EMORROISSA. - Early Christian funerary art depicted the healing of the H. narrated by the three Synoptics (Mt. 9:20-22; Mk. 5:25-34; Lk. 7:43-48), either at the moment when the woman, ill for twelve years, approaches behind the Lord and touches the hem of his garment and is immediately healed, or at the instant when the Lord turns and, after asking who touched him, says to the woman prostrate at his feet: "Your faith has saved you; go in peace, you are healed." The H. was a symbol of the ancient Christians' profound faith in the thaumaturgic divinity of the Redeemer.
The oldest scene is that in the cemetery of Pretestato between the end of the 2nd century and the beginning of the 3rd (Wilpert, Pitture, pl. 20); other examples are in the cemeteries of Domitilla and of Sts. Marcellinus and Peter (id., 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 there are examples on sarcophagi from Rome, Civitacastellana, Clermont-Ferrand, Milan (Wilpert, Sarcofagi, II, p. 300; pls. 39, 1; 123, 2; 124, 3; 143, 3).
But the representation of the miracle was not limited to funerary art. In the 5th century St. Asterius of Amasea deplores the excessive luxury of certain Christians who had evangelical scenes painted on their clothes, and among these he names the miracle of the H. (PG 40, 165). Later it is found reproduced in the mosaics of the basilica of S. Martino in codo aureo (today S. Apollinare Nuovo) in Ravenna; the aforementioned dating evidence attests that it was also represented in the Basilica Ambrosiana in Milan; certain ivories too, such as the pyxis of Pesaro and the capsella of Brescia, reproduce it. Still later it appears in the biblical cycles of churches, as at S. Angelo in Formis (11th century).