ABSTRACT
During the fourth century when Christianity made the transition from an oppressed minority religion with a fairly introverted and circumscribed system of visual symbols to an active and public religion patronized by the Roman emperor himself, a corresponding new set of images as well as contexts for those images emerged. The grand, newly constructed churches in Constantinople, Rome, and the Holy Land lent themselves to – and even demanded – a new program of iconographic themes and, in particular, new ways of presenting the figure of Jesus Christ along with the Virgin and the saints.
