<P> During the persecution of Christians under the Roman Empire, Christian art was necessarily and deliberately furtive and ambiguous, using imagery that was shared with pagan culture but had a special meaning for Christians . The earliest surviving Christian art comes from the late 2nd to early 4th centuries on the walls of Christian tombs in the catacombs of Rome . From literary evidence, there may well have been panel icons which, like almost all classical painting, have disappeared . Initially Jesus was represented indirectly by pictogram symbols such as the Ichthys (fish), peacock, Lamb of God, or an anchor (the Labarum or Chi - Rho was a later development). Later personified symbols were used, including Jonah, whose three days in the belly of the whale pre-figured the interval between the death and resurrection of Jesus, Daniel in the lion's den, or Orpheus' charming the animals . The image of "The Good Shepherd", a beardless youth in pastoral scenes collecting sheep, was the most common of these images, and was probably not understood as a portrait of the historical Jesus . These images bear some resemblance to depictions of kouros figures in Greco - Roman art . The "almost total absence from Christian monuments of the period of persecutions of the plain, unadorned cross" except in the disguised form of the anchor, is notable . The Cross, symbolizing Jesus' crucifixion on a cross, was not represented explicitly for several centuries, possibly because crucifixion was a punishment meted out to common criminals, but also because literary sources noted that it was a symbol recognised as specifically Christian, as the sign of the cross was made by Christians from very early on . </P> <P> The popular conception that the Christian catacombs were "secret" or had to hide their affiliation is probably wrong; catacombs were large - scale commercial enterprises, usually sited just off major roads to the city, whose existence was well known . The inexplicit symbolic nature of many early Christian visual motifs may have had a function of discretion in other contexts, but on tombs they probably reflect a lack of any other repertoire of Christian iconography . </P> <P> The dove is a symbol of peace and purity . It can be found with a halo or celestial light . In one of the earliest known Trinitarian images, "the Throne of God as a Trinitarian image" (a marble relief carved c. 400 CE in the collection of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation), the dove represents the Spirit . It is flying above an empty throne representing God, in the throne are a chlamys (cloak) and diadem representing the Son . The Chi - Rho monogram, XP, apparently first used by Constantine I, consists of the first two characters of the name' Christos' in Greek . </P> <P> A general assumption that Early Christianity was generally aniconic, opposed to religious imagery in both theory and practice until about 200, has been challenged by Paul Corby Finney's analysis of Early Christian writing and material remains (1994). This distinguishes three different sources of attitudes affecting Early Christians on the issue: "first that humans could have a direct vision of God; second that they could not; and, third, that although humans could see God they were best advised not to look, and were strictly forbidden to represent what they had seen". These derived respectively from Greek and Near Eastern pagan religions, from Ancient Greek philosophy, and from the Jewish tradition and the Old Testament . Of the three, Finney concludes that "overall, Israel's aversion to sacred images influenced early Christianity considerably less than the Greek philosophical tradition of invisible deity apophatically defined", so placing less emphasis on the Jewish background of most of the first Christians than most traditional accounts . Finney suggests that "the reasons for the non-appearance of Christian art before 200 have nothing to do with principled aversion to art, with other - worldliness, or with anti-materialism . The truth is simple and mundane: Christians lacked land and capital . Art requires both . As soon as they began to acquire land and capital, Christians began to experiment with their own distinctive forms of art". </P>

The name for a standard subject in christian art