FONTE, MIRACOLO della. — The miracle performed by Moses in the desert was represented very early in primitive Christian funerary art; the patriarch strikes the rock of Horeb, and from it gushes the water that quenches the thirst of the people of Israel (Ex. 17:5). Already St. Paul teaches that Petra autem erat Christus (I Cor. 10:4).
This concept was subsequently developed extensively in ancient Christian literature, from St. Irenaeus, who sees in the water “the rivers of the Holy Spirit to be poured out upon the chosen people” (Adv. Haer., 4, 35, 19; PG 7, 1682), to St. Cyprian, who states that “if the Jews should thirst and seek Christ, they will be refreshed among us, attaining the Grace of Baptism” (Ep. 63, 8; CSEL 2, p. 706). The representation, therefore, of the miracle of the spring is a symbol of Baptism and is already found in the cycle of the so-called Greek chapel in the cemetery of Priscilla (Wilpert, Pittura, tav. 13); it is subsequently repeated in the cemeteries of Callistus, Domitilla, Praetextatus, the Giordani, in the cemetery ad duas lauros, etc., and outside Rome also in the cemetery called that of S. Gennaro dei poveri in Naples. Moses is always represented in tunic and pallium, with the virga virtutis, beardless in the earliest period; in a cubiculum of the Giordani cemetery, however, the scene is set not in the desert but between two trees (E. Josi, Le pitture rinvenute nel cimitero dei Giordani, in Rivista di archeol. crist., 5 [1928], pp. 188–89, fig. 3).
The scene is also found scratched on a funerary slab from the cemetery of Ciriaca (O. Marucchi, Monumenti del Museo Pio Lateranense, Milano 1910, tav. 57, n. 14), and sometimes on gold glass, on ivory plaques, on one of the wooden panels of the door of S. Sabina, on bronze fittings, and on a fabric from Alpin, now in Vienna in the Museum of Art and Industry, etc.
On a late sarcophagus from Aix there is a group of people drinking their fill (Wilpert, Sarcofagi, tav. 97, 2).
A glass cup of the fifth century discovered at Podgontza (Albania) offers a crude scene of the miracle of the spring, with the inscription: “Petrus virga percussit fontes cooperunt currere.” Peter, therefore, takes the place of Moses; indeed, already on sarcophagus 119 of the Lateran Museum, from the Vatican Basilica, the iconographic type of St. Peter can be recognized, and three young men in military dress are drinking from the spring (Wilpert, Sarcofagi, tav. 9); military dress is likewise worn by the figure drinking in a scene of the same miracle in the cubiculum called that of the little sheep in the cemetery of Callistus (Wilpert, Pittura, tav. 237). Wilpert interprets this scene, which recurs so frequently on the sarcophagi of Rome, Gaul, and Spain, as a representation of the Baptism conferred by St. Peter on the centurion Cornelius and his retinue.
The scene is also repeated on a bronze lamp in the Archaeological Museum of Florence (W. Neuss, Die Kunst der alten Christen, Augusta 1926, tav. 92, fig. 184).