Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Byzantine   Listen
adjective
Byzantine  adj.  (Written also Bizantine)  Of or pertaining to Byzantium.
Byzantine church, the Eastern or Greek church, as distinguished from the Western or Roman or Latin church. See under Greek.
Byzantine empire, the Eastern Roman or Greek empire from a. d. 364 or a. d. 395 to the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, a. d. 1453.
Byzantine historians, historians and writers (Zonaras, Procopius, etc.) who lived in the Byzantine empire.
Byzantine style (Arch.), a style of architecture developed in the Byzantine empire. Note: Its leading forms are the round arch, the dome, the pillar, the circle, and the cross. The capitals of the pillars are of endless variety, and full of invention. The mosque of St. Sophia, Constantinople, and the church of St. Mark, Venice, are prominent examples of Byzantine architecture.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Byzantine" Quotes from Famous Books



... university students. These grew rapidly during the first half of the fifteenth century, receiving a marked impetus from the new interest in Greek studies. Some years before the fall of Constantinople in 1453 Italian book-sellers were accustomed to send their buyers to the centers of Byzantine learning in the near East in quest of manuscripts to be disposed of at fancy prices to the rich collectors and patrons of literature. There is evidence of similar methods in France and Germany during the earlier decades of ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater

... This is hard indeed to do; yet if we ponder upon a chapter of ancient or mediaeval history, it seems to me some glimmer of a chance of doing so breaks in upon us. Take for example a century of the Byzantine Empire, weary yourselves with reading the names of the pedants, tyrants, and tax-gatherers to whom the terrible chain which long- dead Rome once forged, still gave the power of cheating people into thinking that they were necessary lords ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris

... or blown through reed since the days of the great AEolian poetess. But Sappho, who, to the antique world was a pillar of flame, is to us but a pillar of shadow. Of her poems, burnt with other most precious work by Byzantine Emperor and by Roman Pope, only a few fragments remain. Possibly they lie mouldering in the scented darkness of an Egyptian tomb, clasped in the withered hands of some long-dead lover. Some Greek monk at Athos may even now be poring over an ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... they were compelled to join together under the authority of a prince, a knez. The bad result of this profoundly democratic spirit was that the Slavs, not knowing how to keep united, fell under the yoke of other nations. From the interesting series of documents, Latin, Arabic, Byzantine and others, which have been collected in Monimenta Sclavenica by Miroslav Premrou, notary public at Caporetto, and published in 1919 at Ljubljana (Laibach), we can see that the Slovenes occupied a much greater extent of territory than do their ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein

... the diverse states of Christianity, at first enshrined in pagan forms, and then traversing the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to muffle itself up finally, and bedeck itself with modern finery. The Byzantine epoch has left its imprint in the mosaics of the great nave and the apsis, and in its bloodless and lifeless Christs and Virgins, so many staring specters motionless on their gold backgrounds and red panels, the fantoms of an extinct art and a ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various

... the fashionable breed is, but they have qualities of pluck, good humour, and a certain well-wearing virtue which are not altogether bad. They will not hold aloof from the life of the land, nor pray in unknown tongues to Byzantine saints; while the very tenacity and caution which made them cleave to England this long, help them to root deeply elsewhere. They are more likely to bring their women than other classes, and those women will make sacred ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... seated next to some one whom she did not know, as she was at this moment next to Mme. de Franquetot, she suffered acutely from the feeling that her own consciousness of her Guermantes connection could not be made externally manifest in visible character like those which, in the mosaics in Byzantine churches, placed one beneath another, inscribe in a vertical column by the side of some Sacred Personage the words which he is supposed to be uttering. At this moment she was pondering the fact that she had never received an invitation, or even call, from her young cousin ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... partly inherited from the clan period, have developed from that basis of common ownership of land during the long succession of centuries which was required to bring the barbarians under the dominion of States organized upon the Roman or Byzantine pattern. The village community was not only a union for guaranteeing to each one his fair. share in the common land, but also a union for common culture, for mutual support in all possible forms, for protection from violence, and for a further development of knowledge, ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin

... we may surely be led somewhat to distrust our judgment of them by observing what ignoble imaginations have sometimes sufficiently, or even enthusiastically, occupied the hearts of others. The principal source of the spirit of religious contemplation is the East; now I have here in my hand a Byzantine image of Christ, which, if you will look at it seriously, may, I think, at once and forever render you cautious in the indulgence of a merely contemplative habit of mind. Observe, it is the fashion to look at such a thing only as a piece of barbarous art; that is the ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin

... submergence of that morality which we believe to be distinctively American, and get throughout the older hemisphere a type of society based upon authority, reproducing it may be some features of past civilizations, Mongol, Asiatic, or Byzantine. If that were to happen, if Europe were really to become a mere glorified form of, say, certain Asiatic conceptions that we all thought had had their day, why, then, of course America could not escape a like transformation of outlook, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... 1. L. Fris., 17, 5. Decree of 960 concerning the abolition of the trade in Christian slaves between Germany, Italy and the Byzantine Empire. Tafel und Thomas, Urkunden der Staats-und Handelsgeschichte ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... rhetoric, it is only sober truth to say that the persevering absorption and incorporation of all this ceaseless torrent of heterogenous elements into one united, stable, industrious, and pacific State is an achievement that neither the Roman Empire nor the Roman Church, neither Byzantine Empire nor Russian, not Charles the Great nor Charles the Fifth nor ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... to appear in the east like a silver circle gleaming through the sky, and the avenue of poplars is wrapped in the uncertain dusk of twilight.... The monastery bell, the only one that still hangs in its ruined Byzantine tower, begins to call to prayers, and one near and one afar, some with sharp metallic notes, and some with solemn, muffled tones, the other bells of the hillside towns reply.... It seems like a harmony that falls from heaven and rises at the same time from the ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

... Yes: but as poets know, and statesmen ought to know, it is by sentiment, when well directed—as by sorrow, when well used—by sentiment, I say, great nations live. When sentiment dies out, and mere prosaic calculation of loss and profit takes its place, then comes a Byzantine epoch, a Chinese ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley

... Umbrellas were generally used in the south of Europe; they are found in the ceremonies of the Byzantine Church; they were borne over the Host in procession, and formed part of ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster

... remains are now enshrined in the Church of St. Cecilia in Trastevere, the Trappist suddenly left him at a corner to attend to other incoming visitors, and disappeared. Aubrey looked around him, vaguely touched and awed by the solemnity of the scene;—the damp walls on which old Byzantine paintings of the seventh century were still visible, though crumbling fast away,—the glimmering lights,—the little crowd of people pressed together,—the brilliantly illuminated altar,—the droning accents of the officiating priests;—and presently the sound of a ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... hitherto produced the Christian type, founded on a belief in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, appears to be the happiest and the best. At its birth it encountered alien and hostile influences; Alexandrian theosophy, Oriental asceticism, Byzantine imperialism. Later it encountered the worst influence of all, that of theocracy engendered by the ambition of the monk Hildebrand. Theocracy, not Catholicism or anything spiritual, has been the source of the crimes of the Papacy; of the Norman ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith

