The First Christian Art and its Early Developments - Lord Richard Harries

Good afternoon everyone, it is very good to be with you again. I am looking forward to sharing this course of conferences with you. Now almost all of the oldest Christian art that has survived is in the Roman catacombs and we have art there from sort of the third to the fifth century under the current tunic streets and of course many of you will have visited them just to remind you, Of course, they weren't places where Christians huddled away from persecution, they were Christian burial places, uh, and it's no surprise, therefore, that actually what we have mostly are inscriptions.

About 45,000 inscriptions have survived from that

early

period, more than half in Rome and 75% are funerary in nature and 133% of them have an unequivocal Christian symbol and obviously we have an unequivocal Christian symbol from the 3rd century with the Alpha and the Omega and the P of PS on a cross, but of course the symbolism developed and became more sophisticated, here we have a funeral plaque for a lady called Antonia, if you look. at the top you can see the letters there for o o i n i a just up at the top there uh yes there we are look look Antonia um and uh of course there we have an anchor uh the anchor was a symbol of hope in the Roman world and it was adopted by Christians as a symbol of hope, but it also forms a crude cross, two rather strange little fish.

The meaning of this seems to be related to what a Talian theologian said in the 2nd century. when he described Christians, swimmers, Christians as little fish swimming in the waters of baptism and holding on to the Cross of Christ, then the symbolism becomes a little more sophisticated, and here, of course, is a very famous

early

Christian symbol. from the catacombs uh the fish and I'm sure everyone knows that the fish was an early Christian symbol because the

first

uh the word fish in Greece Greek ichus uh forms the

first

letters of Jesus Christ Son of God savior that's why the fish was an important early Christian symbol and of course here it is linked with the multiplication of the loaves or the bread of the Eucharist or a combination of the birth of both.

Now what characterizes this very ancient Christian art is that simply. reflects the Ro style of Roman art at that time and very often Roman images, here this fresco of Christ as the Good Shepherd, the Good Shepherd was an image in Roman art and in Christian art, and you can imagine how Christian The Their eyes lit up when they saw that because it obviously fit very well with what is said in the gospel of Saint John I am the good Shepherd and there are many images of Christ as the Good Shepherd and we also have very famous images. and quite beautiful carvings like this one of Christ the Good Shepherd um and you can see uh that it is in the style of any other Roman statuary of the time now here is a non-Christian image uh it is the apotheosis of the emperor the emperor uh being changed and rising R rising to the sky uh it reflects the period in the Roman Empire when the emperors were adopting Saul, the god of the sun, so you can see the rays around the head there, um and it was actually the beginning of some kind of feeling for Mony ISM in the Roman world among the popular religion, so it is completely pagan.

Imagine the extraordinary surprise when, in the last century, digging beneath the great church of St. Peter in Rome, they saw this and the scholars believe, uh, this, uh, what it was. uh found under Saint Peter and dates from the year 250 to 275 is actually Jesus uh represented in the form of an apotheosis um but instead of uh the stars uh but very similar to the stars of the Sun God Salt uh they are doing a little bit more of a Halo at least that's what the scholars who actually discovered this and have worked on it believe that this type of foliage around here is very typical Roman mosaic of the time, this is a mosaic, but That's such an amazing illustration, isn't it? ?

And it shows how far those early Christians were willing to go in taking and baptizing Christian imagery, now obviously one of the themes above all that the Christians in the catacombs wanted to convey to the people. uh it was the idea of ​​God as protector um remember that at that time uh of course the scriptures referred to the Old Testament scriptures uh and therefore the Christians plundered the Hebrew scriptures to find images that expressed their beliefs uh and this is one which occurs frequently in Daniel in L's D, dates back to chapters 2 and 3 of Daniel, where Daniel refused to obey King Nebuchadnezzar and worship idols and so was thrown into a pit of lons, but due to the protection of God. they kept him safe and that is a very familiar image in older Christian art and so is this one from chapters 2 and 3 of the Book of Daniel.

