Note 468 — Chapter II
Reading edition
The earliest example of a dead Christ is in a MS. of date A. D. 1059. The oldest mural picture of this awful theme, now so common throughout Roman Catholic Christendom, and which was prescribed as necessary for every altar by Benedict XIV, 1754, is the Church of Urban at Rome, and bears the date A. X. R. I. MXI.—Anno Christi 1011. Few of those in the Italian churches are older than the fourteenth century.