The Flattened and Highly Decorative Style of Art Influenced Byzantine Art Quizlet

The magnificent soaring domes
of the interior of the Hagia Sophia
in Istanbul (Constantinople).
Islamic elements are visible
on the top of the chief dome.

Centres of Byzantine-fashion
early Christian fine art were
Ravenna, Kiev, Novgorod
and Moscow. Delight see:
Christian Byzantine Art.

The Collapse of Rome and the Rising of
Byzantine Art (c.500-1450)

Contents

• What is Byzantine Art?
• General Characteristics
• Byzantine Mosaics (c.500-843)
• Byzantine Fine art: Revival and Development (843-1450)
• Byzantine Icons

What is Byzantine Art?

Between Emperor Constantine I's Edict in 313, recognizing Christianity as the official religion, and the fall of Rome at the hands of the Visigoths in 476, arrangements were made to split the the Roman Empire into a Western half (ruled from Rome) and an Eastern half (ruled from Byzantium). Thus, while Western Christendom savage into the cultural abyss of the barbaric Dark Ages, its religious, secular and creative values were maintained past its new Eastern majuscule in Byzantium (later renamed Constantinople later on Constantine). Forth with the transfer of Imperial authority to Byzantium went thousands of Roman and Greek painters and craftsmen, who proceeded to create a new prepare of Eastern Christian images and icons, known as Byzantine Fine art. Exclusively concerned with Christian art, though derived (in particular) from techniques and forms of Greek and Egyptian art, this manner spread to all corners of the Byzantine empire, where Orthodox Christianity flourished. Item centres of early on Christian art included Ravenna in Italia, and Kiev, Novgorod and Moscow in Russia. For more than detail, see also: Christian Fine art, Byzantine Period.

RECOVERY OF MEDIEVAL Fine art
For details of arts under
Charlemagne and the Ottos,
encounter: Carolingian Fine art (750-900)
and Ottonian Art (900-1050)

ROMANESQUE ERA
Romanesque Art (m-1200)
For Italian-Byzantine styles, see:
Romanesque Painting in Italian republic.
For more abstract, linear styles, see:
Romanesque Painting in French republic.
For signs of Islamic influence, meet:
Romanesque Painting in Kingdom of spain.

During the menstruation 1050-1200, tensions grew up betwixt the Eastern Roman Empire and the slowly re-emerging city of Rome, whose Popes had managed (by careful diplomatic manoeuvering) to retain their authority equally the heart of Western Christendom. At the same time, Italian city states like Venice were becoming rich on international trade. As a result, in 1204, Constantinople fell under the influence of Venetians.

This duly led to a cultural exodus of renowned artists from the urban center back to Rome - the reverse of what had happened 800 years previously - and the beginnings of the proto-Renaissance period, exemplified by Giotto di Bondone's Scrovegni Chapel frescoes. However, even as information technology declined, Byzantine influence continued to brand itself felt in the 13th and 14th centuries, notably in the Sienese School of painting and the International Gothic style (1375-1450), notably in International Gothic illuminations, like the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, past the Limbourg Brothers. See as well Byzantine-inspired panel-paintings and altarpieces including Duccio's Stroganoff Madonna (1300) and Maesta Altarpiece (1311).

NOTE: For other important historical periods similar to the Byzantine era, see Fine art Movements, Periods, Schools (from well-nigh 100 BCE).

Byzantine Mosaics (c.500-843)

Using early Christian adaptations of late Roman styles, the Byzantines developed a new visual language, expressing the ritual and dogma of the united Church and land. Early variants flourished in Alexandria and Antioch, but increasingly the regal bureaucracy undertook the major commissions, and artists were sent out to the regions requiring them, from the metropolis. Established in Constantinople, the Byzantine style somewhen spread far beyond the capital letter, round the Mediterranean to southern Italy, up through the Balkans and into Russian federation.

Rome, occupied by the Visigoths in 410, was sacked again by the Vandals in 455, and past the terminate of the century Theodoric the Great had imposed the rule of the Ostrogoths on Italy. However, in the 6th century the Emperor Justinian (reigned 527-65) re-established purple order from Constantinople, taking over the Ostrogothic capital, Ravenna (Italy), as his western authoritative centre. Justinian was a superb organizer, and one of the most remarkable patrons in the history of art. He built and re-congenital on a huge scale throughout the Empire: his greatest work, the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, employed nigh ten,000 craftsmen and labourers and was decorated with the richest materials the Empire could provide. Though it withal stands gloriously, hardly whatever of its earliest mosaics remain, thus information technology is at Ravenna that the most spectacular remnants of Byzantine art in the 6th century survive. Meet: Ravenna Mosaics (c.400-600).