Nebuchadnezzar orders people to worship idols. Three boys, Shadrach Misac and Abednego, refused to do so. They are thrown into Bernie's fiery furnace, but they are miraculously protected, so they wanted to express through these images the idea that God was protecting them through the spasmodic persecution of the time when the church was persecuted from time to time. and very intensely. when he was persecuted and also, of course, through the ordeal of death now in the catacombs, after a period towards the end of the second century and the beginning of the third century, we began to have images of Jesus, and you can imagine why this appeared in particular, because it is the theme of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead uh Jesus said in relation to that story in the gospel of Saint John I am the resurrection and the life Jesus rose from the dead he raised Lazarus from the dead and was able to resurrect the Christians who were Buried in the catacombs, there is now a very familiar narrative of that period and eventually, after a while, they began to develop narrative stories as well as individual images, it is the Jonah cycle.

At the end, there you can see Jonah being thrown off the ship. there he was swallowed by the whale there he regurgitated him and here now this is a very, very interesting symbol: it is Jonah in Paradise but, of course, the biblical story says nothing about Jonah resting under this beautiful vine. It tells the story of a sash that grew quickly and then withered and got really tired of it because it withered so they've twisted the story slightly um and uh they've focused on this now this is actually the exact picture of the Roman myth of endeman and selini the goddess of the moon uh the uh emian uh was a very beautiful young man uh young man uh the Moon fell in love with this young man when the moon saw this young man sleeping uh and uh performed some kind of trick in order keep to that young man sleeping happily ever after so that the moon could continue to look at this young man forever this was a Roman myth uh that was depicted in art just like that and again the Christian eyes lit up and said well this would be a wonderful ending for the Jonah cycle in which Jonah rests in great peace, with great leisure in Paradise, is another dramatic and dramatic example of how those early Christians had no qualms about assuming Christian, non-Christian images that they felt.

They express their Christian beliefs. now there's another um from the Jonah cycle that you can see there, there's the ship, there's the whale and there's Jonah, up there, the various images of His too and this highlights a point that not only Christians expressed their Fresh beliefs go to the worlds from the walls of the catacombs, but as soon as they could, they carved them into sarcophagi. Large stone coffins and this is a stone coffin for an early Christian, probably late 3rd early 4th century. again brings up another point, very little Christian art from the 9th century has survived why because because there was this terrible period known as iconoclasm that ruled and raged on and off for two centuries, from the 7th to the 9th century, when the iconic The Class destroyed all the Christian art they could get their hands on and obviously as a result of that they only survived if the materials were very durable or very hidden and one of the reasons we have a good number of sarcophagi of course is because they are Stone and they survive well and here is another sarcophagus, a very famous one called the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, which is in the Papal Museum in the Vatican.

I'm not going to talk about all the scenes in detail this morning. I'm going to do that on one of the sarcophagi in another of my talks, but this is just to show you that when Christians started to become a little richer and a little more respectable in society, they could too. they have the same type of sarcophagus when they died as the pagans and this is Junius Bassus uh who is who a Christian uh who has a sarcophagus carved in the same way as any Roman knight or nobleman, but with Christian themes instead of Roman uh Pagan images and here's another sarcophagus, uh, just to give you an example, you can see, we're not going to talk about this one in detail, but you can see, for example, down there, there's Jesus riding toward Jerusalem on a donkey, the scenes from life and death of Christ are told there in stone carvings, and here is another one that is by Rena, which still uses very basic Christian images, there is Christ with a halo and there.

There are Christians who surround him, follow him and follow him. Palm trees were a ubiquitous symbol of paradise for early Christians. So this is Paradise with the palm trees and Christ with his Christian followers. Now this is a non-Christian. image uh this is one of the fun portraits um those of you who have been to any large museum and have seen Egyptian mummies uh will have noticed that in the first century 2nd and 3rd century mummies, particularly in Egypt, they put a piece of wood where there would be state the face and they painted a portrait of the person and this is a fun portrait of a young man of a mom, obviously she died relatively young and you can see that kind of SE Roman style. the first second third century the same kind of style that you saw in the Pompeii portraits if you've been to Pompeii now look at this this of course is St.

