The conditions under which Christian art was cultivated in the early centuries were eminently unfavourable to its highest development. It was not, like pagan art, the æsthetic exponent of a dominant religion, enjoying the patronage of the great and the wealthy, adorning the numerous temples of the gods and the palaces and banquet chambers of the emperors and senators, commemorating the virtues of patriots and heroes, and bodying forth the conceptions of poets and seers. There was no place in the Christian system for such representations as the glorious sun-god, Apollo, or the lovely Aphrodite, or the sublime majesty of Jove, which are still the unapproached chefs d’œuvre of the sculptor’s skill. The beautiful myths of Homer and Hesiod were regarded with abhorrence, and the Christians were expressly forbidden to make any representation of the supreme object of their worship, a prohibition which in the early and purer days of Christianity they never transgressed.
Nevertheless, the testimony of the Catacombs gives evidence that art was not, as has been frequently asserted, entirely abjured by the primitive Christians on account of its idolatrous employment by the pagans.
They rather adopted and purified it for Christian purposes, just as they did the diverse elements of ancient civilization. It was not till increasing wealth and the growing corruptions of the church led to the more lavish employment of art and its perversion to superstitious uses that it called forth the condemnation of the Fathers of the early centuries.
The art of any people is an outgrowth and efflorescence of an internal living principle: and as is the tree so is its fruit. An adequate representation of its art being given, we may estimate, at least proximately, the moral condition of any age or community. It is the perennial expression of the phenomena of humanity. The iconography of the early centuries of Christianity is, therefore, a pictorial history of its development and of the successive changes it has undergone.[325] The corruptions of doctrine, the rise of dogmas, the strifes of heresiarchs and schismatics, are all reflected therein.[326]
The frescoes of the Catacombs are illustrations, inestimable in value, of the pure and lofty character of that primitive Christian life of which they were the offspring. They were the exponent of a mighty spiritual force, “seeking,” as Kugler remarks, “to typify in the earthly and perishing the abiding and eternal.”[327] The very intensity of that old Christian life under repression and persecution created a more imperious necessity for a religious symbolism as an expression of its deepest feelings and as a common sign of the faith. Early Christian
art, therefore, was not realistic and sensuous, but ideal and spiritual. It sought to express the inner essence, not the outer form.
Christianity has nothing to fear from the comparison of these remains of its primitive art with those of the pre-existing art of paganism. As little has Protestantism to fear their comparison with the monuments of that debased form of Christianity into which the early church so soon, alas! degenerated. On the one hand may be seen the infinite contrast between the abominable condition of society under the empire and the purity of life of the early Christians; and on the other, the gradual corruption of doctrine and practice as we approach the Byzantine age. The exhumation of Pompeii and the recent exploration of the Catacombs bring into sharp contrast Christian and pagan art. While traversing the deserted chambers of the former “two thousand years roll backward,” and we stand among the objects familiar to the gaze of the maids and matrons of the palmy days of Rome. But what a tale of the prevailing sensuality, what a practical commentary on the scathing sarcasms of Juvenal, the denunciations of the Fathers, and the awful portraiture of St. Paul, do we read in the polluting pictures on every side. Nothing gives a more vivid conception of the appalling degradation of pagan society in the first century of the Christian era than the disinterred art of that Roman Sodom. Amid the silence and gloom of the Catacombs we are transported to an entirely different world; we breathe a purer moral atmosphere; we are surrounded by the evidences of an infinitely nobler social life; we are struck with the immeasurable superiority in all the elements of true dignity and grandeur of the lowly and persecuted Christians to the highest development of ancient civilization.
The decoration of these subterranean crypts is the first employment of art by the early Christians of which we have any remains. A universal instinct leads us to beautify the sepulchres of the departed. This is seen alike in the rude funeral totem of the American savage, in the massive mausolea of the Appian Way, and in the magnificent Moorish tombs of the Alhambra.[328] It is not, therefore, remarkable that the primitive Christians adorned with religious paintings, expressive of their faith and hope, the graves of the dead, or in times of persecution traced upon the martyr’s tomb the crown and palm, emblems of victory, or the dove and olive branch, the beautiful symbol of peace. It must not, however, be supposed that the first beginnings of Christian art were rude and formless essays, such as we see among barbarous tribes. The primitive believers had not so much to create the principles of art as to adapt an art already fully developed to the expression of Christian thought. Like the neophyte converts from heathenism, pagan art had to be baptized into the service of Christianity. “The germs of a new life,” says Dr. Lübke, “were in embryo in the dying antique world. Ancient art was the garment in which the young and world-agitating ideas of Christianity were compelled to veil themselves.”[329] Hence the earlier paintings are the superior in execution,
and manifest a richness, a vigour and freedom like that of the best specimens of the classic period. Their design is more correct, their ornamentation more chaste and elegant, and the accessories more graceful than in the later examples. These shared the gradual decline which characterized the art of the dying empire, becoming more impoverished in conception, stiff in manner, and conventional and hieratic in type, till they sink into the barbarism of the Byzantine period.
This is contrary to the opinion which has till recently been entertained. Lord Lindsay asserts of the paintings of the Catacombs that, “considered as works of art, they are but poor productions—the meagreness of invention only equalled by the feebleness of execution—inferior, generally speaking, to the worst specimens of contemporary heathen art.”[330] But this characterization was the result of imperfect acquaintance with the subject. Indeed, he speaks of the Catacombs as “for the most part closed up and inaccessible, and the frescoes obliterated by time and destroyed.” But recent discoveries have brought to light many important examples which completely disprove his depreciatory estimate. In many of the newly opened crypts the colours are as fresh as if applied yesterday; and, as regards style and execution, the frescoes of the Catacombs “approach,” says the eminent art critic, Kugler, “very near to the wall paintings of the best period of the empire.”[331] No one can look through the magnificent volumes of Perret without being struck with the grace, vigour, and classic beauty of many of the paintings there reproduced. It is admitted that the French artists have “touched up” the faded colours, and some of the pictures