Description

In 1193, the French priest John of Matha had a vision of Christ grasping two men by the arm: one white and the other black. This vision inspired him to create the Trinitarian order at San Tommaso in Formis on the Caelian hill, which was a hotbed of medieval-era ecclesiastical sites. The order’s goal was to free Christian crusader captives from their Muslim captors, which was a pertinent issue. In 1210, shortly before de Matha’s death, this mosaic of his vision was created over the gate of the church. John de Matha’s ecclesiastical career illustrates a tension, common in twelfth-century Christianity, between a desire to engage with the world and the traditional pursuit of piety in monastic isolation. The mosaic captures this tension. Christ is shown resolving a realistic human problem, one of whose subjects is African--indicative of the order’s trans-regional mission. However, the work is located over the gate in the walls of the monastic complex. The urge to separate the activities of a religious order from the world – even if they were engaged with the world – was still strong.

Historians disagree on what is depicted in the mosaic—some believe that Christ is freeing both the white and black figures from captivity, while others think that differences in  the white person’s portrayal versus the black person’s indicate otherwise. The presence of what appears to be a whip in the black person’s hand shows that he could be the captor, while the unbroken chain around his ankles suggests that he could even a pagan captive being exchanged for a Christian one. In any case, the mosaic represented the mission of the order to free Christian captives, and the presence of the black person shows a worldly awareness that is not obvious in much of the art of the medieval period.

However, the scene should not necessarily be understood as an abstract meditation on racial egalitarianism. Among other activities, the Trinitarians purchased Afro-Italian slaves and exchanged them for captive Christians. The mosaic thus brings to mind the founding myth and the public activities of the order. A helpful analogy is a modern-day corporate logo.

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Source

Brentano, Robert. Rome Before Avignon: A Social History of Thirteenth-Century Rome. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006.

Epstein, Steven A. Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.

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