§ llO. IMAGES OF CHKIST. 567
favored tliis material representation as a powerful help to virtue and devotion, especially for the uneducated classes, whence tile use of images, in fact, mainly proceeded.
Plastic representation, it is true, was never popular in the East. The Greek church tolerates no statues, and forbids eveD crucifixes. In the West, too, in this period, sculpture occura almost exclusively in has relief and high relief, particularly on sarcophagi, and in carvings of ivory and gold in church decorations. Sculpture, from its more finite nature, lies farther from Christianity than the other arts.
Painting, on the contrary, was almost universally drawn into the service of religion ; and that, not primarily from the artistic impulse which developed itself afterwards, but from the practical necessity of having objects of devout reverence in concrete form before the eye, as a substitute for the sacred books, which were accessible to the educated alone. Akin to this is the universal pleasure of children in pictures.
The church-teachers approved and defended this demand, tliough they themselves did not so directly need such helps. In fact, later tradition traced it back to apostolic times, and saw in the Evangelist Luke the first sacred painter. Whereof only so much is true : that he has sketched in his Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles vivid and faithful pictures of the Lord, His mother, and His disciples, which are surely of infinitely greater value than all pictures in color and statues in marble.'
Basil the Great (f 379) says : " I confess the appearance of the Son of God in the flesh, and the holy Mary as the mother of God, who bore Him according to the flesh. And I receive also the holy apostles and prophets and martyrs. Their likenesses I revere and kiss with homage, for they are handed down from the holy apostles, and are not forbidden, but on the contrary painted in all our chnrches."' His brother, Gregory
' Jerome, in his biographical slietch of Luke, De viris illustr. c. 7, is silent concerning this tradition (which did not arise till the seventh century or later), an/ gpeaks of Luke merely as medicus, according to Col. iv. 4.
' Epist. 205. Comp. his Oratio in Barlaam, Opp L 515, and similar expressions in Gregory Naz., Orat. 19 (al. 18).
568 THIRD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590.
of Kyssa, also, in his memorial discourse on tlie niartyr Tlico (lore, speaks in praise of sacred painting, wliicli " is wont to speak silently from the walls, and thus to do much good." The bishop Paulinns of Xola, who caused biblical [)ictures to be exhibited annually at the festival seasons in the church '.f St. Felix, thought that by them the scenes of the Bible wei-e made clear to the uneducated rustic, as they could not otherwise be ; impressed themselves on his memory, awakened in him holy thoughts and feelings, and restrained him from all kinds of vice.' The bishop Leontius of ISTeapolis in Cyprus, who at the close of the sixth century wrote an apology for Christianity against the Jews, and in it noticed the charge of idolatiy, asserts that the law of Moses is directed not unconditionally against the use of religious images, but only against the idolatrous worship of them ; since the tabernacle and the temple themselves contained cherubim and other figures; and he advocates images, especially foi* their beneficent influences. "In almost all the world," says he, "profligate men, murderers, robbers, debauchees, idolaters, are daily moved to contrition by a look at the cross of Christ, and led to renounce the world, and practise every virtue."' And Leontius already appeals to the miraculous fact, that blood flowed from many of the images.*
Owing to the difficulty, already noticed, of worthily i-epi-e- Benting Christ Himself, the first subjects were such scenes from the Old Testament as formed a typical prophecy of the liistory of the Redeemer. Thus the first step from the field of nature, whence the earliest symbols of Christ — the Iamb, the fish, the shepherd — were drawn, was into the field of pre-Christian revelation, and thence it was another step into the province of gospel history itself. The favorite pictures of tin's kind were, the ofiering-up of Isaac — tlie pre-figuration of the great
* Paulinus, Carmen ix. et x. de S. Fclicis natali.
' See the fragments of this apology in the 4th act of tlic second council of Nicaea, and Neander, iii. 560 (2d Germ, ed.), who adds the unjjrejudiced remark: "We cannot doubt that what Leontius here says, though rhetorically exaggerated, is nevertheless drawn from life, and is founded on impressions actually produced by the ipntemplation of iniages in certain states of feeling."
* TloWaKti alfiaTwv ^ucrtiv f J elicdvup yiySvaai.