Volume 55, Number 4 · March 20, 2008
The Private Art of Early Christians
By Peter Brown
Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art
an exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, November 18, 2007–March 30, 2008.
Catalog of the exhibition by Jeffrey Spier, with contributions by Mary Charles-Murray, Johannes G. Deckers, Steven Fine, Robin M. Jensen, and Herbert L. Kessler
Yale University Press/Kimbell Art Museum, 309 pp., $65.00
In the past several decades, the history of Early Christian art and of the late-antique world in which this art developed have been subject to a series of surprises, all of them profoundly disruptive of previous certitudes. These weighty disciplines had developed in Rome in the later nineteenth century under the shadow of an embattled papacy. Their leading experts were giants of erudition, given to patient, eye-straining labor. But they were also nineteenth-century Catholics. They thought of themselves as the direct heirs, through the Roman papacy, of the Early Christian past. They assumed that behind each image they discovered there lay a message; and that each message referred to the earliest form of a dogma or a practice that was still current in the modern Catholic Church. What they found in the catacombs were Early Christians who were simply Catholics like themselves, but in ancient dress.
Review, 5663 words
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