Robin Jensen is the preeminent North American scholar of early Christian art. Over the course of three decades, she has shaped the field through more than a dozen books and nearly one hundred articles on diverse topics of material and visual cultures of early Christianity. Having already written definitive works on early Christian baptisteries, the history of the Christian cross, and the distinctive features of Christianity in Roman-era North Africa, Jensen now applies her multidisciplinary approach to “devotional images” in the first few centuries of Christianity. How did Christianity honor the theological critique of idolatry inherited from early Judaism and also engage the primacy of the senses in other forms of religion around the Mediterranean world? What were the sign posts on the path from the Decalogue's “no graven images” to the powerfully charged “icons” of Christian late antiquity?
The book's structure is an elegant double helix with chronological and thematic strands. The eight chapters have overall a slightly chronological sequence, though each addresses a theme, such as “Epiphanies” (Chapter 3), “Holy Portraits” (Chapter 5), and “Miraculous and Mediating Portraits” (Chapter 7). The book is adequately illustrated with six to eight color photographs per chapter.
The first three chapters introduce Jensen's trademark blend of source material, integrating visual and cultic artifacts of Roman-era religions with carefully curated interpretations from patristic authors. She situates early Christian disapproval of “cult images” or “idols” by apologetic writers (Chapter 1) in relationship to Jewish “aniconism” regarding the visibility of God (Chapter 2). Yet, since people generally struggle to pray to beings that they cannot in some way visualize, early Christian artists experimented with figural representations such as the “hand of God,” the monogram of Christ, and other cruciform shapes. Developing Christian belief in the incarnation of the God of Israel in the human person of Jesus then offered a crucial turning point for the visibility of God. God's power was depicted as manifest in the miraculous works of Jesus on sarcophagi and other media, while the transfiguration (as depicted in the apse of Ravenna's Sant'Apollinare Nuovo) and resurrection of Jesus (as in the apse of Thessaloniki's Church of Hosios David) offered proleptic visions of God's face (Chapter 3).
Chapters 4–6 advance a chronological argument that hinges on—as is so often the case in early Christian studies—the fourth century, when the extant material evidence dramatically increases and the theological debate also intensifies. On the one hand, early Christians mostly avoided a most common and potent way of imaging God in the Mediterranean world, namely sculpture in the round. On the other hand, they shifted their artistic tendencies away from narrative art toward portraiture of Christ and other biblical heroes and saints (Chapter 4). The increasing production of such portraits drew criticism from cultured Christian elites, whose Platonic philosophical lenses viewed them as mere shadows and altogether too close to Greek and Roman cult images for comfort. Yet other Christian writers were more positive about the edifying potential of such portraits, and Jensen is likely correct that popular veneration for the relics and portraits of recent martyrs would have weakened the impact of any cultured despisers (Chapter 5). If the blood of martyred Christians was a seed of the church, as Tertullian claimed, it seems that their relics and portraits were early fruits. But what did such figures look like? For a recently martyred saint, perhaps one could create a realistic likeness; to know the real face of Jesus or Mary or Peter, however, was impossible. The look of Christ as created by artists in the fourth through seventh centuries thus became divergent, malleable, and adapted from surrounding visual models with apparent ease (Chapter 6). Jensen shows how Christian theologians of late antiquity navigated this problem, culminating in John of Damascus's semiotic defense of the veneration of icons as symbols.
If the argument had concluded at this point, Jensen's book would have been an excellent guide for scholar and student alike. But she substantially raises the sophistication of the work—and its value for scholarly readers—in the final two chapters on how portraits seem to perform miracles (Chapter 7) and engender new modes of spiritual visuality (Chapter 8). It is rare for a historian to show sensitivity to both ritual-centered experiences (like the kissing of relic portraits) and also the abstruse points of Neoplatonic theories of sight. This is why Jensen remains the best of her kind. These final chapters also bring scholarly citations and debates up from the endnotes and into the body of the argument, such that Jensen moderates an interdisciplinary concluding parliament of art historians, liturgical historians, classicists, and theologians on the sacred gaze and its effects.
The book does not engage much with a discursive approach to its topics—that is, how the language used by the ancient authors about images creates the realities it purports to describe. Thus, Jensen's excellent, balanced, and reliable book might be complemented with others who use that method, such as Clifford Ando's Matter of the Gods, Jason von Ehrenrook's Sculpting Idolatry in Flavian Rome, and Sonja Anderson's forthcoming Idol Talk.
