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If this happened, "Christian" art would not be immediately recognizable as such. Early Christianity used the same artistic media as the surrounding pagan culture. These media included fresco, mosaics, sculpture, and manuscript illumination. Early Christian art used not only Roman forms but also Roman styles. Late classical style included a ...
The events that mark the division between early and middle Byzantine art are called the Iconoclastic Controversies, which took place from 726 to 842. This period is defined by a deep skepticism towards icons ; in fact, Emperor Leo III placed an outright ban on the creation of religious images, and authorities within the Orthodox Church ...
Byzantine art comprises the body of artistic products of the Eastern Roman Empire, [1] as well as the nations and states that inherited culturally from the empire. Though the empire itself emerged from the decline of western Rome and lasted until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, [2] the start date of the Byzantine period is rather clearer in art history than in political history, if still ...
The earliest surviving Christian art comes from the late 2nd to early 4th centuries on the walls of tombs belonging, most likely, to wealthy [17] Christians in the catacombs of Rome, although from literary evidence there may well have been panel icons which, like almost all classical painting, have disappeared.
The single most important piece of Byzantine Christian mosaic art in the East is the Madaba Map, made between 542 and 570 as the floor of the church of Saint George at Madaba, Jordan. It was rediscovered in 1894. The Madaba Map is the oldest surviving cartographic depiction of the Holy Land.
The most famous example of Byzantine architecture is the Hagia Sophia, and it has been described as "holding a unique position in the Christian world", [9] and as an architectural and cultural icon of Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox civilization.
Late 13th-century Byzantine mosaics of the Hagia Sophia showing the image of Christ Pantocrator.. Much of the art surviving from Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire is Christian art, although this is in large part because the continuity of church ownership has preserved church art better than secular works.
As an outstanding example of early Byzantine art and architecture, in addition to the importance of the Rotunda as one of the earliest Christian monuments in the Eastern Roman Empire, both sites were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1988 as part of the Paleochristian and Byzantine monuments of Thessaloniki. [1]