church, especially in Russia, where there is an intense and superstitious reverence for pictures, known nowhere else. Many of the churches are completely covered with paintings, which are valued, not for their execution, for they are often hideously ugly, but as a sort of talismans on account of their supposed religious sanctity.[356] Thus art, which is the daughter of paganism, relapsing into the service of superstition, has corrupted, and often paganized, Christianity, as Solomon’s heathen wives turned his heart from the worship of the true God to the practice of idolatry. Lecky attributes this degradation of style to the latent Manicheism of the dark ages, to the monkish fear of beauty as a deadly temptation, and to the terrible pictures of Dante, which opened up such an abyss of horrors to the imagination. But by means of this mediæval art, imperfect, and even grotesque as it often was, would be brought vividly before the minds of the people of a rude and barbarous age an intense conception of the scenes of Christ’s passion, and a realistic sense of the punishment of the lost.
It will be convenient to treat the art of the Catacombs under the two heads of symbolical and biblical paintings, and to discuss separately the gilt glasses and other objects of interest found in these crypts. De Rossi divides the subject into symbolical, allegorical, biblical, and liturgical paintings; but some of these divisions, as for instance, the last, assumes the whole question of the purport and interpretation of these pictures.
[325] M. Didron’s Iconographie Chrétienne is a valuable contribution on this important subject.
[326] In the beautiful figure of Pressensé, all art is an Æolian harp, shivering with the breezes that pass over it.
[327] Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, p. xii.
[328] One of the earliest indications of human existence on the planet is a sepulchral cave in the post-pliocene drift at Aurignac, in France, in which are evidences of the celebration of the funeral banquet and other sepulchral rites. “The artificially closed Catacomb,” says Dr. Wilson, “the sepulchred dead, the gifts within, the ashes and débris of the last funeral feast without, ... all tell the ever-recurring story of reverent piety, unavailing sorrow, and the instinctive faith in a future life which dwells in the breast of the rudest savage.”—“Prehistoric Man,” by Daniel Wilson, LL.D., Toronto University, p. 84.
[329] “History of Art,” by Dr. Wilhelm Lübke, vol. i, p. 275.
[330] “History of Christian Art,” vol. i, p. 39.
[331] Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, p. 14.
[332] Mr. J. H. Parker refers to the fifth or sixth century many paintings which De Rossi ascribes to the second or third. These eminent authorities represent two extremes of opinion. Probably the truth lies between them.