"Byzantine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Alexandria began to take the place of Athens as the centre of culture for the Hellenistic world, Homeric dictionaries and glossaries seem to have been constantly published. Indeed, Athenaeus tells us of a wonderful Byzantine blue-stocking, a precieuse from the Propontis, who wrote a long hexameter poem, called Mnemosyne, full of ingenious commentaries on difficulties in Homer, and in fact, it is evident that, as far as the language is ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... of the early mediaeval art developments was the Byzantine. It flourished principally in the eastern part of Europe. In the west it was known, with a few variations, as the Lombard and the Norman. All three are often included under ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 598, June 18, 1887 • Various
... breakfast in the refectory, and the abbot deigned to come in and talk about Pitsoonda. His was an ancient and beautiful monastery, built by the same hand that erected St. Sophia at Constantinople, Justinian the First. It was indeed a replica of that famous building, a fine specimen of Byzantine architecture. It had changed hands many times, belonging to the Greeks, the Turks, the Cherkesses, and finally to the Russians. Here formerly stood the fortified town of Pitius, scarcely a stone of which was now standing, though many were the weapons and household implements ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... 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 ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... of the High Alps and the peaks of La Salette," said he to himself; "that huge white hotel, that church coloured with dirty yellow lime-wash, vaguely Byzantine and vaguely Romanesque in its architecture, and that little cell with the plaster Christ nailed to a flat black wooden Cross—that tiny Sanctuary plainly white-washed, and so small that one could step across it in any direction—they ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... Baptistery is the most restful place in Florence; and this is rather odd considering that it is all marble and mosaic patterns. But its shape is very soothing, and age has given it a quality of its own, and there is just that touch of barbarism about it such as one gets in Byzantine buildings to lend ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... consider, for it is this alone that makes up the life of 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
... "is perhaps the gem of the whole collection. It is Byzantine, and is of wonderfully delicate workmanship." The filigree gold ornament, was a long and slender pendant, of intricate gold work and studded with tiny jewels. It was one of a pair of earrings, and they wondered where its mate might be, if indeed, ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... No. 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 engage him, ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... that he could never bring himself to smoke in his formal dinner clothes, he went to the right-hand cabinet, and opened it. He stood with a smile, taking up coins one by one. In this particular drawer they were of the best Byzantine dynasty, very rare. He did not see that Cecilia had stolen in, and was silently regarding him. Her eyes seemed doubting at that moment whether or no she loved him who stood there touching that other mistress ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... undergone more memorable sieges during ancient and mediaeval times than has the city of Syracuse. Athenian, Carthaginian, Roman, Vandal, Byzantine, Saracen, and Norman have in turns beleaguered her walls; and the resistance which she successfully opposed to some of her early assailants was of the deepest importance, not only to the fortunes of the generations then in being, but to all the subsequent current of human events. To ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... when inspecting the Conciergerie. Alas! for the Conciergerie has invaded the home of kings. One's heart bleeds to see the way in which cells, cupboards, corridors, warders' rooms, and halls devoid of light or air, have been hewn out of that beautiful structure in which Byzantine, Gothic, and Romanesque—the three phases of ancient art—were harmonized in one building by the architecture of the ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... too, is likely to be considerable. The Byzantine historians speak of numerous and permanent settlements, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, both in Thessaly, and in the Morea; statements which the frequency of Slavonic names for Greek geographical localities confirms.[10] Neither, however, outweighs the undoubted ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... are mainly used for offices. There is still some waste ground lying to the south of Victoria Street, in spite of the great Roman Catholic Cathedral, begun in 1895, which covers a vast area. The material is red brick with facings of stone, and the style Byzantine, the model set being the "early Christian basilica in its plenitude." The high campanile tower, which is already seen all over London, is a striking feature in a building quite dissimilar from those to which we in England are accustomed. The great entrance at ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... making the real arch spring from a point above the impost and building the lower portion of it vertical, as shown in Fig. 98. This device of stilting the smaller arches to raise their crowns to the level of those of the larger arches was in constant use in Byzantine and early Romanesque architecture, in the kind of manner shown in the sketch, Fig. 99; and a very clumsy and makeshift method of dealing with the problem it is; but something of the kind was inevitable as long as nothing but the round arch was available for covering ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... mines. They rose in rebellion, threw off their allegiance, and made incursions into Persia and China, proving themselves formidable enemies. From being a weak and enslaved people they became the allies and conquerors of the Byzantine emperors. 