"Byzantine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ones; and unless you aim at 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
... 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 ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... 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, ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... 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 fought so long and stubbornly ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... just as the City of Mexico has her San Francisco promenade, leading from the Alameda to the Plaza de Zocalo; or Rome her famous Corso, the old Via Flaminia, with its shops and its teeming life; or Athens her Hodos Hermou, with its old Byzantine church of Kapnikaraea; or Constantinople her Grande Rue de Pera, with its hotels and theatres and bazaars; or old Damascus, her "street that is called straight," Suk et-Tawileh, the street of the Long Bazaar, with its Oriental life and colouring; or Cairo her ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... 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 ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... 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 ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... favoured by fortune, for the governors of the city had invited certain Greek (probably Byzantine) painters to Florence, for the purpose of restoring the art of painting, which had not merely degenerated but was altogether lost. These artists, among other works, began to paint the chapel of the Gondi in Santa Maria Novella, and Cimabue, often escaping ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... what he likes," advised by his wife who has visited some of the cathedrals, and by an architect who has been elaborately educated in the principles of Roman Renaissance, but who knows no more of Lombard, Byzantine, or Gothic art than he does of the dynasties of ancient Egypt. When a church has fallen into the hands of such renovators and been heavily "restored," if the ghost of one of its medieval builders came to view his work he would scarcely recognize it. Well ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... the Christian king, built a church for the wanderers, and richly endowed it. Both Athelstane and "Edmund, the Magnificent," visited the tomb, and rendered homage to the saint. The latter brought valuable presents to the shrine, consisting of Byzantine workmanship, and two bracelets, which he took from his own arms. Edred also ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... 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 ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... dragged me from my intellectual feast. This transient glance served rather to irritate than to appease my curiosity; and as soon as I returned to Bath I procured the second and third volumes of Howel's History of the World, which exhibit the Byzantine period on a larger scale. Mahomet and his Saracens soon fixed my attention; and some instinct of criticism directed me to the genuine sources. Simon Ockley, an original in every sense, first opened my eyes; and I was led from one book to another, till I had ranged round the circle of Oriental ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... Farnie, who used to make comic operetta books in London, adapted the 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 ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... religious awe, that solemn 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... more certain 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 ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... the campanile before, and the reason was that the cathedral happened not to be on the route between Alexandra Grove and her principal customers. Suddenly, out of Victoria Street, they came up against the vast form of the Byzantine cathedral. It was hemmed in by puny six-story blocks of flats, as ancient cathedrals also are hemmed in by the dwellings of townsfolk. But here, instead of the houses having gathered about the cathedral, the cathedral had excavated a place for itself amid the houses. Tier above tier the expensively ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... 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 helped corrupt much ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... 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. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... 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 north, more ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... O'Creat uses [circle with bar], applying the name cyfra to both forms. Frater Sigsboto[204] (c. 1150) uses the same symbol. Other peculiar forms are noted by Heiberg[205] as being in use among the Byzantine Greeks in the fifteenth century. It is evident from the text that some of these writers did not understand the import ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... with 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 ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... below them, and at no great distance, an immense city shining with a thousand colors, surmounted by a host of gilded domes, resplendent with light; a singular mixture of woods, lakes, cottages, palaces, churches, bell-towers, a town both Gothic and Byzantine, realizing all that the Eastern stories relate of the marvels of Asia. While the monasteries, flanked with towers, formed the girdle of this great city, in the center, raised on an eminence, was a strong citadel, a kind of capitol, whence ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... cabin, and knocking at the door. Then they rise up; their craft is laden with invisible beings; on their return it is lighter. Several of these features reproduced by Plutarch, Claudian, Procopius, [Footnote: A Byzantine historian of the fifth and sixth centuries.] and Tzetzes [Footnote: A Greek poet and grammarian of the twelfth century.] would incline one to believe that the renown of the Irish myths made its way into classical antiquity about ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... bronze gates crusted with a beautiful hard polished coin-like patina, would repay the excursion, even were the interior less fine. Here we have columns from whose high architraves the Gothic arch springs vigorously; walls perfectly covered with old Byzantine mosaics; a roof of marvellous lightness, and almost modern elegance; still the critic, who is bound by metier to find fault with violated canons, will, we must own, be at no loss for a text in the church of Monreale—a building which is, however, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... brotherhood that is brotherly love, but that which gives the bad the right to share with the good. That is why the Empire could be victorious in France, and that is why the Roman Catholic Church, even in its most modern, Byzantine form, is ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... original report—a new one has scarce any chance of being heard amidst the ceaseless reverberation of the old. The more ancient a nation is, the more liable is it to be overwhelmed by this dreadful evil. The Byzantine empire, during a thousand years of civilisation and opulence, did not produce one work of original thought; five hundred years after the light of Athenian genius had been extinguished, the schools of Greece were still pursuing the beaten paths, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... was Sarafoff's business. He had been a servant and then a novice at one of the monasteries of Mount Athos. Could make beautiful tenth-century Byzantine madonnas. I've sold some. Then he carved ikons in wood, ivory, silver, or what came. His things really looked Scythian enough to those who didn't know their modern Greece and Russia. So we set him to work in a back alley of Vienna at three kroners a day—double pay for him—and Schoenfeld ran ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... side,—flowers as strange and as gorgeous as Byzantine chalices; flowers narrow and fluted and transparent as long Venetian glasses; opaque flowers bulging and coloured with gold devices like Chinese vases, flowers striped with cinnamon and veined ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... healthy existence and 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
