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11 ~ The Art of Borrowing Images

9/6/2012

The Domitilla Catacomb Shepherd

In the subterranean world outside Rome, artists painted a young shepherd holding a lyre and sitting on a rock, surrounded by gazing and grazing sheep. He luxuriated on a wall in the Catacombs of Domitilla, a resting place for the bodies of Christians from the third and fourth centuries.

For followers of Christ, the Domitilla shepherd represented Jesus as a shepherd, based on New Testament metaphors. But for Roman pagans, the telltale harp recalled the mythical figure Orpheus, who charmed the beasts with his singing. Consequently, the Orpheus-Christ fresco, though simply rendered and presented, represented the complexity of early Christian art.

During the advent of Christianity, classical Roman art prevailed. Whether pagan or Christian, artists painted and sculpted according to this style. It epitomized the definition of good art. The best models of classical art—the rounded, idealized body—emerged from representations of Roman gods and goddesses. So it’s natural that early Christian art mimicked this style, creating figures similar to pagan models.

In addition to style, the earliest Christians borrowed common themes from the Roman culture. These themes helped pagans and other non-Christians to understand core messages of the growing faith. Consequently, Christian art compared Christ to the pagan shepherd, a god of light, and a wise teacher or philosopher.

In other adaptations in the Roman Empire and the Holy Lands, Christians used less-controversial symbols in the culture to express Christian beliefs. Christians converted pagan images of anchors, ships, and stars into images of the new faith. As a result, early Christians viewed their art in light of redemptive adaptation. Christian artists of Late Antiquity adapted what their culture understood and redeemed these images by assigning new meanings to them. With time, the adaptations represented biblical beliefs incorporated into Christianity’s own visual lexicon. Christian images and symbols meant what Christians believed about them.

Biblical Salvation Themes
Besides Roman themes, early Christian art also heartily pulled from Old Testament and Apocrypha stories and events in Christ’s life. While the Church endured intermittent persecutions, art themes centered on metaphors for salvation. These themes decorated catacomb walls, memorializing the deceased and encouraging the living. In particular, the stories of Jonah, Noah, Moses, Abraham, and Daniel relied on a redemptive message, as did less-popular images such as Susanna or Daniel and his friends in the furnace. So did New Testament stories like Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.

It’s commonly supposed that Christians chose these narratives for the catacomb walls and sculpture because they lived in an uncertain world, at times fraught with persecutions. The most frequent images emphasized God’s ability to deliver his spiritual children from peril, either on earth or in heaven.

In the fourth century, after Constantine’s intervention, deliverance and safety images diminished and Christian mourners selected more narratives from the New Testament. Perhaps it’s because Christians no longer lived in peril, and more believers were Gentiles rather than converted Jews. During Constantine’s reign and later when Theodosius I declared Christianity the Roman Empire’s state religion, Christian art flourished.

With this transition, Christians and their art breathed freely in the Roman world and ventured into new cultures, extending into the future and finally reaching ours.

Learn more about early Christian art in Judith Couchman’s book, The Art of Faith: A Guide to Understanding Christian Images (Paraclete Press).

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10 ~ Becoming Thoroughly Christian

9/3/2012

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The Columns of Santa Costanza

When Princess Constantina died only fourteen years after her father Emperor Constantine’s death, Romans memorialized her with a royal mausoleum. Constantina was a Christian, but the circular, domed building contained no overt symbols that signified her faith. The tomb’s mosaics represented common pagan motifs: cupids, birds, foliage, grapevines, drinking vessels, and depictions of winemaking. At best, pagans claimed these Roman themes as a celebration of Bacchus, while Christians viewed the images as reminders of Christ’s Last Supper cup.

Visitors to the mausoleum, later transformed into the Church of Santa Costanza, can puzzle over the images if they don’t know about Constantina’s two arranged marriages to pagan rulers, and the religious syncretism in fourth-century Rome. Christianity and paganism co-existed and even mingled in art, culture, and religious practices.

At one point art historians noted that midst the putti (cherubs) picking, transporting, and stomping grapes on the mausoleum’s ceiling, the building’s four niches suggested the form of a cross. Artists color coordinated the twelve pairs of columns in red and green marble to highlight the points of a cross. It’s as if the cross quietly but securely superseded the pagan and syncretic activity, taking a revered place above it all.

