Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Light tanning. Plates bright and vivid. Year 1960. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> The aim of both Roman and Renaissance art was to carry visual experience to the utmost limits of an illusionary reality. Nature therefore was closely followed and was intensified only in the sense of an idealization meant to emphasize the sublime the beautiful and the divine. The art of the Byzantine civilization on the contrary was not concerned with re-creating the concrete image of living form but sought rather to penetrate the infinite. In the materialistic secularized western world saints and celestial beings were distinguished from ordinary mortals only by outward symbols such as halos wings or the attributes of their martyrdom. Byzantine masters conveyed holiness by their spiritualized attitude and by their interpretation of the inner being as well as through these outer symbols. That Byzantine art was not concerned with the visible world but with a spiritual and visionary one accounts for its strong emotional appeal today. The spirit of Classical and pre-Classical Antiquity and of the iconography of Early Christian art of the Near East as well as traces of the earlier style of these countries are all incorporated within this art. And through this synthesis a new style emerged. (SP)