These first enrolled with the followers of Christ, pagans, whose convictions impelled them to accept the Redeemer, offered to their inquiring hearts, commenced anew lives with many pagan prejudices and customs clinging to them.
Some of them were incisori, and it is interesting to observe among the comparatively few gems of this epoch the evidence of transition. Many of these gems unquestionably bearing some of the simpler Christian decoration were still adorned with pagan designs. On one we find Astarte; on others, Serapis, Mercury, Venus, or Apollo. The divinity, the loveliness of expression sometimes given to these transition portraits seem to have been the work of artists whose souls were imbued with the singular beauty of that Divine Man whom Publius Lentulus announced to the Senate as “the prophet of truth,” a man whose personal beauty excelled all human creatures—and yet the effigy really was of some pagan deity. These gems, however, which were characterized by remnants of pagan decoration, were only of the epoch immediately succeeding the institution of the sect of “followers of Christ,” and preceding the dawning struggle of the “Early Christians,” to establish their belief and to retain their rights as citizens. They renounced the idolatrous religion of the nation, and their glyptic work was generally typical of the purity and simplicity of their faith and their devotion to its observance.
BYZANTINE.
One might naturally suppose that the gems of the early Christians would abound in representations of scriptural events and incidents of the life of Christ. Such was not the case; these subjects were abundantly produced by the Byzantines about the fifth century A. D. This can be accounted for from the fact that most of these subject-gems were engraved to decorate the sacred vessels and paraphernalia of the church altars in Byzantium.
With Constantine we find the Byzantine epoch in its maturity. With the simplicity of the early Christians we have remarked that everything like representation of the Godhead was eliminated or rather forbidden.
It was the Byzantines who created for the gem market token cameos and intaglios on which were incised effigies of the Holy Family, and incidents in every phase in that series of events that never has been equalled in historic interest in the records of time: the birth, life, trial, sufferings, death, and resurrection of the Son of God.
Elaborate details characterized the cameos picturing the triumphs of that Christian emperor and the portraiture of his mother Helena.
SOMMERVILLE COLLECTION.