LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Byzantine Art: Early Christian
built 656 days ago
Icons: Byzantine Christian Art - A gallery of 40 icons, hand painted in egg tempera on wood, following Orthodox Christian traditions of almost 2000 years. There is ... a shop with thumbnails and a pricelist.
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In the early Byzantine period, as wide a diversity of styles is seen in ecclesiastical architecture as in art. Two major types of churches... can be distinguished: the basilica type, with a nave flanked by colonnades terminating in a semicircular apse and covered by a timber roof; and the stone-vaulted centralized church, with its separate components gathered under a central dome. The second type—the stone-vaulted centralized church—was dominant throughout the Byzantine period.
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Early Christian and Byzantine furniture was of two distinct types. The common people had very little furniture. The few items they had were lightly built and usually designed so that they could be easily folded and put away, leaving additional space in cramped environments. Church and palace furniture... was built of solid, heavy timber, designed to last, and designed for the space it was to occupy.
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Ultimately, Byzantine architecture in the West gave way to Romanesque and Gothic architecture. In the East it exerted a profound influence on early Islamic architecture, with notable examples including the Umayyad Great Mosque of Damascus and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, which required Byzantine craftsmen and mosaicists to decorate. In Bulgaria, Russia, Romania, Georgia, and other Orthodox countries the Byzantine architecture persisted even longer, finally giving birth to local schools of architecture.
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Although popular perception may consider that Byzantine art lost interest in the realistic depiction of actual people, closer observation shows this not to be the case. Art historian Hans Belting argued in his book Likeness and Presence that early Byzantine art has long been unfairly judged anachronistically with late modern "aesthetic" lenses, when in fact icons have to be perceived on their own terms - those of "likeness" to the saint using carefully guarded traditions of representation, and the unique "presence" of that saint which is mediated through the icon. This perspective, he says, is made possible through the deeply aesthetic theologies of both John of Damascus and Theodore of Studion, whose perspectives on images anticipated recent developments of contemporary semiotics by over a millennium.
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Working from the surviving material presented here with the help of superlative photographs, many specially taken for this book, John Lowden explains how and why Early Christian & Byzantine art was made and used. This is an accessible and authoritative book that will inspire anyone who is curious about the origins of Christian art.
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