'With the Koran in one hand,' says Macaulay, 'and the sword in the other, they went forth conquering and converting eastward to the Bay of Bengal, and westward to the Pillars of Hercules.' They became a terror to the nations that had beheld with contempt their rising ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... time deprived of any relations with civilized Europe. The necessity of concentrating all her strength on fighting the Mongolians laid the corner-stone of a sort of semi-Asiatic political autocracy. Besides, the influence of the Byzantine clergy made the nation hostile to the ideas and science of the Occident, which were represented as heresies incompatible with the orthodox faith. However, when she finally threw off the Mongolian yoke, and when she found herself face to face with Europe, Russia ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... streaming across the sidewalk from an endless chain of motor-cars and being ground through the revolving doors like grist in the hopper of an unhallowed mill, the men all in evening dress, the women in garments whose insolence outrivalled the most Byzantine ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... successions of details, are insulated, and, in one word, sporadic. This follows from the very nature of his work; for it is a perpetual commentary on the incidents of Grecian history, from the era of the Roman conquest to the commencement of what Mr. Finlay, in a peculiar sense, calls the Byzantine empire. These incidents have nowhere been systematically or continuously recorded; they come forward by casual flashes in the annals, perhaps, of some church historian, as they happen to connect themselves with his momentary theme; or they betray themselves ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... 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 ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... theory of vortices and the nebular hypothesis and the direction of ocean currents and the qualities of kelp and the direction the codfish go in Iceland waters when the northeast wind blows; that he knows about Gothic architecture and Byzantine painting, the social movement in Jerez and the exports of Patagonia, the wall-paper of Paris apartment houses and the red paste with which countesses polish their fingernails ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... are the temples of Paestum, far away there to the south beyond Naples, on the flat strip of miserably cultivated soil between the Apennines and the Mediterranean. But they are too far gone in ruin and decay to speak with so living a voice of sadness as does this old Byzantine church. The human element is at Paestum too far away,—too utterly dead and forgotten. In St. Apollinare life still lingers. Life, flickering in its last spark, like the twinkling of a lamp which the next moment will extinguish, is still there. ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... her acquaintance. Her rooms were rich with statues of marble and statues of bronze, and figures in ivory and figures in silver, and with gold vessels, and cabinets of ebony and other costly woods; and pictures by Byzantine painters hung upon her walls, and her rooms were rich with all manner of costly stuffs and furs. He that was favored to have audience with Monna Vittoria went to her as through a dream of loveliness, marvelling at the many splendid things that surrounded her: at the ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... 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 a fateful ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... to be a plaything for men—such a thing has existed; such a thing exists even now. In simple and savage times such a thing constituted an especial trade. The 17th century, called the great century, was of those times. It was a century very Byzantine in tone. It combined corrupt simplicity with delicate ferocity—a curious variety of civilization. A tiger with a simper. Madame de Sevigne minces on the subject of the fagot and the wheel. That century traded a good deal in children. Flattering historians ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... intervals, "and soon observed a drunken-looking soldier staggering about the pavement. He came up to me and said, 'Buy my silver cross, sir! You shall have it for fourpence—it's real silver.' I looked, and there he held a cross, just taken off his own neck, evidently, a large tin one, made after the Byzantine pattern. I fished out fourpence, and put his cross on my own neck, and I could see by his face that he was as pleased as he could be at the thought that he had succeeded in cheating a foolish gentleman, and away he went ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... laugh a little; and offended, John rose and continued the packing of his Indian gods. Allusion was made to Byzantine art; and Mike told the story of Frank's marriage; and John laughed prodigiously at the account he gave of the conversation overheard. Regarding the quarrel John was undecided. He found himself ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... still 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, lib. ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... Roman Empire; and its temples became their churches, its halls of 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 ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... 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