When looking at early Christian art, people sometimes drew their own conclusions. Was it Christian or pagan or both? Mixed images and metaphors kept them guessing. But as sacred art developed, artists and patrons erased doubt about its origin and meaning. For the most part, Christian art became thoroughly Christian.

Toward the end of the tenth century, Gero, the archbishop of Cologne, Germany, commissioned a crucifix for his cathedral that demanded attention to Christ’s death. Over six feet tall, the painted wood sculpture featured a lifeless Christ still hanging on the cross. Christ’s skin sagged from holding the body’s weight and his stomach bulged. His head hung down, with the cratered eyes and contorted lips of prolonged suffering.

Later in the fourteenth century, the artist Giotto di Bondone painted a barrel-vaulted room built over Roman ruins in Padua, Italy. It functioned as a family chapel. Walking toward the altar, the life of Mary and the story of her Son lined the walls, divided into rectangular panels. Giotto successfully distilled each image into an emotionally complex yet unmistakable scene. Viewed vertically, each set of three images foreshadowed or related to the others. Wherever visitors carefully stepped in the Scrovegni Chapel, however close they scrutinized the Gero crucifix, they didn’t doubt. This was Christian art. It poignantly expressed Christian beliefs.

Through many centuries and styles, from Late Antiquity through the Baroque, this creativity promoted the Church’s doctrines, morality, and history. Didactic and symbolic, narrative and representational, Christian art taught, chastised, encouraged, reminded, and celebrated Christians. But mostly, it told and retold the miraculous story of Christ.

Learn more about Christian art in Judith Couchman's book, The Art of Faith: A Guide to Understanding Christian Images (Paraclete Press).

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9 ~ The People of the Book

8/31/2012

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Fifteenth Century Illuminated Manuscript, Ecclesiastes 1

Before the invention of mechanical printing, books were handmade objects, treasured as works of art and as symbols of enduring knowledge. Indeed, in the Middle Ages, the book becomes an attribute of God.—The Metropolitan Museum of Art

In the early centuries after Christ’s departure, his followers became the People of the Book. Christians read, revered, and thrived according to the Scriptures, a combination of ancient Jewish and Christian apostolic texts written through the Holy Spirit’s inspiration.

Because Christians considered the Bible sacred and the rule for godly living, devout leaders and laypeople insisted on its preservation in successive centuries. This meant copying the text by hand onto manuscripts read privately by the clergy and aloud to parishioners at church services. Most Christians could not read, so hearing the Bible’s words proved crucial for understanding and living their faith. Even if a layperson could read, it required influence and wealth to create a biblical manuscript for personal use. Commissions belonged to royalty, the wealthy, or selected clergy.

In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, from the fifth through the fifteenth centuries, manuscript illumination grew into a significant art form. It developed into an elaborate marriage of words and images. The Latin word manuscript translated to “written by hand” and illumination meant “to light up.” In scriptoriums around Europe, scribes and artists illuminated texts with beautiful, expensive, and precious materials to commemorate important texts. They created small pocket Bibles for traveling missionaries, luxurious gospels for emperors, prayer books for aristocrats, and scriptures for working priests and secluded monks. Due to the intensive hand work, elongated time, and significant talent required to create a medieval Bible, whoever held or listened to one considered it a treasure. Page by page, it honored and affirmed their faith.

Unfortunately, as formal education spread, illuminated manuscripts couldn’t serve the needs of increasingly literate Christians. The intricate handwriting and painting process all but vanished, replaced by the printing press. The Gutenberg Bible, printed in the fifteenth century, ushered in a more efficient way to produce and distribute sacred literature. Eventually the masses could hold Bibles—or the Reformation’s religious propaganda—in their own hands and read for themselves. Engravings and woodcuts decorated the pages, and books no longer safeguarded one-of-a-kind artwork.

From an artistic standpoint, Christians traded beauty and mastery for the ability to spread God’s Word faster and farther. But we can hardly blame them. They stepped ahead with progress, following Christ’s command to preach the Gospel throughout the world. Above all, they were People of the Book.

Learn more about Christian art and illuminated manuscripts in The Art of Faith by Judith Couchman. Available at amazon.com and paracletepress.com.

