67 St. Peter (Greek type, eleventh century)
The ancient Greek type of the head of St. Peter, ‘the Pilot of the Galilean lake,’ is so strongly characterised as to have the air of a portrait. It is either taken from the description of Nicephorus, so often quoted, or his description is taken from some very ancient representation: it certainly harmonises with all our preconceived notions of St. Peter’s temperament and character. He is a robust old man, with a broad forehead, and rather coarse features, an open undaunted countenance, short grey hair, and short thick beard, curled, and of a silvery white: according to the descriptive portrait of Nicephorus, he had red weak eyes,—a peculiarity which it has not been thought necessary to preserve in his effigies. In some early pictures he is bald on the top of the head, and the hair grows thick around in a circle, somewhat like the priestly tonsure; and in some examples this tonsure has the form of a triple row of curls close to the head, a kind of tiara. A curious exception to this predominant, almost universal, type is to be found in Anglo-Saxon Art,[161] where St. Peter is always beardless, and wears the tonsure; so that but for the keys, suspended to a ring on his finger, one might take him for an elderly monk. It is a tradition that the Gentiles shaved the head of St. Peter in order to make him an object of derision, and that this is the origin of the priestly tonsure.
68 St. Peter with one Key (Taddeo Gaddi)
The dress of St. Peter in the mosaics and Greek pictures is a blue tunic, with white drapery thrown over it, but in general the proper colours are a blue or green tunic with yellow drapery. On the early sarcophagi, and in the most ancient church mosaics, he bears merely a scroll or book, and, except in the character of the head, he is exactly like St. Paul: a little later we find him with the cross in one hand, and the Gospel in the other. The keys in his hand appear as his peculiar attribute about the eighth century. I have seen him with one great key, but in general he carries two keys, one of gold and one of silver, to absolve and to bind; or, according to another interpretation, one is of gold and one of iron, opening the gates of heaven and hell: occasionally, but rarely, he has a third key, expressing the dominion over heaven, and earth, and hell.[162]
St. Paul presents a striking contrast to St. Peter, in features as in character. There must have existed effigies of him in very early times, for St. Augustine says that a certain Marcellina, living in the second century, preserved in her Lararium, among her household gods, ‘the images of Homer, Pythagoras, Jesus Christ, and Paul the apostle.’ Chrysostom alludes to a portrait of Paul which hung in his chamber, but unfortunately he does not describe it. The earliest allusion to the personal appearance of St. Paul occurs in Lucian, where he is styled, in a tone of mocking disparagement, ‘the bald-headed Galilean with a hook-nose.’ The description given by Nicephorus, founded, we may presume, on tradition and on the existing portraits, has been the authority followed in the early representations. According to the ancient tradition, Paul was a man of small and meagre stature, with an aquiline nose, a high forehead, and sparkling eyes. In the Greek type the face is long and oval, the nose aquiline, the forehead high and bald, the hair brown, the beard long, flowing and pointed, and of a dark brown (in the Greek formula it is said that his beard should be greyish—I recollect no instance of St. Paul with a grey beard); his dress is like St. Peter’s, a blue tunic and white mantle; he has a book or scroll in one hand, sometimes twelve rolls, which designate his epistles. He bears the sword, his attribute in a double sense; it signifies the manner of his martyrdom, and it is emblematical of the good fight fought by the faithful Christian, armed with ‘the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God’ (Ephes. vi. 17). The life of St. Paul, after his conversion, was, as we know, one long spiritual combat:—‘perplexed, but not in despair; cast down, but not destroyed.’
69 St. Paul (Greek type, eleventh century)
These traditional characteristic types of the features and persons of the two greatest apostles were long adhered to. We find them most strictly followed in the old Greek mosaics, in the early Christian sculpture, and the early pictures; in all which the sturdy dignity and broad rustic features of St. Peter, and the elegant contemplative head of St. Paul, who looks like a Greek philosopher, form a most interesting and suggestive contrast. But, in later times, the old types, particularly in the head of St. Paul, were neglected and degraded. The best painters took care not to deviate wholly from the square head and short grey beard of St. Peter; but, from the time of Sixtus IV., we find substituted for the head of St. Paul an arbitrary representation, which varied according to the model chosen by the artist—which was sometimes a Roman porter or a German boor; sometimes the antique Jupiter or the bust of a Greek rhetorician.
I shall now give some examples, in chronological order, of the two great Apostles represented together, as Founders of the Church.