Byzantine art is the art of the Eastern Roman Empire, which lasted from 330, when the emperor Constantine made Constantinople, today's Istanbul, his capital, to 1453, when the Ottoman Turks took the city.
It is known for walls covered in gold mosaic and for icons, painted images of Christ, the Virgin and the saints, whose figures stand still and face the viewer against a field of gold.
The clearest example is a mosaic in the church of San Vitale, in Ravenna, on the Adriatic coast of Italy. The emperor Justinian, who ruled from Constantinople in the sixth century, stands in a purple robe, a halo around his head, holding a golden bowl for the bread of the Mass.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
Courtiers, clergy and soldiers line up on either side of him, and every one of them faces straight out. On the opposite wall, his wife, the empress Theodora, stands among her ladies in the same pose, holding a jeweled cup. The two panels face each other across the altar.
Neither of them ever set foot in Ravenna, a city only recently won back from the Goths, a Germanic people who had ruled Italy after the fall of Rome in the West. Their portraits stood in for them, and the emperor gazes out over a city he never visited.
To a modern eye the row of figures looks stiff, and that stiffness is the first thing most people notice about the style. The common explanation is that Byzantine artists had lost the skill of the ancients, the Greeks and Romans, and could not do any better.
Yet in Constantinople, some seven centuries after Justinian, a mosaic of Christ was made with a face so softly shaded that the explanation hardly holds.
Roman, that is, Byzantine
The word Byzantine itself would have puzzled the people in the Ravenna mosaic. They called themselves Romans, and to them their state was the Roman Empire, which had simply moved its capital east.
Byzantine is built on Byzantion, the old Greek town that Constantine renamed Constantinople. The label was fastened on the empire long after its fall, by men who had never seen it, and one of them made it stick.
What You'll Discover
The church whose dome seemed to hang from heaven.
What gives the gold its glow.
What happened when holy images were banned.
A face that breaks the stiff style.
Where the style traveled after the empire fell.