Peter one of the few early icons that survived this one is from the 6th century and it survived because it was kept in sini and you will see that there is a very strong stylistic resemblance between the funny portrait and Peter, so again it reflects the artistic style of the time um. I've pushed something I didn't mean to do, but still, I'm not quite sure how I can get it out, that is, anyway, we'll push someone, maybe James, you could tell me. how to take that off without ruining everything my finger turned towards evil there we are you still there we are um also uh in uh siai uh there is a wonderful mosaic of uh Moses receiving the law uh Moses removing his feet before the burning bush and of course it they did with Moses because the Monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Mount Siai is built in the place where they thought that Moses saw the burning bush and also received the Law and also on Mount Sinai is this. wonderful applications Mosaic of the Transfiguration The Family Transfiguration uh images that have persisted virtually unchanged from that time to the present uh and this is the first very good example dating from the 6th century CE in the church there uh other icons have also survived in siai uh this is another uh maybe a little uh uh after the boys in the fary fmis these images persist although curiously Daniel in the last and these boys in the fiery furnace finally become extinct were not so relevant to later Christians um here uh you will see the angel there um because the Book of Daniel says that there was a mysterious angelic figure that was with them protecting them um you will see that the uh boys appear to be dressed in a Persian costume and were taken by the early Christians as a kind of down payment of the three wise men who came from Persia to worship Jesus Jus and the image of the angel there was interpreted by Christians, not only as an angel that would protect us in difficult times, but it is an image of Christ himself who would rescue our souls from limbo.

Here is just another example of an Ascension of an icon that has survived a little later from the 9th to the 10th century showing Palestinian influence. You see, it's somewhat classic in its lines, but it has its own particular charm of the Ascension of Christ, and then another icon that has survived from there and dates back to the 6th century, of Mary surrounded by the side. she to uh Soldier uh Saints showing that uh in the 6th century uh the person of Mary had begun to receive uh great importance and prominence, so those icons survived uh and can be seen in the Monastery of Saint Catherine in SII uh Today in day, what other materials survive the great Ian Clasm period?

Well, ivory, we have quite a bit of ivory from the first thousand years and this is what was known as a consular diptych when a person was appointed consul in Rome. They made an ivory diptych. for them for his time in office and this obviously reflects the time when that consul was a Christian and if you look up here you can see a cross up there and that is an angelic figure as well, of course, now one of the places where there are a magnificent treasure of early Christian AR is Rena and some of you will have been to Rena, three large churches, two dedicated to Saint Apollinaris, uh, Saint Apollinaris in class or by the port, which is this s Apollinari noovo and San Vitali the wonderful most wonderful collection of sixth century mosaics from the time when the Great Justinian was the Emperor uh here these are the applications of sari in class in class to uhyou can see uh there the saint uh here is a sheep that represents the Christians and above there you can see Don't you see it's a figure of Christ and this is heaven um and uh this is a close up of it you get a better view of it there something like a kind of sensation because of its wonderful uh wonderful colors um or everything again you see it tries to reflect uh Paradise, those trees, those flowers that reflect Paradise as, of course, it is in Islam.

Nowadays green is the color of paradise, that's relatively simple, but now when we get to San Vitali we get even more interesting images, here is the great emperor uh Justinian uh surrounded by bishop Maximus uh and uh ious uh deacons and priests and of course it is Justinian uh in the Eucharist bringing the Eucharistic bread as an offering in the eukar in the Eucharist so intertwined uh we were what we would call the church and say that it was a papalism of Cesaro at that time uh the emperor was seen as the viceregent of God on Earth and worked uh hand in hand with the patriarch of Constantinople uh and uh they express it with great processions in the great church of haa Sofia in Constantinople in which the emperor would bring the bread for the Eucharist no less notable is his wife Theodora was once a chorus girl, if not something even more shameful, a very, very notable lady who saved Just's life and indeed the entire Byzantine Empire at that stage simply because of her, her bravery when her husband Justinian was beginning to show cowardice.

