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Martyrs were believed to hold a special place in heaven, So being favoured by a martyr was deemed to be your ticket to the afterlife and a place with Zeus.
This is Santa Constanza. It’s Christian church now. But, originally, this was a Roman mausoleum. It was built by Constantine’s own daughter, Constanza.
The pagan Goddess Isis was a natural model to become the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus Christ.
From the outside, you wouldn’t have known the Lullingstone house church was there. It was a modest Christian conversion and almost invisible.
In the early days of Christianity, nobody really knew what Jesus Christ looked like. What little evidence there is often conflicts.
The first Jesuses in art are young, handsome, curly-haired and free. So, either Jesus deliberately misled his followers about what he actually looked like for the first 1,000 years or so of Christianity, or the Turin Shroud is a mediaeval fake. I know what I think.
Waldemar Januszczak discusses the meaning of symbolism used in early Christian Art. The secrecy and Rotas Square used to hide it from the Romans,
The famous Christian sign, the Christogram, or Chi-Rho, represents Jesus himself. It is made by combining two Greek letters, Chi and Rho, the first two letters of the word Christos, which means “the anointed one”.
The Roman Empire collapsed, not because it became too decadent, but because it became too large to govern effectively. It became a victim of it’s own success.
It’s that secret religious language again that Christianity had employed from the beginning.
Christianity was a secretive underground religion until Constantine adopted this fledgling religion as the official Roman religion.
One of the most common uses of a Roman basilica was as a law court. The populace would mill about down here while the magistrate would sit up at the end, raised on a magisterial throne, sitting in a special rounded apse that signalled his importance.
Christianity often looked to the Pagan Gods for models to adopt into the new fledgling religion. Jesus is believed to be modelled on the youthful Apollo.
Waldemar Januszczak explores the fantastic art, created by hugely misaligned groups of peoples during the inappropriately named Dark Ages.
The Dark Ages go roughly from the fourth century to roughly the 11th. They begin when the Roman Empire starts to crumble, and they end when William the Conqueror invades England.
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