Early Christian Art and the Basilica

For nearly three centuries, Christians in the Roman Empire met in houses and buried their dead in underground cemeteries (catacombs), where they painted simple images on the walls. In AD 313 the emperors Constantine and Licinius agreed, in what is called the Edict of Milan, to tolerate Christianity. Constantine then paid for large churches. The question was what a church should look like.

Temples would not do: a Roman temple was a house for a god's statue, with sacrifices outside, and it held few people. Builders chose instead the basilica, a Roman public hall used for law courts and business. A basilica is a long hall with a tall central nave, lower aisles on each side behind rows of columns, windows high in the nave walls (the clerestory), and a rounded apse at one end, where a judge had once sat. In a church, the altar stood before the apse. An entrance porch, the narthex, sat at the other end, and some large churches added a cross-arm, the transept.

Looking closely: The Good Shepherd. Above a doorway in a small cross-shaped chapel in Ravenna, a young, beardless shepherd sits among rocks and plants, with sheep around him, three on each side. He wears a gold robe with a purple mantle, the colors of an emperor, and holds a tall cross like a shepherd's staff. The scene still has Roman roots: a landscape, shading on the robe, sheep turning in space. But the gold halo and the cross make it a Christian image of Christ as protector. The glass tesserae glow against a deep blue sky.