Why early Christians made no art: one historian says they were broke
For a long time scholars assumed the first Christians shunned images on principle. Art historian Paul Corby Finney offered a blunter explanation: before about 200 they simply lacked land and money, and art needs both. Once they acquired property, they started experimenting, and the long tradition of the icon began to take shape.
An icon is a religious artwork, usually a painting, venerated in Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, Catholic and Lutheran churches, most often showing Jesus, Mary, saints or angels. The classic technique is egg tempera on a wooden panel, though icons also appear in metal, stone, embroidery, mosaic and fresco. Greek uses the same word for painting an icon as for writing, so Orthodox sources in English often speak of icon 'writing'.
Origins are disputed. Orthodox tradition holds that Christian images go back to the faith's earliest days in an unbroken line, and an 8th-century tradition names Luke the Evangelist as the first icon painter, which may not be historical. Academic art history traces the tradition only to the 3rd century. Finney also argued that Greek philosophy's idea of an invisible, indescribable God shaped early Christian caution about images more than the Jewish aversion to sacred images did.
Legends supplied a 'first' portrait of Jesus. Eusebius, in the 4th century, tells of King Abgar of Edessa writing to ask Jesus to heal him, with no image mentioned. Around 400 a Syriac version adds a painting, and by the 6th century, in Evagrius Scholasticus, it has become a miraculous likeness left on a towel when Jesus pressed it to his wet face. The cloth reportedly reached Constantinople in the 10th century and vanished when Crusaders sacked the city in 1204, though copies had already fixed its design.
Early evidence of image veneration comes from unexpected places. The pagan emperor Alexander Severus, who reigned from 222 to 235, reportedly kept a household chapel with images of Christ, Orpheus and Abraham beside deified emperors. After the destruction of the Byzantine Iconoclasm settled the question of images for good, Eastern icons kept a continuity of style and subject far greater than Western religious art.
Source: Icon
