Type and Antitype
“Type” may be defined as a person, event, or institution that provides
an example, pattern, or model of some other person, event, or institution;
places and things may also be seen as types. “Antitype” sometimes means a copy
of a type—e.g., Heb. 9:24: the earthly sanctuary is the antitype (copy) of the
true (heavenly) one. At other times it is the reality represented by the
type—e.g., 1 Peter 3:21: baptism is the antitype (copy) of God’s saving Noah
from the waters of the flood (see D. L. Baker, “Typology and the Christian Use
of the Old Testament,” SJT 29 [1976]:
137–57). Early Christianity was a form of religiosity given to typological
thinking; its devotees, habitually looking for types of NT persons, events, and
institutions, turned first to the OT; secondarily they looked to other
environments for prefigurations of their beliefs and practices. The definition
of typological thought within early Christianity and the extent of its
influence are matters of controversy and debate.
For the study of early Christian art it has long been assumed that
typological intentions are at the heart of this pictorial tradition, beginning,
e.g., at Dura and in the Roman catacombs, with Adam as a type of Christ and Eve
as a type of Mary. A recent study (Schrenk, 1998) argues instead that there are
very few early Christian monuments that can sustain the weight of a typological
interpretation. Schrenk argues that the key factor in assessing this issue must
be a clear presence of both sides of the iconographic equation: the type and
the antitype. Much of early Christian iconography consists of the presentation
of one or the other, but not both. Schrenk identifies 11 early Christian
monuments that support a typological interpretation:
• three so-called
Passion sarcophagi (RepSark 1, nos. 61, 215, 677),
• mosaic sequences in
four churches (S. Maria Maggiore, S. Vitale, Sant’Apollinare in Classe, St.
Catherine’s on Mt. Sinai),
• two codices (→ Rossano
and the → Ashburnham Pentateuch),
• a lost fresco sequence
from St. Paul’s at Jarrow, and
• a textile fragment of
a wall hanging (the Elijah fragment in Riggisberg).
In all, we have a total of 23 early Christian images that can be
admitted under Schrenk’s rigorous definition of the type-antitype rubric
applied to pictorial art. This approach radically diminishes the importance of
typological thought in the interpretation of early Christian iconography.
The idea of exhibiting, in works of pictorial art, people and events
in the past that anticipate the present has a long history in Greek and Roman
art. A familiar example is Augustus’s Ara Pacis (Nash.1961–62, 1:63ff.), which
presents images of a hoary and mythic Golden Age interspersed with allusions to
Virgil’s rendition of the founding of Rome (A. Geyer, Die Genese narrativer Buchillustration [Frankfurt, 1989], 286ff.).
The fulfillment of promises and prodigies, the anticipation in Aeneas of the
coming of the new father of the country, Augustus—these are the types and
ancient prefigurations that the viewer is prompted to see coming to fruition in
the new Golden Age, the Augustan period. The allusive imagery of the famous
Gemma Augustea (T. Kraus, Das römische
Weltreich [Berlin, 1985], no. 384b) makes a similar statement, well
understood by those versed in the language of Roman political ideology. The
famous Vatican Virgil MS (Vaticanus latinus 3867; Sörries.1993, 127ff.),
painted at the tail end of the Roman Empire in the West, presents the same
pictorial allusions and prefigurations. The Christians who took upon themselves
the responsibility of making pictures may have simply been continuing a
well-established and venerable Greco-Roman tradition of imagining the past in
the present, in which case Christians would not have been any different in this
respect from the culture that produced them. Typological intention poses for
the study of early Christian art the same problem as for the study of all
pictorial art—namely. the subjective character of the viewer. Reading a
prefiguration of the present in the past, finding the meaning of the present in
examples, patterns, models lifted from the past—these depend very much on what
the viewer brings to the work of art. That is, typological intention is largely
the viewer’s prerogative, and the effort to establish hard-and-fast rules of
admissibility (governing when typological intention can be said to be present
and when it is absent) is doomed to failure.
However, Schrenk is no doubt correct to insist on degrees of
probability. In church environments, such as where early Christian pictures
survive in close spatial proximity to the sanctuary and its altar—e.g., OT
pictures illustrating → Cain and Abel, → Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac, or
→ Melchizedek’s offering of bread and wine—there is little reason to doubt the
presence of typological intention. The eucharistic liturgy provides the
explicit context and the interpretative key supporting the application of a
type-antitype mode of seeing and processing visual information. Where early
Christian pictures survive in settings that are not liturgically encoded, it is
more difficult to insist on the presence of typological intention. Ultimately,
the matter must be judged case by case. (Paul Corby Finney and Franz
Rickert, “Type and Antitype,” in The Eerdmans Encyclopedia of Early
Christian Art and Archaeology, ed. Paul Corby Finney, 3 vols. [Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2017], 2:664-65)
