of the vitality of his eyes and head along with the devestation in his belly. The thin rod or wand we likewise see many times as the rod by which Jesus revives Lazarus. It is here held by a bearded disciple, not by the Master, and we recall that Peter with Tabitha, or Dorcas, demonstrated his power to raise the dead (Acts 9 36-42). The painting reproduces none of the details of the Tabitha narrative, for the figure is not even that of a woman, except that "she opened her eyes and sat up" may be represented here. The healing and saving power of Christ through his church, especially Peter, seems to me, then, to be perhaps the idea depicted. The great central figure does not hold the wand or give the "lecture," and I doubt that a lecture is being given at all. I cannot myself, however, choose between seeing the man on the ground as being Judas or a reviving corpse. In either case, the great group in the Robe seem to me Christ and the Twelve.

The Inspiration of Catacomb Art

These last two scenes take us back to the inspiration of catacomb art here and in general. Before beginning upon so basic a question we must come to understand a principle which seemed to operate in the construction of ancient designs, whether pagan, Jewish, or Christian, that the artist had great freedom to construct designs so long as he followed a basic symbolic vocabulary in so doing. The principle came out most sharply, for example, when I was discussing the shell in the eighth volume of my Symbols. The shell as symbolizing the womb of the sea, or of cosmic water, came to represent immortality from very

9 The material is collected in the forthcoming ninth and tenth volumes of my Symbols.

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primitive times. Aphrodite, born of the sea, was born from a shell, and became the shell goddess in offering her shell for spiritual birth. The same was true of other water deities like the nymphs. So, at the end, many pagan sarcophagi carried shells in the background for a portrait of the dead person or carved one over his head, while some put a shell over a grave. Christians and Jews adapted the convention, and Chris- tians went on to identify it with another symbol of apotheosis, the halo. All these could be used with freedom of pattern by any artist. The shell carried on into the marine thiasos, and innumerable sarcophagi and graves could be decorated with it, each a fresh composition of the artist. Early Christian art (and Jewish art as at Dura) seems to have been designed in much the same way. A basic model or archetype would rarely be reproduced exactly, as emerges from the individuality of each sarcophagus or mosaic design. For common little objects, like clay lamps, a mold could still be used, though almost all molds had fresh designs; but larger compositions seem always to have been created afresh.

Differences in detail, accordingly, as in the two paintings of the crossing of the Red Sea and of Jacob blessing Ephraim and Manasseh, by no means indicate to me different "originals," or even different artists, any more than we should expect identity in Raphael's Madonnas. Where detailed identities do occur, however, they have great importance, since identical features will rarely be invented by different creators and hence presume a common tradition or even a common archetype. For all the great variety in painting Madonnas in later centuries, for example, the detail that they often sit on chairs and wear blue robes comes not from the fact that women usually like to sit down when tending a baby, or that the color blue is pretty, or that they follow a common archetype, but from the idea of enthronement and the tradition of the Queen of Heaven. Similarly the tradition of vines, birds eating from vines or baskets or drinking from goblets, goblets that are fountains, peacocks eating or spread in glory, Victories or cupids with wreaths, Seasons, and sheep leaping with the thyrsus, could be adapted to given spaces, but are monotonously repeated in pagan, Jewish, and Christian graves presumably not as formal decoration but for the importance of the motifs in the problem of life and death poignant in common for all three religions. Without such literary tradition as we have for later Chris- tians, it is extremely dangerous to assign specific explanations to these, as we can for the symbols with the Virgin, since presumably the definite explanations of the symbols would vary from religion to religion, if

specific verbal explanations were given at all. What is important at Via Latina is to see these re-emerge in such mass, whereas in the other catacombs they appear much more sporadically. To assert without reference to the history of symbolism that they had specific religious value, or were simply produced as ornament, would be equally unjustified.

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I can only state my own conviction, that as such study continues the

symbolic value will be increasingly felt. But it will never be felt by those to whom "semantics" refers only to words.

