"Byzantine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... service, the Sultan gave to Etrogruhl a large piece of territory, and he became the chief of a clan in this beautiful tract of land, which was all his own, bordering on the Byzantine Empire (as it was then called), and almost within sight of the Bosphorus and ...
— The Great Round World And What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 22, April 8, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... 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 ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... 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 in the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... any woman who has ever touched lyre or blown through reed since the days of the great AEolian poetess. But Sappho, who, to the antique world was a pillar of flame, is to us but a pillar of shadow. Of her poems, burnt with other most precious work by Byzantine Emperor and by Roman Pope, only a few fragments remain. Possibly they lie mouldering in the scented darkness of an Egyptian tomb, clasped in the withered hands of some long-dead lover. Some Greek monk at Athos may even now be poring over an ancient manuscript, ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... after mere tradition had died out,—for instance, in the Byzantine and early Italian pictures from the eighth to the middle of the thirteenth century,—presents the strongest contrast to all that had gone before. The morose and lifeless monotony or barbarous rudeness of these figures seems like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... the Ambrosian chant is evident if we look at the following; and we must also bear in mind that the Ambrosian chants were very simple in comparison with the florid tours de force of the Byzantine church: ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... 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 ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... theatre—a really fine edifice, in truth—the interior and exterior arrangement of which combined every style of architecture. It was at once Byzantine, Roman, Gothic, Renaissance, with semicircular doors, Pointed windows, Flamboyant rose-windows, fantastic bell-turrets,—in a word, a specimen of all sorts, half a Parthenon, half a Parisian Grand Cafe. Nor was this surprising, the theatre having been commenced under ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... up the life of the mind in the sense in which it is a vital part of the life of the community. Will the life of the mind in this sense be helped or hindered by Socialism? And will there still be a sufficient spur to progress to prevent a condition of Byzantine immobility? ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... and embraced the Mohammedan faith, an example which many Mongols followed. The converts proved trusty warriors to fight the cause of Islam, which gradually attained the zenith of success. On May 29, 1453, Constantinople was captured by the Turks, and an end was made of the Byzantine Empire. Eastern Europe was subsequently overrun by them, and it was not until John Sobieski defeated the Turks under the walls of Vienna in 1683 that their ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... the golden background of a cherished Byzantine picture, memory held untarnished every tint and outline of that blessed day, when she and her father had looked for the last time on the sunny sea they ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... and Genoese, and throughout the world's history no point possessed a more constant and unchangeable attraction from its geographical position and natural advantages than the island of Cyprus, which in turn was occupied by Phoenicians, Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Romans, Byzantine rulers, Saracens, Byzantine rulers again, English, Lusignans, Venetians, Turks, and ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... 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 ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 05, May 1895 - Two Florentine Pavements • Various
... 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 light on this extraordinary event, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... the fortune of his House to be the subject of dispute from first to last. Some writers have endeavoured to trace its descent back to the Caesars of Rome, others to the Byzantine Emperors; one genealogical explorer has tracked the family to Majorca, and, altering its name to Bonpart, has discovered its progenitor in the Man of the Iron Mask; while the Duchesse d'Abrantes, voyaging eastwards in quest ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Western Empire with Rome at its head declined and fell, while the Eastern Empire with Constantinople as its capital grew great. But it grew into a Greek Empire. Even very clever people cannot tell the exact date at which the Roman Empire came to an end and the Greek or Byzantine Empire, as it is called, began. So we need not trouble about that. All that is needful for us to understand now it that Constantinople was a Christian city, a Greek city, and a treasure-house of Greek learning ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... with a specimen of mediaeval carving which is a long delight to the few archaeologists who find their way to the almost forgotten village of Carennac. The composition, which fills the tympan of the scarcely-pointed arch, represents Christ surrounded by the twelve Apostles. The influence of Byzantine art is perceptible in the treatment. Very few such masterpieces of twelfth-century carving have been so well preserved as this. The seated figure of Christ in the act of blessing His Apostles, the right hand upraised, the left resting upon a clasped ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... autocracy has now reached its Byzantine period of decadence. During the Middle Ages Catholicism suited the Latin races very well on the whole. Their ancestral paganism was allowed to remain substantially unchanged—the nomina, but not the numina ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... speak to kings and princes as few men have spoken to them, and pour out his inmost convictions before those whom he revered and loved. But at Berlin, though he might have learnt to bow and to smile and to use Byzantine phraseology, his voice faltered and was drowned by noisy declaimers; the diamond was buried in a heap of beads, and his rays could not shine forth where there was no heavenly ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... between these two classic and decadent extremes. Decadence suggests to us going down, falling, decay. If we walk down a real hill we do not feel that we commit a more wicked act than when we walked up it....Roman architecture is classic to become in its Byzantine developments completely decadent, and St. Mark's is the perfected type of decadence in art. ... We have to recognize that decadence is an aesthetic and not a moral conception. The power of words is great but they need not befool us. ... We ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... of heresy and schism and Paganism, and Christianity was installed by violence throughout the Empire. In the Eastern Roman Empire things were even worse. Violence became the customary device in the seething religious quarrels of the time, and, literally, tens of thousands lost their lives. The Byzantine or Greek Christianity entered upon a record of crime and violence which ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... are precious stones, and portraits, with inscriptions in Greek capital letters. These portraits and inscriptions seem to me to be perfect, but barbarous, specimens of Byzantine art. Around the whole are the titles of the Four Gospels in coeval capital letters. The general effect of this first side of the book-cover, or binding, is perfect—for antiquarian genuineness and costliness. The other side of the binding contains representations ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... date until well 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 as that last tremendous struggle; and when on ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... 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 anger of a man whose innocent ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... accompanied by the symbolic animal, usually assigned to him, occupy nearly the whole of their respective pages. They are taken from Byzantine models, of which, as Westwood points out, nothing remains but the attitudes, the fashion of the dress and the form of the seats. There can be little doubt that these illuminations were copied from a MS. brought into England by the missionaries sent from Rome ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... dispute the invention of point or needle-made lace. The Italians probably derived the art of needle-work from the Greeks who took refuge in Italy during the troubles of the Lower Empire. Its origin was undoubtedly Byzantine, as the places which were in constant intercourse with the Greek Empire were the cities where point-lace was earliest made. The traditions of the Low Countries also ascribe it to an Eastern origin, assigning the introduction of lace-making to the Crusaders ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... he said, "is perhaps the gem of the whole collection. It is Byzantine, and is of wonderfully delicate workmanship." The filigree gold ornament, was a long and slender pendant, of intricate gold work and studded with tiny jewels. It was one of a pair of earrings, and they wondered where its mate might be, if indeed, it ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... 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 spirit for wretched ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... of inconsistencies which may illustrate different aspects of the infinite, but it rarely tries to cramp the divine within the limits of a logical phrase. Attempts to explain how the divine and human nature were combined in Christ convulsed the Byzantine Empire and have fettered succeeding generations with their stiff formulae. It would be rash to say that the ocean of Hindu theological literature contains no speculations about the incarnations of Vishnu similar to the views of the Nestorians, Monophysites and Catholics, but if such ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... This is the same which is called, according to locality, climate, and races, Lombard, Saxon, or Byzantine. There are four sister and parallel architectures, each having its special character, but derived from the same origin, the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... over the city and to helmet-shaped Lycabettos. The wind, too fond of the Attic Plain, was blowing, not wildly, but with sufficient force to send the dust whirling in light clouds over the pale houses and the little Byzantine churches. Long and narrow rivulets of dust marked the positions of the few roads which stretched out along the plain. The darkness of the groves which sheltered the course of the Kephisos contrasted strongly with the flying pallors and ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... about their own disappointment. And similarly even those who are truly irritated by the unfamiliar fashions of worship in a place like Jerusalem, do not know how to discover what is interesting in the very existence of what is irritating. For instance, they talk of Byzantine decay or barbaric delusion, and they generally go away with an impression that the ritual and symbolism is something dating from the Dark Ages. But if they would really note the details of their surroundings, ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... 