some sarcophagi may have been ordered during the person's life and custom-made to express their beliefs or aesthetics. most were mass-produced, and if they contained a portrait of the deceased, as many did, with the face of the figure left unfinished until purchase. the carved sarcophagus survived the transition to christianity, and became the first common location for christian sculpture, in works like the mid 4th-century sarcophagus of junius bassus.