CLIPEATA, IMAGE. — The expression "imago clipeata," already found in Macrobius (Saturn., II, 3), is used to designate the figure, or more often the half-length portrait, of a person carved in relief or painted on a surface in the form of a shield. This type of portrait (εἰκὼν γραπτή ἐν ἀσπίδι), which originally arose in the Greco-Oriental Hellenistic milieu as an image of heroic character and later as a simple reproduction of the physiognomic traits of great personages or ordinary citizens, was widely used by the Romans for funerary purposes throughout the imperial period. Its use is attested from as early as the 3rd century B.C.; Pliny indeed (Nat. hist., XXXV, 12) states that the consul Appius Claudius placed clipei with portraits of ancestors in the temple of Bellona.
Particularly noteworthy are a relief in the Vatican Museums and a painted sarcophagus from Kerch because they show, respectively, one the workshop of a sculptor with a marble worker intent on finishing a clipeate portrait of a Roman woman, the other the studio of a painter who, after hanging two clipei with half-length portraits on the wall, sits before an easel. Cl. images on Roman sarcophagi begin to become quite frequent from the age of the Antonines, and Christians also adopted them widely. On sarcophagi, however, the bust or busts of the deceased are generally not carved on a convex surface with a circular outline like that of a clipeus, but within a hemispherical cavity most often carved in the center of the chest or, less frequently, on the lid, or also, but exceptionally, on one of the sides, as seen in a Christian sarcophagus from Toulouse. Often the clipeus assumes the form of a shell, thus acquiring a greater aesthetic sense, due to the highly decorative effect of the fluting and the fact that the volute near the hinge of the shell provides a graceful support for the bust or busts of the deceased. Not always, however, has the transformation of the clipeus into a shell been fully accomplished; sometimes, indeed, the characteristic volute remains at the bottom, but the cavity lacks fluting. At other times, clipei with the busts of the deceased are supported by genii, flying erotes, victories, etc., but much more frequent are those not supported by any figure, i.e., set into the center of the sarcophagus chest both in the case that it is strigilated and in the case that it is decorated with a continuous frieze. When, moreover, the front of the sarcophagus is divided into two horizontal zones, the clipeus is usually found in the upper register, though often encroaching at least partially on the lower one as well. As two triangular spaces form to the right and left at the point where the terminal ledge of the sarcophagus chest meets the upper part of the clipeus, Christian sculptors very ingeniously filled these corners with small-volume figures that could find a justifiable place in the upper part of the scenes represented; and since the figure of the hand of God emerging from the clouds to stay Abraham’s arm or to hand the tablets of the Law to Moses suited the purpose well, for this reason on either side of the clipei one almost invariably finds these two Old Testament scenes: the Sacrifice of Abraham and the Revelation on Sinai.
Christian art also used cl. images in the paintings of the catacombs to depict there often the bust of Christ (as seen, for example, in the vault of the arcosolium of Celerina in the cemetery of Praetextatus); in the paintings of basilicas to insert there the busts of saints or (as at St. Paul’s Outside the Walls) the busts of popes; in mosaics to make the hieratic bust of the Pantocrator stand out (as is frequently seen in the center of Byzantine domes).