... them had to do with the most abstruse fields of philology. For work of this kind Page had little interest and less inclination. When Professor Gildersleeve would assign him the adverb [Greek: prin], and direct him to study the peculiarities of its use from Homer down to the Byzantine writers, he really found himself in pretty deep waters. Was it conceivable that a man could spend a lifetime in an occupation of this kind? By pursuing such studies Gildersleeve and his most advanced pupils uncovered many ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... baseborn fellow, for he could not conceal the mind he had of him. "Fellow," quoth he, "here wilt thou leave the forfeit for my lord, whom thou hast slain. If I bear not off thy head with me, then esteem me not worth a bad Byzantine coin. I will to make the duke a present of it, for I will not accept any other forfeit in its stead. So much will I render to him for his nephew; and he will have had a good exchange for him." Cliges hears that the Saxon is abusing him as a madman and low-bred fellow. "Man," ...
— Cliges: A Romance • Chretien de Troyes
... of Horticulture, a combination of French Renaissance with the Byzantine, is consistently flowery in decoration. It has been given a carnival expression. The general sculptured adornments are heavy garlands and overflowing baskets, and profuse ornamentations of flowers. Large flower-decked jars stand in niches; the cartouches bear the flower motif. Suggestions ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... has just published the first number of a new work, The Decorative Arts of the Middle Ages, the object of which is to exhibit the peculiar features and general characteristics of decorative art, from the Byzantine or early Christian period to the decline of that termed the Renaissance. This beautiful work—for beautiful it is—is extremely well timed, as it appears at a moment when our manufacturers who desire to display their skill at the great exhibition of 1851, ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.26 • Various
... stern fanatics to ambitious conquerors. Whoever would submit to the dominion of the caliph might easily evade the recognition of the Prophet's title. The Jews had reason to rejoice in the change of masters. An Islamite sovereign would not be more oppressive than a Byzantine on the throne of Constantinople or a Persian on the throne of Ctesiphon. In every respect the Jew rose in the social scale under his Mohammedan rulers. Provided he demeaned himself peaceably, and paid his tribute, he might go to the synagogue ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... it's a Russian season?" she instructed him. "Dancers and music and hats—those high fur ones—and perfumes? And all that Byzantine embroidery? ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... 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 ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... with us. After my mother died I went to boarding-school, and to Europe in summer, and when my school days were ended, and I acquired a stepmother, I set up an apartment of my own. It has Florentine things in it, and Byzantine things, and things from China and Japan, and the colors shine like jewels under my lamps—you know the effect. And my kitchen is all in white enamel, and the cook does things by electricity, and when I go away in ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... revival of art, we find the Byzantine idea of angels everywhere prevailing. The angels in Cimabue's famous "Virgin and Child enthroned" are grand creatures, rather stern, but this arose, I think, from his inability to express beauty. The colossal angels at Assisi, solemn sceptred kingly forms, all alike in action ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... and stole quietly about on voyages of exploration and discovery, they were duly rewarded at the hands of the custodian of the chapel, who rather encouraged the seeming sacrilege. He left his prayers unsaid to pilot us from nook to nook; he exhibited the old paintings of Byzantine origin, and in broken English endeavored to interpret their meaning. He opened antique chests that we might examine their contents; and when a volume of prayers printed in rustic Russian type and bound with clumsy metal clasps, was bartered for, he seemed quite ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... who recognises in it the Nimbus of the ancients, used to protect the heads of statues from the weather, and from being soiled by birds; and adds that the glory of the ancient masters in painting was no doubt introduced into the Byzantine school from the Boodhists.] and the Chinese "cloud messenger," or winged dragon, floated in azure and gold along the capitals and beams, amongst scrolls and groups of flowers. At one end was a sitting figure of Gorucknath in Lama robes, surrounded by a glory, with mitre and beads; the right ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... 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 ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... 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
... promised to explain to us the difference between the Sassanian and Byzantine motives in Carolingian art; but the Manager has sent up word that the two new Creole dancers from Paris have arrived, and her Serene Highness wants to pop down to the ball-room and take a peep at them.... She's sure the Professor ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... 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 ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... of the Second Crusade was 1147-1149. Louis and Conrad each commanded a great army, but they made the mistake of working separately. Conrad reached Constantinople first, and partly in consequence of the faithless conduct of Manuel, the Byzantine emperor—who, like his predecessor Alexius, in the time of the First Crusade, threw obstacles in the way of the western hosts—the whole German army was cut to pieces in Asia Minor, only the Emperor himself, with a few followers, escaping. Louis, soon arriving with his ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... $Byzantine.—300 A.D. to 1450 A.D.$ 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, Sacracenic and ...
