“Jesus, when his three hours were run,
Bequeathed thee from the cross to me;
And oh! how can I love thy Son,
Sweet Mother, if I love not thee?”
We return to these pictures of the Catacombs, and we will content ourselves with an allusion only, preferring that the reader who is interested in them should examine them through his own, rather than through another's eyes. From a lunette in an arcosolio in the cemetery of S. Agnes is a picture which of late years has been frequently copied. It represents the Blessed Virgin with uplifted hands, seemingly in the act of intercession, with the Infant Jesus in her lap. In the cemetery of Domitilla is a picture of the Mother and Son, and four Magi offering their oblations. It may be well to remark that the Gospel history of the Adoration of the Wise Men from the East does not limit their number. We have somewhere seen it suggested that the restriction to three had its rise from the offerings presented—gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Another scene of the Adoration of the Magi is given with some difference of detail. The Virgin Mother is seated holding the Divine Son in her lap, above her head appears the star which guided the wise men to where the Infant lay. To the left is a somewhat youthful person, supposed to be S. Joseph. He holds in his hand a book, which the Cavaliere de Rossi very wisely and ingeniously interprets to be the writings of the evangelical prophet Isaiah, whose prophecies concerning the Messiah had now their fulfilment in the Infant Jesus.
Such are some of the many beautiful pictures which Roman art, through the indefatigable industry of de Rossi, has given us of the Blessed Virgin as represented in early ages. To other than jaundiced eyes, calmly and candidly studying them, they reveal the light in which they were so often viewed by the suffering children of the church amid the persecutions which attended the conflict between paganism and Christianity. In teaching us to honor the Mother of our Lord—Θεότοκος—they impress us with more distinct and more tangible thoughts of the incarnation of her Son.[174] With his usual discrimination and mastery of style, Dr. John Henry Newman has well said: “The Virgin and Child is not a mere modern idea; on the contrary, it is represented again and again, as every visitor to Rome is aware, in the paintings of the Catacombs. Mary is there drawn with the Divine Infant in her lap, she with hands extended in prayer, he with his hand in the attitude of blessing. No representation can more forcibly convey the doctrine of the high dignity of the Mother, and, I will add, of her power over her Son. Why should the memory of his time of subjection be so dear to Christians and so carefully preserved? The only question to be determined is the precise date of these remarkable monuments of the first age of Christianity. That they belong to the centuries of what Anglicans call the ‘undivided church’ is certain, but lately investigations have been pursued [pg 381] which place some of them at an earlier date than any one anticipated as possible.”[175]
One other topic remains to be considered before we pass on to some general reflections which early Christian art suggests. It was not uncommon for the artist in the first ages of the church to take subjects of heathen mythology, and invest them by his art with a Christian symbolism. The genius of Michael Angelo, so truly Catholic in taste and devout in expression, transplanted pagan forms from the broken temples of the elder civilization to the Christian churches of the new. He retouched them under the aureate light shed upon them by the reverent imagination of the Fathers. On the magnificent ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are painted by this master-hand the Sibyls, who in early times were regarded as the unconscious prophets of divine truth, uttering in their blindness crude intimations of the glory of him who was to be the fulfilment and completion of all shadows and of all types.[176] In the Catacombs may be seen a representation of Orpheus playing upon his lyre, and subduing by his melodious strains the ferocity of man and beast, and drawing even from inanimate creation by the power of music the subjects of his sway. Rocks and trees yielded to his lyric sweetness, the region of Plato opened to the sound of his “golden shell,” the wheel of Ixion ceased its revolutions, and Tityus forgot for the nonce the vulture that preyed on his vitals. The Thracian bard was the representative of the civilizer of savage men.
“Silvestres homines sacer interpresque Deorum
Cædibus et victu fœdo deterruit Orpheus;
Dictus ob hoc lenire tigres, rabidosque leones.”[177]