BYZANTINE ART


      BYZANTINE ART
BEFORE                         AFTER
  •  The purpose of Byzantine art was to glorify the Christian religion and to express its        mystery.
  •   Byzantine art is a combination of Eastern and classical Western art.  
  •   The Byzantine Empire inherited the ideas and forms of art of the classical world of Greece and Rome. However, part of the empire was in Asia and Africa.

 Icon in Byzantine art
  • Byzantine Iconoclasm (Greek: Εἰκονομαχία, Eikonomachía) refers to two periods in the history of the Byzantine Empire when the use of religious images or icons was opposed by religious and imperial authorities within the Eastern Church and the temporal imperial hierarchy.

 The Byzantine period in art
  •  The pictorial and architectural styles that characterized Byzantine art, first codified in the 6th century, persisted with remarkable homogeneity within the empire until its final dissolution with the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453.

                                              
One of the most famous of the surviving Byzantine mosaics of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople – the image of Christ Pantocratoron the walls of the upper southern gallery. Christ is flanked by the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist. The mosaics were made in the 12th century.

Medieval Byzantine mosaics in
St Mark's Basilica, Venice.


BYZANTINE ERA

The pictorial and architectural styles that characterized Byzantine art, first codified in the 6th century, persisted with remarkable homogeneity within the empire until its final dissolution with the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. A brief treatment of Byzantine art follows.

ü  The earliest examples of Christian art in the Roman catacombs are crude and timid, but for that very reason they, are not hampered by the weight of a strong stylistic tradition.
ü  Before Christianity could evolve an articulate artistic language of its own it was necessary that the pagan language of art, so carefully perfected by the Greeks, should disintegrate.
ü  And it was fortunate that at the very moment when the earliest Christian artists were groping for a means of expression, that disintegration was already in an advanced stage. The symbolic language (iconography) for which the Christian was searching would have been strangled by the descriptive language of pre-Christian art.
ü  As long as Christianity had no official status it could produce no art of any permanence. In the Roman catacombs a few tentative experiments in evolving the new symbolism were made, but they are of little aesthetic interest. There was, however, one exception to the confusion that reigned over most of Europe. 

CHARACTERISTIC OF BYZANTINE ART


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