Lamb of God sheep representing the apostles flanking the central Agnus Dei, as in Santi Cosma e Damiano, Rome (526–30). The Moravian Church uses an Agnus Dei as their seal with the surrounding inscription "Vicit agnus noster, eum sequamur" ("Our Lamb has conquered, let us follow him"). Although the depiction of Jesus as the Lamb of God is of ancient origin, it is not used in the liturgical iconography of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The reason for this is that the depictions of Jesus in the Orthodox Church are anthropomorphic rather than symbolic, as a confession of the Orthodox belief in the Incarnation
Mass for Four Voices the B flat strikingly changes to a B natural, producing an unexpected major chord at a key point in the music. A special feature of the mass (as also of the Five-Part Mass) is the final clause of the Agnus Dei. Although text-expression is not generally a feature of sixteenth-century Mass cycles, Byrd clearly regarded the ending of the Agnus Dei text ‘Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem’ as an opportunity for an expressive treatment of the words. He almost certainly identified ‘nobis’ as the persecuted Tudor Catholic community, as he had done with many of the