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#7460
tmbergan
Participant

Stylistically, the Byzantine art definitely shifted away from the realistic and structured forms of art that we had seen in the Greco-Roman pieces. Rather than having sculptures, they started to produce more paintings and mosaics that reverted back to being simpler and almost cartoony. For example, the Virgin of Vladimir shows that painted faces no longer have ideal ratios, instead, they start to elongate the nose and face of the adults and don’t really have a youthful look to them. Their artwork also begins to show a larger variety of different important figures to their faith as well as an actual face for Jesus, which wasn’t seen as often in the previous Christian artworks. An interesting thing that I saw is that the Byzantines were struggling through different crises during their time period, and at one point split the empire in two with their religion. A lot of their pieces almost seem to mimic this with their mosaics, which, as we saw, are images made up of smaller fragments of different materials. It could be nothing, but it was definitely an interesting little detail I noticed.