This is a kind of wonderful and mysterious thing that is sometimes found in Christian representations at this time of a curtain being drawn indicating there. There is a kind of supreme mystery behind it, so Theodora also appears in the great procession in haa sopia for the Eucharist with her husband now, at that time people did not read the Bible in a literal and very direct way, the idea of read. the Bible in a kind of literal and direct way would have been totally foreign to most Christians for most of Christian history they thought the Bible had at least four different kinds of meaning uh allegorical moral and spiritual spirit and God knows what more and therefore when you read the biblical stories that you were looking for you were always looking for these other types of meaning now this is from the church of San Vitali in uh Rena obviously reflects a time when the Eucharist is of fundamental importance for Christians uh because we have a eucharistic table there this is on top of the eucharistic table in the church it is a mosaic uh and you have two figures from the Old Testament there uh you have Abel uh and Abel uh it is said in the Bible that he presented his offering to God and that is what is doing and melkisedek this strange figure melkisedek uh we who read know nothing practically nothing about him appears in the Old Testament very suddenly after Abraham won a battle uh and he simply referred to it as melkisedek uh who was uh priest of the most Alto Melis the king brought bread and wine and he was the priest of the Most High God.

The wonderfully mysterious statement seems to have very little context, uh, reference to the context of MTH. The king brought bread and wine and was a priest of the Most High. God but again you can see how Christian eyes and minds lit up when they saw that and they said ah yes this is a prefiguration of the Eucharist and so Melkisedek appears with his offering because he brought Bread and Wine and was a priest of the highest God, uh , foreshadowing Christ, our great high priest H, and this is another one of those wonderful symbolic scenes, uh. I'll show you a little closer in the middle, but you might also get the feeling of how. it looks uh it's in an arch uh there Mosaic AR uh and if we look at it a little bit closer, I'm afraid I couldn't get a better reproduction of this than this, but I hope you can see it, but again I have a Eucharistic table and in a On one side you have Abraham providing hospitality to three angelic figures and on the other side you have Abraham about to slaughter his son Isaac, but is prevented from doing so by God, now Abraham, of course, was a very, very important figure for the early Christians, prefiguring Christ in all kinds of ways now this scene uh this on this side uh emerges from the Old Testament story uh where apparently three divine strangers uh strangers appeared before Abraham and Abraham offered them hospitality and they revealed their divine provenance and the The early church took this as a foreshadowing of the holy trinity of God, so this was a very, very important image for the early Christians, but not just an image. of the Holy Trinity there is the Holy Trinity that invites us to share the Eucharist which is to share the Divine life and some of you will know the wonderful 14th century icon of this scene by Andre Rublev, perhaps the greatest ion that has ever been painted deeply moving with Three Angels behind the table So Graceful and as if inviting the viewer And to share the Divine Life and do so by sharing the Divine banquet in the Eucharist now this image here uh of Abraham and of Abel and melkisedek that we showed before there uh there and there and there uh this is still reflected Ed uh in uh the words uh trient of the Trientine mass uh Latin of the words of the Roman Catholic Church that were adapted from the derivative of ancient Roman law this is what the prayer says in that Eucharist accept as you accepted to accept the offerings of Abel your righteous servant and the sacrifice of Abraham our patriarch and what your high priest Melchizedek offered you as a holy and blameless sacrifice. victim, as you see here, you often get in Christian art and in Christian history the wonderful sense of continuity, that these figures that were interpreted very early as harbingers of Christ represented in art from an early stage, are reflected in the words of the Eucharistic prayer and continue to emerge in Christian art throughout the centuries.

Now I'm showing this again deliberately because before we focused on Justinian in his Eucharistic prayer, this is his bishop, uh Max maximianus, and what he has here is, of course, a Bible, a wonderfully Beed Bible uh . Um and uh one of the important points to highlight about this period that we're talking about the 3rd and 4th century now and the 5th century is that Christianity emerged as a book religion, a book religion um and very often early Christianity. . The books are called codices or codices which come from the word codex meaning a block of wood. Judaism was seen as a religion of the scroll and Christianity as a religion of the book.

Obviously, having books instead of scrolls made illustration possible if you illustrate. Parchments become erased and damaged very quickly, but books can contain, safeguard and preserve illustrations in a much more possible way and what we get during this period is what has been well described as the costly materialization of the Bible. Materials were used, you can see the jewels there and the expensive covering, and it was used liturgically, as you can see, it is being presented in the Eucharist, the Old Testament, as we would call it in the New Testament, was seen as a whole. with the New Testament replacing the old, so we have supersessionism, a view with which most Christians today are very unhappy and therefore in an illustration of which I am afraid I was unable to obtain a copy , but I will only tell you about her.

