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Byzantine   Listen
noun
Byzantine, Byzant  n.  (Numis.) A gold coin, so called from being coined at Byzantium. See Bezant.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Byzantine" Quotes from Famous Books



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

... has spoken of the "Byzantinism" of Henry's reign, and possibly the objection to female sovereigns was strengthened by the prevalent respect for Roman imperial and Byzantine custom (cf. Hodgkin, Charles ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard

... "magnorum artificum frangebat pocula miles, ut phaleris gauderet equus," than when her walls flashed with the marble and the gold, "nec cessabat luxuria id agere, ut quam plurimum incendiis perdat." Better the state of religion in Italy, before Giotto had broken on one barbarism of the Byzantine schools, than when the painter of the Last Judgment, and the sculptor of the Perseus, sat revelling side by side. It appears to me that a rude symbol is oftener more efficient than a refined one in touching the heart, and that as pictures rise in rank as works of art, they are regarded ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin

... field of such magnitude that we may divide it conveniently into periods or countries or controversies. Books on the Council of Trent engage the attentions of some, others are attracted by the history of the Waldenses or the Byzantine Churches. Some again specialise in the writings of certain great characters, such as Bonaventura, Augustine, or Erasmus. A 'Bibliotheca Erasmiana, ou Repertoire des Oeuvres d'Erasme' appeared at Ghent in 1893 and was followed four years later by a new edition. ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan

... which have greatly occupied people's minds in many modern readings of philosophy; it makes as much difference between the modern and the earlier landscape art as there is between the roughly outlined masks of a Byzantine mosaic and a portrait by Reynolds or Romney. Of this new landscape sense the poetry of Wordsworth is the elementary and central exposition; he is more exclusively occupied with its development than any other poet. Wordsworth's own character, as ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater

... authority of de Goeje in adhering to my own original opinion that the word Mukaukas is not to be regarded as a name but as a title, since the Arab writers to which I have made reference apply it to the responsible representatives of the Byzantine Emperor in antagonism to the Moslem power. I was unfortunately unable to make further use of Karabacek's researches ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... council who 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. ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... 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

... like. The last person lectured on 'The Minor Satellites of Jupiter,' and the one who comes after me is doing 'The Architecture of the Byzantine Period,' so I can take ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne

... The old Byzantine pulpit still occupies its original position at San Luis Rey, but the sounding-board is gone—no one knows whither. This is of a type commonly found in Continental churches, the corbel with its conical sides harmonizing ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James

... of the Ancien Regime, unless they happened, as they sometimes did, to be the head of the state. Without going back to the semi-mythical Semiramis, we should glance at the characters of Cleopatra and certain Byzantine usurpresses, and with a look askance at the two empresses of Russia, should arrive at her late imperial majesty of China. The poor, bad Isabella of Spain would concern us no more than the great, good Victoria of England, for ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... 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 the trappings of religion.... the ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells

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

... 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, by ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... Then Aaron looked up into Lilly's face. It was dark and remote-seeming. It was like a Byzantine eikon at the moment. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence

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

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

... into the nineteenth century, as the scourge and the terror of all those who, during those ages, desired to "pass upon the seas on their lawful occasions." The capture of Granada was separated from the fall of the Byzantine Empire by a period of thirty-nine years, as it was in the year 1453 that Constantinople was captured by the Caliph Mahomet II. Byzantium fell, and perhaps nothing in the records of that Empire became it so well ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey

... Koraés Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language, Literature, and History in ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... 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

... Alexandria, about 180 or 200 B.C., so that it may be inferred that other kinds of organs were then in existence. Aldhelm, an Anglo-Saxon writer, mentions that organs were used in England at the end of the seventh and the beginning of the eighth century. The Byzantine emperor, Constantine VI., sent an organ to Pepin, the father of Charlemagne, about the year 757. In 812, Charlemagne had another one built in the same way. This is related by Eginhard, who was Charlemagne's secretary. In 880, Pope John VIII. had an organ from Germany, and an expert player ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... soon grew into a fixed disapproval of statues, and favored only the lesser works of art. Ivory-carving, which long before had been brought from the East by the Greeks, now came into special favor, and the Byzantine artists devoted all their talent to making beautiful works of this sort. The most important of these carvings which remains is in the cathedral of Ravenna. It is the episcopal chair or cathedra of Maximianus, and was made between 546 and 552 ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement

... Ercole after the conclusion of the peace of Bagnolo. Now its ancient walls, dating as far back as the year 900, had been freshly decorated with frescoes, and the long arcades and loggias, with their massive pillars and Byzantine capitals of grey marble, were enriched with shields carved with the unicorns and lilies of the house of Este. Within, the spacious halls were lavishly adorned with gilding and variegated marble, with fine pictures and the painted cassoni and chairs which we still admire on ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright

... of the 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 festivities of ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles

... Altai mountains, where they were employed by their masters in working iron 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... lady at the feet 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 may come to ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France

... 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 ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... at Roncevaux), and Ogier, and other great and beloved names; though the authoress, who was an untiring picker-up of scraps of information, has actually consulted (at least she quotes) Sainte-Palaye; there is no faintest flavour of anything really Carlovingian or Byzantine or Oriental about the book, and the whole treatment is in the pre-historical-novel style. Indeed the writer of the Veillees was altogether of the veille—the day just expired—or of the transitional and half-understood ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... 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 ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... 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

... you have been circumventing me half unconsciously into answering a question which has silently been insinuated by you." Freedom of communication, unfettered movement of thought, there can be none under such a ritual, which tends violently to a Byzantine, or even to a Chinese result of freezing, as it were, all natural and healthy play of the faculties under the petrific mace of absolute ceremonial and fixed precedent. For it will hardly be objected, that the privileged condition of a few official councillors and state ministers, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... Chesterle-Street, where Guthrun, 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

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

... notions were to reach England soon enough. Already there were germinating in southern Europe ideas out of which the completer notions were to spring. As early as the close of the ninth century certain Byzantine traditions were being introduced into the West. There were legends of men who had made written compacts with the Devil, men whom he promised to assist in this world in return for their souls in the next.[2] ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein

... known. The term "Greek Empire" expresses the fact that the state became more and more Greek in character, owing to the loss, first of the western provinces in the fifth century, and then of Syria and Egypt in the seventh century. Another term— "Byzantine Empire"—appropriately describes the condition of the state in still later times, when its possessions were reduced to Constantinople (ancient Byzantium) and the territory in the neighborhood of that city. But through all this period the rulers at Constantinople regarded themselves as the ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER

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

... he was always 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 ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland

... Roman power, Corsica shared the fate of the other territories in the Mediterranean attached to the eastern empire. Seized by the Vandals under Genseric, despotically governed by the Byzantine emperors, pillaged by Saracen corsairs, protected by Charlemagne, and, on the fall of his empire, parcelled out, like the rest of Europe, among a host of feudal barons, mostly of foreign extraction—who, from their rock-girt towers, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... 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 ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood

... of paper, covered with writing, lay before him, headed, "The Byzantine Poets." The books were all in Greek. It was the ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille

... Egyptians, such a fire in every temple; while the Mexicans, Natches, Peruvians and Mayas kept their "national fires" burning upon great pyramids. Eventually the keeping of such fires became a sacred rite, and the "Eternal Lamps" kept burning in synagogues and in Byzantine and Catholic churches may be ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini

... 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

... on the little terrace near 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 ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... literature of the day; and, fascinating as is the pomp and commanding march 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 ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... superior persons who may consider that Japanese architecture has no claim to be regarded as art. These persons have no conception of art in architecture unless it be Doric, Gothic, Byzantine, Early English, or something of the kind, and unless it be expressed in bricks and mortar. Now Japanese architecture is only wood, but though only wood, as regards its majestic beauty, seemliness, and adaptability ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery

... ceremonial of the state dinner, the fifteen, twenty and thirty beings busy around the king's plates and glasses, the sacramental utterances of the occasion, the procession of the retinue, the arrival of "la nef" "l'essai des plats," all as if in a Byzantine or Chinese court.[2146] On Sundays the entire public, the public in general, is admitted, and this is called the "grand couvert," as complex and as solemn as a high mass. Accordingly to eat, to drink, to get up, to go to bed, is to a descendant of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... the Armenians, and finally of the Arabs. The Byzantines themselves, unlike the inhabitants of western Europe, did not ignore the literature of old Greece; the Greek language became the regular speech of the Byzantine people, and their writers made a strenuous effort to perpetuate the idiom and style of the classical period. Naturally they also made transcriptions of the classical authors, and thus a great mass of literature was preserved, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... against her, that may still be read in a thousand pamphlets. These imputed depravities far surpass anything that John Knox ever said against Mary Stuart, or that Juvenal has recorded against Messalina; and, perhaps, for the only parallel we must look to the hideous stories of the Byzantine secretary against Theodora, the too famous empress of Justinian and the persecutor of Belisarius. We have to remember that all the revolutionary portraits are distorted by furious passion, and that Marie Antoinette may no more deserve to be compared ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley

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

... 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

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

... lay on top of it. Instead of a mirror, there was on the mantelpiece a pyramid-shaped whatnot, displaying on its shelves an entire collection of curiosities, old silver trumpets, Bohemian horns, jewelled clasps, jade studs, enamels, grotesque figures in china, and a little Byzantine virgin with a vermilion ape; and all this was mingled in a golden twilight with the bluish shade of the carpet, the mother-of-pearl reflections of the foot-stools, and the tawny hue of the walls covered with maroon leather. In the corners, on little pedestals, there were bronze vases containing ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert

... 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 ...
— The Religious Spirit of the Slavs (1916) - Sermons On Subjects Suggested By The War, Third Series • Nikolaj Velimirovic

... form is that given by early Byzantine artists, of a very formal and conventional character. Christ is in the mandorla, from which five rays of glory proceed. These five rays touch the prophets at His side, and the disciples, all three crouching low at His feet. We see Giotto scarcely emerging ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton

... 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

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

... 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 survivals of ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

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

... T'ang masterpieces,[1] or those early Japanese works of which I had the luck to see a few superb examples (especially two wooden Bodhisattvas) at the Shepherd's Bush Exhibition in 1910, or whether, coming nearer home, we consider the primitive Byzantine art of the sixth century and its primitive developments amongst the Western barbarians, or, turning far afield, we consider that mysterious and majestic art that flourished in Central and South America before ...
— Art • Clive Bell

... the time 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 ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue

... 1240-1302, "ends the long Byzantine succession in Italy. . . . In him 'the spirit of the years to come' is decidedly manifest; but he never entirely succeeded in casting off the hereditary Byzantine asceticism."—Heaton. Giotto was his pupil. Ghiberti: Lorenzo Ghiberti, the great Florentine sculptor, 1381-1455; his famous ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... 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 ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey

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

... southern wall, facing South Gardens, the Tower of Jewels, by Thomas Hastings, of Carrere & Hastings, New York. Developed from Italian Renaissance architecture, with Byzantine modifications, and designed to suggest an Aztec tower; 433 feet high; original intention to ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry

... of criticism has given us the opportunity to reach a comprehension of the most peculiar formulas. Our culture is sufficiently broad to allow us to perceive the beauty of an Egyptian fresco or an Assyrian bas-relief as well as of a Byzantine mosaic or a painting of the Renaissance. We have therefore no excuse for remaining inaccessible to the art of the Far East and we have surely all the mental vigor that is requisite in order to accustom ourselves to the foreign nature of its presentation. It ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci

... arrogance, obstinacy, and secret intrigues with the enemies of his country. 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, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... 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 hour on the hour, ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price

... 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 liberties ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... Emperor of the Byzantine realm, Justinian, drives up in a chariot drawn by four horses. He enters the temple attended by the Patriarch of Constantinople. The building is as large as a market-place, and the beautiful dome, round ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin

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

... penetrate the galleries; I had no heart to urge my 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 not silent. He talked ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington

... collapse was known to all the Legations which were exceedingly anxious about the possibility of a soldiers' revolt in the capital. The arrival of a first detachment of the savage hordes of General Chang Hsun added Byzantine touches to a picture already lurid with a sickened ruler and the Mephistophelian figure of that ruler's ame damnee, the Secretary Liang Shih-yi, vainly striving to transmute paper into silver, and find the wherewithal to prevent a sack of the capital. ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... his beard had come, the Tyanean was dead, and he found himself in straits; for the personal attractions which might once have been a resource were diminished. He now formed great designs, which he imparted to a Byzantine chronicler of the strolling competitive order, a man of still worse character than himself, called, I believe, Cocconas. The pair went about living on occult pretensions, shearing 'fat-heads,' as they describe ordinary ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata

... 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]

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

... 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 of Titians and Tintorets ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... Greek epigram 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 ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus

... 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 ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... passing fashion of modern thought there is something stiff, scholastic, archaic, rigid, and even Byzantine, about the words "truth," "beauty," "goodness," thus pedestalled side by side. But just as with the old-fashioned word "matter" and the old-fashioned word "soul," we must not be misled by a mere "superstition of ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... scene of this kind is in St. Mark's Place, which has a night-time glory indescribable, won from the light of uncounted lamps upon its architectural groups. The superb Imperial Palace—the sculptured, arcaded, and pillared Procuratie—the Byzantine magic and splendor of the church—will it all be there when you come again to-morrow night? The unfathomable heaven above seems part of the place, for I think it is never so tenderly blue over any other spot of earth. And when the sky is blurred with clouds, shall not the Piazza vanish with ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... servants 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 summer my friends have Italian villas—like the Watermans, on the ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey

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

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

... 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 softly-blended colours, ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys

... 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 sickly existence. During this Byzantine Period ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott

... to us are of the portrait style, and are of Byzantine or Greek origin. They were brought to Rome and the western empire from Constantinople (the ancient Byzantium), the capital of the eastern empire, where a new school of Christian art had developed ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll

... were engaged henceforward in struggles with each other. At this time the entire plain between the Amanus and the Euphrates was covered with rich cities, of which the sites are represented to-day by only a few wretched villages or by heaps of ruins. Arabian and Byzantine remains sometimes crown the summit of the latter, but as soon as we reach the lower strata we find in more or less abundance the ruins of buildings of the Greek or Persian period, and beneath these those belonging to a still earlier ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... 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

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

... King and on his lips as he saw the new-made archbishop 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 ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... Black Sea is a short distance. Soon the existence of an organised Slavic State became known in Constantinople. This meant a new field for the zealous missionaries of the Christian faith. Byzantine monks followed the Dnieper on their way northward and soon reached the heart of Russia. They found the people worshipping strange gods who were supposed to dwell in woods and rivers and in mountain caves. They ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... appreciation, that faculty in which the French have always been, and still are, unrivalled. Its syntheses were based on elements already in combination. It originated nothing. It was eclectic at the outset. Compared with the slow and suave evolution of Italian art, in whose earliest dawn its borrowed Byzantine painting served as a stimulus and suggestion to original views of natural material rather than as a model for imitation and modification, the painting that sprang into existence, Minerva-like, in full armor, at Fontainebleau ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... 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 ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes

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

... dogs, tied at intervals to long heavy poles, lie panting in the sun, snapping viciously at the flies and mosquitoes which disturb their rest. In the centre of the village, facing the west, stands, in all the glory of Kamchatko-Byzantine architecture, red paint, and glittering domes, the omnipresent Greek church, contrasting strangely with the rude log houses and conical balagans over which it extends the spiritual protection of its resplendent golden cross. It is built generally of carefully hewn logs, painted ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan

... 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

... executed Engravings (taken from some of the best authorities now remaining) the peculiar features, and general characteristics of Decorative Art, as applied to the various materials on which it was employed, whether for sacred or domestic purposes, from the Byzantine, or early Christian period, to the decline of ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.19 • Various

... seeming 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 ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... Porphyrogene: from Greek words meaning "purple" and "begotten," hence, born in the purple, royal. This term, or "porphyrogenitus," was applied in the Byzantine empire to children of the monarch born after his accession to the throne. It is not clear whether the word is used here as a descriptive adjective or as ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill

... and the Medea in the house of Castor and Pollux, recalling the masterpiece of Timomachos the Byzantine are the only two Pompeian pictures which reproduce well-known paintings; but let us not, for that reason, conclude that the others are original. The painters of the little city were neither creators nor copyists, but very free imitators, varying familiar ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier

... was a long process which began at least as early as the age of Alexander and continued until the fall of the Western Roman Empire and afterwards, until, indeed, the decadent classical art was utterly supplanted by the art which we call Romanesque and Byzantine, and which seems to us now at its best to be as great as any ...
— Progress and History • Various

... operates to make female letters good which operated at one period to make the diction of Roman ladies more pure than that of orators or professional cultivators of the Roman language—and which, at another period, in the Byzantine court, operated to preserve the purity of the mother idiom within the nurseries and the female drawing rooms of the palace, whilst it was corrupted in the forensic standards and the academic—in the standards of the pulpit ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... prince, what king, what potentate of any denomination, to break the universal calm, that through centuries continued to lave, as with the quiet undulations of summer lakes, the sacred footsteps of the Caesarean throne? The Byzantine court, which, merely as the inheritor of some fragments from that august throne, was drunk with excess of pride, surrounded itself with elaborate expressions of a grandeur beyond what mortal eyes were ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... 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, ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon

... grave that was marked with a cross like this?" he demanded; and stooping, he traced a Byzantine cross ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... churches have many points of similarity, although entirely different in plan. San Miniato was referred to in the article upon the Byzantine-Romanesque doorways of Southern Italy in our February number, and Fergusson's classification of Byzantine-Romanesque was, for the time being, adopted for lack of better authority. Later writers have, however, generally agreed ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 05, May 1895 - Two Florentine Pavements • Various

... destined 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 have ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... however sad, are indeed eternal and inspired. For they have proved true, and will prove true to the end, of every despotism of the East, or empire formed on Eastern principles; of the old Persian Empire, of the Roman, of the Byzantine, of those of Hairoun Alraschid and of Aurungzebe, of those Turkish and Chinese- Tartar empires whose dominion is decaying before our very eyes. Of all these the wise man's words are true. They are vanity ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... which Jesus attached to himself, and the character which all the first Christians attributed to him.[3] Until the great day, he will sit at the right hand of God, as his Metathronos, his first minister, and his future avenger.[4] The superhuman Christ of the Byzantine apsides, seated as judge of the world, in the midst of the apostles in the same rank with him, and superior to the angels who only assist and serve, is the exact representation of that conception of the "Son of man," of which we find ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan

... of them, is not older than the middle of the sixth century.[3] At this period we see them traversing the Danube in large multitudes, and settling on both the banks of that river. From that time they appear frequently in the accounts of the Byzantine historians, under the different appellations of the Slavi, Sarmatae,[4] Antae, Vandales, Veneti, and Vendes, mostly as involved in the wars of the two Roman empires, sometimes as allies, sometimes as conquerors; oftener, notwithstanding their acknowledged valour ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson

... town gradually evacuated. Barclay de Tolly prepared to follow their example. At sunrise Davout entered without difficulty into Smolensk in flames. The women and children, collected in the ancient Byzantine cathedral, seemed the mere remnant of a wretched population. Many men had fled; and the bridge, which joined both banks, being cut, the Russian army had started before us on the road to Moscow, without any possibility of our at once pursuing ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt

... heads high and ten centuries old, which almost made me become a Mariolatrist on the spot. She stands leaning up the bend with two pale hands lifted in ghostly blessing. Underfoot the floor is all mosaic, mountainous with age and earthquakes; the architecture classic in the grip of Byzantine Christianity, which is like the spirit of God moving on the face of the waters, or Ezekiel ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous

... measure of the risk Italy has faced in undertaking this war for an idea. With a Latin lucidity she has counted every risk, and with a Latin idealism she has taken her place by the side of those who fight for a liberal civilisation against a Byzantine imperialism. ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells

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

... 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 class by itself amongst the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock

... himself with a novel form of sovereignty, the only precedent which suggested itself for his adoption was the domination of the Emperors of Rome. To parody a common quotation, he became "aut Caesar aut nullus." Either he pretended to the full prerogative of the Byzantine Emperor, or he had no political status whatever. In our own age, when a new dynasty is desirous of obliterating the prescriptive title of a deposed line of sovereigns, it takes its designation from the people, instead of the territory. Thus we have Emperors and Kings of the ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine

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

... 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, ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn

... Catholicism on a firm basis in the Western lands of the Empire, the power of the papal see, when Rome was reconquered by the imperial forces from Constantinople, seemed to sink to the lowest depths. The papacy under Vigilius (537-55) and Pelagius (555-60) was the servant of the Byzantine Caesars. The history of the controversies in which each pope was engaged, the scandal of their elections, there is no need to relate here. Suffice it to say that the decisions of the Fifth General Council were in no way the work of either, ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton

... heard of the new "Everyman's Library," projected by that benefactor of bookmen, Mr. J.M. Dent, my first impassioned act was to sit down and write a postcard to my bookseller ordering George Finlay's "The Byzantine Empire," a work which has waited sixty years for popular recognition. So that I cannot be said to be really antagonistic ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett

... Bible. No music of another country is such a true mirror of a nation's racial character, life, passion, blood, struggle, despair and agony, as the Russian. One can almost see in its turbulent-lugubrious or buoyant-hilarious chords the rich colors of the Byzantine style, the half Oriental atmosphere that surrounds everything with ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy

... 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 apples count ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... the 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, and teaching ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various

