Prologue -- Early Christian art : Rome and the legacy of the Caesars -- Early Christian art : the Eastern provinces of the Empire and the foundation of Constantinople -- Early Christian art : the synthesis of the secular and the religious image -- The age of Justinian -- The forsaken West and the emergence of the Supreme Pontiff -- The troubled East -- The triumph of orthodoxy -- The scholar Emperor and the triumph of the imperial ideal -- Metropolitan authority -- Metropolitan diffusion and decline -- Epilogue.