In this illust in that illustration appears Moses with the book of the law Mary with Jesus and ecclesia or the church with the Bible and in this Express the view that the revealed word of God in Judaism is fulfilled in Jesus the word and this is brought to Us by the church Through the Bible, uh, whose words point to Jesus, uh, the word, uh, so there we have this physicalization of the Bible, uh, and there's a close-up of it and you get a view even better of the jewelry. there and its value and we get some wonderful copies of the first Bibles, this one is known as the gospel copi.

You can see the great richness of this gold on the page, the wonderful printing, or rather calligraphy, and at the bottom of the page there is always a gospel scene, this is Jesus healing the blind man and here is another wonderful gospel from the 6th century , the Rosano gospels, this shows Jesus raising Lazarus, and here are the Old Testament prophets and them. They are named and they are pointing out through the Scriptures that they are associated with the fact that Jesus, who is the Resurrection, the Life that would raise the dead, so the Old Testament, the New Testament, is seen as one of the settings that they replace. uh, the other uh, these were wonderfully, wonderfully, uh rich and valuable um uh Bibles, they could rarely be commissioned by emperors um and uh, of course, they also had wonderful covers, it's funny that we went straight to that one um, this is um uh some of you possibly uh I'm going to I'm moving I'm moving to a slightly different period uh now or rather different to a similar period but moving a little further west because most of the art that What I have shown you so far comes from the Christian East centered in Constantinople, the Eastern Roman Empire, what about the West?

Well, of course, the West had fallen into a state of disarray because Rome fell to the Vandals in 410 tribes moving around Europe. from the East it put pressure on the various tribes, gosth, vandals, viigo, etc., it moved down, in fact, it moved up to Spain, um, and the pressure of Islam went up, uh, from the South, it was a very , very difficult for the West, uh, but uh. Under Charlemagne, who was crowned the first emperor of the Christian Roman Empire in the year 800, the Christian West began to recover and also had the opportunity, therefore, to express its faith in an art that would probably survive now, that is Aran .

The place where Charlamagne built his church has the same architectural style as San Vitali in Rena that I just showed you and this is the type of ivory book cover that also came from this period and survived. This is Matthew writing because in these gospels they also showed. I like to show the different writers of the gospels. This is Matthew. And here is a water bucket dating from 860 to 880 of the Carolingian art period. you can see beautifully carved figures wonderfully valuable but it had a surgical use um and uh here's another Ivory book cover uh Christ and the apostles dated between 850 and 890 uh here's another bucket of water again from this kind of Carolingian period and then, later, Aonian art because there was another revival of Christian art under the emperors of the Aonian Empire who came after Charlamagne um and here is another ivory plaque or book cover of the women uh in the tomb uh can you see uh what wonderful works of art, these are.

I'm not going to talk more about Christian art in the West in later talks, but I just want to give you a glimpse of some of the things that were happening in the west under Charlemagne and Otto, what they were really trying to do was revive classical Christian art. from the time of Justinian and Constantine. There was a classical revival under Charlemagne and also under Otto as Very often in the past they returned to classical prototypes to revive their own art, as of course we did in the West at the time of the Renaissance. But the classical art they returned to was not pagan art.

Rome, uh, it was the art of uh Christian, uh, Constantine and his Emperor and maybe even more so the art of Justinian in the 6th century and his great Byzantine Empire, so you have this classic Renaissance, but as I say, it's a classic Renaissance of those previous ones. Christian periods, but there was a very good period for art, both under the chamagne and with the Ottonians, um and again from this kind of period, uh, books, uh, Western books, this is, uh, Saint Egbert, you can see the kind of some of the kind of books that are being produced and what's further west and everything is very well in France Charlemagne was king of the Frankish Franks before it was the first Roman Empire what's further west?