Inside the dry brick exterior of Due south. Vitale in Ravenna, the worshipper is dazzled by a highly controlled explosion of color blazoned across glittering gold. Mosaic art and beautifully grained marble encompass almost all wall surfaces, nigh obliterating the compages that bears them. The golden, flooding the background, suggests an infinity taken out of mortal fourth dimension, on which the supernatural images bladder. In the apse, wrapped in their own remote mystery, Christ and saints preside unimpassioned. Nonetheless, in ii flanking panels of mosaic, ane showing the Emperor Justinian with his retinue and the other, opposite, his married woman Theodora with her ladies, there persists a articulate attempt at naturalistic portraiture, specially in the faces of Justinian and Theodora. Even so, their bodies seem to float rather than stand inside the tubular folds of their draperies.

In S. Vitale, and in Byzantine art generally, sculpture in the round plays a minimal function. However, the marble capitals (dating from the pre-Justinian's era) are carved with surprising effeminateness, with purely oriental, highly stylized vine-scrolls and inscrutable animals. A rare example of Byzantine figurative sculpture is an impressiye head, peradventure that of Theodora, in which the Roman tradition of naturalistic portrait fine art lingers.

To the East, Justinian'south well-nigh of import surviving work is in the church, (slightly subsequently than S. Vitale), of St Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai. At that place, in the great Transfiguration in the apse, the figures are once more substantial presences, suspended weightlessly in a golden empyrean. The contours, still, are freer, less rigid, than at S. Vitale, and the limbs of the figures are strangely articulated - almost an assemblage of component parts. This was to become a characteristic and persistent trait in the Byzantine manner.

Elsewhere (notably at Thessaloniki) there were other song variations of style in mosaic. Relatively little remains in the cheaper class of fresco, and still less in manuscript illumination. A very few 6th century illuminated manuscripts, on a purple-tinted vellum, show a comparable development from classical conventions towards an austere formality, though pen and ink tend to produce greater freedom in construction and gesture. In the famous Rabula Gospel of 586 from Syria, the glowing intensity of the dumbo imagery may even bring to mind the work of Rouault in the twentieth century. Ivory panels carved in relief have too survived, usually covers for consular diptychs. This type of diptych consisted of two ivory plaques, tied together, with records of the departing delegate'due south office listed on their inner surfaces. The carvings on the exterior, representing religious or purple themes, take the clarity and detachment characteristic of the finest mosaics, and are splendidly assured.

In the 8th and 9th centuries the development of the Byzantine manner was catastrophically interrupted in all media. Art was not but stopped in its tracks: there was a thorough, wide-ranging destruction of existing images throughout the Byzantine regions. Figurative art had long been attacked on the grounds that the Bible condemned the worship of images; in about 725 the iconoclasts (those who would have religious images destroyed) won the day against the iconodules (those who believed they were justified) with the promulgation of the starting time of a number of imperial edicts against images. Complicated arguments raged over the issue, merely iconoclasm was also an assertion of purple potency over a Church thought to have grown besides rich and too powerful. Information technology was surely attributable to the Church building that some tradition of art did persist, to flower again when the ban was lifted in 843.

Byzantine Art: Revival and Development (843-1450)

The halt to iconoclasm - the subversive campaign confronting images and those who believed in them - came in 843. The revival of religious art that followed was based on conspicuously formulated principles: images were accepted as valuable non for worship, but as channels through which the faithful could direct their prayer and somehow anchor the presence of divinity within their daily lives. Different in the afterward western Gothic revival, Byzantine art rarely had a didactic or narrative function, but was essentially impersonal, formalism and symbolic: it was an element in the performance of religious ritual. The disposition of images in churches was codified, rather every bit the liturgy was, and generally adhered to a set iconography: the great mosaic cycles were deployed most the Pantocrator (Christ in his office equally ruler and gauge) central in the principal dome, and the Virgin and Child in the apse. Below, the chief events of the Christian year - from Annunciation to Crucifixion and Resurrection - had their appointed places. Below over again, hieratic figures of saints, martyrs and bishops were ranked in order.

