Jonah & the Shepherd

Some art discoveries enrich and expand the work of a great individual; others can illuminate a whole period. The latter is the case with a group of eastern Mediterranean sculptures dating, scholars believe, from the late 3rd or early 4th century, and going on view next week at the Cleveland Museum of Art (see color page). Apart from their superb craftsmanship and miraculously undamaged state, what makes these marbles exciting is that they are among the earliest Christian statuary known. Their subjects are two favorite Biblical figures: the Good Shepherd and the prophet Jonah.

Fear of Idolatry. Early Christians, following the second commandment's injunction against graven images, at first frowned on artistic expression. Eventually, in catacombs and cemeteries, pictorial art did appear in frescoes and sarcophagi reliefs, but statuary is so rare that scholars have concluded that it was once forbidden. The principal exception is the figure of a shepherd carrying a wounded sheep across his shoulders. With classical Greek sculptures of Hermes as a ready model, it was so common that even given the Christian significance of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, it was not considered idolatrous.

Jonah is a far rarer image, though his ordeal in being swallowed and then cast up has long existed for Christians as a parable of death and resurrection. But early Christian depictions of the event as sculpture are all but unknown; apart from Cleveland's acquisitions, only one other marble group, found at Tarsus in 1876, is known to exist. As he is portrayed in Cleveland's marbles, Jonah resembles the Greek river god appearing in some Antioch mosaics, and the sculptor gave his fancy free rein in carving the curious sea monster with leonine feet and massive ears.*

The Whole Story. What makes Cleveland Curator William Wixom overjoyed with his new sculptural group is that it also shows Jonah in idyllic repose under the gourd vine, and includes a freestanding orant, probably Jonah, which Wixom calls "one of the most moving depictions of a figure in prayer in the entire history of art." It is thus the only such group in the world to portray the Jonah story from beginning to end. The works were probably commissioned by an unknown early Christian for a cubiculum. As for the artist, scholarship can only produce guesses; he was almost certainly Greek, or at least Greek trained, and probably pagan. Even the site at which the marbles were recently unearthed remains a dealer's secret. Says Curator Wixom: "Antioch seems the most likely candidate."

*Ketos in Greek means "sea monster" or "sea dragon"; not until the Bible was translated into English did it become a whale.

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