Well, some of you will recognize that this is from the book of Kel around the year 800 an initial letter another of the ways that they made these books works of art of course they decorated the initial letter of a page in a very very elaborate way uh and uh here we have an eagle head from the same book of hell with a very characteristic Celtic style now we come to the last type of period that I want to talk about today after this terrible fight between Iona Jewels the icon lovers and the Icona classes uh the Destroyers of icons finally Those who loved the icons survived uh and this was a great triumph for the church uh it is still celebrated as a great holiday in the Orthodox Church uh 843 was the date uh and uh in uh, the Church of Hopia, If you go today and look at the applications, you will see this mosaic of Mary as an empress sitting on a throne with the baby Jesus on her lap and we can date it very accurately because I actually have the complete sermon that was preached on the occasion of the inauguration of this Holy Saturday in the year 867 by Patriarch Phus and although of course it was covered up for a long time, when Hopia was simply an Islamic monument. now it has been discovered and you can see some of the Glory of it, so the Triumph of Orthodoxy in 843 was a huge Ely, a significant marker in early Christianity, in the development of early Christian artand also in Hay suia, you can see this little mosaic in an ark and this is significant because this is how they saw themselves, this must be, simply, Constantine, who built the WS wall of Constantinople, and this is Justinian, who built the Great Church of Hagia Sophia in the 6th century, and they are both making their offerings to the Christ child uh on the lap of Mary seen a lot there as an empress uh Constantine offering the great city of Constantinople with its wonderful walls and Justinian offering the church that built uh to uh Christ now um in this period post iconic clasm uh we We began to have the iconographic scheme firmly established for the church in the East, which we still have today, one of the first things to note about how they saw the church, they saw the church with its decoration as an entrance to Paradise, for example, there is a church in Rome, the Church of Saint Cosma and Damian, which is this is the Mosaic application that has the inscription, the residence of God radiates brightly in brilliant materials, the precious Lights of faith in Shine even brighter and at the entrance of the church in a place called Nola Bishop Paulinus wrote The worshipers of Christ take the path to heaven through this beautiful sword that is this beautiful species of green grass as you approach from Bright Gardens was It is fitting that from here those who wish are granted their departure to the Holy Paradise and that is why in so many of these uh churches uh you get the flowers, the animals, the hunting scenes, the fish of everything that will be uh in uh heaven, but of course uh everything much uh much better now, as I said, it is the Church of Saint Cosmos and Demian um and it shows its Christ with one placed in a cloud of wonderful marvelous splendor now here that we can't see very very well um are the words Jordan um and um what this is trying to indicate is that this is the Jordan River and we passed through the Jordan River of death uh to reach the splendor, the brilliance and the glory of heaven. where Christ already is and is reigning in glory and there is a wonderful saying uh from uh the patriarch uh gerus who said the church is the earthly heaven in which the Heavenly God lives and moves the church is the earthly heaven in which he lives and The Heavenly God moves and that is why Orthodox churches are wonderfully decorated when they are at their best in the applications on the dome at the west door, frescoes or mosaics around the walls because you are entering a fora or path towards heaven and this is a preview of heaven, so that is the Church of Saint Cosmo and Damian and actually that church arrives quite early, uh, that is preionic class, but I have cited it because even before the iconic it gives you this sensation of movement. to Paradise once you enter the church, but if we actually move Beyond Iconoclasm, then a very good example of what we have is this small church in oos Lucas dating from the year 1020, a classic architectural design of the Arch which came up at that time in in a square um and um once you get into these little churches uh then you look at the apps and the apps will contain a mosaic or a fresco of Mary with the baby Jesus now this is one of my favorites, actually It is from the applications of a small church in Torello, which is an island in the Venetian lagoon and the interesting thing is that many Byzantine artisan mosaicists and others from Can Nole went in the 11th and 12th centuries to work in Venice and this is clearly the work of a Bantine craftsman with fundamentally Bantine images showing that the applications of a church are very typical, the decoration at its best, so between the applications and the main body of the church it would be a chancel screen, not the large icon type iconic. which you may know from Russian churches that go from ceiling to floor and are covered with panels which is a much later development in the early stages of the church there was simply one panel, probably a stone panel like this, with some Christian Pictures.