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8 ~ When East Met West

8/27/2012

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Byzantine Mosaic at the Abbey Church of Montecassino

Byzantine art exerted a profound and continuing influence on the art of the West . . . transmitted first by artists and then later by handbooks.—Marilyn Stokstad

In sixth-century Palestinian churches, the clergy sometimes placed a reliquary—a stone box for holy objects—beneath the altar. The reliquary looked like a small sarcophagus (stone coffin) with two to four compartments. The reliquary housed bits of martyrs’ bones, sometimes encased in smaller, precious-metal boxes. The center of the lid contained a funnel-shaped hole, with another one in the reliquary’s side. A goblet stood beneath the side hole. Worshipers poured oil into the top hole and recaptured it in the goblet. They considered the oil sanctified because it touched the sacred relics, and hoped the freshly produced “holy oil” would protect them as they ventured back into everyday life.

Although this Palestinian ritual may seem strange today, it capsulated a predominant Byzantine belief. Eastern Christians especially honored saints and martyrs, and considered their bones and artifacts sacred. They believed touching or owning a relic—the remains of something or someone sacred—transmitted healing and holiness. Ancient Christians traveled far to visit relics safeguarded in beautiful reliquaries, and churches collected these sacred remains as signs of protection and prestige.

As trade increased, more people traveled and Christianity proliferated, Eastern art and practices influenced Western Christians. Byzantine artists especially mastered painting icons, carving ivory, shaping metal, and designing mosaics. When artists passed along information about style and technique, tourists and merchants carried back works of art, or warriors carted home war booty, East and West shared their creativity. Artisans and craftspeople experimented, improved existing techniques, and introduced new stylistic approaches. Even when the Church split over theological differences, declaring distinct and bitter differences between the East and West, the artistic influences lingered and mingled.

For some projects the crossover was deliberate and planned. In the eleventh century Abbott Desiderius organized the decoration for the new abbey church of Montecassino in southern Italy. Sometime after 1066 he sent envoys to Constantinople “to hire artists who were experts in the art of laying mosaics and pavements.” The monk Leo of Ostia recorded, “The degree of perfection which was attained in these arts by the masters Desiderius had hired can be seen in their works.” Desiderius also arranged for the Byzantine master artists to teach his young Italian monks the art of mosaics. Italian artists revived the ancient art practiced by their ancestors.

Eventually, an appreciation for Eastern art spread. The abbott’s decisions blessed the world with beauty.

Read more about Byzantine artists in The Art of Faith: A Guide to Understanding Christian Images by Judith Couchman. Available at amazon.com and paracletepress.com.

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7 ~ The Sacred Role of Sculpture

8/24/2012

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An Ölberg from Germany.

I say that the art of sculpture is eight times as great as any other art based on drawing, because a statue has eight views and they must all be equally good.
--Benvenuto Cellini

During the sixteenth century in a town near Ulm, Germany, Anna Brietinger and Anna Mentzen left a local spinning-bee and walked to the nearby church. In the churchyard they illegally uprooted a statue of Christ from the Ölberg, the portrayal of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane before his trial and crucifixion. This arrangement, often set up in churchyards, served as a focal point during the Passion Week. Christians carried the sculpture into the church and placed it in a simulated sepulcher on Good Friday and “resurrected” it on Easter Sunday.

Familiar with this ritual, the two Annas carried the Christ image to a house sponsoring another spinning-bee and placed it on a table. Three men then spoke to the statue, and when it would not answer, a man drew his sword and chopped off its hand. After this, one of the men carried the sculpture to another spinning-bee, sat it on a table, and demanded: “If you are Paul, help yourself!” He knocked the statue from the table and then threw it out the window. Afterwards, Anna Brietinger and another woman returned the Christ figure to the Ölberg.

The Ölberg incident seems almost comical today, but it highlighted serious convictions that factored into the Reformation. Speaking to an image—even daring it to act or save itself—emerged from the medieval idea that sacred art harbored supernatural qualities. Protestantism sought to destroy this belief and smashing or dismembering the object proved it did not possess magical powers to help itself or anyone else.

Even more, the incident underscored the powerful influence of sculpture, handed down from classical Greek and Roman artists. Sculptors often created three-dimensional works, offering viewers a sense of reality and interaction with the figures. In some cases, people perceived sculpture as nearly lifelike and assigned them human characteristics.