— Mission Furniture - How to Make It, Part I • H. H. Windsor
... miss the portrait of the reigning sovereign, 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 founder of many schools and institutions ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff
... that morning, and especially gay, humming the old air, "Partant pour la Syrie." But his gaiety was checked when Raoul, taking from his breast a holy talisman, which he habitually wore there, suspended it with loving hands round his brother's neck. It was a small crystal set in Byzantine filigree; imbedded in it was a small splinter of wood, said by pious tradition to be a relic of the Divine Cross. It had been for centuries in the family of the Contessa di Rimini, and was given by her to ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... when the creative age was succeeded by the age of criticism and 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 concerned, such a phrase as 'Homeric ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... an event 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
... sovereigns and 458 years of duration. We are thus brought down to the conquest of Mesopotamia by the Egyptian Pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty. The names of the Chaldaean princes have been transcribed by those Byzantine chroniclers to whom we owe the few and short fragments of ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... more arches; for there the vertical force is divided, flowing in different directions in the little triangular piece of wall between, or along the ribs of the vaults. Something similar occurs in the Byzantine dome on pendentives, only instead of supporting the horizontal weight of a gallery or a vault, the triangular pendentives meet the outward thrust of a ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... Nicomedia. Metrophanes, bishop of Byzantium, was detained by old age and sickness, but Alexander, his presbyter, himself seventy years of age, was there with a little secretary of the name of Paul, not more than twelve years old, one of the readers and collectors of the Byzantine Church. Alexander had already corresponded with his namesake on the Arian controversy, and was apparently attached firmly to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... of 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 ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... it to Marius, who refused to accept it. "Father of his Country" was the appellation of Cosmo de' Medici, and the Genoese inscribed the same title upon the base of the statue erected to Andrea Doria. One of the later Byzantine Emperors, Andronicus Palaologus, even went so far as to assume this honoured title. Nor has the name "Father of the People" been confined to kings, for it has been given also to Gabriel du Pineau, a French lawyer of the ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... friend. For us the whole of Venice had become one bridge of sighs, and we sat in the shade of the piazza, not watching the pigeons, and listening very little to the music. There are times when St. Mark's seems to glare at you with Byzantine cruelty, and Venice is too hot and too cold. So it was then. Evening found us staring out at the Adriatic from the terrace of a cafe' on the Ledo, our coffee cold before us. Never was a greater difference than that in my companion from the previous day. Yet he was ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... time with which the Encyclopaedists did battle, but an organised corporation, with exceptional tribunals, with special material privileges, with dungeons and chains at their disposal. We have to realise that official religion was then a strange union of Byzantine decrepitude, with the energetic ferocity of the Holy Office. Within five years of this indirect plea of D'Alembert for tolerance and humanity, Calas was murdered by the orthodoxy of Toulouse. Nearly ten years later ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... search for this 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 gold" ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... 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, ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... 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 ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... errors are almost inevitable from the close condensation of his matter. From the immense range of his history, it was sometimes necessary to compress into a single sentence, a whole vague and diffuse page of a Byzantine chronicler. Perhaps something of importance may have thus escaped, and his expressions may not quite contain the whole substance of the passage from which they are taken. His limits, at times, compel him to sketch; where that is the case, it is not fair to expect the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... well, as we drifted by: A strange old ship, with her poop built high, And with quarter-galleries wide, And a huge beaked prow, as no ships are builded now, And carvings all strange, beside: A Byzantine bark, and a ship of name and mark Long years and generations ago; Ere any mast or yard of ours was growing hard With the seasoning of long Norwegian snow. * * * * * "Down her old black side poured the water in a tide, As they toiled to get the better of a leak. We had got a signal set in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... piece of Byzantine sculpture, Fig. 20, with the more elaborate treatment of foliage shown in Fig. 21, from late Gothic capitals, in Southwell Minster, it will be seen how an increasing desire for imitative resemblance has taken the place of a patterned foundation, and how, ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... give for the honor of 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 ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... contained then, as now, a considerable number of Jews among its inhabitants. In Christian times it became a great ecclesiastical centre, and was influential in the conversion of the Slavs and Bulgarians. It is still famous for its splendid Byzantine churches, though the finest have long since been converted into mosques by ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... Crescent, which must do its best to make me forget my new abode. I forget you don't know Venice. Well then, the Palazzo Manzoni is situate on the Grand Canal, and is described by Ruskin,—to give no other authority,—as 'a perfect and very rich example of Byzantine Renaissance: its warm yellow marbles are magnificent.' And again—'an exquisite example (of Byzantine Renaissance) as applied to domestic architecture.' So testify the 'Stones of Venice'. But we will talk about the ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... 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 of Titians ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... 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 her ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... not until the decline of the glorious Byzantine Empire that the Slavs embraced Christianity. For nine hundred years the Greeks were the principal representatives, protectors, elaborators and explorers of Christianity. When the Greeks visited the Slav country with their divine message, the Slavs were ...