They are peacocks, they drink from the fountain of the water of life, just a loading screen to separate the chancel from the Nave and then if you look up there will be an image of Christ Pantoc in the The dome, uh, Christ, the ruler of all things, generally a pretty stern figure, this is from the church of Daphne, also in Greece, which dates back to about the year 1100 and then, um, if you looked around the frescoes, uh, just below, uh, Dome, uh, like it's around the Dome before the Dome itself, very often you'll see Angels and Archangels um and um uh oh, I push that again, don't worry, there we are, it's gone, it's miraculously gone now, this is one of my favorites if you have ever been to Cyprus or gone to Cyprus, for the love of God don't neglect those wonderful wonderful jewels of churches in the trus mountains, outside they look like nothing, they are hidden with big roofs bent over because they needed to hide. far from the time of Turkish occupation, but inside you can enter paradise and this is one of my favorite churches of laguda um church dating back to the 12th century.

Now you can see the wonderful flowing lines, one of the characteristic features of Byzantine art. were the successive classical revivals and this clearly was the result of another classical revival in the 12th century. Look at those wonderful flowing lines of that most beautiful angel that is the Church of Lag Goodra uh in Cyprus which dates back to the 12th century, so if you look at the corners the tubes uh those devices that allow the Dome to go to the cross in the Square you will see in the trunks there uh the main scenes from the life of Christ here obviously is the nativity scene, I'm not going to talk about that in detail uh because I will in another of my talks, but again right now I'm just trying to show the classic outline of iconography that grew and then just to give you an example. which was a little bit outside the Bantine world uh this is a Georgian enamel icon again quite early from this period if I remember correctly 12 from the 13th century uh from the presentation of Christ in the temple now you can see that somehow of course , they are classic Christian images, but the style is not classical, it is much more a type of folk art, lovely colors, quite attractive faces of the people there in a quite simple but very, very attractive way, just to remind us that although the The influence of the Byzantine world spread very far, there were areas outside of it that were Christian and their Christian faith was reflected in their own style and then, in the church, when you came out of the western door, it is quite possible that you have seen a fresco like this, so in the applications we see the Virgin and Child, the dome of Christ, the angels and archangels, the whole company of the heavenly hosts in the band around the dome, in the trumpets, the main scenes of the life of Christ, perhaps. around the wall Fresco of various scenes from the life of Christ and as you walk out the door uh in a classical scheme this is what you would see uh this uh in Greek it is the kis k i m s i s or in Latin the bedroom Mission the falling asleep of the Virgin Mary because in the Eastern Church they prefer to talk about the cois or the bedroom, missing the dream of the Virgin instead of the ascension.

It is described as the most beautiful creation in all Orthodox art. You can see Maria, of course. lying uh dead um probably Saint John uh bending over her uh one of the early churches of the church. I'm going to show you another one of this because like Paul at the other end we will see it, then what is so beautiful is Christ coming down to take the soul of the Virgin to heaven and there the Angels are going to help her Christ comes down and takes the soul of the Virgin and carries the soul of the Virgin uh to heaven um the Virgin Mary clear and Christian The thought at that time and now is, so to speak, a completely ordinary human being in some sense and, therefore, if Christ can carry his soul to heaven, we too can under the grace of God and this is another example of that.

The kesis scene is the last one that I am going to show you to leave some time for discussion uh and the reason to show this also because uh at one end uh of uh this cois always appears Saint Paul, you can always say Saint Paul, of course it has a big head, that's how you know it's Saint Paul, but as I say, what has been described is the most beautiful creation of Orthodox church art and I think that's all we need to show for the moment. I have tried to cover a broad spectrum showing mainly the East and the development of the type of iconographic scheme established in the 10th and 11th centuries, so anyone who wants to ask. one question now is do you have a microphone please do we have those who would like to ask a question or make a point?

I had never met this group of silent people before. um there's a gentleman there oh that picture you showed us of Jonah. I and we remember that on the right there was an image of Jonah in heaven, as you said well. May I suggest that this does not refer to Jonah in heaven but to the last episode of Jonah's story? Do you remember when he sat and watched? the destruction of Nineveh and the gourd grew in one night and perished in one night. That may not be that episode, well, you're absolutely right, that's what it's based on, that's the biblical story, but the interesting thing is that the early Christians didn't feel obligated to stay close to the biblical story because the biblical story of the ya you know, the withering of God G and so on is very, very different from those images that we have there.