... as glass-making, enameling, leather work, gold and silver work, and the making of 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 whom Tomaso had ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... Rome. In some of the North African kingdoms the infiltration of Negro blood was very large and kings like Massinissa and Jugurtha were Negroid. By way of the Atlantic the Carthaginians reached the African west coast. Greek and Roman influences came through the desert, and the Byzantine Empire and Persia came into communication with Negroland by way of the valley of the Nile. The influence of these trade routes, added to those of Egypt, Ethiopia, Benin, and Yoruba, stimulated centers of culture in the central and western Sudan, and European ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... un oui, pour un non, pour un dogme arien Dont le pape sournois rira dans la coulisse, Pour quelque fille ayant une peau fraiche et lisse, Des yeux bleus et des mains blanches comme le lait, C'etait bon dans le temps ou l'on se querellait Pour la croix byzantine ou pour la croix latine, Et quand Pepin tenait une synode a Leptine, Et quand Rodolphe et Jean, comme deux hommes souls, Glaive au poing, s'arrachaient leurs Agnes de deux sous; Aujourd'hui, tout est mieux et les moeurs sont plus douces, ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... facing Cadillac Square, with a lofty tower surmounted by a gilded dome. The Federal building is a massive granite structure, finely decorated in the interior. Among the churches of greatest architectural beauty are the First Congregational, with a fine Byzantine interior, St John's Episcopal, the Woodward Avenue Baptist and the First Presbyterian, all on Woodward Avenue, and St. Anne's and Sacred Heart of Mary, both Roman Catholic. The municipal museum of art, in Jefferson Avenue, contains some unusually interesting Egyptian and Japanese collections, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... the most brilliant times for the production of works of art in gold and silver, was when Constantine, upon becoming Christian, moved the seat of government to Byzantium. Byzantine ornament lends itself especially to such work. The distinguishing mark between the earlier Greek jewellers and the Byzantine was, that the former considered chiefly line, form, and delicacy of workmanship, while the latter were led to expression through colour and ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... romantic chapter in the history of the extension of this law, is the account of its introduction into the Frankish principality of the Morea. This principality was wrested from the Byzantine empire, in the year 1213, by William of Champlitte, at the head of a band of adventurers, and passed by intrigue into the hands of the family Ville Hardouin. An old chronicler of the times tells us that when the second prince of this family, Godfrey ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... an overbearing soldiery at home, and the attacks of barbarian foes gradually increasing in strength. Rome fell quickly into the hands of the barbarians, and her power was broken. In A.D. 395, was founded the Byzantine Empire, also styled the East Roman, Greek, or Lower Empire, which lasted for more than a thousand years, and took its name from the capital, Byzantium or Constantinople. In this empire medical science maintained a feeble and ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... Italy a great artist. The schools of Spain were budded on a full-bearing tree. 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 ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... grey of the ruins all covered with clinging green and the glowing blossoms of creepers, the hidden antique nooks where some woman's head leaned out of an arched casement, like a dream of the Dandolo time when the Adriatic swarmed with the returning galleys laden with Byzantine spoil, the dim, mystic, majestic walls that towered above the gliding surface of the eternal water, once alive with flowers, and music, and the gleam of golden tresses, and the laughter of careless revellers in the Venice of Goldoni, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... of his sentences, we are rather dazzled by his eloquence than convinced by his argument. He is picturesque, rich; but it is the picturesqueness and richness of the truly bewildering Roman architecture of the Renaissance—half Byzantine, three-eighths Gothic, and the remainder Greek. But Motley, with all his varied learning and association, is still perfectly and nobly Anglo-Saxon. His short, epigrammatic sentences ring like the click of musketry before the charge, and swell ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... Under the 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]
... any woman who has ever touched lyre 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 ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... Greece, including not only the earliest forms, but the Parthenon itself, while in parts showing an evolution out of Egyptian and Assyrian architecture, exhibit frequent reminiscences and even imitations of earlier constructions in wood; the medieval cathedrals, while evolved out of Roman and Byzantine structures, constantly show unmistakable ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... widely read in the East. But it is only a depraved taste that can prefer such an epigene to the fresh desert-music of Imr-al-Kais. Panegyrics, songs of war and of bloodshed, are mostly the themes that he dilates upon. He was in the service of Saif al-Daulah of Syria, and sang his victories over the Byzantine Kaiser. He is the true type of the prince's poet. Withal, the taste for poetic composition grew, though it produced a smaller number of great poets. But it also usurped for itself fields which belong to entirely different literary forms. Grammar, lexicography, philosophy, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... "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, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... of sauce; and I may say That each is worth attention in its way. Sweet oil's the staple of the first; but wine Should be thrown in, and strong Byzantine brine. Now take this compound, pickle, wine, and oil, Mix it with herbs chopped small, then make it boil, Put saffron in, and add, when cool, the juice Venafrum's choicest olive-yards produce. In taste Tiburtian ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... in with parted lips all that concerned the Holy Mother, of whom she was never weary of hearing. Jean had a rude drawing of the Madonna and Child, given him by Father Austin: the figures had the angularity and rigidity of Byzantine art, but the artist had represented his subject with reverence, and no lack of skill, and she loved to dwell on the pure mother's face, and on the longing look in the eyes of the Child. She accepted wholly the idea of a God who loved mankind, of infinite goodness ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... 