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, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... 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 Anthologia, lib. i. ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... 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 ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... Byzantine Empire lasted until A.D. 1453. In the West, however, the last Roman Emperor had been deposed by Odoacer in 476. Italy had fallen into the hands of the East Goths and Lombards successively. The Visigoths had established their dominion in Spain, and the Franks and Burgundians ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... unhappily make matters worse; they tend only to multiply the echoes of 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... 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 an unreasoned manifestation of the belief in truth as the supreme necessity ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... of platinum 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 ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... find that he has looked at the stars and knows Lord Kelvin's theory of vortices and the nebular hypothesis and the direction of ocean currents and the qualities of kelp and the direction the codfish go in Iceland waters when the northeast wind blows; that he knows about Gothic architecture and Byzantine painting, the social movement in Jerez and the exports of Patagonia, the wall-paper of Paris apartment houses and the red paste with which countesses polish their ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... their cathedrals, its tongue the only language understood of the gods. It is unthinkable that a people who were already in the twelfth century the possessors of a marvellous decadent art in the painting of the Byzantine school, who, finding again the statues of the gods, created in the thirteenth century a new art of painting, a Christian art that was the child of imperial Rome as well as of the Christian Church, who re-established sculpture and produced the only sculptor of the first rank in the modern ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... sympathetically responded to his excitement. She had never even noticed 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 Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... 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 you find ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... 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. By the ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... sixty-five feet front by one hundred and twenty deep; but as the books arrived before this was completed they were placed temporarily in a hired house in Bond Street. The new building, which was opened January 9, 1854, was in the Byzantine style, after the design by Alexander Saeltzer, the lower story being of brownstone and the two upper stories of red brick. The main hall or library-room, beginning on the second floor, was carried up through two stories ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... comparative rank in literature which it enjoys at present. Then the numberless prose romances which occupy the present generation of readers will, perhaps, be collected in some immense corpus, like the Byzantine historians, will be reckoned among the curiosities of literature, and will at least have the merit of making the study of antiquities easy and interesting. There ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... 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 the monasteries and other religious places, their curative properties increased ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... his course in nearly every possible position, that music is made almost more of a mathematical problem than the free expression of emotions and aesthetics. "Correct" music has now hardly more liberty than Egyptian sculpture or Byzantine painting once had. Certain dissonances are permitted, and certain others, no more dissonant, forbidden, quite arbitrarily, or on hair-splitting theories. It is as if one should write down in a book a number of charts, giving every scheme of color and every juxtaposition of values permissible to ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... the social scale which an ordinary education enables its possessor to reach. But is one next to read through the sixty and odd folio volumes of the Bollandist Lives of the Saints, and the new edition of the Byzantine historians, and the State Trials, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Moreri, and the Statutes at large, and the Gentleman's Magazine from the beginning, each separately, and in succession? Such a course of reading would certainly ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... comes in with the Roman round arch its allied forms of spandril and vault, lunette and medallion, presenting new spaces for the surface designer, and new suggestions of ornamental line (see illustration, p. 117[f069]). It is noticeable how, with the round-arched architecture under Roman, Byzantine (see illustration, p. 118[f070]), and Renaissance forms, the scroll form of ornament developed, the reason being, I think, that it gave the necessary element of recurring line, whether used in the horizontal frieze in association with round arches, or in spandrils ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... 