This book was first published in 1977 in London and represents a landmark in the literature on the art of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. This era was long perceived as a time of decline and decay.

Kissing is the first to approach it as a unified period with clear boundaries: at its beginning, the dissolution of the Roman state, and at its end, the emergence of new powers - the Arabs in the south, the Germans in the north.

Through the pages of the book unfolds nearly half a millennium of European history, during which art serves as testimony to the radical changes that occurred on political, social, religious, and spiritual levels. Precisely because of these upheavals, there is no simple evolutionary path in the art of the period from the 3rd to the 7th century.

The author rather explores a dialectical process: at certain moments and places, sudden leaps towards new, non-classical artistic forms occur, which are later followed by other currents that return to the old, like a kind of rebirth.

During this period, which ends with the Byzantine Iconoclasm in the 8th century, a form of art with Christian content is fully established, overcoming the taboo that until around 200 AD prohibited religious art.

The author's viewpoint focuses on the exploration of these multiple artistic currents, which are clearly highlighted as their most characteristic examples are presented.

The book presents a panorama of the period from the 3rd to the 7th century based on works of art: sculptures, reliefs, metalworking, and ivory reliefs, coins, icons, murals, and of course mosaics, as well as illustrations of manuscripts.

The translation into Greek by Stella Papadaki-Oakland, a professor of the History of Byzantine Art at the University of Crete until her passing (2002), enriches the Greek-language bibliography with a classic book on the art of late antiquity and the early Byzantine period.

A work of the author's maturity, it is significant not only for the era and the works of art it addresses but also for its methodology. The author observes changes in artistic expression and its various manifestations, using the keen analysis of artistic form, a mature fruit of the German tradition of art history, which is where its roots lie.

For this reason, the Greek edition of the book is not only a contribution to better understanding a period of groundbreaking upheavals, but it also brings to the Greek reader, in its most refined form, a method of reading artistic forms that has been a fundamental tool of European art history for the entire 20th century.