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

... 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various

... went to the Alcazar (El-Kasr), or Palace of the Moorish Kings. We entered by a long passage, with round arches on either side, resting on twin pillars, placed at right angles to the line of the arch, as one sees both in Saracenic and Byzantine structures. Finally, old Bailli brought us into a dull, deserted court-yard, where we were surprised by the sight of an entire Moorish facade, with its pointed arches, its projecting roof, its ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... on being the first nation to formally adopt Christianity (early 4th century). Despite periods of autonomy, over the centuries Armenia came under the sway of various empires including the Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Persian, and Ottoman. During World War I in the western portion of Armenia, Ottoman Turkey instituted a policy of forced resettlement coupled with other harsh practices that resulted in an estimated 1 ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... new scenes here and there, so that as a whole it is his own creation. In this work Moussorgsky went against the foreign classic opera in conception as well as in construction. It is a typically Russian music-drama, with all the richness of Slavic colors, true Byzantine atmosphere and characters of the medieval ages. Based on Russian history of about the middle of the seventeenth century, when an adventurous regent ascends the throne and when the court is full of intrigues, its theme stands apart ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... obviously far beyond the powers of a small peasant state, most of whose present leaders were born under a foreign yoke. Nor is Greece a serious candidate for the vacant post. The Greeks, of course, unlike the Bulgarians, have a definite claim, based on the traditions of the Byzantine Empire, and there is a large Greek population in the city—at present close upon 350,000, though their numbers are likely to be materially reduced before this war is over. But in their case also Constantinople would be a fatal gift. The resources ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... throws out such names for them as Cimabue, Ghirlandaio, Giottino, a crucifixion painted on a banner, Giottesque, if not Giotto, but unique, or nearly so, on account of the linen material, and a little Virgin by a Byzantine master. The curious thing is that two angel pictures, for which he had given a scudo last year, prove to have been each sawn off the sides of the Ghirlandaio, so called, representing the 'Eterno Padre' clothed in a mystical garment and encircled by a rainbow, the various tints of which, together ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... had to 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 at the many splendid things that surrounded her: at ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... Indeed, this desire for a brilliant finish pervades the neighborhood. The Johnson Building on Broad Street (to choose one out of the many) is sober and discreet in design for a dozen stories, but bursts at its top into a Byzantine colonnade. Why? ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory

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

... 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 Raoul, the only gift she had ever made him, as an emblem of ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... 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: ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett

... 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 of his thoughts—that other ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... S. from Smallford Station, G.N.R.) is an ecclesiastical parish. The brick church (1844) is in Byzantine style; it has an apsidal chancel, and small N. porch and tower. The new West Herts County Asylum ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins

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

... jewelry, and what not; and then you discovered that in the panels of the cabinets were painted series of allegorical heads on a gold background; and then perhaps you stumbled on a painted glass window where no window should be. It was a splendid blaze of color, no doubt. One began to dream of Byzantine emperors, and Moorish conquerors, and Constantinople gilt domes. But then—mark the dramatic effect!—away in the blaze of the farther chamber appears a solemn, slim, bowed figure, dressed all in black—the black velvet coat seemed even blacker ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black

... Mohammedanism afterwards, which was the natural reformation and revolution from Christian image-worship—Christianity, in a natural succession, and by fortuitous circumstances, took possession of the executive, and placed on the seat of power a Christian Byzantine emperor in lieu of a pagan. Basilicas, dedicated to Jupiter, Mercury, Adonis, Venus and the deities of High Olympus, were re-dedicated to God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary, and the other saints ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran

... 'let alone,' and that the precincts of Falaise are certainly of them. These century-wide contrasts and concussions, jar so terribly sometimes, that we are half-inclined to ask with M. de Tocqueville, whether we do not seem to be on the eve of a new Byzantine era, in which 'little men shall discuss and ape the deeds which great men did in their forefathers' days.'[39] The refrain in this nineteenth century is, 'still the showman, still the spectator,' until we become almost tired of the song. 'Here some noble act was ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn

... current etiquette.[1922] Form was especially sought after under the old monarchies, Egyptian and Assyrian.[1923] The exaggerated Oriental court etiquette, introduced into Roman life as early as the time of Diocletian, was maintained and developed under the Byzantine emperors.[1924] These usages may have affected the growth of the Greek and Roman Church liturgies.[1925] In modern China, under the imperial government, divine worship was substantially identical in form with the worship ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

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

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



Words linked to "Byzantine" :   complex, Asiatic, Byzantine Empire, knotty, Asian, Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium, convoluted, Eastern Orthodox Church, tortuous, Byzantine architecture, tangled



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