Latin cross
A cross with a long upright and a crossbar set high. It is the form of cross most often shown on Christian monuments, and recalls Christ’s death by crucifixion.
Meaning
Christians honour the cross because Christ died on one. The Catholic Encyclopedia (1908) explains that his death turned a Roman instrument of shame into a sacred sign of his Passion, and so of protection. In the Latin form the crossbar sits about two-thirds of the way up the upright. In the equal-armed Greek cross, which the same encyclopedia notes was adopted in the East, it sits halfway; Russian churches use the three-bar Orthodox cross.
Origin and history
Crosses are rare in Christian art of the first four centuries: the Catholic Encyclopedia counts no more than a score of examples from that period, and early Christians often drew an anchor instead. One of the oldest surviving pictures of a crucifixion on a Latin-shaped cross is a mockery. A graffito scratched in plaster on the Palatine in Rome shows a man with an ass’s head fastened to a cross, and beside it a man praying, with the words “Alexamenos adores God”: a pagan comrade making fun of a Christian named Alexamenos. The earliest known image of Jesus crucified is carved on a magical amulet from the eastern Mediterranean, of the late second or early third century. The earliest scene of the Crucifixion told as a story is an ivory panel of about 420 to 430, one of the four Maskell Passion Ivories that the British Museum bought in 1856.
The sign before the picture
Christians made the sign of the cross long before they put crosses in their art. Tertullian wrote that at every step, at every going in and out, dressing, bathing, eating and lighting the lamps, “we trace upon the forehead the sign”; in the late second century, Walter Lowrie judged from his account, the gesture was made more often than at any time since. When pagans said Christians worshipped crosses, the apologist Minucius Felix answered that crosses were something Christians “neither worship nor wish for”, and added that the sign of the cross was everywhere anyway: in a ship under sail, and in a man praying with his hands outstretched.
Lowrie, in his 1901 handbook of early Christian monuments, put the absence of crosses from early art down to Christians’ distaste for picturing an instrument of execution still in use, “like our gallows”. The Crucifixion itself, he wrote, was never shown before the fifth century, and until the twelfth its pictures showed Christ alive.
Which shape was Christ’s cross?
The Catholic Encyclopedia holds that Christ was nailed to a crux immissa, the Latin shape, whose upright rises above the crossbar. It records the other view too: that he died on a crux commissa, a T-shaped gallows cross, and that the part above the crossbar in pictures is only the title board with its inscription.
See also
Orthodox cross, Anchor, Chi-Rho, Skull and crossbones, Orthodox cross, Jerusalem cross.
Sources
- Archæology of the Cross and Crucifix, The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907–1912), via New Advent, Forms of the cross; the cross in art
- The Anchor (as Symbol), The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907–1912), via New Advent, Various forms of the anchor
- Earliest Depiction of the Crucifixion, Encyclopaedia Romana, University of Chicago (James Grout)
- The Octavius of Minucius Felix, Chapter 29; Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, New Advent (Fathers of the Church), Chapter 29
- De Corona (The Chaplet), Tertullian, chapter 3; Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3, New Advent (Fathers of the Church), Chapter 3
- Monuments of the Early Church, Walter Lowrie, 1901, Macmillan, New York and London (Internet Archive), pp. 236–238, 276–277
Last reviewed September 24, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research