Early Christian Art Take A Journey Back In Time with Wonderful Early Christian Art - Pierre Du Bourguet - 1971 - Hardcover - William Morrow &company, Inc.

Early Christian Art
Take A Journey Back In Time with Wonderful Early Christian Art

With 60 full-page color plates and 97 black-and-white illustrations

The beginning of the third century witnessed the dawn of Christian art, the seminal force which later led to the great Byzantine and Christian masterpieces. This book describes the origins, development and historical background against which early Christian art flourished, ending with its maturity at the close of the fourth century. Lavish illustrations, in color and black and white, depict outstanding examples of this unique art, inspired by the Christian message, with its powerful and universal appeal to the human condition.

Some outstanding features of Early Christian Art are :

1. This is the most complete book ever to appear on the subject. Included, for instance, are examples of the minor arts, such as jewels and colored glass.

2. The historical, economic and social circumstances of the times are examined, and help to illuminate the style and stages of development of early Christian art.

3. Many misconceptions about early Christian art are dispelled. For example, Pierre du Bourguet demonstrates that Byzantine art, usually considered inseparable from early Christian art, is in fact a derivation and clearly distinct from it.

Introduction

I. Semiclandestinity (200-260)
Lines of Force
* The religious background
* The political scene
* Social conditions
* Internal obstacles to the development of a Christian art

Architecture
* Places of worship
* The martyrium
* The catacombs

Decoration
* Panoramic survey of the elements of decoration
* The graven image
* The themes and their sources
* The style and its evolution
* The sarcophagus reliefs
* The paintings
Guidelines

II. Period of Emergence (260-313)
Christianity in the Empire
Architecture
Decoration
* The themes
* The style
The Minor Arts

III. Into Broad Daylight
Preliminaries
* The rise of Christianity
* Political and social conditions
* The art of the period
Architecture
* The liturgy and the basilica
* The Coastantinian period
* The churches
* The martyria
* The post-Constantinian period
* The baptisteries
* Trends in church architecture reviewed
* The Funerary monuments
Decoration
* Media and techniques
* Sources and evilution of the themes
* Stylistic evolution
The Minor Arts
Conclusion
Extension
Notes
Bibliography
Glossary
Map

Early Christian art, primitive Christian art, paleo-Christian art�a profusion of labels for a period that, even for the expert, is associated with much confusion and uncertainty.
For example, precisely when did it begin? The answer would appear to be�with Christianity itself. Theoretically, this is obvious to the point of tautology, yet it remains pure theory. A new doctrine does not come suddenly into being complete with a corresponding body of beliefs and rituals and, as its material expression, appropriate buildings, art forms and cult objects. There must be a preliminary stage of development during which ideas crystallize into institutions as well as dogma. The fact is that the first Christian "monuments" appeared at a relatively late date in relation to the birth of Christianity. The exact moment of their appearance is by no means easy to ascertain. Indeed, opinion has varied widely on this point. Although some have thought to trace it back to the beginning of the second century, it is now generally agreed that it must have coincided with the beginning of the third.
The end of the period is, for many, perhaps even more vague. In fact, there are histories of early Christian art that extend it as far as Justinian's century (i), thus absorbing a number of "monuments" that must be considered direct precursors, if not indeed an integral part, of Byzantine art. The ambiguity appears to derive from the coincidence, to within a few years, of the liberation of the Church and the foundation of Constantinople. Even the most alert are sometimes careless in distinguishing Imperial from Byzantine. Yet Byzantine art implies a conscious organization of Christian art by the imperial court. In this respect it stands apart from a period during which the court, while it presided over the production of Christian works of art, many of them monumental, had not yet reached the point of assuming full responsibility in its sphere of influence. With the boundaries of the period so ill-defined, its contents must be affected by a similar uncertainty, a situation which the almost total lack of information useful in dating monuments of such antiquity does nothing to improve. The chronological confusion is compounded by the vagueness of the inventory.
Despite these uncertainties, there can be no doubt that in most minds the words early Christian art evoke, immediately and almost exclusively, images of paintings in the Roman catacombs and reliefs on Christian sarcophagi.
This picture, if not thoroughly distorted, is at least essentially incomplete. In the first place, it ignores architecture. Yet, except perhaps in certain climates, architecture is the basis of all art and, in particular, of all explicitly religious art. Admittedly, at first glance, it may not be obvious that the "catacomb," though underground, is still a work of architecture. It is also easy to overlook the records and remains attesting to the existence, above ground, of places of worship that could fairly claim to be called churches. Finally, the reality of an architecture predating the birth of Byzantine art is positively confirmed by the Christian sanctuaries that, despite transformations, still survive.
Moreover, to confine one's attention to Western paintings and reliefs would be totally to ignore all the early Christian art of the East which, even in these departments, anticipated the art associated with the name of the Eastern capital of the Empire.
And yet for all its exclusivity, narrow and even ignorant though it may be, the impression created by casually visiting the catacombs at Rome or leafing through the pages of art books is not altogether false.
It must be acknowledged that in the category of things extant and accessible to inspection, early Christian art offers in abundance only mural paintings, particularly those in the Roman catacombs, in lesser numbers the carved sarcophagi of Italy, Gaul and Spain, and, finally, a few products of the minor arts. It is equally true that in the East most of the works of early Christian art have disappeared. Because of these virtually irremediable losses, both in religious architecture in general and in the artistic production of the East, any study of early Christian art must start under a severe handicap. It is important to try and restore the balance, though one must never lose sight of the speculative element thereby introduced. Of course, rather than build on hypotheses, it is more honest to stick to the verifiable facts, including those that can be extricated from an examination of ruined monuments and contemporary documents.
It is these data that form the basis of the present reconstruction of early Christian art.
One cannot neglect, however, to (ill in the details of the reality that these fragments represent. To proceed otherwise would be to condone the rather common practice of doing no more, by way of characterizing the period, than offer a few examples of Christian paintings and reliefs and ultimately to risk being led into underestimating the importance of early Christian art or even, as has happened, into contesting its right to be called an art at all.
Early Christian art might be defined as the art of Christianity's "infancy." Not that, apart from a certain naivete, there is anything infantile about it. But the works that we have reason to consider the most ancient are, in some respects, scarcely to be distinguished from contemporary profane art while, in others, they reflect the awkwardness typical of new untried energies. It is possible to discern in them, and indeed quite quickly, already conscious lines offeree. While they to some extent foreshadow the submission to imperatives imposed from above, with features appropriate to each of the two parts of the Empire, these efforts are still far from conveying the impression of self-confident gestures. That had to await two truly epoch-making dates: the imperial edict of 380 that made Christianity a state religion, and that of 391 that forbade pagan worship (2). These were sovereign interventions of the temporal power in the religious sphere. Their net effect was to involve the emperors and, by repercussion, the hierarchy of the Church in every area directly affected by religion and, in particular, religious art. Starting from the fifth century, the first traces of Byzantine art appear in the I vast and those of an ecclesiastically supervised art in the West.
Thus, whereas the dawn of early Christian art may still remain somewhat hazy, though it can, without too grave a risk of error, be assigned to the beginning of the third century, there can be little doubt that the end of the fourth century marks the transition to a fully constituted Christian art.
This "aura" of first beginnings that surrounds early Christian art should have entitled it, like any newborn thing, to a sympathetic study of its still clumsy behavior in search of clues to its mature personality. Yet, for a long time, the consequences were unfavorable.