The Vine in Early Christian Art and the Eucharist

The vine image left the page early. Christian funerary art in the catacombs of Rome, from the third century onward, used a spreading vine scroll heavy with grape clusters and birds to mark a wall or a ceiling as Christian ground without painting a single human figure, a plant pattern any visitor could read as a claim about the world to come rather than as mere decoration. The fourth century mausoleum of Santa Costanza in Rome carries one of the best preserved examples, a ceiling mosaic of vine scrolls, harvest putti treading grapes, and grape laden branches that draws on a much older Roman decorative vocabulary for wine and abundance and turns it toward a specifically Christian meaning. The same plant carried a Eucharistic charge that the funerary examples only implied, since the fruit of the vine becomes the wine of the communion cup, so a carved or painted vine could stand for the sacrament itself as readily as for the discourse in John. Byzantine and later Orthodox art developed a distinct icon type, Christ the True Vine, in which Christ sits or stands at the center of a spreading vine and the twelve apostles appear as clusters of grapes or as figures seated among the branches, a direct visual translation of the Gospel text into an image of the church gathered around Christ. The motif also spread into architectural ornament, vine scroll friezes and column capitals in churches from late antiquity onward, where it functioned as a recognizably Christian border pattern independent of any narrative scene.