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We're in St Peter's Basilica and we're looking at a famous early Christian sarcophagus.

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It's the tomb of Junius Bassus.

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Now it's a little complicated because what people generally see is the copy that the Vatican has

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in their museum but we're in the Treasury and this is the actual sarcophagus.

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And so Junius Baccus was a Roman prefect in around the mid-fourth century.

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Right, we know that he had his position in 359.

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So we're looking at a very early moment, soon after Constantine has made it

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legitimate to be a Christian in the Roman Empire

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and Constantine is in the process of making Christianity or leading towards Christianity becoming the

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official religion of the Roman Empire which will happen in the end of the 300s.

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So this is an early example then of a kind of openness and really magnificenct rendering of

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the iconography of the Christian tradition.

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Right, and what's really interesting is that it doesn't look the way we expect it to, in a way because

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Christ is here in the center represented with probably Peter and Paul, the two figures on either side of them--

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It looks likely to be Peter and Paul, yes.

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But he looks very youthful, like a young philosopher teacher.

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He's even holding a scroll in his hand--

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And he's seated and frontal, though not entirely frontal. So I guess what I'm saying is that things

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that we normally associate with representations of Christ where he looks like an emperor, he's older

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and he's got a beard. Here he is represented very youthful,

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although he's seated and frontal, he does have a kind of naturalism and movement to his body,

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his left leg comes forward a little bit, his head is slightly turned.

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And he's got his foot above an image of a river god

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Which is interesting because it shows Christianity surmounting the old

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Polytheistic traditions of ancient Romans--

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Using the iconography of the ancient Roman, pagan, art in a new Christian context.

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I really am interested by the point you made earlier about Christ not fulfilling the physical attributes

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that we come to expect. And this is so early that in a sense, those traditions hadn't yet developed--

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Exactly.

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--they hadn't yet really been constructed and accepted so this is a very flexible moment.

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Right, this iconography is being developed. And here he looks like pagan figure in a way.

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That's certainly true because of the classical garb that he wears. And it's interesting stylistically

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because this sculpture is really showing a pretty highpitched naturalism

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in terms of the rendering of the bodies, the contrapposto that we see the figures standing in,

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and even some of the emotional attributes of the figures.

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There is a kind of naturalism although we see the beginnings of a kind of early Christian style.

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There are some hints of what's to come. The heads are a little bit too large for the bodies.

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The bodies are starting to be a little bit on the stubby side.

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So it's a very interesting transitional moment.

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We see some other scenes from the bible and we're seeing early expressions of it

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here but these are ways of representing these scenes that will become very familiar to us.

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We have Adam and Eve on the lower register--

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and also other Old Testament scenes that would've prefigured the events in Christ's life.

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So that idea of saying that events in the Old Testament such as the sacrifice of Isaac prefigured

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Christ's own sacrifice for the salvation of mankind so that way of saying that Christ's life

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is a fulfillment of the prophecy and the events of the Old Testament.

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What we're witnessing here is the invention of a new iconography, the invention of a new visual language

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for the tellling of these critical stories.

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What I'm also noticing is just how deeply carved it is. It is essentially a relief sculpture

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but the figures are in very, very high relief. Some of them seem to be separate from

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the marble ground. And I love these columns with capitals and bringing together of the

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classical and the beginnings of the Christian.