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 from the Ottoman Empire in 1908. Having fought on ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... 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.' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... for him. Indeed, it may be said that he takes from others even his religion, clothes, language, customs; there is hardly anything which is Turkish and not borrowed. The religion is Arabic; the language half Arabic and Persian; the literature almost entirely imitative; the art Persian or Byzantine; the costumes, in the Upper Classes and Army mostly European. There is nothing characteristic in manufacture or commerce, except an aversion to such pursuits. In fact, all occupations, except agriculture and military service are distasteful ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... they carried with them the religion, the poetry, and the laws of their race, and on this desolate volcanic island they kept these records unchanged for hundreds of years, while other Teutonic nations gradually became affected by their intercourse with Roman and Byzantine Christianity." These records, carefully collected by Saemund the learned, form the Elder Edda, the most precious relic of ancient Northern literature, without which we should know comparatively little of ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... that their minds reached beyond the Koran into the wider ranges of knowledge, a fact which tempered their fanatical zeal, but the Seljuk Turks swept forward with their armies until they conquered the Byzantine Empire of the East, the last branch of the great Roman Empire. They had also conquered Jerusalem and {320} taken possession of the holy sepulchre, to which pilgrimages of Christians were made annually, and aroused the righteous indignation of the Christians of ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... goods. The religion is Roman Catholic; education is now compulsory. The Gothic kingdom of Italy was founded on the ruins of the Roman Empire, A.D. 489. In succession the country was conquered by the forces of the Byzantine Empire, by the Lombards, and by the Franks. From the 11th century onwards its history has been one of constant internal strife and confusion. The presence of the papal power in Rome, the rise of such rich trading republics as the cities of Milan, Florence, Naples, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... strike a responsive thrill from his exacting nerves. 'Considering within himself, he realised that a work of art, in order to attract him, must come to him with that quality of strangeness demanded by Edgar Poe; but he fared yet further along this route, and sought for all the Byzantine flora of the brain, for complicated deliquescences of style; he required a troubling indecision over which he could muse, fashioning it after his will to more of vagueness or of solid form, according to the state of his mind at the moment. He delighted ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... between la France and l'empire, the latter of which was, by conquest, to be gradually extended over the whole of Europe, and to be raised by him above that of Germany, in the same manner that the western Roman-Germanic empire had formerly been raised by Charlemagne above the eastern Byzantine one. ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... these increasing demands for ancient documents of any kind spread over Europe and portions of Asia, bringing into Florence a great quantity of them, as well as many scholars and copyists. Shiploads of the works of the Byzantine historians arrived from the Golden Horn, and the city became a vast manufactory for duplicating or forging ancient MSS. Parchment and vellum were too costly to employ very much, so most of them were of paper. Vespaciano, one of the many engaged in this business and who lived in 1464, found it ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... a generic category of thought. Egyptian, Grecian, Byzantine, and Gothic buildings are well-marked species, of which each individual building of the sort is a material embodiment. Now, the question is, whether these categories or ideas may not have been evolved, one from another in succession, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... certain decay of the Jewish Empire. And his words, 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 and vexation of spirit. That which is crooked cannot be made straight, ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... brought smoking hot from the nasty eating-houses. It is worth while to be acquainted with the two kinds of sauce. The simple consists of sweet oil; which it will be proper to mix with rich wine and pickle, but