Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/342

 S24 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. Little Christian sculpture can be placed before the time of Constantine. Possibly the statue of Christ as the Good Shepherd, in the Lateran Museum, belongs to the third century, to which belong a very few carved Christian sarcophagi. There are at Rome many Christian sarcophagi of the fourth and fifth centuries. Their reliefs present mainly the circle of Biblical subjects painted in the catacombs, and may be interpreted in the same way. Their style is the Graeco-Roman antique of the time ; and, as with the paintings in the catacombs, the Christian compositions are inferior to those borrowed from pagan designs. Outside of Rome, the sarcophagi of these centuries have sometimes the same characteristics as the Ro- man, and sometimes show deviations. For example, the sarcophagi of the southeastern part of Gaul (Pro- vence) resemble the Roman in style, while those of the southwest (Aquitaine) show local peculiarities and perhaps barbarisms. The former, and still more the latter, group of sarcophagi present some new Biblical subjects, and omit certain subjects carved upon the Christian sarcophagi of Rome. The Ravenna sarcoph- agi show Eastern influences, and some of them are altogether Byzantine. The course of antique Christian sculpture was com- paratively unimportant. After Hadrian's time the technique of Italian sculptors rapidly deteriorated. By the fourth century they could not carve the human figure correctly, whether nude or draped. The new stimulus which came to art with the free expansion of Christianity in the fourth century revived painting and mosaic, rather than sculptui-e. Much of the ar-