— The Religious Spirit of the Slavs (1916) - Sermons On Subjects Suggested By The War, Third Series • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... property. And thus Anaxilaus, being afterwards accused at Lacedaemon for this treason, neither disowned nor professed to be ashamed of the action; for he urged that he was not a Lacedaemonian, but a Byzantine and saw not Sparta, but Byzantium, in extreme danger; the city so blockaded that it was not possible to bring in any new provisions, and the Peloponnesians and Boeotians, who were in garrison, devouring the old stores, whilst ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... sympathizers known to the fighting-men as "ojaladeros," or warriors with much decoration in the shape of polished buttons. Their depot was at Biarritz, an aristocratic watering-place born under the second French Empire, and not ignorant of some of the vices of the Byzantine Empire. There are healthful breezes there, but they do not quite sweep away the scent of frangipani. Warlike, with a proviso, the Scot might have been designated, but he was not to be compared with these ojaladeros; he ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... painted in Italy, or no sculptures carved. The tradition of the arts 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 not really so near the truth. What I mean is that ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... epitome of Josephus also existed. We find it used by a Byzantine historian, John Zonaras, during the tenth and the eleventh century, in the composition of his chronicles. It omitted the speeches and historical evidences of the fuller work and pruned its excessive garrulousness. ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... from his galleys on the towers of the imperial city, forms the splendid subject of the fourth act. The marvellous spectacle was there exhibited of a band of adventurers, not mustering above twenty thousand combatants, carrying by storm the mighty Queen of the East, subverting the Byzantine empire, and establishing themselves in a durable manner, in feudal sovereignty, over the whole of Greece and European Turkey. The wonderful powers of Gibbon, the luminous pages of Sismondi, have thrown a flood of ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... sceptre of Poland, which is now treasured in the Kremlin, has a 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... of whom a unicorn lay on the grass, extended above cabinets to the painted beams of the ceiling. He led her to a large and low divan, loaded with cushions covered with sumptuous fragments of Spanish and Byzantine cloaks; but she sat in an armchair. "You are here! You are here! The world ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... braided with silver, while they and the coats and the blue velvet rugs were lined and bordered with sable. One set of horses was coal black, and the others a dark gray. Everything seemed in keeping with the buildings, and the semi-Byzantine scene with its ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... 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 ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... 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]
... Greek settlement in the vicinity of Third and Folsom streets you will see narghile water pipes displayed in the windows alongside Russian brasses and Byzantine ware. If you crave the cooking of Attica and the honey-sweets of the Grecian archipelago you can ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... understanding. She drank 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 ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... cradle in which the Saviour had lain, a tooth from his adolescent jaw, a hair of his beard, a particle of the bread used in the Last Supper, and a portion of the royal purple worn by him before Pilate. Naturally clerical adventurers among the occidental Crusaders, pending the sacking of the Byzantine city, sought out most zealously these valuable remnants of pristine glory, and in obtaining them were by no means scrupulous with menaces and violence. When scattered through Western Europe, in ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... Leo's actions, that some have been disposed to assign to his reign the first attempt at making policy depend on theology; and to this period, as I have elsewhere remarked, they therefore refer the commencement of the Byzantine empire. Through one hundred and twenty years, six emperors devoted themselves to this reformation. But it was premature. They were overpowered by the populace and the monks, by the bishops of Rome, and by a superstitious and ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... epic, but has little in it that is really comic or of literary merit, except perhaps the list of quaint arms assumed by the warriors. The text of the poem is in a chaotic condition, and there are many interpolations, some of Byzantine date. ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... 