with no other pickle than that by which the Byzantine jar has been tainted. When this, mingled with shredded herbs, has boiled, and sprinkled with Corycian saffron, has stood, you shall over and above add what the pressed berry of the Venafran olive yields. The Tiburtian yield to the Picenian ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... me. He had the loveliest set of Byzantine mosaics and pearls which he wished to give me; and when I would not accept them he seemed so hurt that I did not like to refuse this trifle. What do ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... over the French monarch, that he himself was the author of some of the works published for the use of his son. In the first (published by Lerch and Reisch at Leipsic, in 1751) he described the ceremonial of the Byzantine court; the second (published by Banduri, in his Imperium Orientale) is a geographical survey of the provinces, or, as he calls them, the Themata of the empire; the third, which some ascribe to the emperor Leo, his father, describes the prevailing system of military tactics; ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... of Rome and the rise of Constantinople these forms underwent in the East another transformation, called the Byzantine, in the development of Christian domical church architecture. In the North and West, meanwhile, under the growing institutions of the papacy and of the monastic orders and the emergence of a feudal civilization out of the chaos of the Dark Ages, the constant preoccupation ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... end of the fourteenth century it became known in Florence that Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1350-1415), a Byzantine of noble birth, a teacher of rhetoric and philosophy at Constantinople, and the most accomplished Greek scholar of his age, had arrived in Venice as an envoy from the Eastern Emperor. Florentine scholars visited him, and on his return accompanied him to Constantinople to learn Greek. In 1396 ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... history, Russia was for a long time deprived of any relations with civilized Europe. The necessity of concentrating all her strength on fighting the Mongolians laid the corner-stone of a sort of semi-Asiatic political autocracy. Besides, the influence of the Byzantine clergy made the nation hostile to the ideas and science of the Occident, which were represented as heresies incompatible with the orthodox faith. However, when she finally threw off the Mongolian yoke, and when she found herself face to face with Europe, Russia was led to ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... vigorous culture, of such rapid and astonishing growth, which seemed to conquer though it was scarcely born: that civilisation created by the religious enthusiasm of the Prophet, who had assimilated all that was best in Judaism and in Byzantine civilisation, carrying along with it also the great Indian traditions, fragments from Persia and much from mysterious China. It was the Orient entering into Europe, not as the Assyrian monarchs into Greece, which repelled them ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... of the original Exodus from China and the retrogressive Exodus from Russia. With respect to the designation adopted for the Russian Emperor, either it is built upon some confusion between him and the Byzantine Caesars, as though the former, being of the same religion with the latter (and occupying in part the same longitudes, though in different latitudes), might be considered as his modern successor; or else it refers simply to the Greek form of Christianity professed ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... Christian times, under the reign of Constantine, a certain Sopater suffered death at Constantinople on a charge of binding the winds by magic, because it happened that the corn-ships of Egypt and Syria were detained afar off by calms or head-winds, to the rage and disappointment of the hungry Byzantine rabble. Finnish wizards used to sell wind to storm-stayed mariners. The wind was enclosed in three knots; if they undid the first knot, a moderate wind sprang up; if the second, it blew half a gale; if the third, a hurricane. Indeed the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... 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 ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... there to the south beyond Naples, on the flat strip of miserably cultivated soil between the Apennines and the Mediterranean. But they are too far gone in ruin and decay to speak with so living a voice of sadness as does this old Byzantine church. The human element is at Paestum too far away,—too utterly dead and forgotten. In St. Apollinare life still lingers. Life, flickering in its last spark, like the twinkling of a lamp which the next moment will extinguish, ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... 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 ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... to state, that prior to this publication of M. Mezeriac, the life of AEsop was from the pen of Maximus Planudes, a monk of Constantinople, who was sent on an embassy to Venice by the Byzantine Emperor Andronicus the elder, and who wrote in the early part of the fourteenth century. His life was prefixed to all the early editions of these fables, and was republished as late as 1727 by Archdeacon Croxall as the introduction to his edition of AEsop. This life ...