However, the Reformation didn’t tell the entire story about Christian sculpture. For many centuries believers regarded it as a beautiful expression of faith, memorializing Christ, saints, biblical characters, and sacred stories. Sculpture also extended beyond figures-in the-round into coins, homes, coffins, icons, jewelry, vessels, reliquaries, church architecture, and more. Sculpture participated in many aspects of Christian worship, and much survived for us to appreciate.

These surviving works compel us to respect the sculptors among us today. They fulfill a sacred role.

Read more about Christian art in Judith Couchman’s book, The Art of Faith, published by Paraclete Press. Available at amazon.com in paperback and Kindle.

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6 ~ The Work of Our Hands

8/20/2012

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Santa Maria del Fiore or Florence Cathedral.

Someone in the whole body of the congregation of the church may have the designation of a “hand” because of his practical gifts. —Origen

Filippo Brunelleschi believed in quality control. In the early fifteenth century he created a daring plan for the dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral in Florence, Italy. Combining the ideal placement of brick and stone, he designed a dome without the support of flying buttresses that bolstered other towering churches. Consequently, he needed perfectly made bricks placed in exact formation.

As the dome rose higher and higher, Brunelleschi often personally inspected the bricks. According to the artist Giorgio Vasari, “[Brunelleschi] himself went to the kilns where the bricks were being formed, since he wanted to see the clay and knead it himself, and when the bricks were baked, he wanted to pick them out as carefully as possible with his own hands. He would examine the stones being used by the stone-cutters to see if they were hard or contained any thin cracks.” Because of this attention to detail, the cathedral’s dome still stands—and ranks as the largest in the world.

Brunelleschi’s story highlights that Christian art and architecture of the past required hand work. Artists and architects planned their work, selected materials, and created images with their hands. At times, artists also destroyed the work of their hands. Vasari explained that Michelangelo Buonarroti “had such a distinctive and perfect imagination and the works he envisioned were of such a nature that he found it impossible to express such grandiose and awesome conceptions with his hands that he often abandoned his works, or rather ruined many of them.”

Scripture reminds us that working with our hands patterns after God. The psalmist exclaimed, “For You, Lord, have made me glad through Your work; I will triumph in the works of Your hands. O Lord, how great are Your works!” (Ps. 92:4-5, NKJV). In turn, the prophet Moses modeled asking God to bless the work of his hands. He prayed, “And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us, And establish the work of our hands for us; Yes, establish the work of our hands” (Ps. 90:17, NKJV).

We can imagine this prayer lingering on the lips of Christian artists as they created art styles and forms that spoke to successive generations about the Gospel. Contemporaries of Fr Angelico, the fifteenth century Dominican friar, claimed “he would never take up his pencil until he had first made supplication.” Perhaps before the friar painted stunning angels and tender Madonnas, he implored heaven to guide and bless his hands. The ancient Celts prayed, “May there always be work for your hands to do. May your purse always hold a coin or two.” This blessing was also apt for artists!

Certainly, the history of Christian art is the story of artists and craftsmen working with their hands. Many millions of hands, hearts, and minds left behind a legacy—a testament to the faith—that still teaches and inspires us today. As we explore the eras and forms of Christian art, we can also pray, “Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands.”

Learn more about Christian artists working with their hands in The Art of Faith by Judith Couchman. It's available at amazon.com.

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5 ~ Learn, Learn, Learn

8/16/2012

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Every painting is a voyage into a sacred harbour.
--Giotto di Bondone

Giorgio Vasari, a Renaissance painter and historian, recalled how the painter Luca Signorelli advised his father.

“Antonio, have little Giorgio learn to draw at any rate so that he will not get even worse,” advised Signorelli. “This art, even if he applied himself to his literary studies, cannot fail to provide him with the same profit, honour, and delight it has provided to all worthy men.”

Then turning to the young Vasari, the old artist said, “Learn, little cousin, learn.”

As with all artists, young Renaissance painters studied technique through apprenticeships with older, experienced painters. They also learned by copying the great artists and reading a limited number of treatises written about art. For example, in the Middle Ages the monk Theophilus wrote On Divers Arts: The Foremost Medieval Treatise on Painting, Glassmaking, and Metalwork. During the Renaissance the painter Leon Battista Alberti wrote a manuscript, On Painting. As an adult, Vasari chronicled the lives of painters, sculptors, and architects, with insights to their working lives and methods.

