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Despite such adaptations, as the classical world sank, it took some arts with it. The great casualty was large-scale sculpture in the round. From Constantinople to Italy, there are plenty of low-relief carvings after the 4th century. But not for a thousand years would there be bronze heroes on horseback to match the Marcus Aurelius on the Roman capitol. From Constantine onward, the Christian emperors preferred flat hieratical art, especially mosaics, whose multiplicity of shapes suited a power based on ceremony. The "otherworldliness" of those gold-and purple-sheathed Byzantine nobles, glittering in mosaic on the walls of Ravenna and points east, is propaganda; there could have been no better medium than mosaic for impressing on subjects' minds the idea of a continuity between the courts of heaven and those of earth. The rigid bodies and fixed, wide-eyed stares, we now feel, are pure spirit. But, as in the fearsome tapestry of St. Theodore, they were also meant to remind the faithful that Big Brother was watching, that the eye of the state found its model in the all-seeing eye of God. With its Christs enthroned as emperors and its emperors carrying the victorious insignia of the church, the official art of the early Christian empire is a sustained paean to the divine right of kings.
Naturally, secular art was more relaxed. The homosexual content of Greek art is lovingly preserved in a tiny blue glass roundel made in Alexandria in the late 3rd century A.D. Called a portrait of "Gennadios most accomplished in the musical art," and rendered with innumerable scratches of a needle on a sheet of gold leaf, it presents a young man who, from his curly hair, might be a cousin of Leonardo's boyfriend Salai. It is not, of course, the only masterpiece of portraiture in the show. The tradition of the Roman portrait bust was kept and amplified among patrician families. The show is also exceptionally rich in objets de luxe, ranging from a golden Aphrodite set on a lapis lazuli shell to The Casket of Projecta, a bridal coffer, dug up in Rome late in the 18th century, but made around 375 A.D. to celebrate a marriage of Christian aristocrats. A mélange of Christian symbol ism and the still-active images of classicism —Nereids riding on sea serpents, Aphrodite borne up on the half shell by Tritons, and the bride (as in The Song of Solomon) primping herself for marriage—it is one of the most dazzling pieces of silver work to survive from the ancient world.