In this Essay (pp. 560, et seqq.) M. de Rossi describes some very curious pictures discovered in the cemetery of Callistus (of the age, he states, of the middle of the third century), evidently relating to the Holy Eucharist. We have ourselves seen, too hastily perhaps, these pictures. If M. de Rossi had not warned us (p. 360) that he was about to adduce something fatal to the new views on this subject, advanced in the 16th century, we should have read in unsuspecting innocence, and accepted the whole as a pleasing testimony to the profound reverence in which the Holy Eucharist was held by the earliest Christians. We have again read this part of the Essay with great care, and, for the life of us, can detect nothing, not the most remote allusion in the pictures themselves, or even in the interpretation of M. de Rossi, to which, we will not say, any high Anglican might not assent, but even all those likewise who in any way acknowledge any presence of Christ, spiritual or symbolical, in the Lord's Supper. The Fish, the divine Saviour, is in more than one way represented in juxtaposition to, or in a sort of parallelism with, the sacred elements. Here he is supporting a basket (canistrum) containing the bread, of a peculiar shape and colour, with what M. de Rossi supposes, with some subtlety, to signify or represent the wine. There the Fish appears with the bread and wine on a table. In another (a pendant, let us observe, to a painting clearly representing the Sacrament of Baptism) there is what seems a priest or bishop in the act of consecrating the elements, with a kneeling female, doubtless representing the Church. We must cite, though Latin, M. de Rossi's own words :

'Jam quis dubitare possit ixùv, sive ille panem et vinum dorso sustinet, sive in mensâ cum pane positus, sive sub ipsâ consecrantis sacerdotis manu depictus est, Christum esse in eucharistiâ.'

Here we pause, for M. de Rossi cannot, or will not perceive, that as to the litigated question of the nature of Christ's presence, it stands precisely as it stood, in the mysterious vagueness in which it was left by our Saviour's words. Of the two main points of difference between our Churches, the iteration of the sacrifice,which we hold to have been made once for all, as a sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction:' and the absolute transmutation of the elements, so that the bread and wine cease to exist,— of this materialistic change there is total silence, there is neither word nor hint. Indeed the symbolic character throughout would seem to favour those who interpret the whole symbolically. We must decline to follow M. de Rossi in some of his further speculations about the Supper of Emmaus, into which, we think, that

the

the more cautious divines of his own Church would hardly follow him.

The last publication on our list will perhaps still more have alarmed some of our readers; it has not in the least disturbed our equanimity. In this we must indeed express our regret that M. de Rossi again appears, and more avowedly, no longer as the calm and sober inquirer, and the candid and conscientious archæologist, but rather as a thorough going controversialist. We had rather meet him in amity in the former character; we cannot think that he is equally successful in the latter. He may convince those who are determined to be convinced, or are already convinced; we do not think that he will be held to have made out his case by a single sober or dispassionate inquirer. Though his Preface is more peaceful, M. de Rossi's almost ostentatious object, in his few pages (illustrated by very beautiful chromo-lithographic engravings, which do great credit to Roman art, but which seem to us almost, like the French work, too beautiful to be quite true), is to show that the worship of the Virgin, in general supposed, even by the most learned in his own Church, as he himself admits, hardly to reach earlier than the second Council of Nicæa, is to be found in initiate, if not in full development, in the Catacombs of Rome; M. de Rossi would persuade us nearly in Apostolic times. We confess that we look on this question with greater indifference than may be pardoned by some of our more jealous brethren. At what time that holiest, most winning of human feelings, maternal love, appealed to the heart of the believer, kindled the imagination of the artist, and induced him to bring to life, as far as he could, in his speaking colours, or even to express in marble, the Virgin Mother and the Divine Child; at what particular period the solemn and devout affection, which hallowed every passage in the early Evangelic History, everything relating to the birth as well as the life of the Saviour,-how soon, and by what slower or more rapid degrees, respect, reverence, tender and devout interest, passed, imperceptibly no doubt, into adoration, worship, idolatry, till it culminated in merging as it were the Redeemer in his more powerful and more merciful mother, jure matris impera filio;' till it added, literally, a fourth person to the Trinity :

'Ante adventum Mariæ regnabant in cœlo tres personæ,

*

車

*

*

Alterum thronum addidit Homo Deus ;'

*

—all this we hold it absolutely impossible to define with precise

accuracy.

accuracy. Bolder steps may have been taken, at an earlier period, in certain times, certain places, by certain persons of more fervent religious passion. We are silent on the greater change in our own days; when a revelation has been made to the holiness and wisdom of our contemporaries, which was not vouchsafed to the piety of St. Bernard or the angelic theology of Thomas Aquinas.

But as to the works of art now before us, the few early pictorial representations of the Virgin, as dwelt upon by M. Rossi, they are of two kinds; one of the Virgin Mother with her Child in her lap, or on her bosom; the other as a female in the attitude of supplication, or as M. de Rossi would fondly believe, of intercession. As to the latter M. de Rossi is obliged, by that natural candour which he cannot shake off, to acknowledge that it may be no more than what it appears to our profane eyes, a female, possibly a martyr, or one of the faithful women in the attitude and act of adoration; or still more probably, an impersonation, by no means uncommon in the earliest periods, of the Church. But though M. de Rossi fairly admits all this, by some strange process of reasoning, because in some passages of the most poetical or metaphor-loving of the Fathers, the Church was represented as a Virgin, and by others an analogy drawn between the Virgin Mother and the Virgin Church, therefore he would assume that these are premature representations of the Virgin herself. So bold a conclusion from such scanty premises we have rarely known.

