EMORROISSA. — Early Christian funerary art depicted the healing of the woman with an issue of blood as recounted in the three Synoptics (Mt. 9:20–22; Mk. 5:25–34; Lk. 8:43–48), either at the moment when the woman, afflicted for twelve years, approaches from behind and touches the hem of the Lord’s garment and is immediately healed, or at the instant when the Lord turns, asks who touched Him, and then says to the woman prostrate at His feet: “Your faith has saved you; go in peace, you are healed.” The woman with an issue of blood became a symbol of the deep faith of early Christians in the wonder-working divinity of the Redeemer.
The earliest known scene is in the cemetery of Praetextatus between the end of the 2nd and the beginning of the 3rd century (Wilpert, Pitture, pl. 20); other examples occur in the cemeteries of Domitilla and of SS. Marcellino and Pietro (ibid., loc. cit., pls. 98, 130; G. P. Kirsch, Un gruppo di cripte dipinte del cimitero dei SS. Pietro e Marcellino, in Riv. di arch. crist., 7 [1930], p. 211, fig. 3); in funerary sculpture examples are found on sarcophagi from Rome, Civita Castellana, Clermont-Ferrand, and Milan (Wilpert, Sarcofagi, II, p. 300; pls. 39, 1; 123, 2; 124, 3; 143, 3).
Yet the representation of the miracle was not confined to funerary art. In the 5th century St. Asterius of Amasea deplores the immoderate luxury of some Christians who had scenes from the Gospels painted on their garments, and among these he names the miracle of the woman with an issue of blood (PG 40, 166). Later it appears in the mosaics of the basilica of S. Martino in Cielo d’Oro (now S. Apollinare Nuovo) in Ravenna; the surviving distich confirms that it was also depicted in the Ambrosian Basilica in Milan, and certain ivories, such as the piscina at Pesaro and the chapel at Brescia, reproduce II. Still later it appears in biblical cycles in churches such as S. Angelo in Formis (11th century).