Classical remains and Christian remembrance: reviewing late Roman sarcophagi

Early Christian art is of key importance in the mutual transformation of Roman culture and Christianity, the transformation of an anti-imperial offshoot of aniconic Judaism, into the official religion of an iconophilic empire. Despite this, early Christian sarcophagi have often fallen into the gaps between classics, medieval studies, art history, and patristics and biblical studies. Christian funerary commemoration has been characterised as a break, with Christian sarcophagi treated separately to non-Christian, and considered to represent the foregrounding of a very different kind of identity: communal and religious, rather than individual and cultural. This thesis offers a re-viewing of early Christian sarcophagi in their late Roman context. It explores the formation of a newly Christian Roman identity from the late third into the fourth century, and will find that Christian sarcophagus patrons were building on the frameworks of traditional commemoration, and still engaged in elite Graeco-Roman culture. The aesthetics considered here were distinctive in several interrelated ways that also reflect wider trends in late antique visual (and even literary) culture: inherited formal frameworks, an interest in the statuesque, and a self-conscious sense of materiality. The increased interpretative opportunities challenge the characterisation of Christian sarcophagi as less complex and culturally engaged than their predecessors. Roman heritage was made the foundation for the new Christian identity of the fourth century