The biblical and mythological scenes framed by these motifs, however, present different problems. Quite clearly the artist or artists knew a solid tradition of OT painting which we find thus massively represented elsewhere only at Dura, Santa Maria Maggiore, and in early Christian illuminated manuscripts, especially in the Octateuchs. Here again I feel that similarities tell us of the tradition, while differences may show us the creative play of the artists' minds, novelties which might well spring from interpretation of the meaning of an incident beyond mere representation. So we shall only have begun to understand a painting when we have identified a scriptural passage as having prompted it.

At Via Latina, however, there is still much to learn merely from the incidents selected for illustration. For a number of scenes I can suggest no interpretation because I do not know what is being represented; as in the paintings which Ferrua entitles Joseph enthroned before his brothers, Jacob and family migrating to Egypt, and Susannah and the Elders. The meaning of the grave digger, usually abbreviated to a simple representation of his ascia or pick, but here shown as a man in action (pl. 41), has always been perplexing. Adam and Eve, however, appear several times at the fatal tree. It is the one scene in Christian catacombs that seems inappropriate with the funerary art generally found there. Except for this one scene Christians left their dead only with scenes or symbols of hope; but no Christian has ever had any hope in the Fall itself. In one representation (pl. 5; cf. p. 43), the Fall appears with one of the leaping goats or rams beneath it, which conceivably may represent salvation as over against the depravity of the Fall. Another lunette (pl. 39) has a spread peacock in the center with a similar Adam and Eve on one side, an orant on the other. Here again the Fall seems balanced by hope.

Still more strikingly, this balance appears in an arch that shows a pair of paintings without parallel, to my knowledge. In one (pl. 29) God in the full Robe drives Adam and Eve out from the garden through a doorway, they dressed in leopard skins. On the other side of the same arch (pl. 95) they sit in dejection wearing skins, while Cain in a short tunic brings them his vegetables, and Abel, in the center of the painting, wears the Robe and holds out to them a lamb. How the presumably Jewish original of this was drawn cannot be guessed, but clearly the lamb presented by the robed figure in the Christian painting represents the hope of salvation in Christ as over against the Fall, and strengthens the suggestion that the leaping ram in the other cubiculum had the same implication with the protoplasts. That only Abel wears the Robe would harmonize with the suggestion that the dress indicates God or the Savior

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or a saint, a symbolism quite consistently followed in the paintings throughout. With this in mind we return to the first example and notice that not only does it show the leaping ram along with the Fall, but that to balance it is the scene which Ferrua suggested showed the drunken Noah (pl. 9). He wears the full Robe as he lies on a couch. He holds a cup high in his right hand and an amphora in his left, while he leans with his left elbow on an object which Ferrua calls a cask. The general pose is that of the eschatological drinking scene of Dionysus, or of a dead person identified with Dionysus, which appears on funerary art throughout the Greco-Roman world. Noah's sons do not appear, so it may not be Noah at all. Anyone who knows Philo's allegory of the drunkenness of Noah, however, would recall that he interpreted the incident as representing the mystic ecstasy of "sober drunkenness," and so it could easily have been used by Christians to represent final redemption. If so, the Robe is again properly used according to my hypothesis.

The only other presentations of depravity are in the vault of Cubi- culum B. In one (pl. 93) God leans out of a casement window in heaven and squeezes out the flood from a sponge, while two men and a tree are

being submerged below. In another panel in this vault (pl. 17) Absalom in military dress hangs by the hair from a tree while his horse runs out from under him. A third panel there shows a man and woman standing side by side and holding hands. The painting is so damaged that Ferrua did not reproduce it and his description (p. 47) had to be quite uncertain. It is worth suggesting that the pair may have been another Adam and Eve. Of the fourth panel with these only the lower third is preserved, but one can see that it represented a man in the Robe wrestling with a lion, as described above. That is, whether the hero is David or Samson, the robed figure appears suppressing evil, and again may represent hope as over against the depravity of the other panels in the vault. If the

