Byzantine Art in General Could Be Said to Be in Relation to Christian Art

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

Centres of Byzantine-style
early Christian art were
Ravenna, Kiev, Novgorod
and Moscow. Please run across:
Christian Byzantine Art.

The Plummet of Rome and the Rising of
Byzantine Fine 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 Fine art?

Betwixt Emperor Constantine I's Edict in 313, recognizing Christianity equally the official religion, and the autumn of Rome at the hands of the Visigoths in 476, arrangements were made to divide the the Roman Empire into a Western half (ruled from Rome) and an Eastern half (ruled from Byzantium). Thus, while Western Christendom barbarous into the cultural completeness of the barbarian Nighttime Ages, its religious, secular and artistic values were maintained by its new Eastern upper-case letter in Byzantium (later on renamed Constantinople afterward Constantine). Along with the transfer of Imperial authority to Byzantium went thousands of Roman and Greek painters and craftsmen, who proceeded to create a new set of Eastern Christian images and icons, known equally Byzantine Art. Exclusively concerned with Christian art, though derived (in particular) from techniques and forms of Greek and Egyptian fine art, this mode spread to all corners of the Byzantine empire, where Orthodox Christianity flourished. Particular centres of early Christian art included Ravenna in Italy, and Kiev, Novgorod and Moscow in Russia. For more detail, come across also: Christian Fine art, Byzantine Flow.

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

ROMANESQUE ERA
Romanesque Fine art (1000-1200)
For Italian-Byzantine styles, run across:
Romanesque Painting in Italy.
For more abstruse, linear styles, see:
Romanesque Painting in France.

For signs of Islamic influence, run into:
Romanesque Painting in Espana.

During the menstruum 1050-1200, tensions grew up between the Eastern Roman Empire and the slowly re-emerging city of Rome, whose Popes had managed (past careful diplomatic manoeuvering) to retain their authorization as the centre of Western Christendom. At the same time, Italian city states like Venice were condign 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 city dorsum 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. Even so, even as information technology declined, Byzantine influence connected to make itself felt in the 13th and 14th centuries, notably in the Sienese Schoolhouse of painting and the International Gothic mode (1375-1450), notably in International Gothic illuminations, like the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, by the Limbourg Brothers. Meet also 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, come across Art Movements, Periods, Schools (from well-nigh 100 BCE).

Byzantine Mosaics (c.500-843)

Using early on Christian adaptations of late Roman styles, the Byzantines developed a new visual language, expressing the ritual and dogma of the united Church and state. Early variants flourished in Alexandria and Antioch, simply increasingly the imperial bureaucracy undertook the major commissions, and artists were sent out to the regions requiring them, from the metropolis. Established in Constantinople, the Byzantine style eventually spread far beyond the capital, round the Mediterranean to southern Italian republic, upwards through the Balkans and into Russia.

Rome, occupied past the Visigoths in 410, was sacked again by the Vandals in 455, and by the end of the century Theodoric the Keen had imposed the rule of the Ostrogoths on Italy. However, in the 6th century the Emperor Justinian (reigned 527-65) re-established regal order from Constantinople, taking over the Ostrogothic upper-case letter, Ravenna (Italian republic), every bit his western administrative centre. Justinian was a superb organizer, and one of the nearly remarkable patrons in the history of art. He built and re-built on a huge scale throughout the Empire: his greatest work, the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, employed well-nigh 10,000 craftsmen and labourers and was decorated with the richest materials the Empire could provide. Though it still stands gloriously, hardly whatever of its earliest mosaics remain, thus it is at Ravenna that the most spectacular remnants of Byzantine fine art in the 6th century survive. See: Ravenna Mosaics (c.400-600).

Within 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 cover about all wall surfaces, virtually obliterating the architecture that bears them. The gold, flooding the background, suggests an infinity taken out of mortal time, on which the supernatural images float. In the alcove, wrapped in their own remote mystery, Christ and saints preside unimpassioned. Yet, in ii flanking panels of mosaic, one showing the Emperor Justinian with his retinue and the other, opposite, his wife Theodora with her ladies, at that place persists a clear attempt at naturalistic portraiture, especially in the faces of Justinian and Theodora. All the same, 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 part. Still, the marble capitals (dating from the pre-Justinian's era) are carved with surprising delicacy, with purely oriental, highly stylized vine-scrolls and inscrutable animals. A rare example of Byzantine figurative sculpture is an impressiye head, perhaps that of Theodora, in which the Roman tradition of naturalistic portrait art lingers.

