Fourth Sunday of Easter

SInce it is good shepherd Sunday and I am not in an original frame of mind the theme for the week's art should come as no great shock, and I was expecting a quiet enough week. How wrong I was. What I thought would be an easy quest for pictures of lambs turned into a veritable detective story: 'The Mysterious Absence Of The Good Shepherd'.

Let me explain... if you search around for depictions of the Good Shepherd you find, overwhelmingly, nineteenth and twentieth Century material. I've included a particularly famous example, by Bernard Plockhurst, a member of the German Romantic movement (with a not inconsiderable connection to the English Pre-Raphaelite movement).

The Good Shepherd, Bernard Plockhorst

Okay there are exceptions - Philippe de Champaigne's 'Le Bon Pasteur' provides at least one Baroque example and there are representations in Greek iconography. Anyway, so far, so unpopular, but digging marginally deeper we find the Good Shepherd is unavoidable in very early Christian art. 

Depiction of the Good Shepherd from the Catacomb of Priscilla

There are curious features - and maybe even a couple of clues to its sudden disappearance here. Unlike their later counterparts these images were not generally portraits so much as metaphors or symbols. I am certainly no specialist but there seem convincing connections to pagan imagery around Apollo or earlier, Greek, figures, which serve as a prototype for these very early Good Shepherd images. There is also a marked distinction or evolution between these images and the fifth century Mosaic in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, shown below, in which Christ is shown as a much more Imperial character.

Still, how can we account for the void in images around this subject following this period until deep into the Baroque period? In fact it seems I am not the first to have wondered upon this mystery, and many (if not all) of the observations I make here are in light of this blog post.

Mosaic in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia

I won't reiterate the points made there, adapted from “A Note on the Disappearance of the Good Shepherd in Art,” by Boniface Ramsey. But suffice to say that in one direction it became less relevant theologically, and politically - as the nature of heresies the Church combated evolved, and as the Church itself evolved from a persecuted few to a self-confident political force. We have in any case a wonderful interplay between how Christians felt about their own status and their faith in Christ, what they thought about the Triune God and how they depicted Jesus.