The former, the Virgin with the Child, are in truth simple Bible illustrations of the first chapters in the Evangelic History. In almost all it is the adoration of the Magi; it is the worship of the Child not of the mother. In one of these, that from the cemetery of Domitilla, the worshipping Magi are four. The theory that they were three, though M: de Rossi cites many earlier instances, does not appear to have been rigorously established. The number, as we know, is not declared in the Gospels. Is it not probable that the three were settled in conformity with the three oblations? One, as we often see, bears the gold, another the incense, the third the myrrh, as the tribute of different Eastern nations. After all, may not the four be here, as M. de Rossi suggests, to balance and give symmetry to the design. On some sarcophagi, it may be added, appears the Child laid in the manger, in his swaddling clothes, with the mother near him, and the ox and the ass, once thought only to belong to later compositions, in mute adoration. No instance of this has been found in the catacomb paintings.

The adoration of the Magi appears again in a lunette of an arcosolio

arcosolio in the cemetery of St. Peter and S. Marcellinus.

Here it is remarkable that the head of the Virgin is without a veil. This is supposed to indicate her virginity; as unmarried maidens did not wear the veil. In this there are only two Magi, looking much less kingly and less Oriental than in later art.

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The third picture is the one which has been so often copied, from a lunette in an arcosolio in the cemetery of S. Agnese. This is familiar to all inquirers into ancient Christian art. It appears in Bishop Munter's Sinnbilder der alten Christen;" who does not scruple to recognise in it a representation of the Virgin. It represents a female with uplifted hands, as in prayer, with a child in her lap. But the style of art, verging towards the Byzantine, and other indications noted by M. de Rossi, especially the double monogram, which rarely appears before the unfolding of the Labarum by Constantine, clearly prove that this is the latest of the four paintings of the Virgin, and dates assuredly after the peace of the Church under Constantine.

There remains the first, on which M. de Rossi lavishes all his ingenuity, and indeed rests the whole strength of his case. It was found on the vaulting, over a 'loculo' in the cemetery of Priscilla. The chromo-lithograph is of the size of the original. Another of these chromo-lithographs exhibits the whole vaulting with the other paintings which cover it, and deserves our serious attention. Half of the centre of this (of one half unfortunately the plaster has entirely fallen away and left no trace of the design) is occupied by the Good Shepherd carrying the lost sheep to the fold; the other two animals on each side of him are figured in relief of the finest white stucco, as is the trunk of the tree, of which the branches, foliage, fruit, and flowers are only painted. It seems to us rather a bold conjecture to suppose that the obliterated half of the picture represented the female, whatever she be or signifies, in the attitude of prayer, because this figure is more than once the 'pendant' to the Good Shepherd. And M. de Rossi here cites a parallel case, which seems to us altogether at issue with his interpretation of the praying female. On a sarcophagus in the Lateran, which has the Good Shepherd balanced by the praying female, appears over the female the name IULIANE. Now as this was the name of the person deposited in the sarcophagus (as appears by an epigraph from her widowed husband) it is clear that in this instance it represents the departed wife, whose piety is thus imaged forth. To return: in another part, on the right-hand side, of the 'loculo,' there is a group to which a more commanding personage, almost obliterated, appears to point, of singular interest. The group consists of three figures; one a female in

the

the attitude of prayer, with a long tunic and pallium; the second, a man in a short tunic and pallium, also with his arms uplifted as in adoration; the third a youth about ten years old,— this figure is less perfect.* We at once made a bold conjecture, anticipating, we rejoice to say, the interpretation of M. de Rossi, as to the Scriptural scene here represented, the return from the visit to the Temple, where our Lord, at twelve years old, disputed with the Doctors. Behold thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing. Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?' Of the same size with this (the chromo-lithograph is that of the picture) is the important painting on which M. de Rossi dwells with such satisfaction. The Virgin Mother is seated with her Divine Son in her lap; above her, faint but still distinctly to be traced, is the star always seen in the representations of the Adoration of the Magi. In the front, to the left, is the figure of a man, youthful, with a few thin hairs on his cheeks, standing up, clothed only in a pallium, with his hands pointing at the star above the Virgin and Child; he holds the volume of a book in his hand. Who can this represent? St. Joseph? That Saint, though usually represented in later times as advanced in years, sometimes, as we are informed, appears as a beardless youth. But why the book? M. de Rossi suggests (and we accept his interpretation with hardly a doubt) that it represents one of the prophets of the Old Testament pointing at the star, and so signifying the fulfilment of prophecy. We had thought of Balaam; M. de Rossi inclines to Isaiah, and cites an authority for the prophet's youth in a glass ornament (vetro), described in P. Garrucci's curious work. There are not wanting pictures and sculptures which bear close analogy to this, as a painting, described by Bosio, where the Virgin is seated before two towers, with a figure behind, which is supposed to designate the towers of Bethlehem where the Child was to be born. Be this as it may, we have before us nothing more than what perhaps may not be strictly called a scene from the Evangelic History, but, as it were, a symbolic picture, founded on a real scene. It very nearly resembles those typical pictures so common in early Christian art; Jonah prefiguring the Resurrection, Moses striking the rock, in all which there is ever something more than a mere representation of the scenes in the Old Testament, ever a constant reference to their bearing on the Gospel. In short, we see no reason why the most scrupu

*We accept M. de Rossi's description of the three figures; which seems to us from the print somewhat doubtful.

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