The terminate of iconoclasm opened an era of cracking activity, the and then-chosen Macedonian Renaissance. It lasted from 867, when Basil I, founder of the Macedonian dynasty, became absolute ruler of what was at present a purely Greek monarchy, nearly until 1204, when Constantinople was disastrously sacked. Churches were redecorated throughout the Empire, and especially its upper-case letter: in Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, mosaics enormous in scale took up the former themes and stances, sometimes with great delicacy and refinement.

Despite the steady erosion of its territory, Byzantium was seen by Europe equally the light of civilization, an nigh legendary urban center of gold. Literature, scholarship and an elaborate etiquette surrounded the Macedonian court; the 10th century Emperor Constantine Seven Porphyrogenitos sculpted and himself illuminated the manuscripts he wrote. Though his ability continued to diminish, the Emperor had enormous prestige, and the Byzantine fashion proved irresistible to the rest of Europe. Even in regimes politically and militarily hostile to Constantinople, Byzantine fine art was adopted and its medieval artists welcomed.

In Greece, the Church building of the Dormition at Daphni, virtually Athens, of almost 1100, presents some of the finest mosaics of this period: there is a grave, classic sense of swell delicacy in its Crucifixion, while the dome mosaic of The Pantocrator is one of the most formidable in any Byzantine church. In Venice, the huge expanses of Southward. Marco (begun 1063) were decorated by artists imported from the East, only their work was largely destroyed by burn down in 1106, and later work by Venetian craftsmen is in a less pure style. In the cathedral on the nearby isle of Torcello, however, The Virgin and Child, tall, lonely, and solitary as a spire confronting the vast gold space of the apse, is a twelfth century survival. In Sicily, the first Norman king, Roger II (ruled 1130-54), was actively hostile to the Byzantine Empire still he imported Greek artists, who created i of the finest mosaic cycles e'er, in the apse and presbytery at Cefalu. The permeation of Byzantine art into Russia was initiated in 989 by the marriage of Vladimir of Kiev with the Byzantine princess Anna and his conversion to Eastern Christianity. Byzantine mosaicists were working in the Hagia Sophia at Kiev past the 1040s, and the Byzantine impact on Russian medieval painting remained crucial long after the fall of Constantinople.

Annotation: Goldsmithing and precious metalwork were another Byzantine speciality, notably in Kiev (c.950-1237), where both cloisonné and niello styles of enamelling were taken to new heights by Eastern Orthodox goldsmiths.

The secular paintings and mosaics of the Macedonian revival have rarely survived - their about spectacular manifestation was lost in the called-for of the legendary Groovy Palace in Constantinople during the Sack of 1204. Such works retained much more clearly classical features - the ivory panels of the Veroli casket are an example - merely such features are to exist found, too, in religious manuscripts and in some ivory reliefs (sculpture in the round was forbidden every bit a concession to the iconoclasts). The Joshua Ringlet, though information technology celebrates the war machine prowess of an Old Attestation hero, reflects the pattern of Roman narrative columns of relief sculpture such as Trajan'southward Column in Rome; the famous Paris Psalter of about 950 is remarkably Roman both in feeling and iconography: in one illustration the immature David as a musical shepherd is nearly indistinguishable from a pagan Orpheus, and is even attended by an allegorical nymph chosen Melody.

Note: The importance of Byzantine murals on the development of Western medieval painting should also not be under-estimated. See, for instance, the highly realistic wall paintings in the Byzantine monastery Church building of St. Panteleimon in Gorno Nerezi, Republic of Republic of macedonia.

In 1204, the city of Constantinople was sacked by Latin Crusaders, and Latins ruled the city until 1261, when the Byzantine emperors returned. In the interim, craftsmen migrated elsewhere. In Macedonia and Serbia, fresco painting was already established, and the tradition continued steadily. Some 15 major fresco cycles survive, mostly by Greek artists. The fresco medium doubtless encouraged a fluency of expression and an emotional feeling non often apparent in mosaic.