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, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... though he has grievous misgivings as to the final result of such a prostration of the great interests of society as has there taken place, and is too well-read a scholar not to know that it was in the institutions of the Byzantine empire that a similar levelling resulted in ancient times. But being thus a devout believer, if not in the doctrine of perfectibility, at least in that of ceaseless progress towards democracy, his opinions are of the highest ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... by the symbolic animal, usually assigned to him, occupy nearly the whole of their respective pages. They are taken from Byzantine models, of which, as Westwood points out, nothing remains but the attitudes, the fashion of the dress and the form of the seats. There can be little doubt that these illuminations were copied from a MS. brought into England by the missionaries sent ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... chiaro-scuro—and the painted windows, not gorgeous and flaring with large masses of unmixed colours, (as are the unmeaning windows the modern Templars have put up in their ill-painted church, in which, too, the somewhat tame and dead Byzantine colouring of the walls agrees not with the overpowering glass of the windows;) these old architects, I say, affecting the "dim religious light," and knowing the illumination and brilliancy of their material, took colours without a name, for the most part neither raw reds, nor ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... end of the fourteenth century it became known in Florence that Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1350-1415), a Byzantine of noble birth, a teacher of rhetoric and philosophy at Constantinople, and the most accomplished Greek scholar of his age, had arrived in Venice as an envoy from the Eastern Emperor. Florentine scholars visited him, and on his return accompanied him to ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... 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, with life ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... extravagant in his talk, and, by way of praising the Parisians, used to represent them as a species of scatterbrains, lewd and rowdy, who spent their time in love-making and revolutions without ever taking themselves seriously, Christophe was not greatly attracted by the "Byzantine and decadent republic beyond the Vosges." He used rather to imagine Paris as it was presented in a naive engraving which he had seen as a frontispiece to a book that had recently appeared in a German art publication; the Devil of Notre Dame ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... 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 ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... carried with them the religion, the poetry, and the laws of their race, and on this desolate volcanic island they kept these records unchanged for hundreds of years, while other Teutonic nations gradually became affected by their intercourse with Roman and Byzantine Christianity." These records, carefully collected by Saemund the learned, form the Elder Edda, the most precious relic of ancient Northern literature, without which we should know comparatively little of the religion ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... overthrowing and twisting everything out of shape, and afterward turning them to stone to hold this work of desolation under a spell forever. Some trees standing erect, and having softer outlines, seemed to have feminine faces and figures. They were Byzantine maidens, with tiaras of dainty leaves and trailing vestments of wood. Others were ferocious idols with protruding eyes and long flowing beards; fetiches of gloomy, barbaric cults capable of checking primitive humanity in its progress, forcing it to its knees with emotion as if at a ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... inheritance for her son Clotaire II. On the death of Gontran in 592 Childebert annexed the kingdom of Burgundy, and even contemplated seizing Clotaire's estates and becoming sole king of the Franks. He died, however, in 595. Childebert II. had had relations with the Byzantine empire, and fought in 585 in the name of the emperor Maurice against ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... pure line swerved, ever more and more influenced by the Orient, for Rome, always successful in war, had established colonies in the East. Soon Byzantine art reached Rome, bringing its arabesques and geometrical designs, its warm, glowing colours, soft cushions, gorgeous hangings, embroideries, and rich carpets. In fact all the glowing luxury ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... are scarcely removed from the classical forms appear continuously through the Byzantine era and in Islam as soon as it recovered from the first shocks of its formation. Procopius (died ca. 535) describes a monumental water clock which was erected in Gaza ca. 500.[17] It contained impressive jackwork, such as a Medusa head which rolled its eyes every ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... organism timidly reappeared. The new art-germ developed with the new civilization which surrounded it. Manufacture and commerce reappeared: the artisans and merchants formed into communities; the communities grew into towns, the towns into cities; in the city arose the cathedral; the Lombard or Byzantine mouldings and traceries of the cathedral gave birth to figure-sculpture; its mosaics gave birth to painting; every forward movement of the civilization unfolded as it were a new form or detail of the art, until, when ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... long green stone, fractured in the middle. It is not described, and may be one of the Siberian tourmalines, some of which closely approach the emerald in hue. The imperial orb of Russia, which is of Byzantine workmanship of the tenth century, has fifty emeralds. This fact alone would seem to prove that emeralds were known in Europe or Asia Minor long before the discovery of America; but, on the other hand, the ancient crown which was taken when Kasan was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... Oliver's Second Parliament.—Another Letter from Milton to Mr. Richard Jones: Departure of Lady Ranelagh for Ireland: Letter from Milton to Peter Heimbach: Milton's Second Marriage: His Second Wife, Katharine Woodcock: Letter to Emeric Bigot: Milton's Library and the Byzantine Historians: M. Stoupe: Ten more State-Letters by Milton for the Protector (Nos. XCI.