Felicity Harley-McGowan
Christ too must be understood to be he who in spiritual armour
and as a spiritual warrior is an overthrower of spiritual enemies,
and so it was he who was able to contend with the legion of demons;
and thus it will become evident that of this war the psalm declared,
The Lord strong the Lord mighty in battle. For when he did battle with the last enemy, which is death, he triumphed by the trophy of the cross.
Tertullian, Against Marcion IV.20.4â5
The vivid image of Jesus as a spiritual warrior triumphing over demons and death had profound resonance for Tertullianâs contemporaries in the early third century ce. Having largely expanded and maintained its power through war and the exertion of violence, the Roman Empire was awash with depictions of conquest; and within its bellicose culture, the concept of the âbarbarianâ as an aggressive and ever-present threat to the order of civilized Roman society was vigorously endorsed by the government through word and image. A strong tradition of publicly displaying depictions of battle had existed from the third century bce, where symbolic and allegorical compositions were used to enunciate Roman victory. As this practice evolved, the vanquished were the recipients of increasing attention pictorially: represented as captives, bound, humiliated, and brought to servitude at the feet of Roman tropaea or military trophies, they became in Keith Bradleyâs terms, âabstract symbolsâ of Roman power (Fig. 1). With the rise of Septimius Severus in the late second century ce, representations of subjugation became increasingly explicit, and violent; and it was at this very time (c. 207â208 ce) that Tertullian crafted his own literary image of the imperial Christ vanquishing the enemy in his treatise countering the doctrines of Marcion, cited above. By the fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus attests that Roman emperors delighted in using traditional, symbolic references to imperial power (such as Victories offering them crowns, or personifications of cities offering them gifts), together with a range of scenes that more explicitly detailed the path to victory (the vanquished trampled underfoot, or even slaughtered). The emperors, wrote Gregory, âlove not only the reality of those deeds on which they pride themselves, but also the representations of them.â Within a visual culture redolent of basic power relations, dominant versus subordinate, active and pacified, superior and inferior, the depiction of the vanquished beside the trophy was a critical component in the visual articulation of imperial authority: the conqueror and conquered were two sides of the same coin.
Fig. 1. Gemma Augustea. Roman, c. 9-12 CE; h. 19 x b. 23 cm, low relief cameo, double-layered Arabian onyx stone, (seventeenth century setting of gold, gold-plated silver), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Inv. nr. ANSA IXa79). Photo: Gryffindor, Wikimedia Commons User, with kind permission.
In addressing the arch-heretic Marcion, Tertullian would not have been left untouched by these pictorial developments. While even the winds and sea obeyed Christ (Luke 8:25), authority over nature will have seemed inadequate in visually conveying Christâs domination of that most slippery and subversive enemy, evil. Like the barbarian, invariably represented with a chilling lack of pathos in Roman art, evil needed to be brought under control by Christ in violent combat. Like a Roman artisan in his workshop, Tertullian knew instinctively the narrative components essential for the construction of the image. In careful sequence, he thus builds a crescendo toward triumph: Christ dons armor, fights a legion in battle, slays the chief enemy, and sets up the tropaeum.
For the representation of Christâs triumph over death the imperial model was effective in Christian literature, and became significant in Christian art. Much has been written how the tropaeum was used in early Christian iconography; yet little has been said about the symbol of the captive that was so critical in the formulaic demonstration of Roman imperial glory, but turns out to be absent from representations of Christian triumph, at least in the expected form. This departure from traditional iconography presents a historical puzzle with important ramifications beyond the iconographic detail; in Christian art, the victim was transformed into the victor. This effective reversal of the original meaning had far-reaching cultural effects, gradually enabling the development of an entirely new genre of imagery: Christian suffering. To consider the process of reversal, I take up a theory of AndrĂ© Grabar. In doing so, the historical puzzle inevitably becomes historiographical as well as iconographical: for the case of the tropaeum and the symbol of the captive embodies an unresolved tension in modern scholarship regarding the very question of whether, how, and why imperial themes were influential in the formation of Christian iconography in late antiquity.
Grabar drew attention to the change in the iconography of military triumph, arguing that just as the trophy was absorbed directly into Christian iconography, so was the symbol of the vanquished; but that unlike the trophy, the meaning of the captive had to be reversed. Much of his work on the development of a Christian iconography in late antiquity has been neglected more recently, particularly since the publication of Thomas Mathewsâs study The Clash of Gods in 1993, wherein the viability of Grabarâs template for the interpretation of early Christian iconography (discussed below) was questioned. Yet Grabarâs ideas deserve renewed consideration. In addressing the transformation of the vanquished this chapter will begin by returning to his understanding of the emergence of Christian iconography, specifically highlighting his thoughts on the creative process involved. It will then briefly outline the place of the tropaeum as a symbol of triumph in Roman visual culture, before unfolding the âreversalâ hypothesis as Grabar applied it to the iconography of beheaded martyrs in Christian art. While Grabarâs ideas about the creative process furnish a critical intellectual context for the âreversalâ hypothesis, they will be shown to have important, broader ramifications for our understanding of the ways in which ânewâ iconographies were developed by Roman artisans for Christian patrons in late antiquity after the fourth century. This includes an iconography of death, and, it will be suggested, a more historic representation of the crucifixion.
Grabar and the Emergence of Christian Iconography
Grabar first gave a close analysis of the relationship between Roman imperial visual culture and the formation of Christian iconography in his 1936 monograph LâEmpereur dans lâart byzantin. In systematically presenting his ideas about the influence of the emperorâs court ceremonial on early Christian iconography, he drew together and analyzed both literary sources (which were numerous) and extant examples of imperial imagery (which were widely dispersed). Various scholars before and alongside Grabar actively explored and subscribed to the view that imperial iconography exerted an important influence on Christian art, maintaining that as part of the appropriation of imperial cult imagery, images of Jesus were directly modeled on those of the Emperor.
Grabarâs thoughts about the ways by which Christians utilized Roman iconography, and why they did so, were teased out in the 1960s when he articulated what would become a standard template for understanding the very formation of Christian art in the Greco-Roman world. Grabar proposed that around 200 ce, in the face of competition from other religions, and in spite of their aniconic leanings, Christians began to demand images that were specific to their faith. In response, artisans did not invent a visual language from scratch, but drew from the conventional motifs current in other branches of late Hellenistic art, adapting them to the Christian context. Grabar thus pointed to an important paradox in the creation of early Christian imagery: that to create something genuinely new, artisans turned to what existed around them. In this process, the notion of Christian dependence on imperial art was pivotal for him: âThe mark of imperial iconography in Christian art is recognizable everywhere and in different ways,â he wrote. In his view, therefore, the art of Late Antiquity was like a large family, having many branches but also a core...
