THE ART
The Earliest Christian Art, Underground
The Good Shepherd, the fish, the orant and Jonah — reading the frescoes and symbols in the Cubicles of the Sacraments.
See catacombs tours on GetYourGuide ↗Where Christian art begins
The catacombs of St Callixtus hold some of the oldest Christian art anywhere — frescoes painted in the late second and early third centuries, when Christian imagery was only just being invented. In the Cubicles of the Sacraments, family burial chambers, the walls and ceilings carry paintings that are, in effect, the first attempts to picture Christian belief. Seeing them is seeing a visual language at its very beginning, before the conventions of later Christian art existed.
The Good Shepherd and the orant
Two figures recur. The Good Shepherd — a young man carrying a lamb across his shoulders — is the most common image in the early catacombs, a gentle picture of Christ caring for his flock and, here, for the dead. The other is the orant: a figure, often a woman, standing with arms raised in prayer, representing the soul of the departed at peace. Neither looks the way medieval or Renaissance Christian art would later look; they're simpler, quieter, and closer to the Roman painting of their own day.
The fish, the bread and Jonah
The catacombs are full of symbols that let the early Christians speak in a kind of visual shorthand. The fish stood for Christ — the Greek word for fish, ichthys, forms an acrostic of a creed. In St Callixtus a famous image shows two fish carrying a basket of bread, an early sign of the Eucharist. The story of Jonah, swallowed and returned after three days, appears again and again as a promise of resurrection. Your guide reads these for you, and once you know them you start to see them everywhere.
Why it moves people
What makes the art affecting isn't its sophistication — much of it is modest, even rough — but its context and its hope. These images were painted in the dark, on the tombs of ordinary people, by a community that believed its dead would rise. They are unguarded, tender, and astonishingly early. To stand in front of a Good Shepherd painted eighteen centuries ago, in the cemetery of the people who painted it, is one of the quietly great experiences Rome offers — and a reason to go with a guide who can help you read what you're seeing.