Late Antiquity

Unit 3: Early Europe and Colonial Americas

Historical Background

1st c. CE - Christianity is founded by Jesus Christ whose energetic preaching and mesmerizing message encouraged devoted followers like Saints Peter and Paul to spread the message of the Christian faith and forgiveness across the Roman world through missionary work.
Influential books and letters (New Testament) were powerful tools that fired the imagination of everyone from peasants to philosophers.
Christianity began as an underground cult and hid in the corners of the Roman Empire to escape harsh persecutions.
312 CE - Emperor Constantine triumphs at the Milvian Bridge.
313 CE - Edict of Milan is instilled by Constantine that granted religious toleration throughout the empire. Constantine also favored Christians for government positions and constructed a series of religious buildings honoring Christian sites.
By the Late Antique period, paganism soon became an underground religion with Christianity as the majority.

Enduring Understandings & Essential Knowledge

ENDURING UNDERSTANDING: The culture, beliefs, and physical settings of a region play an important role in the creation, subject matter, and siting of works of art.

Essential Knowledge:

Late Antique art falls within the medieval artistic tradition.
Late Antique art is influenced by the needs of Christian worship.
Late Antique art is known for its avoidance of naturalistic forms.

ENDURING UNDERSTANDING: Cultural interaction through war, trade, and travel can influence art and art making.

Essential Knowledge:

Late Antique art is heavily influenced by ancient art forms.
Late Antique art has many regional variations.

ENDURING UNDERSTANDING: Art and art making can be influenced by a variety of concerns including audience, function, and patron.

Essential Knowledge:

Connections with the divine are illustrated through iconography.

ENDURING UNDERSTANDING: Art history is best understood through an evolving tradition of theories and interpretations.

Essential Knowledge:

Late Antique art is generally studied chronologically.
Contextual information comes from written records that are religious or civic.

Patronage and Artistic Life

Being a Christian in the 1st through the 3rd centuries was not easy with many persecutions and early popes becoming martyrs. Artists who worked for Christians had to be satisfied with private church houses and burial chambers.

Most Christian art in the early centuries survives in the catacombs, buried beneath the city of Rome and other places scattered throughout the empire.

Christians were mostly poor and considered society's underclass. Artists imitated Roman works, but sometimes in a sketchy and unsophisticated manner. Once Christianity became recognized as an official religion, however, patronage expanded.

Early Christian Art Characteristics

Christianity is an intensely narrative religion.
- Christians inspired by parallel stories from the Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures, and illustrated to complement Christian ideology and text from the New Testament.
- No written accounts exists of what men and women from the Bible looked like, so artists recreated these episodes relying on imagination.
- Also important are the four author portraits of the Evangelists (writers of the principal books, or gospels, of the New Testament.) These are: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John.
Depictions of Christ.
- When Christianity was recognized as the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380 CE, Christ was no longer depicted as a humble good shepherd and instead took on imperial imagery (imperial purple robes, gold, his shepherd's crook becoming a staff, and his halo a symbol of the sun-king.)

Architecture

Hundreds of miles of catacombs can be found under the city of Rome, sometimes five stories deep with millions of interred bodies. Christians, Jews, and pagans used these burial grounds because they found cheaper alternatives to aboveground interment.
Christians preferred burials because it symbolized Jesus's body rising from the dead.
Catacombs were dug out of the earth and contained loculi, or holes cut into the walls meant to receive the bodies of the dead. The wealthy were placed in mortuary chapels called cubicula and placed in extravagant sarcophagi.
Christians understood how they could adapt Roman architecture to their use and adopted basilicas. Basilicas had large groin-vaulted interiors and impressive naves perfect as meeting places.

Unit Vocabulary

Ambulatory - a passageway around the apse or altar of a church.

Apse - the endpoint of a church where the altar is located.

Basilica - in Christian architecture, an axially planned church with a long nave, side aisles, and an apse for the altar.

Catacomb - an underground passageway used for burial.

Central plan - a church having a circular plan with the altar in the middle.

Gospels - the first four books in the New Testament that chronicle the life of Jesus.

Loculi - openings in the walls of the catacombs to receive the dead.

Lunette - a crescent-shaped space, sometimes over a doorway, that contains sculpture or painting.

Narthex - the closest part of the atrium to the basilica, it serves as a vestibule, or lobby, of a church.

Nave - the main aisle of a church.

Orant figure - a figure with its hands raised in prayer.

Spoila - in art history, the reuse of architectural or sculptural pieces in buildings generally different from their original contexts.

Transept - an aisle in a church perpendicular to the nave, where the clergy originally stood.

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