— Aesop's Fables - A New Revised Version From Original Sources • Aesop
... 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
... felt the 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 reds, nor ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • 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 ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... 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 ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... Suspension Bridge in all its simple beauty, and see the Soapworks and the Mall on the hither and further shore. Our course led, not through serpentine canals and past Doges' palaces, gaudy with the lavish adornments of tricky Byzantine architecture; nor could we expect to see "lions" as historical as those which ornament the facade of Saint Mark's. However, as we glided up against the tide, in slow but steady progress, by willowy banks and osiered eyots, ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... 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 ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... 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 ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... 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 ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... passionately interesting and grew every day more Byzantine; for the Russian Government itself showed clear signs of dislocation, and the orders of Lamsdorf and de Witte were reversed when applied in Manchuria. Historians and students should have no sympathies or antipathies, but Adams had private reasons for wishing ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... get in the coming years a practical submergence of that morality which we believe to be distinctively American, and get throughout the older hemisphere a type of society based upon authority, reproducing it may be some features of past civilizations, Mongol, Asiatic, or Byzantine. If that were to happen, if Europe were really to become a mere glorified form of, say, certain Asiatic conceptions that we all thought had had their day, why, then, of course America could not escape a like transformation of outlook, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... adjacent to the gateway is a two-storied guest-house, opening from a cloister (C). The inner court is surrounded by a cloister (EE), from which open the monks' cells (II). In the centre of this court stands the catholicon or conventual church, a square building with an apse of the cruciform domical Byzantine type, approached by a domed narthex. In front of the church stands a marble fountain (F), covered by a dome supported on columns. Opening from the western side of the cloister, but actually standing in the outer court, is the refectory ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... gracious towards her. In truth, I have found great pleasure and profit in her works, and was glad to hear her say that she liked mine. We talked about art, and she showed us a picture leaning up against the wall of the room; a quaint old Byzantine painting, with a gilded background, and two stiff figures (our Saviour and St. Catherine) standing shyly at a sacred distance from one another, and going through the marriage ceremony. There was a ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... birth of a new organism, capable of 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 with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... 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 forerunner of ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... 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 kill a man ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... specimens of the marble were submitted to a London expert. As I was now bent on going, his verdict, though not very favorable, did nothing whatever to discourage me. What mainly occupied my mind were thoughts of an island which was unknown to ordinary tourists, the history of which united the sway of Byzantine emperors with that of crusading kings, of Venetian doges and subsequently of Moslem dynasties, where the mountains were crowned with castles almost lost in clouds; where the walls of the marine fortress in which Othello ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... Hurl's expression; but inasmuch as artistic endeavor shows that same lack of originality which was characteristic of all other forms of intellectual activity at this time, the germ took root but slowly, and for a number of centuries servile imitations of the highly decorated and decidedly soulless Byzantine Virgins were very common. One of these paintings may be found in almost every church throughout the length and breadth of Italy; but when you have seen one you have seen them all, for they all have the same expression. The eyes are generally large and ill shaped, the nose is long, the face ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... treatises on stones, which were collections of every possible fancy and "old-wife's tale," about animals, plants, and minerals, mixed up with Greek and Arabic legends and the mystical, medical lore of the "Physiologus"—that Byzantine cyclopaedia of "wisdom while you wait"—deliberately discarded all attempt to set down the truth; they simply gave that up as a bad job, and recorded every strange story, property and "application" ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... The colouring, though it has a gold background, is not rich, for the gold is pale, even to a straw colour, and the pattern on it rather gives it a straw texture. We presume it is meant to represent the dry Byzantine style of colouring, purposely avoiding the richer colours; as power is lost, by this adoption, it is impossible to give either the tones or colours of nature—there is no transparency. To preserve ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... policy of the Persian Court, and their study would draw us away too far. We have noticed only the chief events of its history, without stopping to gather any instruction from facts. Let it suffice to say that the same causes made the Arabs victorious over the Byzantine emperor and the Persian Shah-in-Shah, and that these causes were the weakness and exhaustion of the national dynasties in the presence of the vital elements of the conquerors. The people suffered from the carelessness of their kings; individual energy was powerless against the ...
