Mosaic of the XIII century, from the apse of the Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome. The frieze shows Christ surrounded by the Apostles, all represented in the shape of lambs. The evangelical expression of God’s Lamb (Agnus Dei) is employed in Christianity with a symbolic value, to indicate Jesus’ role as sacrificial victim for the redemption of humanity’s sins. The first reference is to the Easter lamb, which was sacrificed in the Jewish world during the Jewish Passover festival (Pèsach), in remembrance of the blood of lambs put on the doorframes which saved the Hebrews from the death unleashed by God against the sons of the Egyptians (Exodus, 12,1 – 14,46). However, still deeper roots lead to the Sumerian world, where the god Dumuzi, represented as shepherd and keeper of the flocks, was sometimes symbolized by a ram, and was the protagonist of a mythical narrative in which he periodically disappeared in the land of the dead and successively reappeared in connection with the spring festival.
In the flesh of the lamb was seen the flesh of the suffering Christ and this was related to the ram sacrificed in the place of Isaac in the text of Genesis (22, 2-13). In both cases a certain interchangeability between man and animal was explicitly recognized. Certainly, the Fathers of the Church interpreted these depictions as purely allegoric, without any relationship with the animal representations diffused in pagan religions, which were subjects of continuous polemical attacks. Nevertheless, the responsiveness that so concrete images could have on popular mentality remains more problematic, since the latter was still deeply impregnated in beliefs according to which the transformations of a human being into an animal and vice versa were thoroughly possible.


[Image: http://personal.stthomas.edu/plgavrilyuk/PLGAVRILYUK/Art/Lamb/ Lamb%20Rome.htm]