-C.): Morland, Meadows, Durie, Lockhart, and other Diplomatists of the Protector, back in London: More Embassies and Dispatches over Land ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... 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 sea they ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... to go through several sheet-shrouded salons and came out into a thoroughly comfortable room. Its general aspect of decoration had a Byzantine look, and on the floor were several magnificent bear skins, while around the walls low bookcases with quantities of books stood. And above them many arms were crossed. Over the mantlepiece a famous Rembrandt frowned, and another ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... there for the occasion by the hunters. One of them, which represented St. Nicholas, was very valuable, the material being embossed silver gilt. Before the lamps hung large dinted old copper lamps or rather light-holders, resembling inverted Byzantine cupolas, ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... original act. Besides, Guido is so saturated with hateful and ignoble motive as to fill the surrounding air with influences that preclude heroic association. It has been said of the great men to whom the Byzantine Empire once or twice gave birth, that even their fame has a curiously tarnished air, as if that too had been touched by the evil breath of the times. And in like manner we may say of Guido Franceschini that even to have touched him in the way ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... we bought nothing modern, but found several antique shops with Byzantine treasures, also silver ornaments, ancient curios, more beautiful than anything we found in Italy, and ancient sacred brass candlesticks of the Greek Church, which bore the test of being transplanted to an ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... the adjacent villages of the European, and even of the Asiatic coast. But the suburbs of Pera and Galata, though situate beyond the harbor, may deserve to be considered as a part of the city; and this addition may perhaps authorize the measure of a Byzantine historian, who assigns sixteen Greek (about fourteen Roman) miles for the circumference of his native city. Such an extent may not seem unworthy of an Imperial residence. Yet Constantinople must ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... formerly perhaps in the temples of the pagans, or have known the strange faces of the 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 simply the thousand little designs, ideally pure, of that Islam ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... and temporary capital of the Greek Empire, surrendered in 1330. On the other side of the Bosphorus Orkhan could see the domes and palaces of Constantinople which, however, for another century was to remain the seat of the Byzantine Empire. ...
— The Balkan Wars: 1912-1913 - Third Edition • Jacob Gould Schurman
... Woodville, I'm so sorry! What a tactless idiot I am! But Lady Chetwode, now. Her great friend, Vera Ogilvie, I know very well indeed. I met her last Tuesday, so she's quite an old friend. Mrs. Ogilvie's the pretty woman who thinks she has a Byzantine profile. She's all over strange jewels and scarabs, and uncut turquoises and things. She has a box on the second tier, and it was there that it ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... 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 up at ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... 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 ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... obstacles, including the opposition of the Landgrave, without whose consent he was long pledged not to bestow the hand of Anna. For this there were more than one reason. Augustus, who, in the words of one of the most acute historical critics of our day, was "a Byzantine Emperor of the lowest class, re-appearing in electoral hat and mantle," was not firm in his rights to the dignity he held. He had inherited from his brother, but his brother had dispossessed John Frederic. Maurice, when turning against the Emperor, who had placed him in his cousin's ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... our Dean of the Arches; Scott and Liddell, both heads of houses, and even then conspiring together for their great Dictionary. Curzon too (lately Lord De la Zouch) was at the table, meditating Armenian and Levantine travels, and longing in spirit for those Byzantine MSS. preserved at Parham, where the writer has delighted to inspect them; how nearly Tischendorf was anticipated in his fortunate find of that earliest Scripture, no one knows better than Lord Zouch, who must have been close upon that great and important discovery! Doyle, now Professor ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... 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
... of painting. Their works, considered as a subordinate branch of pictorial art, though frequently grotesque and barbarous, are singularly characteristic of the epoch in which they lived, whether we retrace the art to its Byzantine origin in the earliest ages of Christianity, or follow it to its most complete and harmonious development in the two centuries which preceded the discovery of the ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... unlimited reproduction. The Romanesque art seems to have dealt with the ancient forms, without moulding any thing essentially and vitally new. Where there seemed originality, it was, after all, only a theft from the Saracenic or Byzantine, and the plagiarism became incongruity when engrafted upon the Roman. Thus a Latin church was often but an early Christian basilica ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... 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 over its forests of orange and lemon, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... $Byzantine.—300 A.D. to 1450 A.D.$ The "Eastern Roman" style, originating in the removal of the capital of the Roman Empire to Constantinople (then called Byzantium). It is a combination of Persian and Roman. It influenced the various Moorish, ...