The terminal two centuries of Byzantium in its decay were troubled and torn with state of war, only surprisingly produced a third peachy artistic flowering. The fragmentary simply nonetheless imposing Deesis in Hagia Sophia in Constantinople may accept been constructed after the Latin domination, rather than during the 12th century. It has a new tenderness and humanity which was continued - for case in the superb early 14th century cycle of the monastic church of Christ in Chora. In Russia, a distinctive mode developed, reflected not only in masterpieces such every bit the icons of Rublev, but also in the private interpretations of traditional themes by Theophanes the Greek, a Byzantine emigrant, working in a dashing, about Impressionistic style in the 1370s in Novgorod. Though the central source of the Byzantine style was extinguished with the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453, its influence continued in Russia and the Balkans, while in Italia the Byzantine strain (mingling with Gothic) persisted in the era of Pre-Renaissance Painting (c.1300-1400) ushered in by the works of Duccio di Buoninsegna (c.1255-1319) and Giotto (1270-1337).

Byzantine Icons

Icons (or ikons), generally small so easily transportable, are the best-known course of Byzantine fine art. A tradition persists that the first icon was painted by St Luke the Evangelist, showing the Virgin pointing to the Kid on her left arm. Still, no examples that date from before the 6th century are known. Icons became increasingly popular in Byzantium in the 6th and seventh centuries, to some degree precipitating the reaction of iconoclasm. Although the iconoclasts asserted that icons were being worshipped, their proper office was as an assist to meditation; through the visible image the believer could apprehend the invisible spirituality. Condensed into a small compass, they fulfilled and fulfil the same role in the home as the mosaic decorations of the churches - signalling the presence of divinity. The production of icons for the Orthodox Churches has never ceased.

The dating of icons is thus fairly speculative. The discovery at St Catherine's monastery on Mt Sinai of a number of icons that could be ordered chronologically with some certainty is recent. Many different styles are represented. An early on St Peter has the frontal simplicity, the direct gaze from large broad-open optics, that is plant again and over again in unmarried-figure icons. It also has an virtually suave elegance and nobility, allied with a painterly vigour that imparts a distinct tension to the figure. There is a similar emotional quality in a well-preserved Madonna and Saints, despite its unblinking symmetry and rather coarser modelling. Both surely came from Constantinople.

Immediately afterwards the iconoclastic period, devotional images in richer materials, in ivory, mosaic or even precious metals, may have been more than pop than painted ones. From the twelfth century painted icons became more frequent, and one cracking masterpiece tin can be dated to 1131 or presently before. Known every bit "The Virgin of Vladimir", it was sent to Russia soon after it had been painted in Constantinople. The Virgin however indicates the Child, as the embodiment of the divine in human form, but the tenderness of the pose, cheek against cheek, is illustrative of the new humanism.

From the 12th century the discipline thing of icons expanded considerably, though the long-established themes and formulae, important for the comfort of the faithful, were maintained. Heads of Christ, Virgins and patron saints continued, but scenes of activeness appeared - notably Annunciations and Crucifixions; subsequently, for iconostases, or choir-screens, composite panels containing many narrative scenes were painted. Long after it had ceased in Constantinople with the Turkish conquest, production continued and developed in Greece and (with clearly discernible regional styles) in Russia, and in Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria. In Russia, individual masters emerged even before the autumn of Constantinople, along with important centres such as the Novgorod school of icon painting. The most famous Russian iconographer was the monk Andrei Rublev (c.1370-1430), whose renowned masterpiece, The Holy Trinity Icon (1411-25), is the finest of all Russian icons. He transcended the Byzantine formulae, and the mannerisms of the Novgorod school founded by the Byzantine refugee Theophanes the Greek. Rublev'south icons are unique for their absurd colours, soft shapes and quiet radiance. The terminal of the great Russian icon painters of the Novgorod school, was Dionysius (c.1440-1502), noted for his icons for the Volokolamsky monastery, and his Deesis for the Cathedral of the Dormition in Moscow. He was in fact the get-go celebrated figure in the Moscow school of painting (c.1500-1700), whose Byzantine-inspired icons were produced past the likes of Nicephorus Savin, Procopius Chirin and the great Simon Ushakov (1626-1686).

Source: We gratefully acknowledge the utilize of material in the to a higher place article from David Piper's outstanding volume "The Illustrated History of Fine art".

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Source: http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/byzantine.htm

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