Introduction

The Bible was the supreme point of reference, the principal source of narrative imagery for artists working in the public sphere throughout the early Middle Ages, in the extended Mediterranean basin and across transalpine Europe. Public art, from its exposure to the elements, to the wear and tear of use and to the vagaries of changing fashion, is perhaps more vulnerable and liable to damage, replacement or total destruction than is art from the private sphere. Nevertheless, in a fragmentary state and inevitably sometimes with unbridgeable gaps in the evidence, a considerable sample of public imagery referencing the Bible survives from the period.

Traditions of illustrating the Old and the New Testaments had existed throughout the Roman world from at least the late second century ce and had become firmly established in the Mediterranean theatre by the fifth century. Individual scenes and narrative sequences had been devised and deployed by artists working for Christian patrons for a range of contexts, funerary, ecclesiastical and secular – the galleries and cubiculi of the catacombs on the outskirts of Rome, sarcophagi, the walls, fittings and fabrics of churches, liturgical vessels, as well as the personal jewellery and clothing of Christians in everyday life. In Rome, probably by the mid-fifth century, at Old St Peter’s, sequences from the two Testaments, starting with the creation and finishing with the mission of the apostles and the establishment of the church, faced each other on the walls of the nave; at the Lateran basilica also, the two Testaments were opposed, but this time antithetically, with typologically matched episodes set against each other down the length of the nave. Similarly in the third great early five-aisled basilica in Rome, S Paolo fuori le mura, an Old Testament sequence from the creation to Jacob on the south wall of the nave faced forty-two episodes from the life of St Paul, drawn from Acts, culminating in a single conceit from Revelation, the twenty-four elders adoring Christ, over the arch to the transept; and a generation later, in S Maria Maggiore, in the 430s, the mosaics of the nave comprised a selection of narratives from the Old Testament, episodes from the acts of four major patriarchs, before and under the Law, Abraham, Jacob, Moses and Joshua, while an idiosyncratic cycle of episodes from Christ's infancy covered the apsidal arch, drawing on apocryphal tradition as well as on the Pentateuch.