— Mission Furniture - How to Make It, Part I • H. H. Windsor
... and kin of the Tartar and Huns, who came into their present fertile 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 ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... sumptuously draped with the remnant of a Florentine dalmatica. Between two gilded copper monstrances of Byzantine style, originally brought from the old Abbaye-au-Bois de Bievre, stood a marvelous church canon divided into three separate compartments delicately wrought like lace work. It contained, under its glass frame, three works of Baudelaire copied on real vellum, with wonderful ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... group contains the two Roundles of the Metals, which are flat discs: 1, The Bezant, or golden Roundle, No. 151, which has apparently derived its name from the Byzantine coins with which the Crusaders, when in the East, would have been familiar. 2, The Silver Roundle, or Plate, is from the Spanish "Plata"—silver. When Bezants or Plates appear in considerable numbers, the field on which they are ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... the 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, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... has since published an elaborate account of his discoveries. Far toward the west stretched the ruins where had been the markets, the stadium and the ports, with crumbling walls and towers of all stages of antiquity, Greek, Roman and Byzantine. One of the towers or forts, on an elevation to the westward, and of somewhat cyclopean construction, passes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... palatial apartments of verdantique and porphyry. But of those comparatively at liberty, but whose liberty was circumscribed by the hallowed precincts of Studius, every soul was plotting. And never, perhaps, in the corrupt Byzantine Court, where true friendship had been unknown since Theodora quarrelled with Antonia, had so near an approach to it existed as in this asylum of villains. A sort of freemasonry came to prevail in the sanctuary: every one longed to know how his neighbour's plot ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... precious MSS. to Italy had been going on, and 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 ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... which carried Greek medicine to modern days runs through the Eastern Empire. Between the third century and the fall of Constantinople there was a continuous series of Byzantine physicians whose inspiration was largely derived from the old Greek sources. The most distinguished of these was Oribasius, a voluminous compiler, a native of Pergamon and so close a follower of his great townsman that he has been called "Galen's ape." He left many works, an edition of ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... France was controlled by the monarchical, and Germany by the federative, principle. The forces of the nation, divided and swayed from side to side by this commanding dualism, escaped both influences in so far as either Pope or Emperor strove to mold them into unity. Meanwhile the domination of Byzantine Greeks in the southern provinces, the kingdom of the Goths at Ravenna, the kingdom of the Lombards and Franks at Pavia, the incursions of Huns and Saracens, the kingdom of the Normans at Palermo, formed but accidents and moments in a national development which owed important ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... passed the plans for the Byzantine shoulder the esplanade thrust out on to the sand on the slender provocation of a bandstand, the man who had built his hotel with a roof covered with cupolas and minarets and had called it "Westward Ho!" must, Ellen thought, be lovely people, like Shakespearean fools. She liked ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... 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 gold" ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... (such as, among a thousand others, that Massacre of the Innocents which never took place).... bore their listeners by a Tibetan repetition of creeds that have ceased to be credible.... Mutually contradictory propositions.... Prayers and litanies composed in Byzantine and mediaeval times.... the want of actuality, the curious silliness which has, ever since the destruction of Jerusalem, hung about the exposition of Christianity.... But if the Bishops continue to fuss about ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... a display of animation that surprised the others. "He must be removed to a warmer country at once. I had no idea that matters were so bad as this. Mr Burne, Mrs Dunn, I am a student much interested in a work I am writing on the Byzantine empire, and I was starting in a few days for Asia Minor. My passage was taken. But all that must be set aside, and I will stop and see to my dear old ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... with a specimen of mediaeval carving which is a long delight to the few archaeologists who find their way to the almost forgotten village of Carennac. The composition, which fills the tympan of the scarcely-pointed arch, represents Christ surrounded by the twelve Apostles. The influence of Byzantine art is perceptible in the treatment. Very few such masterpieces of twelfth-century carving have been so well preserved as this. The seated figure of Christ in the act of blessing His Apostles, the right hand upraised, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... it to 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... become passionately interesting and grew every day more Byzantine; for the Russian Government itself