In the 4th century the Roman Empire accepted Christianity as its religion. This meant a new kind of art. Sculpture, like painting, music, and philosophy, turned for inspiration to the church, and the church, faced with the need of interpreting the new religion for great masses of people, used the arts to good advantage. The vast majority of people could not read, and sculpture and painting became their books--as stained glass windows would a few centuries later.

Art was austere, symbolic, and otherworldly from about the 8th to the 12th century, the middle period of the Middle Ages. It was decidedly abstract, not realistic. Religious in subject matter, sculpture was closely related to church architecture.