Early Christian Art
The early Christian period saw an almost total rejection of sculpture, other than for sarcophagi, though the remarkable wooden doors of Santa Sabina in Rome - featuring the earliest known representation of the Crucifixion - are a notable exception. The earliest murals were created in the Roman catacombs, and show no great stylistic innovation, but increasingly Christian painters began to render a sense of expression to the facial features, in order that the emotions of pain, sorrow and ecstasy could be depicted, along with a richly symbolic pictorial vocabulary. But the early Christians favoured mosaics rather than painting as a medium. This painstaking art form had hitherto been associated with floor decoration, but it proved ideal for the decoration of the early churches, its inappropriateness for the depiction of movement in many ways responsible for the rigid artistic forms which took an increasing grip. The earliest surviving cycle, in Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome , dates from the second quarter of the fifth century, and is fairly small-scale. The slightly later group in the Mausoleo di Galla Placidia in Ravenna , the city which had by then assumed the status of capital of the western empire, are more monumental, their daring geometric patterns, elaborate imagery and sublime colouring representing perhaps the first great milestone of Christian art. Ravenna continued as a centre of artistic innovation when a century later it became in effect the Italian capital of Byzantine culture and politics. Many magnificent mosaic series were created, and three sets in particular far surpass in quality anything produced in Constantinople itself, or indeed anywhere else in its empire: at the church of San Vitale, where the mosaics are the central focus of the architecture itself; Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, whose two frieze processions were quite unlike anything previously seen in Italian art; and the church of Sant'Apollinare in Classe, whose apse mosaics exude a unique sense of peace and mystery.
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