With all the arts—painting, dancing, writing, weaving—successful practitioners begin with the basics. Devoting time and discipline to enduring techniques rewards later work. Skipping this step eventually degrades it.

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4 ~ When Michelangelo Doubted His Talent

8/12/2012

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Adam and Eve, The Sistine Chapel

Good painting is nothing but a copy of the perfection of God
and a recollection of his painting.—Michelangelo Buonarroti

Michelangelo Buonarroti resisted painting the Sistine Chapel. In fact, he didn’t want to paint at all. He’d acquired his genius reputation as a sculptor, chiseling instead of mixing and dabbing and brushing. But when Pope Julius II asked for a commission at the Vatican in Rome, an artist couldn’t say no. The obstinate religious leader issued a command, not a request.

To complete the complicated fresco, Michelangelo learned how to paint, which he found arduous and aggravating. He complained to his father in a letter: “My work does not seem to go ahead [as I would like it to]. This is due to the difficulty of the work and also because it is not my profession. In consequence, I lose my time fruitlessly. May God help me.”

Steeped in frustration, Michelangelo wrote several months later: “I am attending to the work as best I can. . . . I don’t have a penny. So I cannot be robbed . . . I am unhappy and not in too good health staying here, and with a great deal of work, no instructions, and no money. But I have good hopes God will help me.”

Michelangelo devoted years to lying on his back on a high platform, positioned inches from the ceiling and painstakingly recreating Old Testament stories and characters with paint that often dripped and plopped on his face and the floor. In a satirical poem to a friend, the painter described his back as bent “like a Syrian bow.” Michelangelo also claimed he’d grown a goiter from the strain and a breast like a Harpy. He painted with his “beard toward heaven” and could “feel the back of my brain on my neck.”

But indeed, God helped the sculptor-turned-painter and his team.

Though Michelangelo insisted, “I’m no painter,” he managed to create one of the world’s greatest artistic masterpieces. Some of the fresco’s figures—like the equally guilty Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eve—exceeded conventional expectations and have intrigued neck-craning viewers ever since.

After the chapel’s completion, Michelangelo worked as a sculptor, painter, and architect for another half century. Despite the artist’s significant flaws and spiritual lapses, financial struggles and artistic rivalries, he recognized the source of his gifting and calling. Toward the end of his life, he explained, “Many believe—and I believe—that I have been designated for this work by God. In spite of my old age, I do not want to give it up. I work out of love for God and I put my hope in him.”

Not all artists who picked up a brush struggled as profoundly as Michelangelo when he decorated the Sistine Chapel. Although third- and fourth-century catacomb painters descended below the ground to paint on damp earth, later many artists sketched and painted on canvases in their own workshops, accompanied by apprentices. However, few creative scenarios were ideal. Over time artists managed picky patrons, mediocre materials, bumbling assistants, insufficient wages, self-doubt, poor health, complacency, and missed deadlines. Fortunately, an artistic passion prevailed, and plentiful paintings, sketches, and even graffiti pay homage to Christianity on surfaces throughout the world.

What’s the point? Don’t doubt your talent. Respect your limited resources. Do the work. The outcome might surprise you, and profoundly influence others.

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3 ~ Early Faith, Mystery Art

7/26/2012

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The Donkey Graffiti from Palatine Hill

One of the earliest forms of Christian art wasn’t a painting, a sculpture, or even a catacomb fresco. It was a patch of graffiti on plaster, discovered in the Poedagogium on Rome’s Palatine Hill and dated to around 200 A.D. Imperial teachers used the Poedagogium building to educate the emperor’s staff, and perhaps an idle student etched the crude artwork. The drawing depicted a man with an ass’s head, nailed to a cross. Viewed from behind, the crucified man turned to the left and looked down at a youth with a raised arm. An inscription underneath the cross figure claimed in Greek, “Alexamenos worships his god.”

Art historians disagree whether the scrawled words should be interpreted as a Christian’s profession of faith or a pagan’s scorn. On the one hand, Jesus rode on an ass, so this animal became an important symbol for early Christians. From this perspective, some suggest drawing the crucified Christ with a donkey’s head paid
homage to a hailed Savior. On the other hand, most observers recognized the inscription as a taunt from someone who mis- understood the new religion. In early Christianity, a rumor circulated Rome that Christians worshiped the head of an ass.

