Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

artistic evidence and its interpretation 889
fragment of the Bible paradoxically offers valuable information about
working practices in the first half of the fifth century: flaked miniatures in
the former reveal that the artists worked with an underdrawing before
applying the pigments, and, in the case of the latter, the scribe wrote down
instructions indicating which figures to include in the pictures. 12 The miniatures
were made up to some extent from stock types and stock motives
(sometimes incongruously linked – as in the Laocoön scene in the Vatican
Virgil). Some commentators on this period assume that in all cases artists,
whether floor mosaicists, miniature painters or monumental artists, worked
from ‘pattern books’, and that ideas and styles were transmitted mechanically.
13 However, the range of artistic expertise and the actual complexities
of production can hardly be reduced to a mentality of copying. A test case
is given by the mosaics of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome
(432–40), a major papal commission. These mosaics incorporate some of
the same figure motives and compositional schemes as these two manuscripts.
But this does not prove that all are linked by the use of common
model books; the same congruence of vocabulary might be interpreted as
due to the work of the same artists or by the conformity of different artists
to the same fashions. The significant visual issue here is the divergence in
style between the two parts of the decoration, despite the similarity of the
figural and architectural motives: the nave mosaics (which represent stories
of Old Testament history and accordingly offered Christians in Rome a new
‘past’) are illusionistic in a colourful and impressionist manner, whereas the
style of the triumphal arch mosaics (representing the New Testament story
of the Infancy of Christ) is linear and flat. The pictorial distinction between
the ‘narrative’ emphasis of the nave images and the ‘theological’ imagery of
the triumphal arch around the apse cannot be explained solely by the use of
stylistically different ‘models’ – whether pattern books, illustrated Bible
manuscripts, or some other source. Furthermore, the suggestion that some
of the details of the scenes of the nave might derive from traditions of the
‘Jewish’ community rather than from Gentile Christian thinking and that
their source might be Jewish pictorial iconography which had entered
Christian art through the illustration of manuscripts of the Septuagint
cannot be demonstrated. And in any case the planners and artists of these
mosaics (and the other art of this period) were influenced by a complex
visual experience and a knowledge of ideas from many texts, theological,
spiritual (including hymns) and others; to derive precise elements directly
from (lost) manuscript illuminations must be excessively speculative. 14
The cycles in both parts of Santa Maria Maggiore show parallel thinking,
and, whatever their sources, are examples of highly developed pictorial
12 Degering and Boekler (1932).
13 For the materials see Scheller (1963 and 1996); and Conkey and Hastorf (1990).
14 See Brenk (1975) and (1977).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008