or of her judgments on points of art, or of the accuracy of her information on purely technical matters, or of some minor mistakes caused by her ignorance of Catholic usages, as when speaking of the Pax of Maso Finiguerra, so well known in the history of engraving, she takes the Pax to mean the Pix, or vessel for containing the Blessed Sacrament. But in the two subjoined passages there are errors of a more serious character, and in the latter especially there is much which needs the correction contained in De Rossi's observations. "The early Christians had confounded in their horror of heathen idolatry all imitative art and all artists; they regarded with decided hostility all images, and those who wrought them as bound to the service of Satan and heathenism; and we find all visible representations of sacred personages and actions confined to mystic emblems. Thus, the cross signified Redemption; the fish, Baptism; the ship represented the Church; the serpent, sin or the spirit of evil. When, in the fourth century, the struggle between paganism and Christianity ended in the triumph and recognition of the latter, and art revived, it was, if not in a new form, in a new spirit, by which the old forms were to be gradually moulded and modified. The Christians found the shell of ancient art remaining; the traditionary handicraft still existed: certain models of figure and drapery, etc., handed down from antiquity, though degenerated and distorted, remained in use, and were applied to illustrate, by direct or symbolical representations, the tenets of a purer faith".[32] "The most ancient representations of the Virgin Mary now remaining are the sculptures on the ancient Christian Sarcophagi, about the third and fourth centuries, and a mosaic in the chapel of San Venanzio at Rome, referred by antiquarians to the seventh century. Here she is represented as a colossal figure majestically draped, standing with arms outspread (the ancient attitude of prayer), and her eyes raised to heaven. Then after the seventh century succeeded her image in her maternal character, seated on a throne with the Infant Saviour in her arms. We must bear in mind, once for all, that from the earliest ages of Christianity the Virgin Mother of our Lord has been selected as the allegorical type of RELIGION in the abstract sense, and to this, her symbolical character, must be referred those representations of later times in which she appears as trampling on the dragon, as folding her votaries within the skirts of her ample robes, as interceding for sinners, as crowned between Heaven and Earth by the Father and the Son".[33] That these statements are very far from the truth, we now proceed to show.