Junius Bassus (patron)

He was a Roman prefect — a powerful man, a man of the empire — who converted to Christianity on his deathbed. And to mark his passing, someone commissioned one of the most extraordinary objects of the ancient world: a marble sarcophagus carved with scenes from the Old and New Testaments, so precise, so alive, that scholars have studied it for centuries.

We include Bassus not as a painter but as a patron, because in this era — as in so many — the story of art is often the story of who paid for it and what they needed it to say. Bassus needed his death to mean something. He needed his new faith proclaimed in the most durable, most visible, most Roman material available: marble.

The sarcophagus shows Christ enthroned above the sky, handing scrolls to Peter and Paul — the image of a new emperor, a new kind of power. It is Roman art being converted, the old forms filled with new meaning. It is a man trying, at the very last moment, to belong to a different story.