"physician" scene actually represents the fate of Judas as over against the glory of Christ and the Teacher, we have another presentation of the

triumph of good over evil. The hero who destroys evil to bring men peace in this world and

the next had a special epithet, alexikakos, the Averter of Evil. Philo uses the term to describe the value of various virtues, such as quietness and control, or the logos as human reason which quickly becomes in the passage the universal Logos. But he follows general Greek usage in

saying that alexikakos is the proper virtue of an emperor, or of Ares, and he makes it especially the epithet of Joseph in prison. For the Greco-Romans it characterized Hercules, and to it we shall return in discussing him. Via Latina seems to present several OT heroes in this character. We saw that it is certainly Samson who wears the Robe as he kills the lion in pl. 109, and the scene brings out the saving act in that the lion itself becomes the source of honey. Evil has indeed been

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conquered. Also wearing the Robe Samson releases the foxes in another painting (pl. 31), but most dramatically, in still another, he poses in the same dress fullface, brandishing the jawbone of the ass, while the Philistines flee or lie weltering in their blood (pl. 105). But Samson is not in action; he is simply exhibiting himself as the alexikakos. Samson as one of the great prototypes of salvation appears in Heb 11 32.

The same idea seems presented as Phinehas, here appropriately in armor, strides toward the observer with Zimri and Cozbi on his spear (pl. 92). The details are preserved to us only in rabbinic legend, but no better epithet could be imagined for him with either Philo or the rabbis than the "Destroyer of Evil."

Similarly, we have said, no better epithet could be applied to Hercules (as it often was). In spite of Ferrua's rejection of the recent work of Simon on Hercules and Christianity, here is another powerful block of evidence that Christians could use Hercules in this sense to symbolize their own hopes of salvation in Christ. At Via Latina the representations of Hercules are all together at one end of the catacomb, and Ferrua, to whom any reality of Hercules' symbolism for Christianity seems un- thinkable, dismisses these appearances of the hero, as was noted above, as the work of some members of the family who had not been converted, and were allowed burial with their own pagan art types. The fact is, however, that pagan symbolism in the form of Victories, cupids, shepherd scenes, and the like, are scattered through the catacomb, and that while the Hercules cycle is concentrated in one room, two large figures of a fertility goddess are in the corridor leading to the last room, where stands the highest concentration of strictly biblical pictures in the catacomb along with two smaller pagan female figures. The Hercules scenes are put together because they belong together: they show the tragedy of life and death as Alcestis volunteers to die in place of Admetus, as Hercules brings her back from Hades, and, as in four scenes, he over- comes monsters or difficulties for the sake of humanity.

We can judge the meaning of this only as we recall that Christianity had not yet, for all its theological development, created an art vocabulary of its own for salvation. Dura shows us that at this time Jews, or at least some Jews, had done much better than Christians at expressing their hopes in art. Certainly, pagans had elaborate symbolism. We cannot argue that Christians were slow in developing NT art because they felt reluctant to represent Jesus, their God, for they represented him often enough to show that no such tabu existed. But from the Christian representations alone we should presume that OT characters appear so often because Christians had inherited a considerable body of OT illustrations from Jews, and that early Christian art, like early Christian allegory, was largely concerned with turning to Christian purposes the allegories which lay behind the Jewish paintings. This

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was my impression in 1921 when I first saw the OT mosaics in Santa Maria Maggiore, and certainly the great number of new OT scenes at Dura and in this catacomb do nothing to weaken that impression.

At this point we may well ask what was the character and purpose of the original Jewish paintings. In describing the pictures of the catacomb I have constantly emphasized the persons wearing what in Symbols I termed the Robe. The representations in the synagogue, in the early Christian mosaics, and now overwhelmingly in catacomb art, show this garb worn only by the great heroes of the incidents, themselves usually shown in a towering size which in ancient art always indicated a divinity or a divinized human being. The Robe went on to be the uniform of the Christian saint, and finally took precedence even over its early rival, the dalmatic, as the dress of Christ and the saints in glory. Christianity seems to have inherited this Robe of sanctity from Jews, as Jews took it from pagans, to mark people of more than ordinary human significance for religious life. This in turn implies that Jews themselves laid an em- phasis upon the special religious value of the OT heroes, since it seemed to them proper to dress their heroes in the robe of pagan mystical piety, just as it seemed proper to later Christians to put the dress on Christ and Christian saints.

