Early Christian Chapels in the West: Decoration, Function, and Patronage (review)

Gillian Mackie analyses Christian chapels built between the fourth and seventh centuries in the western Mediterranean. She defines them as structures smaller than churches but without the specific function of baptisteries, built for burial, relic veneration, private devotion, sacristies, or a combination of practical and memorial functions. Part 1 contains four chapters that contextualize the chapels of Italy and the northern Adriatic in terms of history, archaeology, and 'topography' (where they were built). The much longer part 2 focuses on the iconography and meanings of specific chapels in Ravenna, Milan, Capua Vetere (Campania), Toulouse, and Rome. These five chapters are followed by a tenth, 'The Chapel Revisited: A Synthesis,' that deals briefly with stone, metal, textile, and lighting components. A thirty-nine-page appendix offers brief information and bibliography for most of the chapels considered in the preceding text; this is followed by seventy-five pages of notes, nearly thirty pages of bibliography, and a ten-page index.

This is a dense, detailed, and, with 115 illustrations, richly documented book. The reader is grateful for Mackie's compilation of earlier scholarship and the clear, redrawn plans, and her close analyses of several of the individual monuments are very well done (several of these reprise earlier articles). Nevertheless, the book is frustrating on many levels. I have reservations about Mackie's central thesis and criticisms of her methodology and bibliography. I am not convinced that these chapels cohere as a group that is fundamentally distinct from other religious structures. When discussing the cruciform Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Mackie cannot help but consider cruciform churches; and having emphasized the associations between baptism and death in early Christian thought, there seems little reason to exclude baptistery decoration from the discussion of funerary and memorial chapels. The imprecise and inconsistent Latin terms for allegedly different chapel types underscore the fluidity (and perhaps futility) of a functional typology.

Methodologically it is a mistake to invoke Eastern and North African legislation to fill documentary lacunae about Western domestic chapels. Mackie overstates the case for reliance on the Book of Revelation, and for decorative traditions that she traces back to Etruscan tombs entirely unknown to the early Christians. She interprets architectural and decorative features in a positivist vein, as if ceilings or crowns or ivy leaves were understood consistently by multiple viewers across time and space. If 'the liturgy was illustrated' and 'its prayers were depicted in visible form,' the reader expects more treatment of early Christian liturgical practices; in fact this topic is scarcely dealt with in Mackie's book, which on the whole fails to evoke a sense of performance in or actual use of spaces. The possible gendering of these spaces is also left unexplored.

It is odd to find repeated, unproblematized references to the 'Orient,' 'barbarians,' and 'the decorative program ... as a document' in a book published in 2003. Mackie seems unaware of significant developments in early Christian studies in the years since her dissertation was completed in 1991, and she relies uncritically on older scholarship that has been critiqued in such works as Martyrium in Multidisciplinary Perspective (1995) and The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Contribution of Peter Brown (1999). The bibliography is very weak in works after 1990, and relevant books and articles by Crook, Elsner, Finney, Janes, Korol, Monfrin, Pietri, Van Dam, and many others are conspicuously absent. While the appendix is useful, if highly selective, the index is entirely inadequate.

Mackie's scope is vast, even if 'in the West' mostly means Italy, and she deserves praise for the enormous amount of material assembled here. Early Christian Chapels in the West is solid, traditional scholarship that will provide scholars with a firm foundation for future work.