It's clearly just blissful, and the god, far from withering away, is actually doing his job, and there's actually a vine covering Jonah, so it's extraordinary the kind of creative freedom they felt they had. there um we could uh just come back to that if we can do it because you might want to remember it there we are uh you see I mean there's a that almost includes that kind of pure idleness, you know, wonderful pure pure pleasure Langer Langer that's the word, Isn't it for uh uh Jonah, the next question that anyone would like to ask, yes, gentlemen, here, um, before I ask a question, I would like to say that, um, if anyone is interested in running to Saia? to see the applications is invisible right now behind the scaffolding um L more to see that's worth seeing there's a lot more to see that's worth going to, isn't it absolutely the same?

Yes, in classical Roman times there was a lot of specialization in the subjects used and Craftsman seems to have specialized in certain types of scenes, this presumably carried over into early Christian art. Do we know anything about the craftsmanship of early people and who did it well? I think there were guilds, uh, of artisans more like there were in medieval times, uh, um and you know, special specialized occupations, I mean, uh, if I had had the time and I didn't, I couldn't get the picture. , but um, there was a special. Guild of people who dug those catacombs and probably made a lot of the frescoes called uh foses or F foses something like that, we have a photo of them.

They were clearly some kind of Guild of people that we don't know much about them, but We have a little fresco that makes it pretty clear that they were some kind of special car, uh, group of people, um, clearly, also the people who carried sarcophagi um, and what was, uh, I suspect what happened was that, uh, Christianity gradually formed. permeated more with society, some of these craftsmen would have converted to Christianity and would have begun to change and make Christian images at the behest of their Christian patrons, just as they had previously made pagan scenes for their pagan patron, one of the most An interesting feature of the kind of transitional period is that sometimes you have a half-carved sarcophagus, uh, with some beginnings of Roman images that have been twisted into Christian images, for example, it's been said that we don't have time to show it now or find it. and it wouldn't appear very clearly, but the image of Christ riding into Jerusalem on a donkey and the early sarcophagy apparently have all the signs of a pagan anima hunting scene, which had been slightly changed to make C, so there was this kind of transition period when all things were renewed again, thank you, yes, and there is a gentleman there, yes, yes, I must apologize for finding this seat terribly comfortable, and I hope you didn't mention it, but uh.

I was wondering about the story of the last judgments um, I'll do a little bit about that when, uh, when I get to more kind of Western art, um and in particular, um, when in fact, in my next talk, which is Jesus in the art. um I'll talk a little bit about the last judgments uh then um because we associate them a lot with Western tradition, right? and particularly with the development of the Romanesque G and the great kind of uh tempering uh in over the Great Western doors of the cathedrals in France, as we particularly associate The Last Judgments with um, but um, I mean the Orthodox Church that you have , you don't get those elaborate images that you get in the West, you know. and so, those who go down to hell and those who go up to heaven are not understood in the same way, although in torello there is a wonderful final judgment that I really think reflects the fact that torello was partly within the western enclosure despite that it was made by a Bantine craftsman, but if you remember that church that I showed you of uh uh Daphne with the pantoc you get the figure of Christ, a quite severe figure, butno I don't get the kind of elaborate images you get at Westerns last J.The comments had time for one more question.

I guess I'm sorry, it's just a factual question. Where was the Pen Ultimate D mission? Where did that come from? notes, let's take another look at it again, it's lovely, isn't it this or the icon? oh well, that's the last one and that's the penit, you, that's the yes, this is this one, this is that one, uh, I have a feeling it's laguda, but I'll check it, in which case it would be from the 12th century , it looks like the 12th century to me and um, that was the last one that's a later icon, but you can see it, you know. reflects the standard iconography, which is interesting about the Orthodox church, although in the 19th century, and indeed since the Renaissance, they have been influenced to some extent by Western art, always, in my opinion, in a way that detracts from the 20th century.

The Orthodox church has really brought back its traditional iconographer and its traditional way of painting, um, and I think it's this more traditional way that appeals to many of us. I think it's probably best if we leave this there, thank you very much. As I say, next time it will be Jesus in art.