... 1882, where it was described as a “beautiful knife handle, decorated with nielli of Italian character.” It is of blue enamel, beautifully chased with an elegant filigree pattern in silver. It has also been pronounced by an authority to be Byzantine work. As being found near the ruins of Kirkstead Abbey, we might well imagine it to have hung at the girdle, or from the breast, of some sporting ecclesiastic; and to have belonged to the ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter

... pomegranate remains more distinctly a Jewish and Christian type, from its use in the border of Aaron's robe, down to the fruit in the hand of Angelico's and Botticelli's Infant Christs; while the poppy is gradually confused by the Byzantine Greeks with grapes; and both of these with palm fruit. The palm, in the shorthand of their art, gradually becomes a symmetrical branched ornament with two pendent bosses; this is again confused with the Greek iris, (Homer's blue iris, and Pindar's water-flag,)—and the Florentines, in adopting ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... (A.D. 610-641).—For half a century after the death of Justinian, the annals of the Byzantine empire are unimportant. Then we reach the reign of Heraclius, a prince about whose worthy name gather ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... dangers which had so long beset the Eastern or Byzantine Empire, which culminated in the fall of Constantinople—and to the gradual but steady progress of Western Europe in arts and letters, which made it a welcome refuge for the imperilled learning of the East—Greek letters came like a fertilizing ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... not even the age in which any of them lived, can be satisfactorily made out—though the uniformity of stupid extravagance, not less than the similarity of name, would lead a priori to the conclusion that one luckless wight must have been the author of all three. From this list of the Byzantine romances, (in which we are not sure that one or two may not after all have been omitted,) it will be seen that Heliodorus had a tolerably numerous progeny, even in his own language, to answer for; though we fear we must concur in the sweeping censure of a Quarterly Reviewer, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various

... wide plains of eastern Europe. Everywhere their conquests, colonization, and commercial relations have followed the downstream course of their rivers. The Dnieper carried the Rus of Smolensk and Kief to the Euxine, into contact with the Byzantine world, and brought thence religion, art, and architecture for the untutored empire of the north. The influence of the Volga has been irresistible. Down its current Novgorod traders in the twelfth century sought the commerce ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... same which is called, according to locality, climate, and races, Lombard, Saxon, or Byzantine. There are four sister and parallel architectures, each having its special character, but derived from the same origin, the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... smiled pleasantly and reflected that the nobility of the Fanar, which goes back to the Byzantine Empire, is as good as any in France, and even less virtuous. He by no means despised his wealth, and he continually employed his excellent faculties in multiplying it; but in his semi-barbarous heart he was an ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford

... there that the workman saw; people of his nation employed in hunting, fighting, fishing, visiting, making love, building, cooking—everything they did is drawn, magnificently or familiarly, as was needed. In Byzantine ornament, saints, or animals which are types of various spiritual power, are the main subjects; and from the church down to the piece of enamelled metal, figure,—figure,—figure, always principal. In Norman and Gothic work you have, with all their quiet saints, ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin

... State will give rise to at least as many objections as the political economy of a society without private capital. We have all been brought up from our childhood to regard the State as a sort of Providence; all our education, the Roman history we learned at school, the Byzantine code which we studied later under the name of Roman law, and the various sciences taught at the universities, accustom us to believe in Government and in the virtues of the ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin

... that substances which produce peculiar effects of this nature on particular constitutions cure the same symptoms in people in general. Then in another note to the same paragraph he quotes the following fact from one of the last sources one would have looked to for medical information, the Byzantine Historians. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... gods of Egypt and of ancient Greece and Rome; they have been in the churches of the early Christians, or have seen the statues of tortured martyrs, and the images of the transfigured Christ, crowned with the Byzantine aureole. They have been present at battles, at the downfall of kingdoms, at hecatombs, at sacrileges; and now brought together promiscuously in these mosques, they behold on the walls of the sanctuary ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... falling of the slopes of a rhythmic curve between these two classic and decadent extremes. Decadence suggests to us going down, falling, decay. If we walk down a real hill we do not feel that we commit a more wicked act than when we walked up it....Roman architecture is classic to become in its Byzantine developments completely decadent, and St. Mark's is the perfected type of decadence in art. ... We have to recognize that decadence is an aesthetic and not a moral conception. The power of words is great but they need not befool us. ... We are not called ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... the specific emotion of Antique or Gothic, unless you feel the imperious call for the special harmony of either, all the measurements and all the formulas will not avail. While, on the contrary, people without any formula or any attempt at imitation, like the Byzantine architects and those of the fifteenth century, merely because they are obeying their own passionate desire for congruity of impressions, for harmony of structure and function, will succeed in creating brand-new, harmonious, organic art out of the actual details, sometimes the material ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... Byzantine pile of chivalry or Fashion, which seems so fair and picturesque to those who look at the contemporary facts for science or for entertainment, is not equally pleasant to all spectators. The constitution ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... gunpowder, and printing. The littleness of the national character, its self-conceit, and its formality, are further instances of an effete civilization. They remind the observer vividly of the picture which history presents to us of the Byzantine Court before the taking of Constantinople; or, again, of that material retention of Christian doctrine (to use the theological word), of which Protestantism in its more orthodox exhibitions, and still more, of which the Greek schism affords the ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... treaty with the owner, an Austrian and an absentee, for the purchase of the Manzoni Palazzo on the Grand Canal. He considered it the most beautiful house in Venice. Ruskin had described it in the "Stones of Venice" as "a perfect and very rich example of Byzantine Renaissance." It wholly captured the imagination of Browning. He not only already possessed it in his dream, but was busy opening new windows to admit the morning sunshine, and throwing out balconies, while leaving undisturbed the rich ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... originally a Finnish tribe; their three hordes probably constitute in the present day the most numerous nomadic nation, and their tribe dwelt, in the sixteenth century, in the same steppe in which I have myself seen them. The Byzantine Menander (p. 380-382, ed. Nieb.) expressly states that the Chacan of the Turks (Thu-Khiu), in 569, made a present of a Kirghis slave to Zemarchus, the embassador of ustinish II.; he terms her a [Greek word]; and ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... French libretto for performance in English and called the opera "Irene." What a title for a grand opera! Why not "Blanche" or "Arabella"? No doubt such a thought flitted through many a careless mind unconscious that an Irene was a Byzantine Empress of the eighth century, who, by her devotion to its tenets, won beatification after death from the Greek Church. The opera failed on the Continent as well as in London, but if it had not been given a comic operetta flavor ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... extant of Antiphilus, a Byzantine, to the memory of a certain Agricola, is supposed by the learned to refer to the great man who is the subject of this work. It is in the Anthologia, ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus

... of days mainly devoted to sight-seeing. What has become of all the marvels gathered together within the grim fortress walls in the heart of the ancient Russian capital? Of the jewelled ikons, of the priceless sacerdotal vestments, of the gorgeous semi-barbaric Byzantine temples, of the galleries of historic paintings, of the raiment, the boots and the camp-bed of Peter the Great? One wearied of wandering from basilica to basilica, from edifice to edifice and from room to room. Only the globe-trotting American keeping a diary can suffer ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... that goes back to the eleventh century—a tree-trunk of stone, as it were, covered with sculptured sirens and peacocks, serpents and griffins and dragons—a thousand and one monsters and flowers; and a silver-gilt monstrance all enamelled, engraved and chased—Gothico-Byzantine in style and form with a foretaste of Renaissance, the work of Gallucci, an almost unknown artist, but who was the great ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio

... the end of the last Crusade when Italy began to produce the inspired artists who broke the bonds of Byzantine traditions and turned back to the inspiration of all art, which is Nature. Giotto, tending his sheep, began to draw pictures of things as he saw them, Savonarola awoke the conscience, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio—a string of names to conjure with—all roused the intellect. The dawn of the Renaissance ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee

... evidently the ancient Egyptians. The slightly aquiline nose and long eye are the very same as the profiles of the tombs and temples, and also like the very earliest Byzantine pictures; du reste, the face is handsome, but generally sallow and rather inclined to puffiness, and the figure wants the grace of the Arabs. Nor has any Copt the thoroughbred, distingue look of the meanest man or woman of good Arab blood. ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon

... like waves upon the sky, toward the east and west; they flew about like grasshoppers, and were dispersed from left to right; this lasted till day-break; the people were alarmed." The researches of the Orientalist, M. Von Hammer, have brought these singular accounts to light. Theophanes, one of the Byzantine historians, records, that in November of the year 472 the sky appeared to be on fire over the city of Constantinople with the coruscations of flying meteors. The chronicles of the West agree with those of the East in reporting such phenomena. A remarkable display ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... Lily came late to the front to inherit and give fresh vigour to the gifts of all. As the effigies of Byzantine art became living men and women beneath the pencil of Giotto, so the mere imitative poetry of the Sicilian Court became Italian literature in Dante and Boccaccio. Freedom, slow as it seemed in awakening, nowhere awakened so grandly, nowhere ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green

... our national style, that unborn something which a future age might refer to as American, just as we speak of Byzantine or Gothic? Are we waiting for somebody to invent it? We think, maybe, that it is to spring forth, ready made, like Minerva from the brain of Zeus. If this is our idea, we might as well give up at once and confess to the world our imbecility. Never, ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various

... general title of the Epopee courtoise—the Epopee of Courtesy—may be grouped those romances which are either works of pure imagination or of uncertain origin, or which lead us back to Byzantine or to Celtic sources. They include some of the most beautiful and original poems of the Middle Ages. Appearing first about the opening of the twelfth century, later in date than the early chansons de geste, and contemporary ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden

... part, was equally gracious towards her. In truth, I have found great pleasure and profit in her works, and was glad to hear her say that she liked mine. We talked about art, and she showed us a picture leaning up against the wall of the room; a quaint old Byzantine painting, with a gilded background, and two stiff figures (our Saviour and St. Catherine) standing shyly at a sacred distance from one another, and going through the marriage ceremony. There was ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... they belong is a very old one. The prose pastoral romance, that kind of prose romance which professes to delineate the scenery, sentiments, and incidents of shepherd life,[1] is, like most other literary forms, Greek in origin. It goes back at least to the "Daphnis and Chloe" of Longus, the Byzantine romancer of the fifth century A.D. Longus represents the romantic spirit in expiring classicism, the longing of a highly artificial society for primitive simplicity, and the endeavor to create a corresponding ideal. Indeed the pastoral has always been a product of a highly artificial ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge

... any one of them had ever run away. The lovers had been only too faithful; they had remained to be hacked to pieces with a mediaeval knife sparkling with jewels, or to swallow some curious poison out of a Byzantine goblet. She would have a word or two to say to Herbert Courtland when he returned. She would create the part of the woman ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore

... throughout the world's history no point possessed a more constant and unchangeable attraction from its geographical position and natural advantages than the island of Cyprus, which in turn was occupied by Phoenicians, Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Romans, Byzantine rulers, Saracens, Byzantine rulers again, English, Lusignans, Venetians, Turks, and once ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... yet fresh from fountains old, Hellenic inspiration, pure and deep: Strange treasures of Byzantine hoards unroll'd, And mouldering volumes from monastic sleep, Reclad with life by more than magic art: Till that old world renew'd His youth, and in the past the present own'd ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... The Eastern or Byzantine Empire, rich in pride and pretension, but poor in power, was destined to stand for one thousand years more, the shining conservator of the Christian religion (although in a form quite different from the Church of Rome) and of Greek culture. It is impossible to imagine ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele

... more subtle than anything previous in French literature with which we are acquainted. The poem is an episodical romance in the biography of an Arthurinn hero, with the usual amount of space given to his adventures. "Cliges" apparently connects a Byzantine tale of doubtful origin in an arbitrary fashion with the court of Arthur. It is thought that the story embodies the same motive as the widespread tale of the deception practised upon Solomon by his wife, and that Chretien's source, as he ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes

... paints Those "squint-eyed Byzantine saints" Mr. ORROCK so disparages. Martyrdoms and Cana Marriages Over-stock our great Art Gallery, Giving ground for ORROCK'S raillery. Scenes in desert dim, or dun stable, Than Green English lanes by CONSTABLE Are less welcome, or brown rocks And grey streams by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various

... 1. In 1453 by order of Sultan Mohamed II. the Golden Horn was crossed by a pontoon bridge laid on barrels (see Joh. Dukas' History of the Byzantine Empire XXXVIII p. 279). —The biographers of Michelangelo, Vasari as well as Condivi, relate that at the time when Michelangelo suddenly left Rome, in 1506, he entertained some intention of going to Constantinople, there to serve the Sultan, who sought to ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... lectured in Greek on the Institutions; and the substance of his lectures still survives under the name of the Paraphrase of Theophilus. The Greek edicts and novels of Justinian's successors are mainly Roman law. Throughout the Byzantine Empire (within which Kufah and the region where Bagdad now stands were included) Roman law was paramount, and Roman jurists were numerous. The arrangement, the subdivisions, and the substance of Mahometan jurisprudence, show that it has been principally derived from this source. Some of ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various

... other, and so the art degenerated from century to century. The growing Christian religion, which forbade the picturing of any living beauty, gave the death-blow to such excellence as remained. A style of painting followed which received the name of Greek Byzantine. In it was no study of life; all was most strikingly conventional, and it grew steadily worse and worse. A comparison of the paintings and mosaics of the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries shows the rapid decline of all art qualities. Finally every figure produced was a most ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt

