Emile Mâle:
The visitor who wanders through the Catacombs, and glimpses in their shadows the half-obliterated paintings of the funerary chambers, is surprised to recognize the same subjects depicted over and over again. What appear, nearly always, before him are: the resurrection of Lazarus; the healing of the paralytic; the young Hebrews in the fiery furnace; Daniel in the pit of lions; Susannah among the elders; and Jonah thrown to the sea monster. Why were these scenes, which no common thread seems to unite, the ones chosen by the earliest Christian artists? For a long time we remained in ignorance, but today we know why.[Art and Artists of the Middle Ages by Emile Mâle, translated by Sylvia Stallings Lowe. Black Swan Books: Redding Ridge, 1986]
From a very early time, a prayer was recited for the dead whose original phrasing was rediscovered a few years ago. It ran approximately thus: Father, it was said, deliver this soul as Thou didst deliver Jonah from the sea monster, the young Hebrews from the furnace, Daniel from the lions' pit, Susannah from the hands of the elders... Then, addressing the Son, it continued, Thou also, Son of God, I beseech Thee who didst open the eyes of the blind, restore life to the limbs of the paralytic, raise Lazarus...
Thus the funeral liturgy led to the uniformity in the art of the Catacombs. The paintings in the underground chambers were nearly always nothing else than the verses of a prayer for the dead... Nothing could be more moving. Those long-ago generations of Christians saw in Christianity the assurance of immortality. The miracles of both Testaments were for them a guarantee of the Christ's promise, and the raising of Lazarus became the very affirmation of the Christian resurrection. So we sometimes find, near the dead, a small figure of Lazarus wrapped in a winding-sheet. The pagans, hesitating between the dreams of their poets and the systems of their philosophers, did not know what to make of death; they vacillated between the fear of annihilation and the hope of a shadowy afterlife, and that uncertainty was the cruellest of sufferings. Pagan tombs were decorated with a funerary spirit who leaned, weeping, over an extinguished torch. In contrast, on the marble slab which covered the tomb of the Christian, an anchor was engraved, the symbol of his invincible hope. Life: that is the assurance that the paintings of the Catacombs express. That is the word which reveals itself everywhere by the flickering light of lanterns. It was at these depths, among these shadows, under the weight of this deep volcanic ash, heavy as the cover of a sepulcher, that man believed most fervently in life.