J. Spencer Northcote

“ Time was, indeed, when learned men shrank from this conclusion, and suggested, that though unquestionably they were used as burial-places, yet perhaps this was only an afterthought, and that they may have been originally designed for something else. The building of Rome, it was said, must have required vast quantities of stone and of sand to make cement; perhaps, therefore, in the Roman Catacombs we have only lit upon a certain number of exhausted, or rather deserted, sandpits and quarries, which later generations availed themselves of, for economy’s sake, as places of burial. ”

“ We cannot attempt to vindicate our interpretation of all the other symbols used by Christian artists with the same minuteness of detail, neither is it necessary. All will accept the dove as a fitting symbol of the simplicity, the gentleness, purity, and innocence of a Christian soul gone to its rest, and a sheep as fitly representing a disciple of Christ.
Another emblem, the fish, requires more words of explanation, because it is capable of receiving a double meaning. ”

“ We try, then, whether our rendering of the anchor as equivalent to “hope” will make sense, as a schoolboy would say who was trying to translate a piece of Greek or Latin into English, in all these other places; and if it does, we are satisfied that our interpretation can be no longer disputed. A false reading of a single symbol might chance to fit one monument, or two, or three; but to say that any false reading will fit hundreds of separate monuments, fit all equally well, and succeed in extracting a consistent meaning from each, is to assert what no sane man can believe. ”

“ The portions of the Catacombs that were excavated during the fourth century vary considerably in character. In some parts, everything is on an exceptional scale of grandeur; the chambers are not only double, one on either side of the gallery, but even treble and quadruple, and of magnificent proportions. In other parts, on the contrary, there is nothing but a number of miserable galleries, executed with great economy, and destitute of all ornament; evidently they were required to meet the increasing wants of a large Christian population. ”

“ Christian epigraphy was born as Christian art was, simultaneously with the introduction of Christianity itself into the metropolis of the ancient world; it acquired all its special characteristics, and perhaps attained its highest religious perfection, before the end of the third century, after which its beautiful and touching simplicity is somewhat marred and secularised by a gradual influx of some of those modes of thought and expression which prevailed in the world without. ”

“ Now the Roman Catacombs are a vast gallery of ancient Christian art. Single specimens, indeed, may exist elsewhere, and wherever they are found they deserve attentive examination; but it is obvious that the largest and most valuable collection in the world is to be found in subterranean Rome; and here, if anywhere, the subject may be thoroughly sifted and settled. It is to the minuteness of the topographical researches of De Rossi that we are indebted for the solid basis on which the earliest chapters of the history of Christian art can now be made to rest. ”

“ One cannot study a dozen monuments of Pagan Rome without coming across some trace of this great social division of the ancient world into freemen and slaves. Yet in a number of Christian inscriptions in Rome, exceeding twelve or thirteen thousand, and all belonging to centuries during which slavery still flourished, scarcely ten have been found—and even two or three of these are doubtful—containing any allusion whatever to this fundamental division of ancient Roman society. ”

“ We are drawing very near to the end of our subterranean walk: indeed, the staircase which is to restore us to the upper air close to the very entrance of the vineyard is immediately behind us, as we stand contemplating the tomb of St. Cornelius. Nevertheless, if we are not too weary, nor our guide too impatient, we should do well to resist the temptation to escape, until we have first visited two small chambers which are in the immediate neighbourhood. They contain some of the most ancient specimens of painting to be found in the whole range of the Catacombs. ”

“ In the present instance, therefore, we turn to the sacred literature of the Christians, and we find there a passage which speaks of the duty of “holding fast the hope that is set before us, which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, sure and firm.” We assume, then, provisionally, as a basis of further enquiry, that an anchor may perhaps have been used as an emblem of Christian hope. Continuing our search in the same sacred books, we find that there was a special connection in the Christian creed between hope and the condition of the dead. ”

“ And now at length we must conclude our visit to St. Callixtus. We fear that we have already enumerated more than can be seen with advantage during the course of a single visit; yet it is worth an effort to see it all, because it includes monuments which illustrate nearly every century of the period during which the Catacombs were used. It is for this reason that a visit to St. Callixtus is so singularly valuable, whether it be intended to take this cemetery as a sample of all, or only to use it as an introduction to others. ”

“ Gregory of Tours tells us, that when the tombs of these martyrs were rediscovered after the ages of persecution had ceased, there were found with them not only the relics of those worshippers who had been thus cruelly put to death—skeletons of men, women, and children lying on the floor—but also the silver cruets which they had taken down with them for the celebration of the sacred mysteries; and De Rossi holds out hopes that some traces of this precious sanctuary may be restored even to our own generation. ”

“ It was not necessary that the Christians should obtain any special leave to form a collegium, nor seek for any special privileges. The ordinary liberties [23] of every Roman citizen were sufficient for their purpose. Most of the Pagan burial-clubs indeed had, or pretended to have, a certain religious character, being usually placed under the invocation of some one or other of the gods. But this was not an essential condition of their existence. It was not necessary, therefore, that the Christians should put forward any religious profession at all, nor even take the name of a collegium. ”

“ He has studied every monument in its own place. He has examined with his own eyes every detail of the subterranean topography where it has been possible to penetrate, and then recorded his observations with a minuteness of analysis which it is sometimes almost wearying to follow in print, and which nothing but the most enthusiastic love of truth and the most indomitable perseverance could have enabled him to execute in fact. Thus his conclusions are drawn from the monuments themselves; or rather, they are little more than a résumé of the observations he has had to record upon those monuments. ”

“ First, the recorded prices are, in every instance, out of all proportion with the labour really expended on the grave; and secondly, they vary immensely, yet not according to any fixed principle. It seems safer, therefore, to conclude, with De Rossi, that the price was in each case proportionate to the means and good-will of the purchaser, that so provision might be made for the gratuitous burial of the poor out of the superabundant payments of the wealthy. ”