— Les Parsis • D. Menant
... of Filippo Lippi's school, and Leonardo was thirty, before Raphael was born; the printing press had reached England, and Greek had been re-discovered, in the last years of the previous "period"; the Byzantine Empire had fallen; the power of the old Baronage in England and France had been broken before Richard fell on Bosworth field. There were Lollards at home and Hussites abroad before Luther came into the world. The changes did not begin ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... ancestors suffered, a most terrible instance of the child's game outliving the serious performance of that which it represented. The frontier of the Armenian kingdom had been destroyed by one of the Christian Byzantine emperors, thus enabling the Seljouck Turks to pass through the Armenian kingdom, and deal out to the unoffending Asiatic Christians the terrors of pillage by firing their peaceful homesteads. England, France, and Germany have a modification ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... of our greatest treasures were already safe in the hands of scholars when the crash came. Nor is it possible, I believe, to show that between 1204 and 1453 many authors whose works no longer exist were read in Byzantine circles. That there was destruction of books in 1453 is no doubt true; but within a very few years the Turks had learned that money was to be made of them, and the sale and export went on at a ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... acqueduct, and ascended the hill The ruins of the church occupy the eastern summit. Part of them have been converted into a mosque, which the Christian foot is not allowed to profane. The church, which is in the Byzantine style, is apparently of the time of the Crusaders. It had originally a central and two side-aisles, covered with groined Gothic vaults. The sanctuary is semi-circular, with a row of small arches, supported by double pillars. The church rests ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... marble as if it were snow, and their perfect works in architecture and sculpture seemed things of course, not more difficult than the completion of a new ship at the Medford yards, or new mills at Lowell. These things are in course, and may be taken for granted. The Roman legion, Byzantine legislation, English trade, the saloons of Versailles, the cafes of Paris, the steam-mill, steamboat, steam-coach, may all be seen in perspective; the town-meeting, the ballot-box, the newspaper ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... did not make the world, or the smallest wheel or cog of it? What if, for want of obeying the laws of nature, parents bred up neither a genius nor an athlete, but only an incapable unhappy personage, with a huge upright forehead, like that of a Byzantine Greek, filled with some sort of pap instead of brains, and tempted alternately to fanaticism and strong drink? We must, in the great majority of cases, have the CORPUS SANEM if we want the MENTEM SANEM; and healthy bodies are the only trustworthy organs for healthy minds. Which is ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... Philip was already a master of Latin, writing it with an elegance worthy of Niccolo the Florentine. At fourteen he entered the college of Robert of Sorbonne, but found little charm in its scholastic pedantry. But in the capital he learned the Greek tongue from a Byzantine, the elder Lascaris, and copied with his own hand a great part of Plato and Aristotle. His thirst grew with every draught of the new vintage. To Pavia he went and sat at the feet of Lorenzo Vallo. The company of Pico della Mirandola at Florence sealed ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... square as seen from the exterior, but prove to be apsidal on entering. At the end of the south choir aisle, forming a reredos to the side altar, an ancient Saxon Rood will be seen; the Figure is sculptured in an archaic Byzantine style. The Jacobean altar in the north choir aisle was once in the chancel and had above it those old-fashioned wooden panels of the Lord's Prayer and Ten Commandments that may still be met with occasionally. When these were removed an ancient ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... history and 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 is in the realm of painting ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci
... the Byzantine Greeks in warfare, first against the Saracens at the siege of Constantinople in 673 A. D. Therefore an anachronism in this poem. Liquid fire was, however, known to the ancients, as Assyrian bas-reliefs ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... habits of the people of Prague, of Bohemia generally, I am reminded of accounts by Byzantine chroniclers, reporters and travellers who described Slavs they had met or heard of. This would be some time ago, say sixth or seventh century. These Slavs had a wonderful idea of lying in ambush—I cannot ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... Koraés Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language, Literature, and History in the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... 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 Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... in any occupation. He commands his armies in person. He has won distinction as a writer and a public speaker. He is an excellent shot. He has composed music, written verses, superintended the production of a ballet, painted a picture; the beautiful Byzantine chapel in the Castle of Posen shows his genius for architecture; and, clothed in a clergyman's surplice, he has preached a sermon in Jerusalem. What ruler in all history has exhibited ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... 