Actually, Christians liked so often to represent Daniel in the lions' den, the three boys in the furnace, the miraculous career of Jonah, Noah emerging from the ark, and the sacrifice of Isaac, not from antiquarian interest in the OT but because all were types of Christ and his saving power, and Christians had no figures of their own to represent that power. The Christians at Via Latina included Samson, David, Lot, Phinehas, Jacob, Elijah, and Abel as additional prototypes. Similarly they had no more compunction, apparently, in using figures of Victory, Cupid, Hercules, and Demeter to express the idea of salvation than had the Jews, or even in using the woman taking a snake to her bosom. Ingenuity in explaining the figures away does not alter the fact that they are there, along with many others. The figure of Hercules was no farther from the Christian Christ than the figures of Samson or Phinehas, no more essentially strange than figures of Orpheus or the Good Shepherd to represent Christ's saving power. We have come to accept Noah emerging from the ark, or Jonah from the fish's mouth, as symbols of Christ and the Resur- rection only because we have grown accustomed to them. When Chris- tians later evolved their own symbolic vocabulary, these figures disap- peared like the others.

In the same way we may understand other OT figures in the catacomb, though we can easily let fancy run away with us in too precise reconstruction of how the Christians reinterpreted them. The crossing of the Red Sea, itself allegorized by strange new details at Dura, was from the beginning an excellent figure of the escape of the soul from sin,

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of baptism, and regeneration under the great white-robed leader. Moses at the exodus seemed a type of the salvation of Christ. Abraham's vision of God coming to him in three persons at Mamre was already made a type of the Trinity by Justin Martyr, and naturally appeared as such in Christian art when the Three, as well as Abraham sanctified by their visitation, wore the white Robe. I suspect that the three boys in the furnace had much the same value: when they were put into the feminine garb of Victory or of the nymphs they were clearly being allegorized - not represented simply as historical figures. Moses striking the rock seems to have been adopted as a Christ figure before he was identified with Peter. Moses repeatedly wears the Robe as he gets the Law (four times represented), or gives it to the Israelites at the foot of Sinai, not because the Christians at Rome were "Jewish Christians," but because Moses was a type of the Savior bringing God's word from heaven. Jacob's dream again showed a man in the Robe who had direct com- munication with heaven. Isaac lies in the Robe on the banqueting couch, blessing Jacob who has the lamb in his hands and wears the Robe, while Esau stands at one side, rejected in his short chiton. Elijah in the Robe rises to the heavens in the quadriga, and typifies the Ascension of Christ and the hopes of his saintly followers. Lot in the Robe can similarly escape with his daughters from burning Sodom. Balaam, the man who withstood Balak, was again of course a great hero for Philo and the rabbis alike. At Via Latina he twice appears on his ass, with the staff in his hand with which he smote the ass. But he wears the Robe, as does the angel brandishing the raised sword before him. What seems really to be shown is the human being, Balaam, in communion with divinity, and thereby deserving to wear the Robe, much like Jacob in the dream. His importance appears directly as he stands in the Robe pointing to the messianic star.

For some of the other paintings I shall not try to suggest a meaning, namely, Joseph's dream, Jacob blessing Ephraim and Manassah, the Servant of Abraham with Rebekah (if that is what it is), and Tobias with the fish (like the centaurs with the fish at Dura), or the men in armor casting lots. But the general pattern is clear. The woman with the snake at her breast, as we saw above, seems identifiable as a type, but how she was explained to make her appropriate for Christianity it would indeed by hazardous to suggest. I see no reason, however, that she could not have been given a Christian explanation. She certainly would make a slender basis from which to attack the general trend of symbolism I have outlined, for Ariadne, if it is she, could have been Christianized as well as Victory, Cupid, or Orpheus.

As over against this mass of material reinterpreted from Judaism and paganism, Christians had invented few scenes or symbols of their own. They show a beginning in Via Latina by representing the coming of the

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Wise Men to Mary, the raising of Lazarus, and the multiplication of the loaves. Christ enthroned with Peter and Paul, all in the Robe, moves out to the conception of the Roman church in general. Christ with the Twelve, all teaching and with scrolls, and again all in the Robe, shows the church as source of saving knowledge.

