A Note on Byzantine Painting & Mosaics.
Though mosaic was used for floors in civilisations like the Macedonian, the earliest use of mosaics “in a vertical position for wall decoration” was at Pompeii.[1] Though Byzantine mosaic has some lineage with these, it did not show pagan religion since Christianity had been adopted officially as the empire’s faith. Once Byzantine mosaics had been launched- 536-546 A.D.- certain images became linked with specific locations in churches: Christ was shown on the dome, the Virgin was shown in the apse, four evangelists on the pendentives, and so on. Rice identifies two prevailing trends in Byzantine art: “Hellenic grace” and “Semitic significance”; to these should be added “non-representational art of the East,” i.e. abstract and decorative patterns reminiscent of Persia and Mesopotamia, as in the abstract clouds in the Church of Cosmas and Damian in Rome (above). Two distinctive periods of mosaic can be identified: the first spanning the fourth to the seventh centuries; the second from the ninth to the twelfth, both with an interval of an “iconoclastic” period. The most important centres during the first age were Rome, Ravenna, and Salonica. At Ravenna a split between the classical Greek can be discerned with Christ of the former, and the imperial rulers Justinian and Theodora, to Rice characterising the fully developed Byzantine style; though to Byron merely giving promise of what lay beyond the horizon of Byzantine art.[2]
[1] David Talbot Rice, Byzantine Art, (Pelican, 1935, rep. 1962), 77f.
[2] Byron, Byzantine Achievement, 189.
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