Department of Art History

Jas’ Elsner, “Looking East: Early Christian Art Beyond Christian Hegemony”

This paper examines two monuments of early Christian art east of the world of Christian hegemony.  While it is true that scholarship has overwhelmingly studied the archaeology of the spread of the religion to the West, its movement east to Sasanian Persia, India and China was hugely successful as a minority faith. I explore two surviving works of art – a statue of the Good Shepherd from Iraq from the third or fourth century, certainly used and perhaps made in a Sasanian context, and a major stele erected in a church in the Tang capital of Xi’an in China in the late eighth century. The aim is to show that our histories of Christian archaeology, anchored understandably in the Eurocentric assumptions and ancestries where Christianity acquired state control, have failed profoundly to explore the parallel visual and archaeological narratives of non-hegemonic Christianities as they developed in the East from the earliest period to the middle ages. The understanding of the longevity of a Christian narrative of minority and subaltern, sometimes resistant, identities by contrast with forms of state control and triumphalism is important both as a contrast to more normative narratives in Europe and as background for the understanding of Christian archaeology in contexts of Islamic hegemony.