Creative Principles of Late Antique Burial Chambers

The present study deals with guiding principles that were determining in the pictorial decoration of late antique Christian funerary monuments. The starting point of the study are the funerary chambers of the Roman catacombs (so-called cubicula) that have been built as family burials along the underground galleries between the 3rd and late 4th respectively early 5th centuries AD and decorated with figurative wall paintings. With the help of a visual cultural approach that focuses on the interrelationship between space, image and viewer, the arrangement and combination of popular motifs are systematically examined and meaningful structures in the interaction of the images are made visible for the first time. The study came to the astonishing conclusion that the use of images on the grave site was by no means arbitrary, but showed certain regularities: with a majority of 82% most analyzed motifs tended to be attached to certain places in the funerary chamber; the remaining 18% show, however, no such preferences in their distribution. In order to name this visual phenomenon, the terms of position-favoring and position-flexible motifs was introduced in this study describing two basic possibilities in dealing with images. But regularities are also tangible in the combination of motifs. In addition to picture cycles, such as the very popular Jonah cycle, the evaluation of the catacomb paintings shows that twelve combinations of Christian motifs occur on a regular base. In fact, 56% of the funerary chambers studied show one or more of these twelve combinations and/or one or more picture cycles. The principles of ancient rhetoric, which were previously used primarily in Roman wall painting as categories of image analysis in houses, provide the starting point in this study for re- evaluating the interaction of images among each other. On the basis of formal and/or content- related references, mutually confirming and complementary as well as contradictory forms of image combinations can be identified. However, these guiding design principles should not be described as static. Rather they reacted dynamically to iconographic shifts in the pictorial repertory of Roman catacomb painting and to changes in the architecture of the underground funerary monuments. A supra-regional view shows that these design principles worked out on the basis of catacomb paintings are found in contemporary funerary contexts in the east of the Roman Empire too, so that they can be understood as basic phenomena of late antique visual culture. The present study therefore not only opens up a new perspective on a much-researched area, such as that of Roman catacomb painting, but also offers a new approach to the forms of expression of visual image culture in late antique Christianity.