showed clear signs of dislocation, and the orders of Lamsdorf and de Witte were reversed when applied in Manchuria. Historians and students should have no sympathies or antipathies, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... NOIR, or the TALISMAN. The ancient Sclavonic, which is the language of the Eastern Church, possesses great majesty. More guttural than the idioms which have arisen from it, it is severe and monotonous yet of great dignity, like the Byzantine paintings preserved in the worship to which it is consecrated. It has throughout the characteristics of a sacred language which has only been used for the expression of one feeling and has never been modulated or fashioned ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... several months. Notwithstanding the labors required by all these occupations he found time to write for Didot's Univers Pittoresque a history of Carthage from the second Punic war to the Vandal invasion, a history of the Vandal rule and the Byzantine restoration, another of the African Church, and one of the Church of Ancient Syria. He also furnished many important articles to the Encyclopedic Dictionary, wrote often for the National newspaper, and for two years was chief editor of the Nouvelle Revue Encyclopedique. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... 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 specimen. Either a state of deadness ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... unwillingly, all monarchs try, very humanly, to resist awakening out of this hypnotic complacency. Naturally, there were men in the entourage of the German Emperor whose pride kept them from making too large an offering to the throne, but as a rule their suffering in the Byzantine atmosphere of Germany was greater than their enjoyment. I always considered that the greatest sycophants were not those living at court, but generals, admirals, professors, officials, representatives of the people and men of learning—people ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... top for potsherds, to find the latest period of the town. Look around the mound 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
... brick architecture of the Lombard cities took its origin—whether from the precepts of Byzantine aliens in the earliest middle ages, or from the native instincts of a mixed race composed of Gallic, Ligurian, Roman, and Teutonic elements, under the leadership of Longobardic rulers—is a question for antiquarians to decide. There can, however, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... if not their originals, were once extant at Constantinople. Though in no single instance has the Greek original been discovered of any of these romances, the mere name of their heroes would be in most cases sufficient to prove their Hellenic or Byzantine origin. Heracles, Athis, Porphirias, Parthenopeus, Hippomedon, Protesilaus, Cliges, Cleomades, Clarus, Berinus—names such as these can come but from one quarter of Europe, and it is as easy to guess how and when they came as whence. The first ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... population and appropriate the 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 of the Caspian and the Orient; ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... place or in any occupation. He commands his armies in person. He has won distinction as a writer and a public speaker. He is an excellent shot. He has composed music, written verses, superintended the production of a ballet, painted a picture; the beautiful Byzantine chapel in the Castle of Posen shows his genius for architecture; and, clothed in a clergyman's surplice, he has preached a sermon in Jerusalem. What ruler in all history has exhibited ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... testing of Enide is worthy of attention, and is 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 himself claims, was literary (cf. Gaston Paris in ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... 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 ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... they had got some tremendous sacred sanction—some holy thing, some book or gospel or some new prophet from the desert, something which would cast over the whole ugly mechanism of German war the glamour of the old torrential raids which crumpled the Byzantine Empire and shook the walls of Vienna? Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other. Supposing there is some Ark of the Covenant which will madden the remotest Moslem ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... centred on the Mother and Child. A survey of these pages will suffice to show that of these two principal elements a great variety of pictorial effect, of expression, of sentiment, of composition of line, and of light and shade, is possible. We can go back to the splendid Byzantine churches, with their wealth of mosaic, their subdued splendor of dulled gold covering arch and pillar as a background for the glow of color with which the artists of Constantine worked,—in a rigid convention ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... the moony Tennysonian sensuousness which induced, with Lowell's vigorous imagination, the blank artificiality of style which was visible in several of his early poems. There was a tendency, too, to the Byzantine liberty of gilding the bronze of our common words, a palpable longing after the ississimus of Latin adjectives, of whose softness our muscular and variegated language will not admit. Mr. Lowell's Sonnets, too, we could wish unwritten, not from any defect ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various |