To the East, Justinian's near important surviving work is in the church, (slightly afterwards than S. Vitale), of St Catherine's Monastery on Mountain Sinai. In that location, in the nifty Transfiguration in the apse, the figures are once again substantial presences, suspended weightlessly in a golden empyrean. The contours, nevertheless, are freer, less rigid, than at S. Vitale, and the limbs of the figures are strangely articulated - most an assemblage of component parts. This was to become a characteristic and persistent trait in the Byzantine way.

Elsewhere (notably at Thessaloniki) there were other vocal variations of style in mosaic. Relatively little remains in the cheaper grade of fresco, and nonetheless less in manuscript illumination. A very few 6th century illuminated manuscripts, on a purple-tinted vellum, bear witness a comparable development from classical conventions towards an austere formality, though pen and ink tend to produce greater liberty in construction and gesture. In the famous Rabula Gospel of 586 from Syrian arab republic, the glowing intensity of the dense imagery may even bring to listen the work of Rouault in the twentieth century. Ivory panels carved in relief have also survived, usually covers for consular diptychs. This type of diptych consisted of 2 ivory plaques, tied together, with records of the parting consul's office listed on their inner surfaces. The carvings on the exterior, representing religious or regal themes, accept the clarity and detachment characteristic of the finest mosaics, and are splendidly assured.

In the eighth and 9th centuries the development of the Byzantine manner was catastrophically interrupted in all media. Art was non but stopped in its tracks: there was a thorough, wide-ranging destruction of existing images throughout the Byzantine regions. Figurative fine art had long been attacked on the grounds that the Bible condemned the worship of images; in virtually 725 the iconoclasts (those who would take religious images destroyed) won the day confronting the iconodules (those who believed they were justified) with the promulgation of the beginning of a number of majestic edicts confronting images. Complicated arguments raged over the outcome, but iconoclasm was also an assertion of imperial dominance over a Church building thought to have grown too rich and too powerful. Information technology was surely owing to the Church building that some tradition of art did persist, to bloom once again when the ban was lifted in 843.

Byzantine Art: Revival and Evolution (843-1450)

The halt to iconoclasm - the destructive campaign against images and those who believed in them - came in 843. The revival of religious fine art that followed was based on conspicuously formulated principles: images were accepted as valuable not for worship, but as channels through which the faithful could direct their prayer and somehow ballast the presence of divinity inside their daily lives. Unlike in the later western Gothic revival, Byzantine art rarely had a didactic or narrative function, but was essentially impersonal, formalism and symbolic: information technology was an element in the performance of religious ritual. The disposition of images in churches was codification, rather as the liturgy was, and generally adhered to a gear up iconography: the great mosaic cycles were deployed about the Pantocrator (Christ in his role as ruler and guess) central in the main dome, and the Virgin and Child in the apse. Below, the main events of the Christian year - from Announcement to Crucifixion and Resurrection - had their appointed places. Below again, hieratic figures of saints, martyrs and bishops were ranked in order.

The end of iconoclasm opened an era of groovy activity, the then-called Macedonian Renaissance. Information technology lasted from 867, when Basil I, founder of the Macedonian dynasty, became absolute ruler of what was now a purely Greek monarchy, almost until 1204, when Constantinople was disastrously sacked. Churches were redecorated throughout the Empire, and especially its capital letter: in Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, mosaics enormous in calibration took upwards the old themes and stances, sometimes with great delicacy and refinement.

Despite the steady erosion of its territory, Byzantium was seen by Europe as the light of culture, an most legendary metropolis of golden. Literature, scholarship and an elaborate etiquette surrounded the Macedonian court; the 10th century Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos sculpted and himself illuminated the manuscripts he wrote. Though his ability continued to diminish, the Emperor had enormous prestige, and the Byzantine way proved irresistible to the rest of Europe. Fifty-fifty in regimes politically and militarily hostile to Constantinople, Byzantine art was adopted and its medieval artists welcomed.

In Greece, the Church of the Dormition at Daphni, almost Athens, of nigh 1100, presents some of the finest mosaics of this period: at that place is a grave, classic sense of great delicacy in its Crucifixion, while the dome mosaic of The Pantocrator is one of the nigh formidable in whatever Byzantine church. In Venice, the huge expanses of S. Marco (begun 1063) were busy past artists imported from the East, but their piece of work was largely destroyed by fire in 1106, and subsequently work by Venetian craftsmen is in a less pure style. In the cathedral on the nearby island of Torcello, even so, The Virgin and Child, tall, alone, and solitary equally a spire confronting the vast golden space of the apse, is a twelfth century survival. In Sicily, the first Norman king, Roger 2 (ruled 1130-54), was actively hostile to the Byzantine Empire yet he imported Greek artists, who created one of the finest mosaic cycles ever, in the alcove and presbytery at Cefalu. The permeation of Byzantine art into Russia was initiated in 989 past 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 by the 1040s, and the Byzantine impact on Russian medieval painting remained crucial long after the fall of Constantinople.

