SARCOPHAGI. – A 4th-century S. with strigilated decoration. From left to right are depicted the miracle of the fountain, the orant with the peacock, and the miracle at the wedding of Cana – Rome, Lateran Museum.
SARBIEWSKI, MATTHIAS KASIMIERZ. – Jesuit, humanist, known as “the Polish Horace,” b. at Sarbiawo, family castle near Plonsk, 24 Feb 1595, d. at Warsaw, 2 Apr 1640.
He entered the Society in 1612, and from 1622 to 1625 was in Rome at the invitation of Urban VIII for the reform of the hymns in the Breviary; but he played little part in this (attributed to him are: *Superne regum rex bone* and *Rex magnae, rex altissime*, and corrections to *Ad regias Agni dapes*). He then taught rhetoric, philosophy, and theology at Polotsk and Vilnius; in 1635 he became preacher and confessor to King Ladislaus IV.
Besides sermons in Latin and Polish, he left a great reputation as a lyric poet through a series of Latin poems in the style and form of Horace, in which he celebrates patriotic or religious events: *Lyricorum libri tres* (Cologne 1625), which in later editions became four, with the addition of *Epigrammatum liber unus* and *Epodon liber unus*. Unfinished and unpublished remained the epic poem (10 cantos) modeled on Virgil’s *Aeneid*: *Lechiades*, in which he celebrates the founder of the Kingdom of Poland. So classical and refined was he in his flowing poetic vein that his book of odes was long used as a school text in place of Horace.
SARCOPHAGI. – Within the artistic documentation of the early centuries of Christianity, the paleo-Christian sarcophagi, together with the catacomb paintings, constitute the richest and most precious source both for the history of late-Imperial art and for the illustration of Christian thought.
The rite of inhumation, the only one permitted among Christians, for the majority of their dead found the necessary and relatively economical protection in loculi, arcosolia, and trench graves offered by the subsoil, in rock-cut tombs, or, in their absence, in caskets or urns of terracotta, lead, or in tombs composed of tiles or marble slabs. The more affluent, however, never renounced the more costly means of the sarcophagus, so widespread in the Greco-Roman milieu; and from the moment when Christians could fully develop their cemeteries above ground, the workshops of the marble-workers could count on an ever-growing clientele. With the exception of the particular characteristics of a few provincial centers of secondary importance, the surviving monuments reveal Rome as the principal center of production, whose influence extended to southern Italy and Africa, to northern Italy, the south of Gaul, and the north of Spain; the art of Constantinople, by contrast, was slow to develop and only later exerted influence on centers such as Thessalonica and Ravenna. Although there are already certain indications that in various regions local elements combined, according to the period, with influences from the metropolises, much remains to be done to achieve a clear and complete differentiation, a task made difficult by the unresolved question of the intense traffic in marbles, and perhaps also of already finished sarcophagi, throughout the Empire.
It was precisely marble that served as the preferred material, since the use of porphyry remained limited to imperial tombs, while local stones, moreover of poor quality, were employed rather late, in above-ground cemeteries, for sarcophagi only lightly adorned with figures. The marbles most frequently used were Greek white, that of Asia Minor, and Luna marble, but discoveries such as those of Visconti in the ancient Marmorata along the Tiber (1868-70) reveal the full variety of their provenance. As is still the case today, one must imagine the existence of marble-working workshops along the main roads near the large cemeteries (Appian, Salarian, Vatican), workshops of varying categories that presumably adapted their production to demand and thus gradually became Christianized.
If at the outset most sarcophagi were monolithic, the increasing scarcity of marble later led not only to the construction of marble caskets with slabs held together by iron clamps, but also to the joining of blocks of marble of different sizes and even of different materials. The fact of commissions must never be overlooked in stylistic or iconographic studies, for it sometimes obliged the choice of specific scenes, the modification of traditional compositions, or the redistribution of individual scenes. Indeed, one may ask whether certain scenes did not remain in the more advanced repertoire precisely because of such commissions.
As some rare surviving examples demonstrate, many sarcophagi were polychromed, even, in some cases, before their sculpture was entirely finished. By means of carmine and cinnabar outlines, or yellow or violet hues, an attempt was made to heighten the overall design; by surface coloration certain parts of the composition were enlivened so as to contrast with other marble parts left in their natural state; other parts were further detailed or shaded with fine yellow or reddish-brown hatching. Gold, often applied on a purple ground, was used preferentially for the hair of conventional figures, in ornaments (diadems, bracelets, etc.), and on metallic objects. Yet the coloring never followed uniform rules and was subject to evolution over time.
In their general form, sarcophagi fall into two types: those shaped like a trough and those shaped like a chest. Roman art prefers the sarcophagus decorated only on the main face, or at most also on the ends, though with more modest reliefs, all enclosed between simple horizontal moldings; as a lid, a horizontal slab sometimes provided with acroteria and attic moldings, into which the inscribed tablet is inserted.
For the inscription amidst various figurations. Greek art, by contrast, is accustomed to employ complex ornamental schemes to which the rich base and frame give a more pronounced architectural aspect, while the reliefs cover all four sides, and the lid assumes a semicylindrical or gabled form. From one group to another certain overlaps occur. A special architectural type is represented by the column sarcophagus, which spread in the 4th century, and by the city-gate sarcophagus. In the former and its derivatives (tree or pillar sarcophagi), the columns, often richly decorated, are surmounted by architraves, arches, or pediments that may alternate with one another; in the latter, crenellated towers are juxtaposed.
Even the distribution of figures and scenes was governed by a certain constructive technique based on a few fundamental schemes, readily identifiable amid a great variety of solutions and combinations. Although applicable with varying degrees of ease to both the basin and the chest forms, and to both plain and figured sarcophagi, these schemes always obey the law of symmetry, dividing the front of the sarcophagus into main and secondary fields. Thus, the central field alone may be emphasized, or the two end fields may be highlighted, or these two types may be combined to form three important arrangements, so that, together with the plain or figured filler fields, the front of the sarcophagus may be divided into three, four, or five fields or sections. It should be noted, however, that the central field is not infrequently occupied by the lid reserved for portraits of the deceased. By doubling the schemes, sarcophagi with two superimposed registers or mixed combinations are obtained, or sections alternate simple and doubled fields. Even the so-called figured sarcophagi conform to these rules of constructive technique. It is true that as biblical scenes multiply, increasingly eliminating the plain strigillated decorative fields, the composition takes on the character of a true frieze of figures pressed closely together with notable verticality and a fear of wasted space. Yet it is not difficult to discern how the choice of certain scenes is governed by the space they are to occupy, whether at the sides of the central lid or at the ends of the frieze. Conversely, the introduction of the column as a dividing element with two doors inevitably forces a certain equivalence among the various niches, though the central one always remains the most important, and leads to a fragmentation that risks dividing a single scene into several parts, thereby encouraging the use