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 epoch, decrepitude, and ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... CHALE 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 ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... all but unto death in the heavy air of the Tiber, was permitted to seek relief in a visit to which he would of his domains in Italy. His birth, his repute, gave warrant of loyalty to the empire, and his coffers furnished the price put upon such a favour by Byzantine greed. Maximus chose for refuge his villa by the Campanian shore, vast, beautiful, half in ruin, which had been enjoyed by generations of the Anician family; situated above the little town of Surrentum it caught the cooler breeze, and on its mountainous ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... correspondence a friend of his, an art critic of distinction, visited Liverpool with the purpose of lecturing on the valuable examples of Byzantine art in the Eoyal Institution of that city. The lecture was, I fear, almost too good and quite too technical for some of the hearers, many of whom claim (and with reason) to be lovers of art, and cover the walls of their houses with beautiful ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... 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, on ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... 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
... conferred in this letter more significant, since they must have been bestowed after the delation against Albinus and Boethius. Probably it was during Cyprian's embassy to Constantinople (described in this letter) that he discovered these intrigues of the Senators with the Byzantine Court, which ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... infirmity in the eyes it is intolerable. It is true, Antigonus would joke upon himself, and once, receiving a petition written in great letters, he said, This a man may read if he were stark blind. But he killed Theocritus the Chian for saying,—wh Byzantine to Pasiades saying, Sir, your eyes are weak, replied, You upbraid me with this infirmity, not considering that thy son carries the vengeance of Heaven on his back: now Pasiades's son was hunch-backed. And Archippus the popular Athenian was much displeased with Melanthius ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the days when the island city ruled the island sea, always refractory under foreign rule and often unruly under their own rgime, seem to have enjoyed in the later centuries of Roman rule and the earlier of the Byzantine a great prosperity, if one may judge from the evidence of the necropolis, the graves in which yield a singular indication of a well-distributed wealth. These graves lie for great distances along every road leading ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... and by the roadside, it seems; the day breaking, the atmosphere cold, steel-blue, and misty. Rubbing the pane, a few surviving lights are seen twinkling—a picture surely something Moslem. For there, separated by low-lying fields, rise clustered Byzantine towers and belfries, with strangely-quaint German-looking spires of the Nuremberg pattern, but all dimly outlined and mysterious in ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... material on which it is worked; but canvas or very coarse linen almost compels a stitch based upon the cross lines of its woof, and indeed suggests designs of equally rigid construction. That is so in embroidery no matter where. In ancient Byzantine or Coptic work, in modern Cretan work, and in peasant embroidery all the world over, pattern work on coarse linen has run persistently into angular lines—in which, because of that very angularity, the plain outcome of a way of working, we find artistic ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... blocks upon the rough rock and meadow land. The broad Carl-Johansgade, leading directly to the imposing white front of the Royal Palace, upon an eminence in the rear of the city, is worthy of any European capital. On the old market square a very handsome market hall of brick, in semi-Byzantine style, has recently been erected, and the only apparent point in which Christiania has not kept up with the times, is the want of piers for her shipping. A railroad, about forty miles in length, is already in operation as far as Eidsvold, at the foot of the long Miosen ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... end of the Byzantine period, the fork of the river lay at some distance south of Shetnufi, the present Shatanuf, which is the spot where it now is. The Arab geographers call the head of the Delta Batn-el-Bagaraji, the Cow's Belly. Ampere, in his Voyage en Egypte et en Nubie, p. 120, says,—"May it not be that this ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Ruskin couples it with another drawing, both of which we have been fortunately able to reproduce in our pages. These "two perfect early drawings," he writes, "are of A Lemon Tree, and another of the same date, of A Byzantine Well, which determine for you without appeal, the question respecting necessity of delineation as the first skill of a painter. Of all our present masters Sir Frederic Leighton delights most in ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... gradually grew from a huddle of booths to a town, and then to a city, which absorbed its ancestral neighbor and became a cradle for the arts, the letters, the science, and the commerce[2] of modern Europe. For her Cimabue wrought, who infused Byzantine formalism with a suggestion of nature and feeling; for her the Pisani, who divined at least, if they could not conjure with it, the secret of Greek supremacy in sculpture; for her the marvellous boy Ghiberti proved that unity of composition and grace of figure and drapery were never beyond ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... comparison, though it has a notable church tower in which there are traces of some Byzantine imagination brought hither, perhaps, by a Spanish Army of occupation. Also it has a tea-room which is the trysting-place of all the officers in billets, and the chatelaine of which answers your lame and halting French ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... of St. George will illustrate the peculiar arrangement of their religious edifices. Following the example of the older Egyptian Byzantine churches, the nave and tribune are uncovered and the side aisles have galleries. The nave has three divisions: first, a vestibule; second, a section set apart for women; and third, another section ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... drawn and submitted for approval to Don Elijio, who is the head of the firm of Bosch Brothers, our operations begin. The order of architecture which we adopt partakes of the Norman and the early Gothic, with a 'dash,' so to speak, of the Byzantine, to give it a cheerful aspect. It might remind the learned in these matters of York Minster, Temple Bar, or a court in the Crystal Palace; but the Senores Bosch Brothers—whose acquaintance with architectural master-pieces is confined to the governor's palace of lath and plaster, ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... and spiritual change which came over western Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century was the result of a number of converging causes, of which the most important were the diffusion of classical literature consequent upon the break-up of the Byzantine Empire at the hands of the Turks, the brilliant civilization of the Italian city-states, and the establishment, in France, Spain and England, of powerful monarchies whose existence ensured the maintenance of order and internal peace. Thus it happened that the splendid literature of ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... To Byzantine architecture one may not be very sympathetic; the visitor may come to Venice with the cool white arches of Milan still comforting his soul, or with the profound conviction that Chartres or Cologne represents ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... showing specific characters of attenuate, rigid, and in many respects offensively unbeautiful, design, to which Vasari's epithets of "goffa, e sproporzionata" are naturally applied by all persons trained only in modern principles. Under masters, then, of this Byzantine race, Niccola is working ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... over artistic expression from about 1600 on implied a deeper and more vital change in the conception of art itself. Till then men had believed the things they told in their art. Byzantine saints, Cynewulf's Scriptural legends, German Heldenerzaehlungen, Icelandic Sagas, down to the saints and angels of the pre-Raphaelites, all represented realities to the poet; he would have felt no interest in telling of things which he did not believe to be true. ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... to be seen. First of all there is the city itself, one grand curiosity, unique, with nothing on earth that bears a distant approach to it. Its canals, gondolas, antique monuments, Byzantine architecture, bridges, mystery: its pretty women with black lace veils, the true glory of Venice—though ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... 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 ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... good, then, 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 of ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... the adventurer Robert de Hauteville, better known as Robert Guiscard, substantially the founder of that Neapolitan kingdom which we have seen absorbed into the new kingdom of Italy. His daughter married a son of one of the Byzantine Emperors, who was dethroned; and Robert was thus enabled to enter on a series of Eastern conquests, which would have ended in the taking of Constantinople had not imperative circumstances compelled him to return to Italy. A few years later he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... to hear about that," the old man said. "I have a friend at Southern California, Bellingham, who knew Khalid very well. Was in the Middle East doing some research on the Byzantine Empire; Khalid was most helpful. Bellingham was quite impressed by him; said he was a wonderful man, and a fine scholar. Why would anybody want to ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... 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 ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... feel it. Mankind has sound instincts, rooting in untold depths of fitness; and superfine persons, setting themselves against them, reveal their superficiality, their lack of normal intuition and sound judgment, while fancying themselves superior. And mankind (save among barbarous Byzantine and Lombard kings, who encrusted their iron crowns impartially with balas rubies, antique cameos, and bottle glass)—mankind has always shown an instinct against sham jewels and their wearers. It is ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... Phillimore was there, now 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 ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... a professional (for there are professional das, hired only for such occasions), she usually borrows the jewellery. If tall, young, graceful, with a rich gold tone of skin, the effect of her costume is dazzling as that of a Byzantine Virgin. I saw one young da who, thus garbed, scarcely seemed of the earth and earthly;—there was an Oriental something in her appearance difficult to describe, —something that made you think of the Queen of Sheba going to visit ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... Circumcision ("when eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the child") falls naturally on January 1, the Octave of Christmas. It is not of Roman origin, and was not observed in Rome until it had long been established in the Byzantine and Gallican Churches.{29} In Gaul, as is shown by a decree of the Council of Tours in 567, a solemn fast was held on the Circumcision and the two days following it, in order to turn away the faithful from the pagan ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... later books only survive in the epitome of Xiphilinus, a Byzantine writer of the ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... 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 of his thoughts—that other mistress with whom he spent ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... another. The Sultan does not care two straws about Bulgaria now, and will do nothing in the matter except mark time. The Greek Patriarch gave us an official reception, with some Archbishops present, who represented the Churches of Asia and of the Islands, and showed us their splendid Byzantine treasures. It is extraordinarily interesting to see all the effects of St. Chrysostom; but I cannot help feeling that the Church sold the Empire to the Turks, and would have been more estimable had it lost its jewels. The last Constantine tried to reunite the Eastern and Western Churches, ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... 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 ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... there is little doubt that their models, 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 two crusades brought ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... that on their return to their own country the princes of Kieff sowed there the seeds of Christianity; for, eighty years afterward, on occasion of a conference for peace between the prince Igor and certain Byzantine ambassadors, we find mention already of a "Church of the Prophet Elias" in Kieff where the Christian Varangians swore to the observance of the treaty. Constantine Porphyrogenitus and other Greek annalists even relate that in the lifetime of Oskold there ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... 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