Via Latina has concentrated early Christian art for us. Here, in spite of the deep Christian feeling, no cross, let alone Crucifixion scene, has appeared, and this same absence is one of the most surprising features of catacomb art in general. The Last Judgment, or any other suggestion of an unhappy ending for the theme of salvation, has likewise no place here. The nearest approach to a suffering figure is the one presented twice in the person of Job, in one case with the boils all over his bare legs, far indeed from the crucified and suffering Pieta scenes of later Christianity. The paintings of the catacombs are abstractions in general, or figures from OT or classical art. Christ as one who raises people from the dead appears in the Lazarus scenes, or, in other catacombs, when the paralytic obeys the command to take up his bed and walk. Christ himself never is presented directly as the "firstfruits of those that sleep." The "types," like Daniel with the lions, may represent the triumphant Christ, or the believer saved by his faith. We cannot, and probably should not, distinguish sharply between the two, since the same symbol can, as with the sheep, represent both the Savior and the saved. The first new impulse seems to have been to represent the means of salvation, the eucharist in the changing of water to wine, or in the multiplication of loaves, something more specifically Christian than the birds and peacocks at the flowing chalice, which also did yeoman service for the eucharist. But even for this, perhaps the commonest representation is that of Moses striking the rock. No artist in the catacombs, as far as I know, tried to represent literally the Pauline-Synoptic story of the Institution at the Last Supper. Instead, we have the heavenly banquet of the seven, which only quite late became the twelve. For it must be borne in mind that the Christ with the Twelve at Via Latina is a teaching scene with scrolls, not a banqueting scene.

In the catacombs in general the most widely used single figure for Christ is, of course, the Good Shepherd, whether in the usual form with the lamb on his shoulders, or as a shepherd in a pastoral scene with his flock. Both seem to me to reflect the idea of heaven, entering it on the Savior's shoulders or being part of his heavenly company in what was originally the Elysian fields. We know from Dura that the other common figure for Christ, that of Orpheus, had already been adopted by Jews as a symbol in their own religion.

The concentrated decoration at Via Latina might give one a false impression of its purpose, that the rooms were splendid meeting places used by the living. One might get the same erroneous impression from

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collections of catacomb art, such as that of Wilpert. On the contrary, one who has trudged for days and days with his flash or taper through the incredible passages of the other catacombs gets no impression that catacomb art could have had much relation to everyday living. The little paintings stand now as they did fifteen hundred years ago, unseen, un- known, upon the resting places of forgotten loved ones. This art is for the dead, not for the living, in utter contrast to the memorials we now put on tombstones for visitors above ground. The catacomb paintings perpetuate, celebrate, confirm the anonymous faith of those ages and people, the hope of getting the fluid of life, of being carried into heaven on the Savior's shoulders, of being a bird in the tree of life, an orant in perpetual ecstasy, one who shares in the heavenly banquet, as he rises (with Christ, of course) from the dead like Jonah, Daniel, the three boys in the furnace. The concentration of such paintings at Via Latina attests only the ability of rich people to seal their dead with these symbols on a more elaborate scale. One feels in this catacomb as one feels in the great painted tombs of the Pharaohs at Thebes, that the paintings are there for the dead to establish their hopes of future life, as also were the earlier Pyramid Texts sealed in with the king's mummy. Still more, the scattered paintings in the greater catacombs seem consolation and hope for the dead.

We shall never know how much the individuals buried in such places knew of the history and the deeper symbolic implications of the paintings. The vocabulary, at least until Via Latina was discovered, seemed small and conventional. This by no means indicates that the designs were "merely" conventional. No more widespread convention exists for burial among Catholics to this day than the symbol of the cross, but no Chris- tian symbol is farther from being "merely" conventional. The cross itself will never tell us whether the person lying in the grave beneath it was a good Catholic who understood its ranges of symbolism. Its common appearance attests its wide impact, by no means its loss of meaning.