Notation: 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 most spectacular manifestation was lost in the burning of the legendary Great Palace in Constantinople during the Sack of 1204. Such works retained much more clearly classical features - the ivory panels of the Veroli catafalque are an example - but such features are to be found, too, in religious manuscripts and in some ivory reliefs (sculpture in the round was forbidden equally a concession to the iconoclasts). The Joshua Scroll, though it celebrates the war machine prowess of an Erstwhile Testament hero, reflects the blueprint of Roman narrative columns of relief sculpture such equally Trajan'due south Column in Rome; the famous Paris Psalter of nearly 950 is remarkably Roman both in feeling and iconography: in one illustration the immature David as a musical shepherd is about indistinguishable from a pagan Orpheus, and is fifty-fifty attended past an allegorical nymph chosen Melody.

Note: The importance of Byzantine murals on the development of Western medieval painting should as well non be nether-estimated. See, for example, the highly realistic wall paintings in the Byzantine monastery Church of St. Panteleimon in Gorno Nerezi, Commonwealth of Macedonia.

In 1204, the city of Constantinople was sacked by Latin Crusaders, and Latins ruled the urban center 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 fifteen major fresco cycles survive, mostly by Greek artists. The fresco medium doubtless encouraged a fluency of expression and an emotional feeling not often credible in mosaic.

The final two centuries of Byzantium in its decay were troubled and torn with state of war, but surprisingly produced a third great artistic flowering. The fragmentary but still imposing Deesis in Hagia Sophia in Constantinople may have been constructed afterwards the Latin domination, rather than during the 12th century. Information technology has a new tenderness and humanity which was continued - for instance in the superb early 14th century bike of the monastic church building of Christ in Chora. In Russia, a distinctive style developed, reflected not only in masterpieces such as the icons of Rublev, but likewise in the private interpretations of traditional themes by Theophanes the Greek, a Byzantine emigrant, working in a dashing, almost 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 connected in Russia and the Balkans, while in Italy 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-scale and and then easily transportable, are the best-known course of Byzantine art. A tradition persists that the beginning icon was painted past St Luke the Evangelist, showing the Virgin pointing to the Child on her left arm. All the same, no examples that date from before the 6th century are known. Icons became increasingly popular in Byzantium in the 6th and 7th centuries, to some degree precipitating the reaction of iconoclasm. Although the iconoclasts asserted that icons were being worshipped, their proper function was equally an aid to meditation; through the visible image the believer could auscultate the invisible spirituality. Condensed into a pocket-sized compass, they fulfilled and fulfil the same function in the abode every bit the mosaic decorations of the churches - signalling the presence of divinity. The product 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 exist ordered chronologically with some certainty is recent. Many different styles are represented. An early St Peter has the frontal simplicity, the direct gaze from big wide-open eyes, that is establish once more and over again in single-figure icons. Information technology also has an almost suave elegance and dignity, centrolineal with a painterly vigour that imparts a singled-out 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 after the iconoclastic period, devotional images in richer materials, in ivory, mosaic or even precious metals, may have been more popular than painted ones. From the twelfth century painted icons became more than frequent, and i great masterpiece can be dated to 1131 or soon before. Known equally "The Virgin of Vladimir", it was sent to Russia soon later it had been painted in Constantinople. The Virgin still 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 field of study matter 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, just scenes of activity appeared - notably Annunciations and Crucifixions; afterwards, for iconostases, or choir-screens, composite panels containing many narrative scenes were painted. Long afterward it had ceased in Constantinople with the Turkish conquest, production connected and adult in Greece and (with clearly discernible regional styles) in Russia, and in Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria. In Russia, private masters emerged even before the fall of Constantinople, along with important centres such as the Novgorod schoolhouse 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 past the Byzantine refugee Theophanes the Greek. Rublev's icons are unique for their cool colours, soft shapes and repose radiance. The last of the groovy Russian icon painters of the Novgorod schoolhouse, 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 first 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 employ of material in the higher up commodity from David Piper'south outstanding book "The Illustrated History of Art".

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