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Art historians in the past have often simplified Christian art before Constantine as small, incoherent, and limited to symbolic art. For example, Johannes Deckers' description of third-century Christian art, which he argues was concentrated in the private sphere, mainly funeral activities. Jesus was the Son of God, the Good Shepherd, the teacher, the miracle man, the doctor, and the humble philosopher, who was not dressed in imperial clothing, nor with a halo on his head, nor sitting on a throne, he was simply portrayed as an ordinary man.
The historical event in which Constantine legitimized Christianity in 312 AD is seen as a dividing point in Christian art. Some scholars realize that the early Christians transplanted the rituals and art of the Roman Empire almost entirely onto their own religious themes, especially in their portrayal of the image of Jesus Christ, and imitated the secular authority, the Roman emperor.
They believe that the image of Jesus as a good shepherd or miracle man evolved in imitation into a revered king, demonstrating Christ's divine power in the world with the rule and authority of an emperor. Thus, the representatives of the supremacy of the Church and the State are united with such a powerful image.
This imitation was first reflected in the imitation of Christian rituals on the secular rites of Rome, and the art used in Christian religion and rituals added its own understanding of God in the process of borrowing Roman forms and appearances.
Art historians have a simple assumption about this, and once Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire, Christian worshippers and church organizations would carry out a large-scale transplant of the signs and symbols of secular kingship. In such structures, images and ritual activities equally help to equate God or Christ with the crowned ruler and to consider the local bishop his secular priest.
The most commonly cited Roman rituals include the sacrificial golden crown ceremony, the emperor's entry into the city, and the sanctification ceremony after the emperor's death. The Christian counterpart to this is the arrival of the three Eastern Doctors, the entry into Jerusalem, and the ascension of Christ, of which the visit of the Three Doctors is thought to be directly related to Christ's attainment of the authority of a secular ruler. Robin S. Robin M. Jensen, who studied the oldest surviving nativity images today, observed nativity images from the 3rd to 5th centuries and found that frescoes or coffins in Christian burial chambers invariably depict a child sitting on his mother's lap or sitting alone on a ornate throne receiving gifts from three people. It is not the scene of Jesus in the manger and surrounded by parents, shepherds, angels, and kings who come to worship.
The consistent composition and detail in these scenes in the tomb reflect the ritual of sacrificing the golden crown at the court of the Roman Empire. Fergus Millar believed that this ritual was inherited from the Greek kings, in which representatives of cities, senators, or foreign ambassadors presented a golden crown to a ruler or conqueror, especially after the king's accession to the throne or victory, and this ritualized tribute was sometimes part of a Roman triumphal procession or a national day ceremony to commemorate an anniversary, symbolizing the donor's loyalty to a recognized monarch.
It can be observed that the popularity of Christian images of the three doctors is a deliberate encroachment on the theme of the Roman sacrificial golden crown ceremony, which means that there is a parallel relationship between the three doctors who came from the East to worship and the ambassadors who gave gifts to the emperor.
In addition to describing the narratives in the Gospels, it visually declares the authority of Jesus so that in the name of God gives Christ authority over the secular ruler.
André Grabar's study of early Christian tomb images summarizes the "imperialization" of the portrait of Christ, arguing that Christian art has been visually oriented narrative art since its inception, beginning with the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus in the 4th century AD, where images of the coronation of Christ began to appear in the central theme of the Christian sarcophagus, which he called "the kingship of Christ", These images, judging by form and style, are almost entirely cloaked in Roman imperial art. He believed that the characteristics of Roman Empire portraiture could be identified in Christian art in any form and place, their possession of subject matter; Borrowing portrait details, they used ancient models to create similar images, and the art of portraiture in the Roman Empire was a key source of imagery for the makers of the image of Christ.
Thus, the image of Jesus after Constantine received a purple cloak, halo and gem-encrusted throne, although these representations may not accurately indicate the actual wearing of the emperor at that time, but to a certain extent evoke the viewer's memory of the emperor, and it was Roman culture that "imperialized" Christ in imagery.
However, some scholars dispute the idea of the imperial Christ, arguing that it is necessary to dispel the entrenched view that the image of Christ was relatively humble before Constantine, and that the image after it exuded power and glory as a result of the legitimization of it by the Roman Empire. This dichotomy, which draws a clear dividing line between Christian art in Constantine's time, places too much emphasis on the influence of the Roman Empire, and the imperial image of Jesus does not dominate the portrait of Jesus in the fourth century.
Thomas Mathews, for example, challenges this view in his book The Clash of Gods, in the first chapter he sees the conscious search for prototypes from the Roman Empire and the interpretation of Christian art in the period after Constantine as an "error of imperial mysticism." The emperor himself and the authoritarian artistic rituals associated with it should be excluded from the post-Constantine world of Christian art.