What was the true meaning? Only the graffiti artist knew for sure.

During the same era, pagans, Jews, and early Christians carved deep recesses in the soft tufa rock shaping the outskirts of Rome. From the third to fifth centuries, survivors often painted these catacomb walls with images that represented the deceased, and images of a person in prayer, the orans (Latin for “praying”), decorated several catacombs. The orans figure populated Late Antiquity, usually depicted as a standing, veiled woman with her hands outstretched and gazing toward heaven. It’s not always clear, however, whether an orans figure represented a pagan, Jewish, or Christian worshiper. Each religious group used this stance as a prayer posture.

Old Testament Jews spread their hands in prayer. From the desert of Judah, David prayed, “I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands” (Ps. 63:4). When a pagan orans lifted up her hands, she expressed “the affectionate respect due to the state, to a ruler, to the family, or to God.” Because early Christians were Jewish, they naturally practiced this stance. The apostle Paul advised the earliest Christians: “I want men everywhere to lift up holy hands in prayer, without anger or disputing” (1 Tim. 2:8, NIV 1984), and early church literature recorded the widespread practice of this prayer position.

Consequently, the famous orans in the Catacomb of Priscilla in Rome doesn’t own a clear interpretation of her origin or beliefs. As much as art historians argue one interpretation or the other, nobody knows for sure.

Like the Palatine graffiti and the catacomb orans, some of the earliest years of Christianity and its art linger in ambiguity. Even more mysterious, it doesn’t appear early Christians produced art for two centuries of the faith. As far as we know, with a few exceptions of signs and symbols, Christian art didn’t appear until the early third century. Nobody knows the exact reason for this omission, and at any moment a new archaeological discovery could prove this assumption wrong.

Just as we can’t precisely pinpoint why Christian art didn’t exist in the earliest years of Christianity, we don’t know exactly why it appeared around 200 A.D. But when paintings from this growing religion emerged from underground Roman catacombs, Christian art never turned up absent again.

Some people feel uncomfortable that early Christian art sometimes shared images with other religions. They think this either proves Christianity as a “borrowed religion” or taints its purity. What do you think?

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2 ~ A Cross for the Darkness

7/19/2012

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Ancient Oil Lamps

Several years ago I visited a one-room biblical archaeology
museum attached to a small Christian university. The docent fascinated our group with ancient artifacts, handing them out so we could touch Scripture’s history. I remember examining a clay pot and holding facsimiles of iron nails used for a Roman crucifixion. The spike-sized nails evoked murmurs as they passed from one person to another, but the object that stirred me most slipped into my hands quietly. It’s so small, I thought. The archaic oil lamp, in remarkably good condition, fit in the palm of my hand.

While reading biblical metaphors about oil lamps, or looking at them in museum catalogs, I’d imagined vessels much larger than this. How did a traveler find his way in the darkness with such a tiny, fluttering flame? How did a mother sweep a floor, straighten the house, or snuggle her children into bed? Obviously, these people knew something more than I did—something wise and almost mysterious—about navigating the night.

Later I thought about Old and New Testament references to lamp light. The Israelite psalmist wrote, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path” (Ps. 119:105). An ancient proverb claimed, “The light of the righteous shines brightly, but the lamp of the wicked is snuffed out” (Pr. 20:2). While telling the parable about a woman who lost a coin, Jesus asked, “Does she not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it?” (Lk. 15:8). Most likely, early Christians understood lamp metaphors in practical ways unfamiliar to me. Every day in shadowy rooms, every evening when the sun descended, they lit oil lamps to illumine shades of darkness.

Carving Out Religious Beliefs
As far back as 3500 B.C., oil lamps served as light sources
for civilizations. However, pottery lamps didn’t flourish until about the eighth or seventh century B.C. These simple, wheel-thrown vessels looked like saucers with turned-up edges, with wicks immersed in olive or vegetable oil and draped over the edges. Later the Greeks innovated by enclosing their lamps and adding spouts, handles, and glazes. During the Hellenistic Age and the early centuries of Christianity, lamps created from molds of clay, stone, or plaster dispersed as much as those shaped on pottery wheels.