“ In a word, they proceed upon the assumption that there is an incessant interchange of kindly offices between this world and the next, between the living and the dead; they represent all the faithful as living members of one Body, the Body of Christ; as forming one great family, knit together in the closest bonds of love; and this love finding its chief work [118] and happiness in prayer, prayer of the survivors for those who have gone before, prayer of the blessed for those who are left behind. ”

“ The devotion of Pope Damasus to the Catacombs was as intelligent as it was ardent. He longed, as he himself tells us, to be buried in them, in a chamber where many of his martyred predecessors and other saints already lay; but he respected too much the integrity of their tombs, and prepared his place of burial therefore elsewhere. He built a place for the purpose aboveground, in which himself, his mother, and sister, were all buried. It would have been a happy thing for Christian archæology if others had been equally scrupulous ”

“ If all ancient Christian literature had perished, we should have been at a loss to comprehend this enigma; but as soon as we know that the Fathers of the Church speak of it as an acknowledged fact, which “nobody doubts” (to use St. Augustine’s words) , that the Church was typified by the ark, a [91] ray of light begins to dawn upon us; and when we call to mind that St. Peter himself speaks of the waters of baptism as saving men’s souls, “even as Noe and his family were saved by the waters of the flood,” all is at once made clear. ”

“ Those who have seen the Catacombs themselves will call to mind others of which we have not spoken, but we think their meaning is generally obvious so as to need no explanation. We will name one class only of these paintings; those in which our Lord and His Blessed Mother appear. Our readers will hardly expect to find anything that pretends to be a portrait of either one or the other. We have seen that the disposition in primitive Christian art was to represent facts rather than persons, and the mystery which the facts signified rather than the facts themselves. ”

“ The fish and the anchor, the lamb and the dove, the shepherd and the fisherman, may be named as the most prominent examples; and all these during the first, or, as it has been styled, the hieroglyphic or ideographic period of Christian art, were characterised by the utmost simplicity. The principal figure usually stood alone; the fisherman is catching a fish, or the shepherd is carrying a sheep upon his shoulders, and nothing more.
In the second period—i.e., from the middle of the second to the middle of the third century—the Good Shepherd occurs less frequently, and is represented less simply ”

“ There is no branch of Christian archæology in which the labours of De Rossi have produced a more startling revolution than in the history of Christian art. When the Reformers of the sixteenth century protested against the use of pictures and images in churches, and boldly declared that it was contrary to the practice of primitive ages, Catholics had no monuments to appeal to in refutation of such a statement. The remains of the Christian literature of those times were scanty, and more or less silent upon the subject, and the paintings in the Catacombs were buried in darkness. ”

“ On the last day of May in that year, some labourers who were digging pozzolana in a vineyard on the Via Salara happened to break into a gallery of graves ornamented with Christian paintings, Greek and Latin inscriptions, and two or three [52] sculptured sarcophagi. Such a discovery in an age of great intellectual activity naturally excited much curiosity, so that persons of all classes flocked to see it. ”

“ If the Christian religion in its infancy was to make use of art at all, it had no choice but to appropriate to its own purposes the forms of ancient art, so far as they were pure and innocent; by degrees it would proceed to eliminate what was unmeaning, and substitute something Christian.
Some writers have supposed that Christians used at first Pagan subjects as well as Pagan forms of ornamentation; and they point to the figure of Orpheus, which appears in three or four places of the Catacombs, and to that of Psyche also, which may be seen about as often. ”

“ It has been shown that the habits of Pagan Rome about burials and burial-grounds, during the first centuries of the Christian era, unconsciously, yet most effectively, shielded the work of the infant Church. The extensive area so frequently attached to the monuments of the wealthy; the house or chamber built upon it; the assignment of property for its support to chosen friends, with the infliction of fines in case of neglect; the inalienability of any land which had once been used for purposes of burial; the power of admitting friends and excluding strangers by the mere will of the testator ”

“ The whole roof of the vaulted passage is covered with the vine, trailing with all the freedom of nature, and little winged genii are fluttering among the leaves. Certainly we might suspect this of being Pagan, were it not that Daniel in the lions’ den, Noe in the ark, and other undoubtedly Christian subjects, are close at hand to disabuse us of the suspicion. ”

“ An immense number of most curious and interesting monuments still survive, showing how largely the Roman poor availed themselves of this privilege in the second and third centuries of our era, and what sound practical sense they exhibited in establishing the laws and conditions of membership in these burial-clubs. It is a most tempting field, upon which, however, we must not dwell at any length. ”

“ Prayers or acclamations for absent or departed friends are mixed among the most ancient names, and generally run in the same form as the earliest and most simple Christian epitaphs, e.g., Vivas, Vivas in Deo Cristo, Vivas in eterno, ΖΗΣ ΕΝ [132] ΘΕΩ, ΒΙΒΑΣ ΙΝ ΘΕΩ, Te in pace, &c. “Mayest thou live in God Christ, for ever, Thee in peace,” &c. The feeling which prompted the pilgrims who visited these shrines thus to inscribe in sacred places the names of those they loved and would fain benefit, is so natural to the human heart, that instances of it may be found even among the heathen themselves. ”

“ Our space will not allow, neither is it necessary, that we should enter at any length into the history of Christian sculpture, since the same general laws of growth presided over this as over painting. It must be remembered, however, that sculpture was used much more sparingly, and did not attain its full Christian development nearly so soon as the sister art. There was no room for it in the Catacombs except on the faces and sides of the sarcophagi, which were sometimes used there for the burial of the dead ”