11. Image and Rhetoric in Early Christian Sarcophagi: Reflections on Jesus’ Trial

Abstract

Roman art is strikingly rhetorical. In particular, sarcophagi – with their highly distinctive and restricted spatial field for visual representation and the relatively narrow range of formal devices employed to decorate them – are strongly so. By formal devices I mean the repertoire of compositional elements that make up sarcophagi, the repetition of iconographic types (whose differences and specific identities may depend on no more than a single attribute being present or absent, or the juxtaposition with another scene) and the particular (relatively restricted) range of treatments of the carved surface. The relatively limited range of formal elements, combined with a marked creativity and variation in their deployment, creates what is simultaneously an interrelated corpus of copious material (both pagan and Christian) and one in which many figurative images allude (at different levels) to narratives that may range from myth and oral tradition to scriptural texts. But each item claims rhetorical specificity and difference from the others through its employment (including its position, thematic juxtaposition, formal and technical treatment) by contrast with other standard elements. Since the era of Roman sarcophagi (at its heyday between roughly 100 and 400) coincides so closely with what is called the Second Sophistic, the great