/jp/ - Otaku Culture

[Anonymous No.]

With the reign of Constantine, and the introduction of Christianity as the acknowledged religion of Rome, Byzantine art, as such, made its appearance. The culture of Rome was transferred to Byzantium, henceforth to be known as Constantinople. Governed alternately by Greek and by Persian, it had received a strong Oriental character from the Eastern nations, and had added to the Greek subtlety and delicacy of expression the Oriental love of detail. When converted by Constantine into New Rome, it became a perfect treasure house of Eastern and Grecian art. The Byzantine work, which spread over the East in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, is therefore a union of the refinement of the Greek, the desire for color and detail of the Oriental, and the vigor of constructional invention and conception of mass and grandeur of the Roman. A portion of it was transplanted to Ravenna during Justinian's reign, and there is a glorious afterglow in the Venetian splendor of the tenth and eleventh centuries. The three great centres of Byzantine art work are Constantinople, Ravenna, and Venice; and the three most noted examples, the churches of Sta. Sophia, S. Vitale, and St. Mark's. Apart from these, the cathedral at Monreale, and the Capella Palatina in Palermo, Sicily, represent a variation from the Byzantine type affected by Moslem design.

[Anonymous No.]

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