Aside from increasing production, molds allowed elaborate designs and three-dimensional figures to appear on lamps created for religious ceremonies or wealthy patrons. At the same time, factories mass produced undecorated lamps, either for humble homes or Jews whose religious tradition prohibited graven images. Pottery makers stamped the bottom of these popular firmalampen with the factory owner’s name. Archaeologists today still unearth these stamped lamps throughout the former Roman Empire, while digging up settlements and burial sites.

The Herodian lamp—named after the reign of Herod the Great—populated Palestine’s hill country and cities from about 50 B.C. to 70 A.D. It’s possible that this lamp evolved in Jerusalem or a nearby location. To create the Herodian lamp, potters shaped a circular, wheel-made body with a wide spout applied by hand. A hole in the middle of the base accommodated filling the lamp with oil, and the spout’s opening held the wick and its flame.

Jesus probably envisioned this lamp when he told the parable about ten maidens waiting for the bridegroom (Mt. 25:1-12), or explained to his listeners, “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house” (5:14-15). Obviously, Jesus referred to the spiritual light that identified people as his followers. Still, almost 2,000 years later, actual oil lamps have helped archaeologists pinpoint ancient Christian activity.

In late antiquity, oils lamps often expressed religious beliefs with symbols or inscriptions. Pottery workshops in Cyprus, Greece, Egypt, North Africa, and Syria-Palestine manufactured lamps portraying pagan gods, Jewish menorahs, and Christian crosses. When archaeologists recover lamps with crosses, they tentatively assume a Christian community resided nearby. For example, researchers discovered lamps with crosses in an ancient funerary complex at Tel el-Fûl, north of Jerusalem. The crosses indicated that Christians settled in that area 1,600 years ago.

Lamps with crosses flooded the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, after Christianity became the religion of emperors. Constantine’s monogram of the cross was a favorite symbol, either stamped on a lamp’s body or extended as the handle. Art historians theorize that these crosses symbolized the banishment of spiritual darkness. It’s an apt metaphor. As early Christians held out their lamps and stepped carefully into the darkness, they could see crosses guiding them. Literally, the sign of the cross was a light for their paths. But even more, Christ’s cross shed light on their world’s spiritually dark places.

Shining Into a Dark World
“The mystery of the cross shines bright,” wrote the Bishop of Poitiers in the sixth century. Listening to the newscasts, we might wonder about the veracity of that long-ago claim. The world seems full of so much darkness. But in our frustration, we can recall early Christians carrying their oil lamps, following the flickering cross-flames before them, casting light on their paths with each footfall. Perhaps they modeled how we can shed light into our world: not with bonfire ideas that blast into the darkness and eventually fade into cinders, but by faithfully inching along in the world’s darkness, extending the light of the cross. “People living in darkness [would see] a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light [would dawn]” (Mt. 4:16). They would see the accumulated light of the cross.

A few years ago I purchased an inexpensive replica of an oil lamp from fifth-century Alexandria. The lamp sits on my desk and its imprinted cross points at me while I work. It reminds me of the
lamp-light promises of Scripture. I want to believe the cross can shine light into any darkness. I need to light a lamp.

How do you need to light a lamp?

Read more about cross images in Judith Couchman’s book, The Mystery of the Cross, published by InterVarsity Press. Available at amazon.com in paperback and Kindle.

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Judith Couchman is an author, speaker, and college art-history instructor. Her recent book release is The Art of Faith: A Guide to Understanding Christian Images (Paraclete Press). Scroll down to view the book cover and video trailer.

A Sampling of Books
by Judith Couchman

The Art of Faith: A Guide to Understanding Christian Images by Judith Couchman. Click on the photo to purchase the book through Paraclete Press.

The Mystery of the Cross by Judith Couchman. Inspirational readings about images of Christ's cross and how early believers used and respected this sign. Click on the photo to purchase from InterVarsity Press.

The Art of Faith
Exploring Sacred Images
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11 ~ The Art of Borrowing Images

10 ~ Becoming Thoroughly Christian

9 ~ The People of the Book

8 ~ When East Met West

7 ~ The Sacred Role of Sculpture

6 ~ The Work of Our Hands

5 ~ Learn, Learn, Learn

4 ~ When Michelangelo Doubted His Talent

3 ~ Early Faith, Mystery Art

2 ~ A Cross for the Darkness

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Exploring Sacred Images
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A Sampling of Books
by Judith Couchman