(b) As Byzantine art in the East, a revival of Asiatic art.
The beginning of Christian plastic and pictorial art is to be looked for in subterranean caves; in catacombs, used by Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Etruskans, and Romans as burial-places. The deep but simple doctrines of Christ were at first hidden in symbols, types, allegories and emblems. In a Symbol we try to express a general idea by a special outward sign, totally heterogeneous in form to the meaning. Geometrical figures, plants, and animals, furnish the elements of symbolism. In the Allegory the artist represents congruities, traces connections, unites analogies and separates differences. Imagination has in allegories an inexhaustible field for composition. Types are signs, arbitrarily interpreted as meaning something, which they may or may not mean. Emblems with the Greeks were golden or silver figures which could be detached from vessels. With the Romans the word was used as a synonym for symbol or metaphor. They became with us Christians signs in colours. White or blue was the emblem of innocence, red of joy, black of mourning, green of hope, and purple of power or dignity.
Myths generally had their origin in symbols and allegories, which found interpreters, commentators, exegists, and expounders in the priests of the ancient world. Later, the myths were taken up by poets and artists, and the dogmatic explanations of mystic signs were transformed into legends, tales, sagas, or even into historical facts. Nothing affords greater delight to the inquisitive mind of man than a mystic sign! The more unintelligible such a sign is, the more welcome it is to the childish creature. Anything veiled in doubt, shrouded in a symbol or type, has a peculiar charm. Anything that can only be guessed at, or dimly felt, is more admired than that which lies clearly before our perceptive faculty. ‘Mysteries were taught in symbols, in darkness at night-time; the symbolic itself is to be compared to night and darkness,’ says Demetrius. No wonder that symbols were adopted by the first followers of Christ. They were too near to Egypt; the ancient world had not yet altogether lost its hold on the minds of the masses, and they could not have avoided availing themselves of forms which were used by Indians, Greeks, Egyptians, or Romans.
In the old catacombs of St. Sebastiano, St. Calisto, St. Lorenzo, and Sta. Agnese at Rome, extending altogether to about 750 miles, and in those of St. Gennaro de Poveri, Sta. Maria della Sanitá, and Sta. Maria della Vita at Naples, we find some attempts at symbolism; the cross, the monogram of Christ’s name ΧΡ {CHR}; or an ΑΩ {AÔ}, symbolical of the beginning and the end of all things; a palm branch, doves, the piscis vesica, and here and there a lamb. But these signs belong to the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. The inscriptions do not go farther back than the second century. The homely simplicity of the early Christians is distinctly to be traced in the absence of all symbolic decoration during the first two centuries. Gradually the Christians passed through the phase of geometrical ornamentation. Triangles and circles, crosses and squares, squares divided into four squares, or the square taken three times, giving twelve points, which number contains the sacred numbers; three (the Trinity), five (the five sacred wounds of Christ), seven (the seven cardinal virtues, or the seven days of Creation), and twelve (the twelve apostles), made their appearance. Seven was a holy and mystic number with all the ancient nations. There were seven planets, and seven colours in olden times; Apollo’s lyre had seven strings; Pan used seven pipes for his flute. There are seven days of the week; seven or three times seven are the critical days in medicine; there were seven branches to the candlestick of the Jews in the Temple of Jerusalem. Seven years Jacob had to serve for Leah; and seven others for Rachel; seven were the ears and kine of which Pharaoh dreamt; seven were the gods in Scandinavian mythology; seven were the sufferings of the Virgin Mary; seven the cardinal virtues; seven the deadly sins; seven are the sacraments of the Romish Church. We cannot fail to see in the minutest details of history and art, philosophy and religious systems, an eternally progressing ‘one-ness’ pervading humanity as a great whole.
Scarcely had the Christians adopted these signs, when they passed on to the next phase, adorning churches and tombs, altars and sacred vessels, with emblems taken from the vegetable and animal kingdoms, to serve as the holy visible outward signs of some sacred inward grace or virtue. What was immortal was to be expressed in mortal forms, and the finite was to embody the infinite. Again, the meaning hallowed the form; again, by degrees, the form became all, and the spirit was altogether lost through the mere outward sign. Art suffered for centuries under the gloomy pressure of symbolism, and in striving to disentangle itself, produced marvels, but it was only freed and attained higher forms of beauty again, when humanity had gone back to those laws, which when followed out had produced forms perfect in themselves.
For centuries art revelled in the reproduction of symbolical crows, eagles, peacocks, doves, gridirons, pitchers, beehives, oxen, pigs, bulls, geese, violins, fishes, &c., as the attributes of St. Sebastian, St. John, Sta. Barbara, St. Thomas of Aquin, St. Cyprian, St. Narcissus, St. Bernard, St. Sebaldus, St. Anthony, St. Martin, St. Genesius, St. Chrysogonus, &c. A whole science arose out of these symbols and emblems: Iconology, which differs only in form from mythology. The mere phenomena of nature were no longer embodied; the individual spirit that lived in the form, became all in all. We were thus introduced to a two-fold world by Christian art.
(1) Into a spiritual world, in which our intellect moved, as it were, in a circle. We took our beginning in the infinite, lost our transitory bodily form, and returned to the infinite from which we emanated—a kind of idealisation of the corporeal.
(2) A world of external forms, which in their individual phenomena had only a meaning as the fragile temporary vessels of the eternal Spirit; this Spirit was no longer a universal sum total by which the individual was hereafter absorbed, but was assumed to remain individualised through all eternity. Artists and men worked not only for this world, but their deeds were to outlast all time to come. In this two-fold world, Christian art went through the following phases:—
(a) Through a historical phase, which commenced with Christ’s birth, life, death, and resurrection, as the new central point of all things. The eternal Spirit was embodied, worked in a finite form, and freed from it, regained its absolute divinity. This led in time to sublime historical sketches in sculpture and painting.
(b) Through a religious phase. The spirit, freed and redeemed by Christ, sought in deeds of harmonious love totally new spheres of action. Crystals, flowers, trees, landscapes, animals and men, were interwoven to proclaim not only outward beauty, as with the Greeks, but a union of the inorganic and the organic, the ancient and the new worlds, in honour of one God in three emanations or personifications.