St. Peter, with a broad, coarse, powerful physiognomy, strongly characterised, holds two rolls; and St. John, with a long and very refined face, grey hair and beard, holds three rolls.
St. Jude, with a long white beard and very aquiline nose, holds one roll. St. Paul, bald in front, with long brown hair and beard, and a refined face, bears many rolls tied up together.
All the figures are on a gold ground, about six inches in height, very finely conceived, though, as is usual in Byzantine Art, formal and mechanical in execution. They look like small copies of very grand originals. The draperies are all classical; a pale violet or brown tunic and a white mantle, as in the old mosaics; the rolls in their hands corresponding with the number of their writings.
The Twelve Apostles.
The Twelve Apostles.
Next to those who recorded the word of God, were those called by Christ to the task of diffusing his doctrine, and sent to preach the kingdom of heaven ‘through all nations.’
The earliest representations of the Twelve Apostles appear to have been, like those of the Four Evangelists, purely emblematical: they were figured as twelve sheep, with Christ in the midst, as the Good Shepherd, bearing a lamb in his arms; or, much more frequently, Christ is himself the Lamb of God, raised on an eminence and crowned with a cruciform nimbus, and the apostles were ranged on each side as sheep. Instances are to be met with in the old Christian bas-reliefs. In the old Roman churches[145] we find this representation but little varied, and the situation is always the same. In the centre is the lamb standing on an eminence, from which flow the four rivers of Paradise; on one side six sheep issuing from the city of Jerusalem, on the other six sheep issuing from the city of Bethlehem, the whole disposed in a line forming a sort of frieze, just below the decoration of the vault of the apsis. The church of S. M. Maggiore exhibits the only exception I have met with; there we find a group of sheep, entering, not issuing from, the gates of Jerusalem and Bethlehem: in this case, however, the sheep may represent believers, or disciples in general, not the Twelve Apostles. Upon the great crucifix in the apsis of San Clemente, at Rome, are twelve doves, which appear to signify the Twelve Apostles.