Italy, Ivory, & Women at the Most Famous Altar in the World

Amazing Art Chase 2025 - the search through Italy for women portrayed in ancient sacred art

I’ve just returned from a group pilgrimage, three respected professors (Lynn Cohick, Sandra Glahn, and Jazmine Sanchez) leading the charge, as we raced across Italy looking for women portrayed in ancient sacred art. We started in Rome, then on to Orvieto, Assisi, Siena, Florence, Milan, and Venice. I’m going to start here on Question Girl with Venice.

Venice was beautiful and strange, of course, but we were there to see something much more beautiful and strange than Venice itself—something very rare, and very precious to women of faith.

In 1906 a priceless ivory box, broken into fragments, was discovered under an altar at a chapel in Croatia. The box dates from the 400s and it shows women serving at the altar in St Peter’s, Rome—the headquarters of the entire Christian Church at that time (it didn’t split into Catholic/Protestant until hundreds of years later).

A photo I took of the ancient reconstructed ivory box. It's fascinating to look at but the scene I'm going to focus on is the one at the back--you can see part of it reflected in a mirror at the museum.

Two women on the left and two men on the right have their mouths open and arms up in a liturgical pose, singing. In the center is the famous altar of St Peter's, held up by massive twisted columns. Underneath the vaulted roof of the altar are a man (right) and a woman (left) at the table. The woman holds something up--likely a container for the Eucharist (communion).

This scene is at the back of the box and is reflected in a mirror. If you looked at it without the mirror, the men would be on the left, the women on the right.

St Peter’s Basilica with the famous altar. It’s massive.

Here's the same altar today, in St Peter's Basilica (church) in Rome with the twisted columns, that is carved into the ivory box. Underneath the altar lie the bones of St Peter himself. It's hard to see in this photo but the altar is massive--you can tell by how small the poinsettias look in front of the columns. Picture women clergy serving there at the altar alongside men--isn't that a beautiful example of brothers and sisters serving God together? In Christ there is no male or female, wrote Paul.

This is a beautiful example of gender parity--men and women depicted serving together.

This is a crucial piece of church history that, 1600 years later, shows us that women led alongside men in the very early church. This is not new if you’ve read Paul’s roll call of his co-leaders (he calls them “coworkers”) in Romans 16, or have heard about Phoebe, Priscilla, or the apostle Junia, but there’s something about a tangible object picturing an event that is very powerful. I got to see this with my own eyes at an archeological museum in Venice and my writer’s imagination filled in the colors, sounds, and scent from this moment in time captured on this box.

Can women be leaders in the church? Yes! They were, and this is just one example depicting this historical truth at the altar of the most famous church in the world, where Peter is buried beneath the same altar.

Here’s a quote from an article called “Women Leaders at the table in Early Churches” by Ally Kateusz.

“One of the two oldest iconographic artifacts in this study contradicts any assumption that the early churches in the city of Rome had an all-male clergy. This fifth-century artifact depicts the altar area of Old Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. While the scene on the artifact confirms that there was a men’s side and a women’s side in the church, it contradicts that only men were in the altar area. Its sculptor depicted a men’s side and a women’s side in the altar area, too. Since the discovery of this artifact, almost without exception scholars have agreed it depicts men on the left side of the table and women on the right. This scene is on one face of an ivory reliquary (a box for holy relics) that was buried beneath the altar area of a church near the city of Pola in what is now Croatia. It was excavated in 1906. Today it is in the Venice Archeological Museum. Sometimes called the Pola Ivory, most art historians date this delicately carved box to the 400s, usually no later than 450.”

You can read the full article from scholar Ally Kateusz here—there is more detail and some fascinating intrigue with the Vatican, as well—from an academic journal called Priscilla Papers, Spring 2020.

As a bonus, here are 30 Bible Verses on Women Leaders from Marg Mowczko. These make me happy!