At Via Latina, however, we have so many new scenes that we must suppose its designs were selected by people freshly creative in symbolic language. In my forthcoming treatment of the paintings in the Dura Synagogue I give what I hope is good reason to suppose that a similarly creative symbolist planned the decorations there. The only parallel I know appears in the paintings of another Roman catacomb which has such strange designs that it is called the Gnostic Hypogeum of Aurelio. It seems early to me. It has Good Shepherds and rows of twelve men in the Robe, rows which may have begun as the twelve heads of tribes in Judaism, since they appear as such in the Exodus scene at Dura. In Christian art we presume they have become the Christian Twelve. In one scene in the hypogeum a shepherd in the Robe sits on an eminence reading from a scroll to his flock, which might parallel what Ferrua

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thought was the Sermon on the Mount at Via Latina. But the great Moses figure reading from a scroll at Dura shows that this might well be an adaptation of Moses reading the Law, to represent Christ, the Good Shepherd, instructing his flock, with associations of the Sermon on the Mount by no means excluded. And at Via Latina the association of Christ as teacher with scroll in hand and a box of scrolls reappears several times. This convention too may have come to Christianity from Ju- daism. In the "gnostic" hypogeum a large number of individual figures in the Robe hold the rod, but touch nothing with it. That is, we have what was originally the Moses figure becoming a symbol so purely de- tached that it could become Christ raising Lazarus, or Balaam on the ass, or might simply be used as a symbolic figure in its own right. The counterpart of this at Via Latina is the number of panels in which individuals in the Robe hold the scroll. To match "Cleopatra" at Via Latina there are in the hypogeum a number of recumbent male and female figures. And here also is a short cycle of Job, a rare phenomenon in catacomb art.

Except that so many scenes appeared in this hypogeum which seemed anomalies among the more limited vocabulary of catacomb art in general, there was never the slightest reason for calling it gnostic. Just as little reason would there be for calling the new catacomb at Via Latina gnostic or heretical. On this Ferrua expresses himself firmly and convincingly.

It has now become fully apparent that the Christian symbolism in art was rising out of a reinterpretation of Jewish and pagan symbolism. Jews had worked out the pattern of combining pagan and scriptural figures into a common symbolism, and however much Christians borrowed afresh from pagans, the basic pattern by which OT and pagan figures could be used together to express religious hopes was ready at hand in Judaism, and seems the pattern which Christian art followed, while Christian piety infused the symbols with its own fresh interpretations.

The common elements between the art of Via Latina and the paintings at Dura have been mentioned as we described individual paintings, but should here be brought together. The most important feature seems to me to be the convention of representing OT scenes with their great protagonists, divine or human, wearing the Robe in contrast to those who have not the special dignity which later Christians came to call sanctity. By dressing the heroes thus, any OT scene could be made into an allegory, as both Philo and the early Christians treated the biblical heroes. At Via Latina this convention so much dominates the OT scenes that we must suppose that the artist or master mind who planned the decorations had a book of Jewish paintings from which he could select the ones he wanted. In several cases his model seems to have had a common ancestor with the Dura paintings.

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For several reasons we can suppose only that the common original was Jewish. First, the Dura paintings reflect an old and established tradition, one that had originated in a purely hellenistic environment and thence gone eastward and been combined with Iranian elements. All of this had occurred so early that the tradition had reached the remote frontier of Dura by the year 250. I do not see how we can allow less than a century for such a development in Judaism, and presumably the art originated with Jews at least as early as the beginning of the Christian era. Secondly, it is natural to assume that the Jewish art had begun before the final break between Jews and Christians, for it seems to have come over to Christians as an obvious part of their Jewish heritage, presumably in their Septuagint Bibles. As we discover new Christian art, the amount of OT art in the early Christian tradition rapidly increases. Justin Martyr presumably had a hellenized Jewish commentary on the OT which he was freshly reinterpreting to introduce Christian meanings.0I Similarly, I suspect that the man designing the paintings at Via Latina had an illustrated Septuagint, or selections from the Septuagint, whose paintings gave already an allegorized interpretation to the text. The Christian ideas of salvation could easily be superimposed upon the Jewish, as for Christians the exodus became an allegory of salvation under Christ, whereas it had been formerly the same, but under Moses. Perhaps the Christians had seen the designs in Roman synagogues as murals or as mosaics, synagogues now lost without a trace. But since the art could reappear at so remote a place as Dura, it probably circulated in viable form in some sort of manuscripts.

