CHAPTER 19 THE ICONOGRAPHY OF EARLY CHRISTIAN ROMAN ART SEAN V. LEATHERBURY JusT how "Christian" was "early Christian Roman art?" And does it make sense to de- fine artworks commissioned, made, and viewed by "Christian Romans" as a distinc- tive group? In current scholarship, the more popular designation "late antique art, art produced from around the fourth to the eighth centuries CE, encourages us to see a pluralistic and diverse artistic scene-not only "a plurality of styles, subject matter, and visual media" but also of communities of believers (pagans or polytheists, Christians, and Jews) whose aesthetic tastes interacted and overlapped much more than has been realized in traditional scholarship (Elsner 2006, 271; on terminology, also Elsner 2018, 20-21; Couzin 2018). This view is meant to serve as a corrective to previous opinions of the art of the period: that it was not worthy of in-depth study, and that it was entirely de- rived from Roman art (the latter view presented by Grabar 1968, who, despite his close study of Christian iconography, compares it to a "technical" or a "parasitic" language). Instead, the picture of creation, borrowing, and influence is held to be more complex. An oft-invoked material example of this overlap between the arts of different faiths is the sarcophagus. Produced in large numbers by the workshops of Rome in the third and fourth centuries, the period when the Christian community in the city and across the empire was on the rise, these elaborately carved stone boxes were commissioned and used by members of a range of faith communities (for a third-century example, see Gee's Chapter 21 in this volume, Figure 21.10 ). The same workshops produced sarcophagi for individuals of different religious denominations, and before the later third century, Christians appear to have picked the same images that others did. Only in the early fourth century did a large number of sarcophagi begin to display images drawn explic- itly from biblical sources, commissioning sarcophagi with reliefs of salvation stories from the Hebrew Bible, such as Jonah and the sea monster or Daniel in the Lion's Den, as well as images of Christ's miracles and Passion drawn from the New Testament (Koch TH 2000 ; Dresken-Weiland as no object can conscio made for, and used by, Cl In the city of Rome i· objects decorated with , Jews: take the gold-glasi to toast the deceased an grave markers (recently, majority of the glasses a Christ and the saints, es significant group of glai made by the same work most striking examples which depicts a man a hovers a small figure o his feet attached to a r, ject given to the god ai FIGURE 19.1. Gold-g! century CE. D: 10.53 err