CANANEA. — The woman of Tyre, called C. in Mt. 15:21–28 and Syrophoenician in Mc. 7:24–30, who implored and obtained from Jesus the liberation of her daughter from the demon that afflicted her, was rarely represented in ancient Christian art.
Although few female figures have been the object of disagreements among interpreters to the same extent as this one, with the hemorrhaging woman, the adulteress, Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus, the great sinner, etc., proposed as her rivals, it may be regarded as highly probable that C. is to be recognized only in the well-defined figure of a woman who, standing and slightly bent forward, receives the Lord’s right hand upon her veiled hands in order to kiss it as a sign of thanksgiving. Only the sister of Lazarus was given a similar attitude in a limited number of sarcophagi; there, moreover, any confusion with C. is ruled out by the very scene of the Resurrection in which she appears. It does not seem, therefore, that the other female figures, kneeling with their hands extended toward the Lord, can be identified with C., all the less since in several cases they receive the laying on of the hand by Christ.
According to the known monuments, C. was never represented in the cemetery frescoes; she appears, instead, in some sculptures from the second half of the 4th century;
there C. represents in the female sphere what the Centurion symbolizes in the male sphere; that is, both depict the first Gentiles converted to faith in Christ. Since this occurs amid a specific group of scenes that precisely emphasize the doctrine of Christ as a pledge of triumph over death, it would seem that the motif did not have a long duration. Scarcely
known in the other branches of early Christian art, C. could hardly be identified with the kneeling woman in the mosaic of S. Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna; here the figure must rather be the Hemorrhaging Woman or the Great Sinner.
Luciano De Bruyne