He argues that late Roman Christians were not engulfed in Roman ideology and did not confuse Christ with emperors. The image of Christ does not lurk in the memory of the despotic power of the Roman emperors, and Christians of the time were more than capable of creating an art that belonged to their group. While scholars like Andrea Greba wrote about the influence of the Roman Empire because they were blinded by their society, Matthews argues that Greba's description of Jesus as an emperor was nostalgic for tsarist Russia.
However, his attribution seems to reveal more about Greba's personal background than about early Christian art, which makes his view easy to dismiss as a critique of Greba personally and society.
Matthews' views were not widely accepted by art historians, but he forced dialogue and re-evaluation of art during the period. Early researchers such as Greba preferred to view Christian art after Constantine through the lens of the Roman Empire, and the theory of imperial influence proposed by them is also worthy of recognition.
The fact that the image of Jesus in the fourth century was influenced by the portrait of the Roman emperor is well founded, but it has no subversive influence in Christian ideology, let alone misleading the viewer into thinking that the emperor is a substitute for Christ. Matthews also acknowledges in this respect that Christ remained mysterious and undefinable to believers at the time.
They struggled to record and capture this mystery, leaving behind different images that were their way of thinking about the question of Christ, and the images themselves were thought processes. When Jesus is idyllically portrayed as the Good Shepherd, anyone familiar with the Hebrew Bible will easily associate the Davidian ancestors who turned shepherds turned kings, as this is the parable of Israel's salvation.
For example, the mosaic of the Good Shepherd in the tomb of Galla Placidia, the Christian congregation at that time saw through the shepherd the image of the Messiah. At the same time, there are majestic images of Jesus, such as the mosaic in the Mausoleum of Costanza in Rome, where Christ gives the keys to heaven to St. Peter, and Jesus descends from heaven like a conqueror to exert divine authority.
Although the appearance of these two faces of Christ has been sequential, it is more an attempt to adapt to the changes of the times, whether it is the Bodhisattva's low eyebrows or the Vajra angry eyes, which are all interpretations of Christ.
Thus, by the time he came into contact with the portrait of Jesus from the Christian tradition in the 12th century, it had mixed the experiments of early Christians, and Jesus in the Tree of St. Deniersi unconsciously used a visual context that mixed the imperial imagery of the Roman era with the creation of early Christianity.
Christ, the majestic Christ at the top of the tree of Jesse, dressed in purple robes, almost exactly matched the posture, facial details, and size of the other three kings, and could only be distinguished by his position, the light wheel above his head, and the seven doves representing the Holy Spirit. Cypré does not emphasize the status of Christ with striking positions and magnified figures, as in the mosaics of Constantine's time, in which the imperial Christ almost coincides with the king.
This characteristic may be that of the emulation of his forefathers, and the study of biblical theology in the early Middle Ages often used prescriptionism, an interpretation that legitimately correlates the Old Testament with the New Testament. The question of life and descent in the Old Testament is generally understood as an allegory or foreshadowing of the events of the New Testament in the time of Syra's life.
Cyprus also uses the same foreshadowing method in St. Denis's The Window of Jesse, but he also fills in the content of his own intentions in his interpretation. The image of Jesus in the Tree of Jesse foreshadows Jesus' identity in 12th-century biblical interpretations, as stated in Isaiah 52:1-53:12 that Jesus was King of Jerusalem to redeem the exiled inhabitants of Zion, and He was also a priest who bore the blame for the people. Combining this parable with an imperial portrait of Jesus, Syger applied his own understanding and purpose to Christ, so that the portrait of Jesus in the Tree of St. Deniyesi mixes with Cypr's personal ideals and political goals.
From the perspective of the social environment of 12th-century France, Sage needed to interconnect the power of the king with the authority of Christ in order to achieve the political goal of helping the king consolidate the monarchy, and he skillfully borrowed the image of the imperial Jesus and the stereotype to equate the king with Jesus. What Suge foreshadows here is an allegory of a gifted royal power, paving the way for the centralized rule of the Capetian family, who were not of Carolingian royal blood.
The portrait of the king in the Tree of Saint-Deniers is a product of the French 12th-century cultural background, and the personal features and epitographs of the kings have been blurred in the glass windows of Xuère, and they are part of the whole tree of Jesse, like the Virgin and Christ. However, visual images only have meaning if they resonate with a common image symbol or theme. In the historical context of the development of Christianity, the faithful constantly adapted to the visual language of their cultural context, the image of the Tree of Jesse was transplanted into different cultural contexts, and the social scene of the construction of the Tree of Jesse in the church of St. Denis prompted the portrait of the king to be transformed into a more abstract symbol.
In a nutshell, the portrait of the king in the subject of the Tree of Jesse had two common styles during the Middle Ages. The first type of Jesse Tree restores the biblical legend of Jesse and his descendants to the greatest extent, carrying kings of royal blood carrying symbolic objects to indicate their status. Although this pattern has been reorganized and rewritten in subsequent eras, there are very diverse variations in details, and different details may be due to the different events commemorated.