dust near their tombs). Pious people knew this very well. They wanted access to
these “special dead.” Rich and influential Romans got their own holy monopolies
simply by moving saintly bones home with them.
Men like Saint Ambrose (339–397), bishop of Milan, tried to make clergymen,
not pious laypeople, the overseers of relics. Ambrose had the newly discovered relics
of Saints Gervasius and Protasius moved from their original resting place into his
newly built cathedral and buried under the altar, the focus of communal worship. In
this way, he allied himself, his successors, and the whole Christian community of
Milan with the power of those saints. But laypeople continued to find private ways to
keep precious bits of the saints near to them, as later reliquary lockets attest.^9
ART FROM THE PROVINCES TO THE CENTER
Just as Christianity came from the periphery to transform the center, so too did
provincial artistic traditions. Classical Roman art, nicely exemplified by the wall
paintings of Pompeii (Plates 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3), was characterized by light and
shadow, a sense of atmosphere—of earth, sky, air, light—and a feeling of movement,
even in the midst of calm. Figures—sometimes lithe, sometimes stocky, always
“plastic,” suggesting volume and real weight on the ground—interacted, touching one
another or talking, and caring little or nothing about the viewer.
Plate 1.1 pictures an event well known to Romans from their myths. A handsome
man lifts the veil that covers a beautiful woman, exposing her naked body to their
mutual delight. A winged boy, a quiver strapped around his shoulder and an arrow in
his hand, hovers nearby, while another boy, below the couple, plays with a man’s
helmet. Any Roman would know from the “iconography”—the symbolic meaning of
the elements—that the man is the god Mars, the woman the goddess Venus, and the
two boys are their sons, the winged one Cupid. Venus was married to Vulcan, but she
and Mars carried on a passionate love affair until Vulcan caught them in a net as they
were embracing and displayed them, to their shame, to all the other gods. The artist
has chosen to depict a seductive moment before the couple embraces. Even though
the story is illustrated for the pleasure of its viewers, the figures act as if no one is
looking at them. They are self-absorbed, glimpsed as if through a window onto their
private world.
That world was recognizably natural, the same as the one the viewers lived in. In
Plate 1.2 craggy mountains are the focus. A shepherd, painted with sketchy lines,
pushes a goat toward a shrine, perhaps to sacrifice the animal. On the left, another
