Daniel Cochran wants us to take late antique art seriously, just as seriously, he argues, as did late antique Christians. Thereby, Cochran joins ranks with historians and art historians who recognize that mosaics and architecture plotted identities and shaped communities no less vigorously than did sermons and treatises. Numerous studies, eschewing purely stylistic analysis, have turned our attention to the agency of images and the materiality of religious experience, making the case for reconsidering the role of art and architecture in late antique social and spiritual life. Building the Body of Christ seeks to add to this conversation by highlighting several examples of building projects and visual programs that Cochrane believes were engineered by bishops to assert their “orthodox” authority and encourage congregational identification with the “institutional church” (35). To advance this argument, Cochrane develops four case studies that he considers illustrative of this episcopal agenda. So far, so good—although we may wonder why the fourth and fifth-century “institutional church” and its “orthodox” bishops (concepts ill-defined) retain the monolithic character that Cochrane denies the rest of society.
Cochrane is best when collating verbal and visual texts. He is an acutely sensitive reader of both, deftly weaving connections between the poetry of Damasus, the sermons of Chromatius of Aquileia, Peter Chrysologus of Ravenna, and Leo I of Rome and contemporary figural art. His insights remind us that we impoverish our understanding of both media if we read them in isolation. If this is the book's strength, its weakness lies in convincingly linking episcopal patronage and messaging to his selected visual programs. Chapter 2 focuses upon the imperial mausoleum now known as S. Costanza. In the 350s that building received the body of Constantine's eldest daughter, Constantina, who a decade earlier had financed the adjacent basilica of the martyr Agnes. Cochran posits that the mausoleum and ambulatory basilica were initially “off limits” (37) or “beyond the reach” (56) of Rome's bishops, who therefore had no control over the private funerary rites carried out there. This changed, he argues, when the well-known traditio clavis and traditio legis mosaics were installed in the mausoleum. These he credits to episcopal intervention about “the same time” that Damasus (366–384) was promoting “orthodox Christianity” and papal authority throughout Rome's suburban martyria. Certainly, the dating of these two mosaics is contested, but there is no corroborating evidence that Damasus (or any later Roman bishop) installed them in Constantina's imperial mausoleum, which as recently as 360 had also received the body of Constantina's sister Helena.
Chapter 3 ventures north to Aquileia and the early fourth-century mosaic floor in the southern hall of Bishop Theodore's double basilica. Cochrane cogently argues on typological, iconographic, and literary grounds that the floor's tapestry of images, including its human busts, are rich in baptismal and eucharistic allusions. He also contends that this visual program asserted Theodore's “episcopal leadership” (93) while promoting him as “helmsman” of Aquileia's church community (126). The latter argument necessitates denying the floor's busts their common interpretation as donor portraits (104–108) and tendering a problematic translation of the floor's dedicatory inscription. That translation sidesteps the text's grammatical challenges, ignores a crucial conjunction (“et”), and prefers an unlikely dative (“poemnio”) to an ablative in order to assign Theodore sole patronage and excise the busts as donor portraits (125–127). Cochrane neither comments on the notable fact that the inscription celebrates Theodore in the second person (“Theodore . . . fecisti”) nor acknowledges the possibility that Theodore was deceased when the text was installed. Like chapter 2, chapter 4 treats the decorative program of a mausoleum attached to an imperial basilica. Ravenna's Church of the Holy Cross was financed by the empress Galla Placidia, who may have intended its well-known mausoleum to serve as her tomb. Cochrane provides an engaging reading of the mausoleum's mosaic program by collating its imagery with the sermons of Peter Chrysologus. This alone, however, cannot justify identifying Santa Croce and its “mausoleum” as an “episcopal complex” (158) or qualifying it as an “institutional church with a mausoleum attached” (168). Indeed, scholars have long noted that the polyvalent imagery of the mausoleum, to which few contemporaries are likely to have had access, is fully at home in imperial contexts. Potential sematic overlaps, therefore, cannot suffice to prove that the mausoleum's mosaics were the “bishop's challenge” to visitors to “pick up their cross” in the name of the “institutional church” (181). Only Cochrane's fourth case study readily sustains his thesis. Santa Maria Maggiore was indubitably constructed by a bishop, and its messaging was manifestly ecclesiastical and episcopal. In an epilogue, Cochrane explicates the triumphal arch's images of Herod and the Magi as symbols of heresy and orthodoxy by viewing them through the lens of Leo I's homiletic “calls for ecclesiastical unity” (207).
Finally, errors exceed the acceptable. On just one page (39), Honorius I is “Honorious,” Dionysus becomes “Dionysius,” the itinerary De locis sanctis is mislabeled a “hagiography,” and the early sixth-century Passio Agnetis is identified as the “seventh-century” Passio Sanctae Constantinae. Names are a recurrent problem: Marcellis for Marcellus (59), Simon Magnus for Simon Magus (66), and Hilary and Hillary (of Arles) in one paragraph (68). Evidence is mishandled: the episode that saw Damasus's supporters massacre 160 Ursinians did not occur in a “cemetery” but on the Esquiline (57–58); Damasus did not build “numerous martyria and basilicas” and fill them with relics “transferred” from the catacombs (58); Augustine was not a “student” of Ambrose (67); “cathedrals” were not burial sites in the fourth century (95); the Council of Arles in 314 was not concerned with “orthodox Christology” (102); Galla Placidia is not the daughter of Theodosius II (143); and S. Maria Maggiore's dedicatory inscription requires no emendation (200). And so on. The instincts behind Building the Body of Christ are sound, and Daniel Cochrane smartly models ways of reading across the boundaries of words and images; but execution bumps along, and the book's thesis gains little traction via the examples offered.
