In England, no less! MacGregor introduces this religion, of such weight in the west, in a sneaky way, through a mosaic (again, couldn’t find it on exhibit, I think it was under repair or curation or something) left in a Roman house in Dorset, England, the kind of house that might have had a swanky Hoxne pepper pot. It’s a mosaic tile, a standard channel of art for the Romans, and since Constantine in the 200s they’d been ok with Christians as one of the many weird religions in their empire. This image is one of the earliest representations of Jesus that exists; it may be they were reluctant to represent him, earlier, because Judaism (and they were all Jews) of course prohibits any depiction of the divine. Such a culture, where what’s divine is unrepresentable, has long co-existed, in the mideast and Mediterranean world, with the Rameses/Alexander approach of look at me, look at me, look at me, even if this is nothing like what I look like! (On the other hand, as MacGregor points out, what we know of Jesus is that he said “I am the Light and the Way and the Truth and the Life.” But what does that look like, exactly? And how do you render it in mosaic?
What did Jesus look like? No one knows, of course; there aren’t even any physical descriptions in the gospels. There’s probably lots of books tracing the history of how he’s been represented through the millenia; I fondly remember a silly zombie movie, made in Seattle about ten years ago, starring WASP Jesus, Hippie Jesus, Girl Jesus, and Angry Black Jesus. But I guess that’s the thing with such figures, you use them to talk about yourself, or at least something else that you know. In this mural, there’s a badly drawn Jesus, identified mostly because his name is written near his head; and next to him, Bellerophon is riding Pegasus up to battle the chimaera, and Bellerophon looks a lot like Jesus. Heroes morph very gradually, borrowing features from each other and evolving through the ages; thus Harry Potter has a lot in common with Frodo, although there are important differences, too, and when my cartoonist friend tried to make an image of me as well-known superhero ‘Captain Captions’ I believe he began by tracing the body of Captain Avenger, or some such. I didn’t mind.
Me, your humble blogger
In any event, the really odd thing about this Hinton St. Mary Mosaic is that Jesus was on the floor; you stepped on Him as you walked across the room. That probably wasn’t intended as a sign of disrespect, although pretty quickly I think art evolved to where that would be considered inappropriate. One of the many dangers of images; if you create an image, you can’t control it forever.
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