Thirdly, the simple fact is that Christianity was born, as we know its birth in the NT, without art or symbolism, born into a world where symbolism had very great importance. In such a world, as we see from Greco-Roman remains in general, Jews - at least those involved closely in Greco-Roman life - had been forced to develop a symbolism of their own, which they did partly by making allegorized OT illustrations, and partly by reinterpreting (just how we do not know) the lingua franca of current pagan symbolism. Christians seem to have followed the same pattern. They began with a fresh experience that in Christ all their hopes of a Jewish Messiah or of a divine or semi-divine savior had been fulfilled. For these, like the Jews before them, they borrowed and reinterpreted symbols and plastic ways of expressing their hopes. They did not begin by inventing new ones. At Via Latina there is one Chris- tian invention, the visit of the Magi to Mary and the Babe, but in a relatively unimportant small panel. The Mother and Child, second only to the Crucifix, if second even to that, as a symbol of later Christian

xo This has been generally accepted since I published my dissertation, The Theology of Justin Martyr.

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piety, appears nowhere else in the catacomb. In contrast, Samson appears three or four times, Moses about ten times, Balaam three times. Even Absalom hanging by his hair had as much prominence as Mary. Not to speak of the five representations of Hercules. This does not mean that the Christians of the third or fourth century were less devoted to their Savior and church than the medieval Catholic with his icons. It does presume that the icons had not yet developed, and that Christians had to express their faith by allegorizing and reinterpreting the symbols of others.

Because several of the new motifs (actually not many of them) have been known from Christian mosaics and sarcophagi, Ferrua has concluded that the motifs were invented for these media, and from these

brought down to the paintings for the catacombs. For this the evidence is scanty indeed. Few mosaics and sarcophagi can be dated earlier than Via Latina. Indeed Ferrua dates Via Latina a century earlier than the

generally accepted date for the mosaics of Santa Maria Maggiore, and without these there exists hardly any evidence for Christian mosaics earlier than the Via Latina paintings. Nor can I recall any body of Christian sarcophagi with biblical scenes that can be treated with con- fidence as earlier than the fourth century. So I cannot see adequate basis for his assumption that Christian art was invented de novo for mosaics and sarcophagi. Quite apart from the problem of dating, the

sarcophagi, with their crowded representation of scene after scene from the OT and the NT, seem entirely secondary sources of symbolic material. They present what is much more apt to be a shorthand condensa- tion of larger scenes, often even identifiable only in terms of much more detail. We separate one incident from another on the sarcophagi as we know these scenes from fuller paintings and mosaics. Those who carved or designed the sarcophagi seemed to be trying, for the spiritual benefit of the deceased, to put on them as many tokens of salvation as possible, so that the congested and essential presentation might recall to the observer and register for the deceased his symbols of faith and hope. The sarcophagi give us interesting compositions as wholes, but the com-

positions are made up of abbreviations of scenes, allusions to incidents, not representations. When we see some of the scenes in Jewish remains or in the catacomb or mosaic art of Christians, it becomes overwhelmingly probable that the little scenes on the sarcophagi reflected paintings rather than originated them.

Whether the original compositions were in mosaic is another problem. Mosaics with many scenes presuppose elaborate structures, of which the Christians probably had very few if any before Constantine. Fur- thermore, apart from the lateness of extant Christian mosaics, the wide-

spread appearance of the paintings, as I said, seems to indicate a much more viable, more easily circulated medium than mosaics. By the time

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of the painting of Via Latina, many of the designs, especially those of birds and animals at the cup, may indeed appear in the catacomb as imitations of designs well known in mosaic form, though not necessarily in Christian buildings. It is for art historians, not for us, to debate this matter. But that the early Christian representations of biblical scenes were invented by Christians for mosaics or sarcophagi would seem to me a difficult thesis to make plausible.

In what medium the paintings and symbols arose matters relatively little for the historian of religion, whose primary aim is to reconstruct the structure of piety, the sense of religious values, the meaning of the symbolic designs, for those Christians who, if they could afford it, liked to be buried with them.