... quickly away, she remained for some moments in silent thought,—a reverie the jester forbore to disturb. Her head rested on her arm, from which fell the flowing sleeve almost to the ground; her wrist was lightly inclasped by a slender golden band of delicate Byzantine enamel work; over the sculptured form of the stone griffin that constituted one of the supports of the ancient Norman bench flowed the voluminous folds of her dress, partly concealing the monster from view. Against the clambering ivy which ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham

... drawing for distant effect. You know, also, that I meant him to be ugly—as ugly as any creature can well be. In time, I hope to show you prettier things—peacocks and kingfishers, butterflies and flowers,—on grounds of gold, and the like, as they were in Byzantine work. I shall expect you, in right use of your aesthetic faculties, to like those better than what I show you to-day. But it is now a question of method only; and if you will look, after the Lecture, first at the mere white relief, and then see how much may be ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... country from the vast plains of eastern Russia. They made their way thither more than a thousand years ago, and battling at the very gates of Constantinople, by their fierce crusades, secured the grants from the Byzantine Empire of the territory, which constitutes the Bulgaria of today. The population is nearly 5,000,000, and the country contains about 43,000 ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller

... eventually unify the paint with itself. It was a very tedious process, which nowadays has been superseded by the method of painting on canvas, which after completion in the studio is fastened to the wall. Above the Luini hangs a very Byzantine looking Timoteo Viti "Madonna" of interesting colour and good design, but with a Christ child of very doubtful anatomy, and also two old sixteenth century Dutch pictures - a Jan Steen and a Teniers. I have my doubts as to the authenticity of the last two pictures. They are both interesting ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus

... mouth remained, a toothless gap fringed with straggling hairs. Some had faces abnormally bloated, with powerful foreheads and heavy jowls, which gave them an expression of stony immobility like Byzantine lions. All were fearfully dirty and covered ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... which the memoirs chiefly consist there is included much curious information and striking incident. But their main interest is in the light they throw on the gradual sinking of the splendid administrative organisation of the second century towards the sterile Chinese hierarchy of the Byzantine Empire, and the concurrent degradation of paganism, both as a political ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail

... thirsty soil, under the ill-paved streets, under the arid turf, the Legions lay dead, with the Carthaginians they had borne down under the mighty pressure of their phalanx; and the Byzantine ranks were dust, side by side with the soldiers of Gelimer. And here, above the graves of two thousand centuries, the little light feet of Cigarette danced joyously in that triumph of the Living, who never remember that they also are dancing ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... pictures. But the proof of any connection between the two would still be wanting. Here the discoveries Page 30 made by the Germans at Olympia and confirmed by later researches in Sicily and Magna Graecia, are of the utmost importance.[44] In the Byzantine west wall at Olympia were found great numbers of painted terracotta plates[45] which examination proved to have covered the cornices of the Geloan Treasury. They were fastened to the stone by iron nails, the distance between the ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various

... adapting to the Christian era the Emperor's expressions for the year of the original Exodus from China and the retrogressive Exodus from Russia. With respect to the designation adopted for the Russian Emperor, either it is built upon some confusion between him and the Byzantine Caesars, as though the former, being of the same religion with the latter (and occupying in part the same longitudes, though in different latitudes) might be considered as his modern successor; or else it refers simply to the Greek form of Christianity professed by ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... occupation. We watched the boy for a while, and then, passing on toward the Marmora, took a look at the "Cistern of the Thousand Columns." A broad flight of steps leads down to it, and the many tall slender columns of Byzantine architecture make a perfect wilderness of pillars. Wherever we stood, we seemed always the centre from which long aisles of columns radiated till they lost themselves in the darkness. The cistern has long been empty, and is used ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various

... Emperor who had sent him an insulting missive:—"In the name of Allah! From the Commander of the Faithful Harun al-Rashid, to Nicephorus the Roman dog. I have read thy writ, O son of a miscreant mother! Thou shalt not hear, thou shalt see my reply." Nor did he cease to make the Byzantine feel the weight of his arm till he "nakh'd"[FN260] his camel in the imperial Court-yard; and this was only one instance of his indomitable energy and hatred of the Infidel. Yet, if the West is to be believed, he forgot his fanaticism in his ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... the splendid architecture of the Greeks was based. Roman architecture was founded on Greek models with the addition of Etruscan construction, and was for a time universally prevalent. The break-up of the Roman Empire was followed by the appearance of the Basilican, the Byzantine, and the Romanesque phases of Christian art; and, later on, by the Saracenic. These are the styles on which all mediaeval and modern European architecture has been based, and these accordingly have furnished the subjects ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith

... Venus, is gradually relegated to the background as a shadowy abstraction. (6) Both the youth and the maiden are extraordinarily beautiful. No attempt is made, however, to describe the points of beauty in detail, after the dry fashion of the Oriental and the later Byzantine authors. Hyperbole is used in comparing the complexion to snow, the cheeks to roses, etc; but the favorite way of picturing a youth or maiden is to compare the same to some one of the gods or goddesses who were types familiar to all through pictures and statues—a ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... books he had left, and also sent large orders to German bookstores. When his "seraglio," as he called it, was nearly complete, he again became absorbed in study, and particularly in that of the Greek historians of the Byzantine Empire, of whose collective works he had the good fortune to possess the Louvre edition in thirty-six volumes folio; and he soon formed the ambitious project of writing a complete history of that Empire from Constantine the Great ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne

... same races which in the same regions had for ages lived the life of a slowly changing barbarism. The same was true of the Slavs and the slavonized Finns of Eastern Europe, when an infiltration of Scandinavian leaders from the north, and an infiltration of Byzantine culture from the south, joined to produce the changes which have gradually, out of the little Slav communities of the forest and the steppe, formed the mighty Russian ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt

... was already a master of Latin, writing it with an elegance worthy of Niccolo the Florentine. At fourteen he entered the college of Robert of Sorbonne, but found little charm in its scholastic pedantry. But in the capital he learned the Greek tongue from a Byzantine, the elder Lascaris, and copied with his own hand a great part of Plato and Aristotle. His thirst grew with every draught of the new vintage. To Pavia he went and sat at the feet of Lorenzo Vallo. The company of Pico della Mirandola ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan

... one with the identity of Alans and Ossethi, which is another matter, as may be seen in Vivien de St. Martin's elaborate paper on the Alans (N. Ann. des Voyages, 1848, tom. 3, p. 129 seqq.). The Alans are mentioned by the Byzantine historian, Pachymeres, among nations whom the Mongols had assimilated to themselves and adopted into their military service. Gaubil, without being aware of the identity of the Asu (as the name Aas appears to be expressed in the Chinese Annals), beyond ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... justice their cathedrals, its tongue the only language understood of the gods. It is unthinkable that a people who were already in the twelfth century the possessors of a marvellous decadent art in the painting of the Byzantine school, who, finding again the statues of the gods, created in the thirteenth century a new art of painting, a Christian art that was the child of imperial Rome as well as of the Christian Church, who re-established sculpture and produced the only sculptor of the first rank in the modern world, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton

... ancient history knows, it was within this territory that the Macedon of Philip and Alexander was situated, their capital being not far from the present city of Saloniki. Then came the great eastern Roman Empire, which later developed into the Byzantine Empire, whose inhabitants were the degenerated descendants of the ancient Greeks. Western Rome was constantly threatened by the northern barbarian tribes, so the Greek emperors of Byzantium were in perpetual conflict with barbarian hordes that pressed down on them from ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various

... this way, and then it fell back, and I followed its retreat. It led me towards a Byzantine building—a sort of kiosk near the park's centre. Round about stood crowded thousands, gathered to a grand concert in the open air. What I had heard was, I think, a wild Jaeger chorus; the night, the space, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... the Straits. Over them came that young and vigorous culture, of such rapid and astonishing growth, which seemed to conquer though it was scarcely born: that civilisation created by the religious enthusiasm of the Prophet, who had assimilated all that was best in Judaism and in Byzantine civilisation, carrying along with it also the great Indian traditions, fragments from Persia and much from mysterious China. It was the Orient entering into Europe, not as the Assyrian monarchs into Greece, which repelled them seeing ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... literature necessary to record them. Again, there were two other changes, equally unfavourable to the preservation of records, going on. Pagan or Classical literature was becoming Christian or Medieval, whilst the Latin or Roman style was passing into Byzantine and Greek. Ammianus Marcellinus, the last of the Latin Pagan historians, was cotemporary with the events at the beginning of the period in question. Procopius, one of the last Pagan writers of Byzantium, died about ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham

... for days and days in the robes of a Byzantine Empress to a painter. . . I wonder where he discovered these priceless stuffs. . . ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... background. This element is non-existent in the earliest examples of pictorial art. The figures in Pompeiian frescoes are limned upon a blank bright wall, most frequently deep red in color. The father of Italian painting, Cimabue, following the custom of the Byzantine mosaicists, whose work he had doubtless studied at Ravenna, drew his figures against a background devoid of distance and perspective and detail; and even in the work of his greater and more natural pupil, ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton

... Charles and Philip bought masterpieces, and cared Jittle for the crude efforts of the awkward pencils of the necessary men who came before Raphael. There is not a Perugino in Madrid. There is nothing Byzantine, no trace of Renaissance; nothing of the patient work of the early Flemings,—the art of Flanders comes blazing in with the full splendor of Rubens and Van Dyck. And even among the masters, the representation is most unequal. Among the wilderness of Titians and Tintorets you find but ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... Bulgars, a Central Asian Turkic tribe, merged with the local Slavic inhabitants in the late 7th century to form the first Bulgarian state. In succeeding centuries, Bulgaria struggled with the Byzantine Empire to assert its place in the Balkans, but by the end of the 14th century the country was overrun by the Ottoman Turks. Bulgaria regained its independence in 1878, but having fought on the losing side in both World Wars, it fell within the Soviet sphere of influence and became a People's ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government

... succeeded in bringing out by the arts of dress in this Bleeding Nun, framing the ascetic olive face in thick bands of hair as black as the fiery eyes, and making the most of the rigid, slim figure. Lisbeth, like a Virgin by Cranach or Van Eyck, or a Byzantine Madonna stepped out of its frame, had all the stiffness, the precision of those mysterious figures, the more modern cousins of Isis and her sister goddesses sheathed in marble folds by Egyptian sculptors. It was granite, basalt, porphyry, ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac

... some say, was it, that Aeschines speaks of him as a person so much to be wondered at for his boldness in speaking? Or, how could it be, when Python, the Byzantine, "with so much confidence and such a torrent of words inveighed against" the Athenians, that Demosthenes alone stood up to oppose him? Or, when Lamachus, the Myrinaean, had written a panegyric upon ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... Commentaries of Aristarchus on the Iliad; the works of Plato, Proclus, Plotinus, Xenophon and Lucian; the Histories of Arrian, Cassius Dio, and Diodorus Siculus; the Geography of Strabo; Procopius and some of the Byzantine historians; Gregory of Nazianzen, Chrysostom, and other Greek Fathers of the Church. In emulation of these men Bracciolini and a band of bookfinders, assisted and rewarded by the wealth of Princes and Popes, went up and down the countries of Europe to find manuscripts ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... the mind in the sense in which it is a vital part of the life of the community. Will the life of the mind in this sense be helped or hindered by Socialism? And will there still be a sufficient spur to progress to prevent a condition of Byzantine immobility? ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell

... "ends the long Byzantine succession in Italy. . . . In him 'the spirit of the years to come' is decidedly manifest; but he never entirely succeeded in casting off the hereditary Byzantine asceticism."—Heaton. Giotto was his pupil. Ghiberti: Lorenzo Ghiberti, the great Florentine sculptor, 1381-1455; his famous ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... supposed to be the first country to weave patterned silks. India, Persia, Syria, and Byzantine Greece followed. Those were known as "diaspron" or diaper, a name given them at Constantinople. In the twelfth century, the city of Damascus, long famed for her beautiful textiles, outstripped all other places for beauty of design and gave the Damascen or damask, so we have in modern ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson

... being the first nation to formally adopt Christianity (early 4th century). Despite periods of autonomy, over the centuries Armenia came under the sway of various empires including the Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Persian, and Ottoman. It was incorporated into Russia in 1828 and the USSR in 1920. Armenian leaders remain preoccupied by the long conflict with Muslim Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, a primarily Armenian-populated region, assigned to Soviet Azerbaijan in the 1920s by Moscow. ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... events in different parts of the empire. It is necessary to bear in mind that the wars described separately by Procopius overlapped one another in time, and that while the Romans were striving to hold back the Persian aggressor they were also maintaining armies in Africa and in Italy. In fact the Byzantine empire was making a supreme effort to re-establish the old boundaries, and to reclaim the territories lost to the barbarian nations. The emperor Justinian was fired by the ambition to make the Roman Empire once more a world power, and he drained every resource ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius

... which we find on such issues of most monarchies. This is due to a law of Mohammed, which forbids the reproduction of the human figure. On the stamps we find the crescent, said to have been the emblem of the Byzantine empire and adopted by the Turks after the fall of Constantinople. We also find an elaborate device called the Toughra or signature of the Sultan. It owes its origin to the Sultan Murad I, a liberal sovereign and ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff

... Cimabue and Giotto in Florence, Italian refinement had passed steadily down the path of deterioration. Graeco-Roman art, which still at a high level in the early centuries of the Christian era, entirely lost its originality during Byzantine times, and the dark ages settled down upon Italy in almost every walk of life. The Venetians, for example, were satisfied with comparatively the poorest works of art imported from Constantinople or Mount Athos: and in Florence so great ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall

... to the Acropolis Museum, looking down over the city and to helmet-shaped Lycabettos. The wind, too fond of the Attic Plain, was blowing, not wildly, but with sufficient force to send the dust whirling in light clouds over the pale houses and the little Byzantine churches. Long and narrow rivulets of dust marked the positions of the few roads which stretched out along the plain. The darkness of the groves which sheltered the course of the Kephisos contrasted strongly with the flying pallors and seemed at enmity with them. The sky ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... limits and restrains its subjects and its forms. But no one who is at any pains to consider mediaeval sculpture and mosaic painting can fail to see that alongside of much which became conventional, and was fixed in what has been called the 'Byzantine' style, there is an immense amount of work both in sculpture and in mosaic which expresses the determination of the mediaeval artist to represent the world as he experienced and saw it, and that the main obstacle to the free expression of ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... were the purely historical labours of the Bollandists. Thus opening the first volume of the "Thesaurus Antiquitatis," a collection of the critical treatises scattered through the volumes published prior to 1750, the following titles strike the eye:—"Dissertations on the Byzantine historian Theophanes," on the "Ancient Catalogues of the Roman Pontiffs," on the "Diplomatic Art"—a discussion which elicited the famous treatise of Mabillon, "De Re Diplomatica," laying down the true principles for distinguishing ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various

... victories of Omar, and the other successors of Mahomet had in a manner stripped the court of Constantinople of all its provinces, the Byzantine history dwindles into an object petty and minute. In order to vary the scene, and enhance the dignity of his subject, the author occasionally takes a prospect of the state of Rome and Italy, under the contending powers of the papacy and the new empire of the West. When the singular ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin

... intellect, or what is now called intellect, did not make the world, or the smallest wheel or cog of it? What if, for want of obeying the laws of nature, parents bred up neither a genius nor an athlete, but only an incapable unhappy personage, with a huge upright forehead, like that of a Byzantine Greek, filled with some sort of pap instead of brains, and tempted alternately to fanaticism and strong drink? We must, in the great majority of cases have the corpus sanem if we want the mentem sanem; and healthy bodies are the only trustworthy organs for healthy minds. Which is cause ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... outer border are precious stones, and portraits, with inscriptions in Greek capital letters. These portraits and inscriptions seem to me to be perfect, but barbarous, specimens of Byzantine art. Around the whole are the titles of the Four Gospels in coeval capital letters. The general effect of this first side of the book-cover, or binding, is perfect—for antiquarian genuineness and costliness. ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... of decoration adopted is Byzantine. The walls are embellished with many and various beautiful marbles. The eastern side has a representation of Pope Gregory sending St. Augustine with his followers to preach the gospel in England. Another scene is St. Augustine's reception by King Ethelbert ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton

... festooned chains of Hammersmith Suspension Bridge in all its simple beauty, and see the Soapworks and the Mall on the hither and further shore. Our course led, not through serpentine canals and past Doges' palaces, gaudy with the lavish adornments of tricky Byzantine architecture; nor could we expect to see "lions" as historical as those which ornament the facade of Saint Mark's. However, as we glided up against the tide, in slow but steady progress, by willowy banks and osiered eyots, our boat yawning in and out and requiring a stiff weather ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson

... essence subsequently resolved itself into the desire to effect the transmutation of metals, more especially the base metals, into silver and gold. It seems that this secondary principle became the dominant idea in alchemy, and in this sense the word is used in Byzantine literature of the 4th century; Suidas, writing in the 11th century, defines chemistry as the "preparation of silver and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... cultivate them. Bushes of this particular wild variety have had a reputation among the boys of the locality for more than a hundred years, according to legends of the neighborhood. I have recently budded specimens of this variety upon stocks of the Byzantine hazel, in the hope of prolonging the life of an individual plant beyond its normal ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various

... Caesar, the founder of Constantinople and the Byzantine empire, and one of the most gifted, energetic, and successful of the Roman emperors, was the first representative of the imposing idea of a Christian theocracy, or of that system of policy which assumes all ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... the Roman and Persian empires, whose vassals respectively they were. And so, before many months, Abu Bekr found his generals opposed by great and imposing armies on either side. He was, in fact, waging mortal combat at one and the same moment with the Kaiser and the Chosroes, the Byzantine emperor and the great king of Persia. The risk was imminent, and an appeal went forth for help to meet the danger. The battle-cry resounded from one end of Arabia to the other, and electrified the land. Levy after levy, en masse, started ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir

... lead away towards the upper and wilder country of Perigord; but it is in the lower town near the river, where the odours are strong, that the interest really lies. Here is the cathedral of St. Front, a church in the Byzantine style of the tenth century, and closely imitated from St. Mark's at Venice. It is impossible to see it now, however, without regret and disappointment. In many it stirs both sorrow and anger. It is no longer one of the most precious monuments of old France. What we see now ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... Creation, the Fall, the Flood, and the second entry of Sin into the world, demonstrating the need for a scheme of Salvation, promised by the Prophets and Sibyls in the second part of the decoration. The series represented is an old invention, and all the scenes may be found in Byzantine and early Italian works; but the new treatment gives them a character of grandeur only equalled by the Old Testament narrative which they illustrate. All the human figures and most of the angels appear to be dominated by an idea of impending doom, but they nobly act their part in ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd

... for our art, Messer Cavaliere, that at San Donato, our mother church, we workmen of Murano have our Lady in that old Byzantine type; there is none earlier—nor in all Venice more perfect of its time—and the setting is ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... viceroy of the Byzantine Empire in Italy while the latter was a dependency of the former, and who ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... Transvaal; but America exhibited it worse in the war with Spain. There was exhibited more sharply and absurdly than anywhere else the ironic contrast between the very careless choice of a strong line and the very careful choice of a weak enemy. America added to all her other late Roman or Byzantine elements the element of the Caracallan triumph, ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... vineyards, tucked into man-made terraces along the upper cliffs, like bundled herbs on the pantry shelves of a thrifty housewife; and still higher up there would be orange groves and lemon groves and dusty-gray olive groves. Each succeeding picture was Byzantine in its coloring. Always the sea was molten blue enamel, and the far-away villages seemed crafty inlays of mosaic work; and the sun was a disk of hammered ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... alphabet was discarded and Roman law was written in Greek characters and explained by Greek judges. The Emperor became an Asiatic despot, worshipped as the god-like kings of Thebes had been worshipped in the valley of the Nile, three thousand years before. When missionaries of the Byzantine church looked for fresh fields of activity, they went eastward and carried the civilisation of Byzantium into the ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... dyestuffs, were most jealously guarded. Alan had had two fortunate accidents in his life; he had been taught in the beginning by a master- artist, and later had come upon writings by a still greater genius, the Byzantine philosopher of ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey

... though the authoress, who was an untiring picker-up of scraps of information, has actually consulted (at least she quotes) Sainte-Palaye; there is no faintest flavour of anything really Carlovingian or Byzantine or Oriental about the book, and the whole treatment is in the pre-historical-novel style. Indeed the writer of the Veillees was altogether of the veille—the day just expired—or of the transitional and half-understood present—never of the past seen in some perspective, of the real new ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... made by this second-rate compiler, and it has been claimed that the transformation in question took place under the Antonines. This is erroneous. The testimony of inscriptions corroborates that of the Byzantine writer.[13] In spite of his love of archaism, it was Claudius who permitted this innovation to be made, and we believe that we can divine the motives ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont

... work here illustrated of Byzantine and Romanesque elements has also been referred to in the preceding article, but the special characteristics of each style were not particularly pointed out. In the present consideration the peculiarities of detail and ornament are all that need be taken ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 04, April 1895 - Byzantine-Romanesque Windows in Southern Italy • Various

... appears at Amiens, as elsewhere, in the thirteenth century; and, by making his personal way of conception and execution prevail there, renders his own work vivid and organic, and apt to catch the interest of other people. He is no longer a Byzantine, but a Greek—an unconscious Greek. Proof of this is in the famous Beau-Dieu of Amiens, as they call that benign, almost classically proportioned figure, on the central pillar of the great west doorway; though in fact neither that, nor ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... realization, in draperies, gestures, postures, rather than beauty of form. We miss in Giotto much that had been attained before him. What Madonna of his can rank with Giovanni Pisano's? The Northern cathedral-sculptures, even some of the Byzantine carvings, have a dignity that is at least uncommon in his pictures. Especially the faces are generally wooden,—destitute alike of individuality and of the loveliness of Duccio's and even of some of Cimabue's. On the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various

... of the Byzantine Empire, presenting with extraordinary power the siege of Constantinople, and lighting its tragedy with the warm underglow of an Oriental romance. As a play it is ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White

... the eastern ends of the choir aisles is noteworthy. They are square as seen from the exterior, but prove to be apsidal on entering. At the end of the south choir aisle, forming a reredos to the side altar, an ancient Saxon Rood will be seen; the Figure is sculptured in an archaic Byzantine style. The Jacobean altar in the north choir aisle was once in the chancel and had above it those old-fashioned wooden panels of the Lord's Prayer and Ten Commandments that may still be met with occasionally. When these ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes

... the Byzantine empire, and the cognate tribes who dwelt nearer the Danube, like the Moravians, had long been in sore need of a Slavonic translation of the Scriptures and the Church books, since they understood neither Greek nor Latin; and for the lack of such a translation many relapsed into heathendom. ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood

... Byzantine capital became the seat of the Ottoman empire; and, for more than two centuries, Turkish armies excited the fears and disturbed the peace of the world. They gradually subdued and annexed Macedonia, the Peloponnesus, Epirus, Bulgaria, Servia, Bosnia, Armenia, Cyprus, Syria, Egypt, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... of fact," went on the Brazilian, "it's an anklet. But can you make it out? Those spindles are Persian, while the filigree is more Byzantine than anything else. You find funny things up ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... Because the imperfect Byzantine evangelization of the Eastern Slavonic Plains just failed to meet, there in Prussia, the western flood of living tradition welling up from Rome. Prussia was an hiatus. In that small neglected area neither half cultivated from the Byzantine East nor fully from the Roman ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc

... miserable barbaric Christian world bad mutilated and neglected them, - but the beautiful figure of Jesus, which as a work of art might have been immortal and beneficent, embellished with Pauline metaphysics and mixed in the Byzantine sorcerer's pot with Egyptian and Chaldean hodgepodge, has become an evil ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... me. He had the loveliest set of Byzantine mosaics and pearls which he wished to give me; and when I would not accept them he seemed so hurt that I did not like to refuse this trifle. What do you suppose is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various

... NORMAN, and which you may always most conveniently call so; and the most developed conditions of the style in the south, which, formed out of effete Greek, Persian, and Roman tradition, you may, in like manner, most conveniently express by the familiar word BYZANTINE. Whatever you call them, they are in origin adverse in temper, and remain so up to the year 1200. Then an influence appears, seemingly that of one man, Nicholas the Pisan, (our first MASTER, observe,) and a new spirit adopts what is best in each, and gives to what ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin

... many of our greatest treasures were already safe in the hands of scholars when the crash came. Nor is it possible, I believe, to show that between 1204 and 1453 many authors whose works no longer exist were read in Byzantine circles. That there was destruction of books in 1453 is no doubt true; but within a very few years the Turks had learned that money was to be made of them, and the sale and export went on ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James

... occurred which abolished forever the authority of the Byzantine Emperors in Italy, and established on a sure and lasting basis the ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons

... survived, like the tradition of Latin poetry, with the same result, that rude works were produced in the early churches and convents. But there was no life in those things; and when, after a long time, after the early Crusades, Byzantine artists came to Italy, their productions were even worse than those of the still ignorant Italians, because they were infinitely more pretentious, with their gildings and conventionalities and expressionless types, and were ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... was no way of acquiring the unknown tongue. But the second generation of Humanists sat at the feet of Byzantine masters. The first was Chrysoloras, who was sent to Italy on a political mission and settled in 1397 as a teacher of his own language at Florence. When he died, at the council of Constance, there were Italian scholars who could read Greek MSS. As teachers ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

... essentially into great branches, one springing from, the other grafted on, the old Roman stock. The first is the Roman art itself, prolonged in a languid and degraded condition, and becoming at last a mere formal system, centered at the feet of Eastern empire, and thence generally called Byzantine. The other is the barbarous and incipient art of the Gothic nations, more or less coloured by Roman or Byzantine influence, and gradually ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin

... troubling themselves to place the government finances on a satisfactory basis. We see, however, a semblance of financial organization in the institutions of Alaric and his successors. Subsequently, the great Theodoric, who had studied the administrative theories of the Byzantine Court, exercised his genius in endeavouring to work out an accurate system of finance, which ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix

... every thing which is brought smoking hot from the nasty eating-houses. It is worth while to be acquainted with the two kinds of sauce. The simple consists of sweet oil; which it will be proper to mix with rich wine and pickle, but with no other pickle than that by which the Byzantine jar has been tainted. When this, mingled with shredded herbs, has boiled, and sprinkled with Corycian saffron, has stood, you shall over and above add what the pressed berry of the Venafran olive yields. The Tiburtian ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace

... if you hold fast this great connecting clue, you may string all the types of successive architectural invention upon it like so many beads. The Doric and the Corinthian orders are the roots, the one of all Romanesque, massy-capitaled buildings—Norman, Lombard, Byzantine, and what else you can name of the kind; and the Corinthian of all Gothic, Early English, French, German, and Tuscan. Now observe: those old Greeks gave the shaft; Rome gave the arch; the Arabs pointed and foliated the arch. The shaft and arch, the frame-work and ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin

... would almost be worth our while to leap at once to Palermo. It was in the year 1131 or thereabouts that Roger began the Cathedral at Cefalu and the Chapel Royal at Palermo; it was about the year 1174 that his grandson William began the Cathedral of Monreale. No art—either Greek or Byzantine, Italian or Arab—has ever created two religious types so beautiful, so serious, so impressive, and yet so different, as Mont- Saint-Michel watching over its northern ocean, and Monreale, looking down ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

... free from the same impulse. Leaving out of account those who wasted their lives in secret opposition and conspiracies, we speak of the majority who were content with a strictly private station, like most of the urban population of the Byzantine empire and the Mohammedan States. No doubt it was often hard for the subjects of a Visconti to maintain the dignity of their persons and families, and multitudes must have lost in moral character through the servitude ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... background of a cherished Byzantine picture, memory held untarnished every tint and outline of that blessed day, when she and her father had looked for the last time on the sunny ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... development. Think of utilizing that magnificent and formidable engine, the Beethoven symphonic method, to accompany a tinsel tale of garbled Norse mythology with all sorts of modern affectations and morbidities introduced! It is maddening to any student of pure, noble style. Wagner's Byzantine style has ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker

... for any early potsherds. Sherds on the slopes are worth less; as they have probably slipped down. Red burnt brick in Egypt is all Roman or Arab; in Greece and Asia Minor, red brick and mortar is Roman, Byzantine, or later. ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various

... is a generic category of thought. Egyptian, Grecian, Byzantine, and Gothic buildings are well-marked species, of which each individual building of the sort is a material embodiment. Now, the question is, whether these categories or ideas may not have been evolved, one from another in succession, or from some primal, less specialized, edificial category. What ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... expression; but inasmuch as artistic endeavor shows that same lack of originality which was characteristic of all other forms of intellectual activity at this time, the germ took root but slowly, and for a number of centuries servile imitations of the highly decorated and decidedly soulless Byzantine Virgins were very common. One of these paintings may be found in almost every church throughout the length and breadth of Italy; but when you have seen one you have seen them all, for they all have the same expression. The eyes are generally large and ill shaped, the nose is long, the ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... always, whilst the poor creature is being harried by wild boars or terrified by menacing kittens, Clovis may be observed, with finger on lip, begging of the intelligent reader that he will not give things away. Of the present collection of stories I like best "A Touch of Realism," "The Byzantine Omelette," "The Boar-Pig," and "The Dreamer;" but all are good, and I can only hope that it will not be too long before Clovis once again invites us to further ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various

... works of which I had the luck to see a few superb examples (especially two wooden Bodhisattvas) at the Shepherd's Bush Exhibition in 1910, or whether, coming nearer home, we consider the primitive Byzantine art of the sixth century and its primitive developments amongst the Western barbarians, or, turning far afield, we consider that mysterious and majestic art that flourished in Central and South America before the coming ...
— Art • Clive Bell

... churches and the public buildings are located; the cathedral, after the Romano-Byzantine style of architecture; the Palacio, built after Spanish notions of magnificence, around a courtyard shaded by rare trees; and many other edifices, used for official and ecclesiastic purposes. The streets are paved with cobblestone and laid out regularly ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert

... The gloomy breath of this education penetrated all the relations of the Byzantine State. Even the education of the emperor was infected by it; and in the strife for freedom waged by the modern Greeks against the Turks, the Igumeni of the cloisters were the real leaders of the insurrection. The independence of individuality, ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz

... BEZANTS, Byzantine gold coins of varying weight and value, introduced by the Crusaders into England, where they were current till the time ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... first time in the works of Abulpharagius, who flourished in 1264. Six hundred years had elapsed. It is as if a story about the crusades of Louis IX. were to be found for the first time in the writings of Mr. Bancroft. The Byzantine historians were furiously angry with the Saracens; why did they, one and all, neglect to mention such an outrageous piece of vandalism? Their silence must be considered quite conclusive. Moreover we know "that the caliphs had forbidden under severe penalties the destruction" of Jewish ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... from the steps of St. Paul's than that each person is miraculously provided with coat, skirt, and boots; an income; an object. Only Jacob, carrying in his hand Finlay's Byzantine Empire, which he had bought in Ludgate Hill, looked a little different; for in his hand he carried a book, which book he would at nine-thirty precisely, by his own fireside, open and study, as no one else of all these multitudes ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... sciences. Mr. Middleton has lately shown us in his work upon Illuminated Manuscripts that Persia and Egypt, as well as the Western Countries, 'contributed elements both of design and technical skill which combined to create the new school of Byzantine art.' Constantinople, he tells us, became for several centuries the main centre for the production of manuscripts. Outside the domain of art we find little among the Romans of the East that can in any sense ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton

... to relate, but persistent efforts to maintain the disinterested claim on American friendship which we Germans have always (when in need of it) advanced, continue to be misrepresented in that stronghold of atheistical materialism and Byzantine voluptuousness, New York. To the gifted Professor von Schwank's challenge, that he could not fill a single "scrap of paper" with the record of acts of war on our part which were incompatible with Divine guidance and the promulgation of the higher culture, the effete and already discredited ROOSEVELT ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various

... of the meagre success of Russian arms so far, were disinclined to rise against Turkey. In Greece, on the other hand, Russian partisans succeeded in inciting the populace to revolt. From all sides volunteers rushed to the northern frontier. There was even some talk of establishing a new Byzantine Empire. King Otto, partly from lack of sympathy, but more through fear of the Western Powers, whose ships suddenly appeared at the Piraeus, opposed the movement. The Greek volunteers who had gathered at the frontier were ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson

... administers Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, or the bodies claiming to represent purer and finer or more authentic and authoritative forms of Catholic teaching which have erected that new Byzantine-looking cathedral in Westminster, or Whitfield's Tabernacle in the Tottenham Court Road, or a hundred or so other organized and independent bodies. It is still more perplexing to settle upon the Catholic Church in America among an ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... sultan had come to the throne, Mohammed II., one of the greatest sovereigns of the house of Othman. He began his reign with the occupation of Constantinople (1453), and thus destroyed the last refuge of the Byzantine Empire. At the news of this event all Europe burst into a chorus of lamentation. The whole importance of the Eastern Question at once presented itself before the nations of Christendom. It was at once understood ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various



Words linked to "Byzantine" :   complex, Asian, knotty, tortuous, Eastern Roman Empire, involved, Eastern Orthodox Church, Byzantine Church



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com