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Csayreswoody, maybe both of these eras like to show gathering groups conversing with one another because that’s how they spread the word of their religion. Or maybe it could be showing the togetherness of the people like you would see in a church? Just some ideas for why this seems so common in their artwork.
The Medieval Era seemed to be a lot more heavily influenced by Byzantine art rather than Classical art. We saw a lot of depictions of Christ and angels in both Byzantine and Medieval artworks, and none of which were made out to be like a “graven image’ like we would have seen during the classical period. Golds and other bright colors are used to highlight little details and values as we see in the Book of Kells, and in the Jewelry of Queen Arnegunde, we see that medieval and Byzantine may have traded jewelry and other works of art with one another which may emphasize the similarities they shared.
Tamara, interesting catch that they don’t have much art representing living people. The fact that they were trying to push more Christianity over Pagan religious views would definitely explain why there’s so much more artwork telling the stories and meaning of the newer religion.
Jessi, the artists having to create everything in secret would definitely have a huge impact on how much time and effort they can put into each piece, so it makes a lot of sense that they would start to lose focus in details and proportions as we saw in the Greco-Roman artwork. Imagine how the sculptures we previously saw might look if they had to make all of those in secret like the Byzantines did. Great post!
Bob, you brought up a great point that I completely missed this week — there are no depictions of everyday life during the Byzantine Era. It’s mostly all religious pieces with no signs on how their life was like outside of their new beliefs. This is a huge difference from all the other eras we’ve looked at!
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.
Elkingkade, I really like your post because it makes a lot of sense. The Byzantine Empire seemed to go through a rough religious change which would’ve likely made it a lot more difficult to completely grasp the concepts of Christianity and the commandments. Thanks for your post!
In last week’s discussion we saw that the Christian artwork avoided trying to depict a god or anything that could be considered a “false idol,’ but this week, we almost see the opposite. The Byzantine art seemed a lot more interested in showing Jesus and other religious figures that could very easily be seen as idols of worship if you didn’t have an understanding of their stories or meanings. I feel like the Byzantine artwork starts to break the second commandment in that sense. On the Virgin of Vladimir, it says that a lot of the images weren’t considered graven images because they brought people “closer’ to their faith, but it still seems odd that there would be such a big increase in depictions of more religious figures than we saw in the Christian and Jewish artwork.
Tamara, this is an interesting perspective. It still seems confusing since it would seem like the Byzantine art is placing more emphasis on figures like Mary, but they don’t consider it a graven image. But it looks like a lot of people are struggling with this concept as well.
Bob, I like your take on the bull! It’s definitely a creative way to try and recreate it. Is there anything you wish you would’ve done differently while you were working on it or were you pretty happy with it throughout the entire process? Was Procreate pretty easy to navigate or did it get a little frustrating?
Aubri, nice catch! Christ is definitely shown in a way that would’ve been used to depict Greek scholars. You listed a lot of great similarities between the different cultures’ artwork.
Bob, that’s a great piece to use as an example since it does have so many parts that you can examine and find their similarities. I like that you pointed out the Christian adoption of harvesting wheat and grapes — we can definitely see the continuation as the cultures and religions evolved.
We see a ton of Roman influence in the art that we looked at this week, as most pieces have at least one similar aspect to them. One example that stood out was the sculpture of the shepherd boy, as it shows the same ideal, youthful body that we had seen in Roman sculptures. Not only do they use the same body style, but they also use similar curly hair on the piece. There was also signs of their influence in the synagogues (more specifically, the Synagogue at Dura-Europos) where they had visual narratives on the walls around the room as we saw in a couple of examples during our week studying Roman art, as well as the same columns that we saw in a lot of Roman structures.
Lucas, it’s really interesting that there’s usually no actual depictions of the Christian God when so many other religions show theirs. It does make them stand out more because their God (at least in the beginning) doesn’t have a face.
