Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/358

II. Painting in the Early Christian, Byzantine, and Middle Ages. 1. Early Christian Painting, or the Late Roman School. The first examples of early Christian painting are to be found in the Catacombs, the walls, recesses, and ceilings of which were decorated with simple Jrescoes. In the first two centuries, owing to the hatred of everything which could recall the old idolatry (see p. 220), symbols alone were employed, and even these were limited to forms not appropriated to heathen deities. As the power of the Roman Empire declined, and with it its monopoly of art- forms, the love of art — innate in every native of Greece and Italy— once more asserted its sway ; and in the third and fourth centuries, although still to a certain extent hampered by the dread of reviving idolatry, the early Christians were permitted to adorn the catacombs with something more than formal signs. We now find Christ represented as the " Good Shepherd," or as " Orpheus taming the Beasts with his Lyre," etc. The illustration (Fig. 121) affords an exainple of this second class of fresco ; it is taken from the catacombs of S. Calixtus, on the Via Appia, Rome, beneath the church of S. Sebastiano. This church also contains one of the first portraits of Christ, supposed to have been executed at a somewhat later date than the mural frescoes, exhibiting as it does a freedom from restraint and a boldness in exact imitation not indulged in until the establishment of Christianity. In the paintings of the Pontian Catacombs on the Via Portuensis, dating from the fifth century, we note a further advance —