Christ treading on the beasts

[6] The earliest appearance of the subject in a major work is a 6th-century mosaic of Christ, dressed as a general or emperor in military uniform, clean-shaven and with a cross-halo, in the Archbishop's Chapel, Ravenna.

Here the subject is thought to refer to the contemporary struggle of the Church against the Arian heresy, which denied the divine nature of Christ; the image asserts the orthodox doctrine.

From the late Carolingian period, the cross starts to end in a spear-head, which Christ may be shown driving down into a beast (often into the mouth of the serpent) in an energetic pose, using a compositional type more often (and earlier) found in images of the Archangel Michael fighting Satan.

[27] The crucial difference is that in this interpretation the animals do not represent the devil, but actual wildlife encountered by Jesus, specifically in his forty days in the "wilderness" or desert in between his Baptism and Temptation.

Schapiro assembled a good deal of textual material showing tropes of wild beasts submitting to Christ and other Christian figures, especially in the context of the early monasticism of the desert, where the attitude of the challenging local fauna was a live issue.

The inscription round the image on the Ruthwell Cross, for which no direct source is known, reads: "IHS XPS iudex aequitatis; bestiae et dracones cognoverunt in deserto salvatorem mundi" – "Jesus Christ: the judge of righteousness: the beasts and dragons recognised in the desert the saviour of the world".

Other Anglo-Saxon pieces might represent it, for example, according to Leslie Webster a brooch in Ludlow Museum from the 2nd quarter of the 7th century with two beast heads at the foot of a cross "must also represent Creation's adoration of the risen Christ"[30] Schapiro saw the "peaceful" image as the original version, its composition later turned into the "militant" version, probably after the Constantinian conversion, but surviving in a small trickle of examples, especially those produced in contexts of monastic asceticism,[31] showing "Christ as the ideal monk".

Following the imagery of chapter 12 of the Book of Revelation, Bernard of Clairvaux had called Mary the "conqueror of dragons", and she was long to be shown crushing a snake underfoot, also a reference to her title as the "New Eve" [36]