Christ in Majesty

From the latter part of the fourth century, a still beardless Christ begins to be depicted seated on a throne on a dais, often with his feet on a low stool and usually flanked by Saints Peter and Paul, and in a larger composition the other apostles.

This depiction is known as the Traditio legis ("handing over the law"), or Christ the lawgiver – "the apostles are indeed officials, to whom the whole world is entrusted" wrote Saint John Chrysostom.

By the seventh century the Byzantine Christ Pantocrator holding a book representing the Gospels and raising his right hand has become essentially fixed in the form it retains in Eastern Orthodoxy today.

In the West the image showed a full-length enthroned Christ, often in a mandorla or other geometrical frame, surrounded by the symbols of the Four Evangelists, representing the vision of Chapters 4 and 5 of the Book of Revelation.

[6] From the Romanesque period, the image in the West often began to revert to the earliest, more crowded conception, and archangels, apostles and saints, now often all facing inwards towards Christ, appear, as well as the beasts emblematic of the Evangelists and the twenty-four elders.

From the late Renaissance and through the Baroque, it often forms the upper part of a picture depicting events on earth in the lower register, and as stricter perspective replaces the hieratic scaling of the Middle Ages, Christ becomes literally diminished.