One of the great dramas of history was enacted between the 3rd and 7th centuries A.D.: the slow collapse of Rome, the fading of its empire and, with it, the death of the classical world. The age of Christianity was officially brought to term when the Emperor Constantine formally embraced the new faith and in A.D. 324-330 moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to Constantinople. But across the still vast spread of the imperial territories, which ran from the Euphrates to Gibraltar, there was no clean break with the old religions. For 400 years, the remnants of the pagan gods contended against Christianity and with the various mystery faiths of Egypt and Asia Minor.
The eddies set up by the gradual transference of power from Olympus to Golgotha were reflected in art. Some of the complexity of late classical and early Christian centuries can be sampled in a huge exhibition, which opened last month at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Age of Spirituality," assembled under the direction of Art Historian Kurt Weitzmann, is a magnificent compendium of some 450 works in every medium known to the ancient world—marble carvings, glass, gold, jewelry, silver, paint, cameos, cloth, mosaic, ivory, bronze.
No religion ever started with a full-blown iconography. The earliest Christian work was crude and secretive, a code of graffiti—crosses and fish scratched on walls. To enrich that, to give its visual discourse a dignity to match imperial power, Christian art needed pagan symbolism. Once its early frenzies over idolatry had been resolved, the new religion picked over the bones of antiquity, preserving many of its forms in doctrinal art but switching their meaning.
The classical figure of the philosopher, Plato or Seneca, among his students was pressed into service as Christ teaching.The gestures of Ciceronian rhetoric lent authority to the poses of carved apostles; Orpheus with a ram on his shoulders was transformed into Christ the good shep herd. Winged victories became angels. Bacchus turned into the drunken Noah; a late 3rd century carving of Jonah resting under the gourd tree was based on the older Greek image of Endymion asleep. The more refined an early Christian work was, the more subtly it might display its classical affiliations.