It might also be remembered that for quite some time after the beginnings of the Church, there appears to have been no art work showing Christ on the Cross, presumably because it was so barbaric that no one would go there artistically.
This is partially true. Orthodox Christians, did not depict any images of the crucified Christ, either because like most people they found it so barbaric (as you said), or out of necessity. However, there were a few folks who apparently never had such sensitivity.
The
Alexamenos graffito, an inscription carved in plaster on a wall near the Palatine Hill in Rome, now in the Palatine Antiquarium Museum, dating somewhere from the late 1st-3rd century AD. It holds the record as being one of the earliest known pictorial representations of the Crucifixion of Jesus.
The image depicts a human-like figure attached to a cross and possessing the head of a donkey. To the left of the image is a young man, apparently intended to represent Alexamenos, raising one hand in a gesture possibly suggesting worship. Beneath the cross there is a caption written in crude Greek:
Αλεξαμενος ϲεβετε θεον. In standard Greek, the word ϲεβετε is the imperative of the verb “worship”. This would suggest a translation of the entire sentence as “Alexamenos, worship God!”. However it has been suggested by several scholars that
ϲεβετε should be understood as a variant spelling (possibly a phonetic misspelling) of Standard Greek
ϲεβεται, which means “worships”. As a result, the full inscription would then be translated as “Alexamenos worships [his] God”.
The vast majority of scholars consider the sketch to be a mocking depiction of a Christian. Both the portrayal of Jesus as having a donkey’s head and the depiction of him being crucified would have been considered insulting by contemporary Roman society. The accusation that Christians practiced onolatry, or donkey worship, seems to have been common at the time. Tertullian, writing in the late 2nd or early 3rd century, reports that Christians, along with Jews, were accused of worshipping a donkey(-headed deity).
