Performing Paradise in the Early Christian Baptistery: Art, Liturgy, and the Transformation of Vision

Images representing paradise were some of the most pervasive in Early Christian churches throughout the Mediterranean from approximately the fourth to sixth centuries, but it was only through the baptistery and its attendant rituals that the Christian initiate entered the faith community and had subsequent access to the pictorial cycles within the church interior. The baptistery was both the actual and metaphysical gateway for Christian initiates entering the Church, understood symbolically as the body of Christ and physically as the primary location of Christian cult adjacent to the baptistery. The role of paradise within that space, therefore, offers unique insight into the trajectory of Early Christian beliefs in salvation, as well as the threshold of earthly and heavenly existence that Christian initiates were thought to inhabit within baptismal space. Baptistery research has surged in the last fifteen years, but the focus has been primarily architectural and typological. This dissertation shifts the discussion toward a more theoretical context for understanding how visions of paradise were constructed in Christianity’s central induction ritual. The dissertation examines the pictorial, material, and liturgical strategies employed in Early Christian baptisteries of the Mediterranean to recreate paradise sensorially. The experience of paradise not only transformed baptismal initiates into new Adams and Eves reenacting the fall of humanity upon an Edenic stage, but it also facilitated the transformation of the carnal senses into spiritual perception, deemed necessary for physical bodies occupying a liminal space that was thought to unify terrestrial and celestial realities. I examine the development and transmission of paradisiacal motifs and strategies of vision and the manipulation of sensory experience in the baptisteries of Italy, North Africa, and the southwestern Balkans, pairing them with contemporary theories of performative space and late-antique discourse on sensory perception