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. ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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 ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... 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 ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... to lose the moony Tennysonian sensuousness which induced, with Lowell's vigorous imagination, the blank artificiality of style which was visible in several of his early poems. There was a tendency, too, to the Byzantine liberty of gilding the bronze of our common words, a palpable longing after the ississimus of Latin adjectives, of whose softness our muscular and variegated language will not admit. Mr. Lowell's Sonnets, too, we could wish unwritten, not from any defect in their construction, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 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 ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... was no way of acquiring the unknown tongue. But the second generation of Humanists sat at the feet of Byzantine masters. The first was Chrysoloras, who was sent to Italy on a political mission and settled in 1397 as a teacher of his own language at Florence. When he died, at the council of Constance, there were Italian scholars who could read Greek MSS. As teachers were scarce, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... awakening out of this hypnotic complacency. Naturally, there were men in the entourage of the German Emperor whose pride kept them from making too large an offering to the throne, but as a rule their suffering in the Byzantine atmosphere of Germany was greater than their enjoyment. I always considered that the greatest sycophants were not those living at court, but generals, admirals, professors, officials, representatives of the people and men of learning—people ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... the Byzantine empire, and the cognate tribes who dwelt nearer the Danube, like the Moravians, had long been in sore need of a Slavonic translation of the Scriptures and the Church books, since they understood neither Greek nor Latin; and ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... its fine 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
... the real arch spring from a point above the impost and building the lower portion of it vertical, as shown in Fig. 98. This device of stilting the smaller arches to raise their crowns to the level of those of the larger arches was in constant use in Byzantine and early Romanesque architecture, in the kind of manner shown in the sketch, Fig. 99; and a very clumsy and makeshift method of dealing with the problem it is; but something of the kind was inevitable as long as nothing but the round arch was available for covering contiguous spaces of different ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... breaking 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 the dying day, like the strange, spectral smile that only sheds its cold, supernatural light on lips twelve hours dead, Salome's fair face and graceful pose was as softly defined against the western sky as some nimbussed saint or madonna on the golden background of old Byzantine pictures. Her small straw hat, wreathed with scarlet poppies, lay at her feet; and around her shoulders she had closely folded a bright plaid flannel cloak, which tinted her complexion with its ruddy hues, as firelight flushes the olive portraits that ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... steps lending to the fortress, there is a glorious prospect before him. Prague, with its spires and towers, lies in the valley below, through which curves the Moldau with its green islands, disappearing among the hills which enclose the city on every side. The fantastic Byzantine architecture of many of the churches and towers, gives the city a peculiar oriental appearance; it seems to have been transported from the hills of Syria. Its streets are full of palaces, fallen and dwelt in now by the poorer classes. Its famous University, which once boasted forty ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... men prowling about their 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 the first or second century. Plutarch, for example, relates, concerning ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... an almost grotesque arrangement of coiffure should adorn the head of a man in modern evening dress. It should have been on some Byzantine saint. However, there he was, and entirely unconcerned at the effect ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... and incorporation of all this ceaseless torrent of heterogenous elements into one united, stable, industrious, and pacific State is an achievement that neither the Roman Empire nor the Roman Church, neither Byzantine Empire nor Russian, not Charles the Great nor Charles the Fifth nor Napoleon ever rivaled ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... mind that the wars described separately by Procopius overlapped one another in time, and that while the Romans were striving to hold back the Persian aggressor they were also maintaining armies in Africa and in Italy. In fact the Byzantine empire was making a supreme effort to re-establish the old boundaries, and to reclaim the territories lost to the barbarian nations. The emperor Justinian was fired by the ambition to make the Roman Empire once more a world power, ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... fresh from fountains old, Hellenic inspiration, pure and deep: Strange treasures of Byzantine hoards unroll'd, And mouldering volumes from monastic sleep, Reclad with life by more than magic art: Till that old world renew'd His youth, and in the past ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave |
