Byzantine Art

The opulence of Byzantine art, with its extravagant use of gold and silver, is well known. Highly skilled artists created powerful representations reflecting and promoting this society and its values in icons, illuminated manuscripts, and mosaics and wallpaintings placed in domed churches and public buildings. This complete introduction to the whole period and range of Byzantine art combines immense breadth with interesting historical detail. Robin Cormack overturns the myth that Byzantine art remained constant from the inauguration of Constantinople, its artistic centre, in the year 330 until the fall of the city to the Ottomans in 1453. He shows how the many political and religious upheavals of this period produced a wide range of styles and developments in art. This updated, colour edition includes new discoveries, a revised bibliography, and, in a new epilogue, a rethinking of Byzantine Art for the present day.

Focusing on mosaics, sculpture, paintings, jewelry, and silk, the author examines this artistic style as an expression of religious thought

This title examines the parallel phenomena of portraits and icons, and spans from late antiquity through the end of the Byzantine period. Engaging a wide range of material, it addresses prevalent and persistent themes in the creation of a distinctly Christianized portraiture while analyzing the cultural and theological perceptions in place that guided its reception. Christian Rome inherited its traditions and beliefs regarding portraiture from antiquity, especially in terms of its ritual and religious functions. Though certainly altered for its new Christian context, these perceptions did not disappear altogether. Various texts and images survive that allow us to imagine a world where sacred and secular art intermingled, and portraits of Christ and the saints, emperors, bishops, and holy men existed side by side in visual messages of power and hierarchal authority

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Byzantine Art and Renaissance Europe discusses the cultural and artistic interaction between the Byzantine east and western Europe, from the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 to the flourishing of post-Byzantine artistic workshops on Venetian Crete during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the formation of icon collections in Renaissance Italy. The contributors examine the routes by which artistic interaction may have taken place, and explore the reception of Byzantine art in western Europe, analysing why artists and patrons were interested in ideas from the other side of the cultural and religious divide. In the first chapter, Lyn Rodley outlines the development of Byzantine art in the Palaiologan era and its relations with western culture. Hans Bloemsma then re-assesses the influence of Byzantine art on early Italian painting from the point of view of changing demands regarding religious images in Italy. In the first of two chapters on Venetian Crete, Angeliki Lymberopoulou evaluates the impact of the Venetian presence on the production of fresco decorations in regional Byzantine churches on the island. The next chapter, by Diana Newall, continues the exploration of Cretan art manufactured under the Venetians, shifting the focus to the bi-cultural society of the Cretan capital Candia and the rise of the post-Byzantine icon. Kim Woods then addresses the reception of Byzantine icons in western Europe in the late Middle Ages and their role as devotional objects in the Roman Catholic Church. Finally, Rembrandt Duits examines the status of Byzantine icons as collectors’ items in early Renaissance Italy. The inventories of the Medici family and other collectors reveal an appreciation for icons among Italian patrons, which suggests that received notions of Renaissance tastes may be in need of revision. The book thus offers new perspectives and insights and re-positions late and post-Byzantine art in a broader European cultural context.

An unmanageable, but lovable, eleven-year-old misfit learns to believe in himself when he gets to know the new school counselor, who is a sort of misfit too.

The twelve studies contained in this second collection by Henry Maguire are linked together by a common theme, namely the relationship of Byzantine art to the imaginary. They show how art enabled the Byzantines not only to imagine the sacred events of the past, but also to visualize the invisible present by manifesting the spiritual world that they could not see. The articles are grouped around the following five topics: the depiction of nature by the Byzantines before and after iconoclasm, especially in portrayals of the earthly and the spiritual Paradise; the social functions and theological significance of classical artistic forms in Byzantine art after iconoclasm; the association between rhetoric and the visual arts in Byzantium, especially in contrast to the role played by liturgical drama in western medieval art; the relationship of the visual arts to Byzantine concepts of justice and the law, both human and divine; and portrayals of the two Byzantine courts, the imperial court on earth and the imagined court in heaven. The papers cover a wide range of media, including floor and wall mosaics, paintings in manuscripts and churches, ivory carvings, coins, and enamel work.

Finds a correspondence between the evolution of stylistic forms in Early Christian art and the social, religious, and historical developments of the period.