... good architect for the Church of S. Vincent de Paul, but in another architectural venture Marseilles has been unfortunate. She was resolved to have a cathedral, and she gave the designing of it to a man void of taste, who has built a hideous erection on the quay in what he is pleased to call Byzantine style. I am quite sure any Byzantine architect would cheerfully have jumped into the Bosphorus rather than disfigure a city with such a ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... which 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, ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... themselves as, naturally, the factors of power and the colored people as, naturally, the subject class, no factor at all. It was these two things which produced that exhibition of barbarity on the part of the South and impotence on the part of the government which make us go to Roumania and the Byzantine court for ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... 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 ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... 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, (vol. x. p. 301,) ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... 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)
... are 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. Their feet are ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... halos are golden for emperors and prophets (i.e. for mortals), and sky-blue for symbolic figures (i.e. spiritual beings); (Kondakoff, Histoire de l'An Byzantine consideree principalement dans les miniatures, vol. ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... when presenting a petition to Frederick William I, and were promptly told to get up, as "such an attitude was unworthy of a human being." Only on one occasion in the reign has an action of the Emperor's afforded ground for the suspicion that he was for a moment filled with the spirit of the Byzantine emperors—namely, when he demanded the "kotow" from the Chinese Prince Tschun, who led the "mission of atonement" to Germany. This, however, was not really the result of a Byzantine character or spirit, but of the excusable ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... held ill-omened, and not permitted to become a priest (Seneca Controv. ii. 4), a practice perpetuated in the various Christian churches. The manufacture was forbidden, to the satisfaction of Martial, by Domitian, whose edict Nero confirmed; and was restored by the Byzantine empire, which advanced eunuchs, like Eutropius and Narses, to the highest dignities of the realm. The cruel custom to the eternal disgrace of mediaeval Christianity was revived in Rome for providing the choirs ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... to public purposes. Few were completely finished: the sculptor was working at the statues that adorned their fronts; the painter was still touching the external frescoes; and the scaffold of the architect was not in every instance withdrawn. Everywhere was the hum of art and artists. The Byzantine style of many of these buildings was novel to me in its modern adaptation, yet very effective. The delicate detail of ornament contrasted admirably with the broad fronts and noble facades which they adorned. A church with two very lofty ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... use them, the magnetic needle, 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
... appear to him less rational." As regards the height of the dome, we are the gainers because he was compelled to do this. It is not, indeed, the whole of St. Paul's or its only important feature; for St. Paul's is not a Byzantine church in which the dome is practically not a part, but the whole. It is the most magnificent member of a magnificent building, and with its graceful equipoise and conscious evidence of stability stands alone and in a ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... if they partook in some way of the nature of moral questions; but any one who has observed for even twenty years knows that what the architects of twenty years ago declared the only true style of art is now scoffed at by them and their successors as hopelessly false. The cavelike forms of the Byzantine or Romanesque which superseded the wooden Gothic have in turn given way to Renaissance classic in its various forms, which now in turn seem on the point of slipping into the rococo classical of the Ecole des Beaux Arts. In painting, the violent and spotty impressionism ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... secret intrigues with the common enemy. This man draws upon himself the heavy guilt of innocent blood, which attends him to his end. For, while commanding the fleet of the allied Greeks in the Black Sea, he is inflamed with a violent passion for a Byzantine maiden. After long resistance, he at length obtains her from her parents; and she is to be delivered up to him at night. She modestly desires the servant to put out the lamp, and, while groping her way in the dark, she overturns it. Pausanias ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... restored the native beauty to his lip, "fair child, learn not from thy peevish grandam so uncourteous a lesson as hate of the foreigner. As thou growest into womanhood, know that Norman knight is sworn slave to lady fair;" and, doffing his cap, he took from it an uncut jewel, set in Byzantine filigree work. "Hold out thy lap, my child; and when thou nearest the foreigner scoffed, set this bauble in thy locks, and think kindly of William, ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... years ago. Patras is one of the most ancient towns in Greece, known even in mythical times as Aroe, the seat of King Eumelus, "rich in flocks." It became especially prominent after the reign of Augustus as a centre of commerce and industry. Its factories of silk were renowned in Byzantine times, and its commanding position attracted the Crusaders and the Venetians as a military base for the conquest of the Peloponnesus. The citadel walls that crown the hill, on the slopes of which the modern city descends amphitheatrically into the sea, are remnants of Venetian fortifications. ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... Ficino and Poggio Bracciolini. By him was founded the Vatican library, then and long after the most precious and the most extensive collection of books in the world. By him were carefully preserved the most valuable intellectual treasures which had been snatched from the wreck of the Byzantine empire. His agents were to be found everywhere, in the bazaars of the farthest East, in the monasteries of the farthest West, purchasing or copying worm-eaten parchments, on which were traced words worthy of immortality. Under his patronage were prepared accurate Latin versions ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the new civilization which surrounded it. Manufacture and commerce reappeared: the artizans 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 mediaeval civilization was reaching its moment ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... was ripe for a new Art, even more than because this or that great painter entrained it, it also had its transition period, and Holbein is set down in manuals as a transitional painter. Teutonic, too; because all Christian art is either Byzantine or Italian or Teutonic in ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... of sacred pictures placed 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, suspended by ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... decorated with the lozenge. The inner arch is carved with chevrons, and the outer with conventional foliage and medallions. The capitals are richly carved with foliage and grotesques. On the abacus and arch of this doorway occurs a leaf pattern strongly suggesting the Byzantine influence which at one time was found in Norman decoration. Here again, on the door itself, we have a fine specimen of very elaborate and characteristic Norman iron-work. The second, known as the Priors' Door, opens into the south aisle from ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Durham - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • J. E. Bygate
... the world and the main repository of the arts and 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 be called original. They were excellent at an epitome or a lexicon, and were very successful ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... Middle Ages which has survived to us, 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 this spirit was not the acquiescence or satisfaction of ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... The only "learned Jew, Josephus," that we know of is the historian of that name who lived in the first century of our era; but little has been found in his works to justify this reference. The "Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus," was a Byzantine teacher of the eleventh century who wrote a dialogue in which demons are classified according to the element in which ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... 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
... Hanseatic merchants as their maritime base for the exploitation of Swedish, Finnish, and Russian trade. Here were "peoples of divers tongues," so the old chronicles say, while the archeological finds of Byzantine, Cufic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon and German coins testify to the wide circle of trade whose radii focused at this nodal point of ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... eastward. By following the course of the Obi two versts further, he reached a picturesque little town lying on a small hill. A few churches, with Byzantine cupolas colored green and gold, stood up against the gray sky. This is Kolyvan, where the officers and people employed at Kamsk and other towns take refuge during the summer from the unhealthy climate of the Baraba. According to the latest news obtained by the Czar's courier, ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... course of the fourth and fifth centuries the native fire of Art sank, till nothing was left of it but a few dying embers, which the workmen from the East, who brought in the stiff conventionalisms of Byzantine Art, were unfit and unable ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... 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. Northern Bulgaria attained autonomy in 1878 and all of Bulgaria became independent ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... 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 it, too, when ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... affords the above details. The new feast was communicated by Proclus, patriarch of Constantinople (434-446), to Sahak, Catholicos of Armenia, about 440. The letter was betrayed to the Persian king, who accused Sahak of Greek intrigues, and deposed him. However, the Armenians, at least those within the Byzantine pale, adopted it for about thirty years, but finally abandoned it together with the decrees of Chalcedon early in the 8th century. Many writers of the period 375-450, e.g. Epiphanius, Cassian, Asterius, Basil, Chrysostom and Jerome, contrast the new feast ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... the palace belong to the Byzantine school of architecture, such domes as one sees in the mosques of Constantinople and other ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... of Syracuse move eagerly forward in response to the disdainful gesture which told him that the King remembered his existence. He was followed by two priests who bore between them on a stand of ebony a magnificent reliquary, a masterpiece of Byzantine handicraft, its gold and jewels glowing like the fires of fairyland in ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy |
