Between Olympus and Golgotha

By ROBERT HUGHES

One of the great dramas of history was enacted between the 3rd and 7th centuries A.D.: the slow collapse of Rome, the fading of its empire and, with it, the death of the classical world. The age of Christianity was officially brought to term when the Emperor Constantine formally embraced the new faith and in A.D. 324-330 moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to Constantinople. But across the still vast spread of the imperial territories, which ran from the Euphrates to Gibraltar, there was no clean break with the old religions. For 400 years, the remnants of the pagan gods contended against Christianity and with the various mystery faiths of Egypt and Asia Minor.

The eddies set up by the gradual transference of power from Olympus to Golgotha were reflected in art. Some of the complexity of late classical and early Christian centuries can be sampled in a huge exhibition, which opened last month at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Age of Spirituality," assembled under the direction of Art Historian Kurt Weitzmann, is a magnificent compendium of some 450 works in every medium known to the ancient world--marble carvings, glass, gold, jewelry, silver, paint, cameos, cloth, mosaic, ivory, bronze.

No religion ever started with a full-blown iconography. The earliest Christian work was crude and secretive, a code of graffiti--crosses and fish scratched on walls. To enrich that, to give its visual discourse a dignity to match imperial power, Christian art needed pagan symbolism. Once its early frenzies over idolatry had been resolved, the new religion picked over the bones of antiquity, preserving many of its forms in doctrinal art but switching their meaning.

The classical figure of the philosopher, Plato or Seneca, among his students was pressed into service as Christ teaching.The gestures of Ciceronian rhetoric lent authority to the poses of carved apostles; Orpheus with a ram on his shoulders was transformed into Christ the good shep herd. Winged victories became angels. Bacchus turned into the drunken Noah; a late 3rd century carving of Jonah resting under the gourd tree was based on the older Greek image of Endymion asleep. The more refined an early Christian work was, the more subtly it might display its classical affiliations.

Despite such adaptations, as the classical world sank, it took some arts with it. The great casualty was large-scale sculpture in the round. From Constantinople to Italy, there are plenty of low-relief carvings after the 4th century. But not for a thousand years would there be bronze heroes on horseback to match the Marcus Aurelius on the Roman capitol. From Constantine onward, the Christian emperors preferred flat hieratical art, especially mosaics, whose multiplicity of shapes suited a power based on ceremony. The "otherworldliness" of those gold-and purple-sheathed Byzantine nobles, glittering in mosaic on the walls of Ravenna and points east, is propaganda; there could have been no better medium than mosaic for impressing on subjects' minds the idea of a continuity between the courts of heaven and those of earth. The rigid bodies and fixed, wide-eyed stares, we now feel, are pure spirit. But, as in the fearsome tapestry of St. Theodore, they were also meant to remind the faithful that Big Brother was watching, that the eye of the state found its model in the all-seeing eye of God. With its Christs enthroned as emperors and its emperors carrying the victorious insignia of the church, the official art of the early Christian empire is a sustained paean to the divine right of kings.

Naturally, secular art was more relaxed. The homosexual content of Greek art is lovingly preserved in a tiny blue glass roundel made in Alexandria in the late 3rd century A.D. Called a portrait of "Gennadios most accomplished in the musical art," and rendered with innumerable scratches of a needle on a sheet of gold leaf, it presents a young man who, from his curly hair, might be a cousin of Leonardo's boyfriend Salai. It is not, of course, the only masterpiece of portraiture in the show. The tradition of the Roman portrait bust was kept and amplified among patrician families. The show is also exceptionally rich in objets de luxe, ranging from a golden Aphrodite set on a lapis lazuli shell to The Casket of Projecta, a bridal coffer, dug up in Rome late in the 18th century, but made around 375 A.D. to celebrate a marriage of Christian aristocrats. A melange of Christian symbol ism and the still-active images of classicism --Nereids riding on sea serpents, Aphrodite borne up on the half shell by Tritons, and the bride (as in The Song of Solomon) primping herself for marriage--it is one of the most dazzling pieces of silver work to survive from the ancient world.

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