Subjects from the Old Testament are more numerous in proportion to the whole than would have been anticipated. This is also a result and illustration of the allegorical nature of the series. “Rome,” says Lord Lindsay, “seems to have adopted from the first, and steadily adhered to, a system of typical parallelism—of veiling the great incidents of redemption, and the sufferings, faith, and hopes of the church under the parallel and typical events of the patriarchal and Jewish dispensations.”[479] We can refer in detail to only the more striking of these biblical scenes. For
convenience of treatment we will include here those sculptured on the sarcophagi as well as those painted on the walls. The temptation and fall of our first parents is a frequent subject, and meets with considerable variety of treatment.[480] They are generally shown as standing by the tree of knowledge, around which the serpent coils, and receiving from him the fruit
“Whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our woe.”
In the following example from the Catacomb of Callixtus, the fig-leaf aprons with which they try to hide their guilty shame indicate that the act of disobedience has been already consummated.
Fig. 62.—The Temptation and Fall.
On a sarcophagus in the Lateran Museum is a bas relief in which Our Lord, as the representative of the Eternal Father, is seen standing between Adam and Eve, and giving to the former a sheaf of grain, the symbol that by the sweat of his brow he should eat bread, and to the latter a lamb, that she may work diligently with her hands in the domestic employment of spinning—the allotted labour of woman in every age. Perhaps, also, as Dr. Northcote suggests, the lamb was a symbol and mute prophecy of “the Lamb of God whom the second Eve was to bring forth to atone for all the evil that the first Eve had brought upon mankind.”