Firstly: Neophytes, or newly baptized; Secondly: Benefactors, Sovereigns and Bishops; Thirdly: Saints and Martyrs; and Lastly: The Faithful Dead “in the sleep of peace.”
People were very anxious to have their names inscribed, and fearful of being scratched out for heresy.
For the dead bishops the prayer was less for them, than to them, from which comes the word “canonize,” or to be named in the Canon of the Mass. On the inner side of the diptych of Clementinus, at Liverpool, there is in roughly written Greek letters a prayer for the clergy of a church of St. Agatha, and for “our Shepherd Hadrian the Patriarch,” who can be none other than Pope Hadrian (✝795); this diptych probably came from a church in Sicily, for Greek was still spoken, and the patron saint of Palermo is St. Agatha.
Lists of bishops were inscribed, and when the list grew too long parchment leaves were inserted. Whole services were bound in these carvings, and the covers of many of the oldest MSS. are of diptychs, set in an elaborate border of goldsmith’s work, to increase the size as well as to enhance the beauty.
[1] The numbers to the diptychs, in all cases, refer to those in the list of diptychs at the end of the book.
[2] _Mélanges de l’Archéol. et d’Histoire_, Rome, 1882.
[3] See the figure of Circe in the Casa di Modesta, Pompeii.
[4] See the Joshua Rotulus, edited by the Directors of the Vatican Library, Rome.
[5] _Zwei Antike Elfenbeintafeln_, Munich, 1879.
[7] _Roman Art_, Wickhoff, Eng. trans. by Mrs. A. Strong.
I. LATIN, LATINO-BYZANTINE AND THE EARLY BYZANTINE IVORIES
At the end of the last chapter it was shown how the Church had preserved a large number of consular diptychs, either unchanged or altered to suit Christian iconography. To that list must be added several ivory carvings with religious subjects, yet so closely connected with the class of Private Diptychs, that it is more than probable that they also have undergone transformation.
The most important among these are a fragmentary panel in the Museo Civico at Bologna and the celebrated Ivory Book of Rouen Cathedral.
On the Bologna fragment is the figure of a bearded man of heavy type, in a well designed but poorly executed robe; he clasps a roll in his left land and beneath his neatly sandalled feet is a stool, always a mark of honour, in the side of which is a deepened space with the name “Petrus” rudely inscribed. Above, in the broken pediment, is a niche with the bust of a bearded man, labelled “Marcus.” The whole is surrounded by a handsome ovolo moulding, as are also the panels of the Rouen Book Cover, which may be of a slightly later date, but they must both be placed early in the sixth century. The Rouen carvings represent St. Peter and St. Paul, without a doubt, for they are already of that iconographical type which had become fixed by the end of the preceding century, St. Paul with a bald head and long pointed beard, and St. Peter with thick hair and a round curling beard; but it is very likely that the figures on both the Bologna and Rouen tablets were originally intended for authors or poets as on the series of complimentary diptychs.