What the early Christians were doing in catacombs, mosaics, and sarcophagi alike was to present their faith. The great contribution of catacomb art is to show us a faith much simpler and more direct than the faith of the more involved theologians of the time. The presentations collectively bring us nearer to the theologians than I should presume the mass of Christians to have been, because those who did them or had them made in whatever media were the wealthy, and so probably the better educated. Even so, there was no space, and probably no need in their minds, to be buried with the pageant of Praeparatio Evangelica appropriate for a great basilica like the Santa Maria Maggiore, a Praeparatio which became as depicted a great Demonstratio, to use the title of another of Eusebius' treatises. Much more simply the Christians in their death were not arguing or demonstrating, but dying and hoping and believing.

The paintings tell us that they hoped in the great life-givers who had conquered death (Jonah, Daniel, the three Boys, and Lazarus). They hoped in the Eucharist (the multiplication of the loaves and the omni- presence of the vines and cup and, I believe, the baskets of flowers, which the animals and birds face, or eat, or drink); in the baptism (the migration scenes and perhaps Moses getting water from the rock and the ascension of Elijah); in their great champion who destroys evil, the alexikakos (Samson, Hercules, Moses with the dead Egyptians, Phinehas). Peter and Paul with Christ, or the twelve with Christ, or the "Physician" scene, seem to express their belief in the power of the church, temporal and eternal. But the twelve are a teaching twelve; Christ is enthroned with scrolls; Moses gets the divine revelation and teaches the people (or is it the Sermon on the Mount?); saints stand in glory holding their scrolls. These Christians were deeply oriented in their doctrinal tradition, and when they took over the mystical figures with scrolls (common in paganism) they proclaimed, like the theologians of the time, their faith that in contrast to the pagans they had the true mystery or Gnosis, as it was now more commonly called. They felt more aware of the religious

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values of pagan symbolism than Dvofrk" recognized, but even on the basis of Christian art known forty years ago he was aware that in contrast to the pagan mythological and poetic figures of the time Christians put their hope in the revelation of God in historic incidents and through great saviors who were not the products of longing and fancy but who had actually lived for the salvation of man. Strauss12 recalled this in- sight of Dvorik, and quoted it to show that it characterized the art of Dura as well. Both Jews and Christians, with faith in the realities of their revealed salvation, could face martyrdom in a way that amazed and finally disarmed the pagans. Out of the "New and True Judaism" would come the icons of later ages, which expressed faith more directly, but not, I believe, greater faith. The orants and saintly figures proclaimed directly, if in pagan form, their hope of eternal rapture. And yet, for all the new elements in Judeo-Christian art, the paintings show us what church historians have attempted to minimize, how much these people were still a part of ancient civilization. Such believers could be buried with the heroes and symbols of the Jews and pagans because what others vainly had sought in their heroes, what those figures and symbols had represented to others, they had found realized in Christ. But the symbols of the Robe, the philosopher-teacher, the alexikakos, as well as Victory, the cup, the peacocks, the thyrsus, could still be used along with the Jewish pictures of their saving heroes because the Chris- tians believed that in Christ they had really, and at last, available what pagans had poetically dreamed about, and Jews had only anticipated. The concentration in OT figures, and in pagan symbols which Jews had already adapted, shows how deeply Christians were shaping their Chris- tian hopes after the hopes of hellenized Jews in their own white-robed Great Men. As in language so in art the Christians put new meanings into old forms, and so kept lineal connection with the old meanings. We can really understand neither the old meanings nor the new unless we comprehend both.

Ix Max Dvorak, "Katakombenmalereien: Die Anfange der christlichen Kunst," in his Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte. I have not attempted to orient the present study with the long debate on the subject. C. Kraeling listed the most important titles in his The Synagogue [at Dura], p. 398. His summary there, however, of the "differences" between Dura and catacomb art ignores the similarities; and he did not have Via Latina.

1' H. Strauss, "Das Problem der Dura-Europas-Synagoge," Mitteilungsblatt [Tel- Aviv], 25 (2 August 1957), p. 3.

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#1 catacomb art - erwin r. good enough

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