"Byzantine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pour un dogme arien Dont le pape sournois rira dans la coulisse, Pour quelque fille ayant une peau fraiche et lisse, Des yeux bleus et des mains blanches comme le lait, C'etait bon dans le temps ou l'on se querellait Pour la croix byzantine ou pour la croix latine, Et quand Pepin tenait une synode a Leptine, Et quand Rodolphe et Jean, comme deux hommes souls, Glaive au poing, s'arrachaient leurs Agnes de deux sous; Aujourd'hui, tout est mieux et les moeurs sont plus douces, Frere, on ne se met plus ainsi ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... came over artistic expression from about 1600 on implied a deeper and more vital change in the conception of art itself. Till then men had believed the things they told in their art. Byzantine saints, Cynewulf's Scriptural legends, German Heldenerzaehlungen, Icelandic Sagas, down to the saints and angels of the pre-Raphaelites, all represented realities to the poet; he would have felt no interest ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... 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
... 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 fingernails ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... 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 contempt not only of beauty, but of all natural expression. They ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... there is included much curious information and striking incident. But their main interest is in the light they throw on the gradual sinking of the splendid administrative organisation of the second century towards the sterile Chinese hierarchy of the Byzantine Empire, and the concurrent degradation of paganism, both as a political and a ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... of the Byzantine court had given to primitive Christianity a paganized form, which it had spread over all the idolatrous populations constituting the empire. There had been an amalgamation of the two parties. Christianity had modified paganism, paganism had modified Christianity. The limits of ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... finely carved doors. The greatest shrine in the Phillippines is the Cathedral, which fronts on Plaza McKinley. This is the fifth building erected on the same site, fire having destroyed the other four. The architecture is Byzantine, and the interior gives a wonderful impression of grace and spaciousness. Some of the old doors and iron grill-work of the ancient cathedrals have ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... of the aquatic 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 call it a military stratagem, ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... 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, ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... urged on by Venus, is gradually relegated to the background as a shadowy abstraction. (6) Both the youth and the maiden are extraordinarily beautiful. No attempt is made, however, to describe the points of beauty in detail, after the dry fashion of the Oriental and the later Byzantine authors. Hyperbole is used in comparing the complexion to snow, the cheeks to roses, etc; but the favorite way of picturing a youth or maiden is to compare the same to some one of the gods or goddesses who were types familiar to all through pictures ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... 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 ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... performance in English and called the opera "Irene." What a title for a grand opera! Why not "Blanche" or "Arabella"? No doubt such a thought flitted through many a careless mind unconscious that an Irene was a Byzantine Empress of the eighth century, who, by her devotion to its tenets, won beatification after death from the Greek Church. The opera failed on the Continent as well as in London, but if it had not been given a comic operetta flavor by its title and association with the name of the excellent Mr. Farnie, ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... 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 helped corrupt much ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... illuminated manuscripts. The art of decorating manuscripts is as old as Egypt; but we need not linger over the beautiful papyri, which are silent books to all but a few Egyptologists. Greece, out of all her tomes, has left us but a few ill-written papyri. Roman and early Byzantine art are represented by a "Virgil," and fragments of an "Iliad"; the drawings in the latter have been reproduced in a splendid volume (Milan 1819), and shew Greek art passing into barbarism. The illumination of MSS. was a favourite art in the later empire, and ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... yet 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 present ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... beauty, we passed the remains of an 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 on the foundations of some ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... of the Byzantine Empire, presenting with extraordinary power the siege of Constantinople, and lighting its tragedy with the warm underglow of an Oriental romance. As a play it is ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... 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 ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... before the latter date, the export of precious MSS. to Italy had been going on, and many 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 ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... discovered below them, and at no great distance, an immense city shining with a thousand colors, surmounted by a host of gilded domes, resplendent with light; a singular mixture of woods, lakes, cottages, palaces, churches, bell-towers, a town both Gothic and Byzantine, realizing all that the Eastern stories relate of the marvels of Asia. While the monasteries, flanked with towers, formed the girdle of this great city, in the center, raised on an eminence, was a strong ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... in 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 Esthonians, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... 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 of thought may not have been evolved, one from another, in succession, or from some primal, less specialized, edificial category. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... who had scarcely the wherewithal for necessary food, the sanctuary was falling into ruin. There was nothing in the interior but a simple altar of masonry, and by way of reredos one of those byzantine crucifixes still so numerous in Italy, where through the work of the artists of the time has come down to us something of the terrors which agitated the twelfth century. In general the Crucified One, frightfully ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... have a very sombre aspect; they are mainly used for offices. There is still some waste ground lying to the south of Victoria Street, in spite of the great Roman Catholic Cathedral, begun in 1895, which covers a vast area. The material is red brick with facings of stone, and the style Byzantine, the model set being the "early Christian basilica in its plenitude." The high campanile tower, which is already seen all over London, is a striking feature in a building quite dissimilar from those to which we in England are accustomed. The great entrance at the west end has an arch of ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... the Byzantine Empire divides itself into three periods strongly marked by distinct characteristics. The first commences with the reign of Leo III., the Isaurian, in 716, and terminates with that of Michael III., in 867. It comprises the whole history of the predominance of iconoclasm ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... 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 sunlight to ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... the Emperor's expressions for the year 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 ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... Masters," and a few minor chronicles in prose and verse, but not a single work deserving a place in European history. Literally the fame of a few nomad saints, and a collection of torques and brooches (of great beauty, but possible Byzantine workmanship) in the Irish Academy, are the chief grounds on which rest the claims of Ireland to ancient civilization. Yet not merely civilization, but the extreme grandeur and magnificence of Ireland in "former times," is the first postulate of all Irish discontent. It is because England has dimmed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... 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, he forgot his fanaticism in his diplomatic ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... 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 ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... captains, that were ever ready to give her the best they 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 ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... 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
... 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 to the nations that had beheld ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Byzantine Church of the sixth century was supreme. No more glorious edifice has ever been consecrated to the service of Christ than the Church of the Divine Wisdom at Constantinople; and the arts which enriched it in mosaic, marble, metals, were brought ...
— 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
... the professor, with a display of animation that surprised the others. "He must be removed to a warmer country at once. I had no idea that matters were so bad as this. Mr Burne, Mrs Dunn, I am a student much interested in a work I am writing on the Byzantine empire, and I was starting in a few days for Asia Minor. My passage was taken. But all that must be set aside, and I will stop and see to my ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... essential attribute 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 first features so strongly indicated in the ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... in November, 1882, where it was described as a “beautiful knife handle, decorated with nielli of Italian character.” It is of blue enamel, beautifully chased with an elegant filigree pattern in silver. It has also been pronounced by an authority to be Byzantine work. As being found near the ruins of Kirkstead Abbey, we might well imagine it to have hung at the girdle, or from the breast, of some sporting ecclesiastic; and to have ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... upon a foundation of personal and national greatness. Critics of Ruskin will show you that he began Modern Painters while he was yet ignorant of the classic Italians; that he wrote The Stones of Venice without realizing the full indebtedness of the Venetian to the Byzantine architecture; that he proposed to unify the various religious sects although he had no knowledge of theology; that he attempted a reconstruction of society though he had had no scientific training in political economy; but in all this neglect of mere fact the sympathetic reader ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... taste of its founder. The floor was a mosaic of multicolored stones, formed into large symmetrical designs. The walls were covered with a similar mosaic, arranged in panels, Pompeiian allegories, Byzantine compositions, frescoes of the Middle Ages. A Bacchus bestriding a cask. An emperor wearing a gold crown, a flowing beard, and holding a sword in ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... 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 to the purposes for which it is intended, it stands unique. ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... 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. ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... choir aisles is noteworthy. They are 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 painted reredos ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... 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
... imperial and diplomatic sympathy will cordially be bestowed upon any nation and cause which promises to become hostile to England (or, on a given time, to France), on Nena Sahib no less than on Abraham Lincoln. The never-discarded aim of Russia to plant its double cross on the banks of the Byzantine Bosporus, and its batteries on those of the Hellespont, and thus to transfer its centre of gravity from the secluded shores of the Baltic to the gates of the Mediterranean; the never-slumbering dread of this expansion, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... 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 Devil of Notre Dame appeared huddled up above the roofs ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... found homes for themselves in the Hebrides and all over Scotland north of glorious Loch Linnhe and the Murray frith; some made their way through the blue Mediterranean to "Micklegard," the Great City of the Byzantine Emperor, and in his service wielded their stout axes against Magyar and Saracen;[172] some found their amphibious natures better satisfied upon the islands of the Atlantic ridge,—the Orkneys, Shetlands, and Faeroes, and especially noble Iceland. There an aristocratic republic ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... 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 ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... man. The friend and protege of Archbishop Lanfranc, by whom he had been brought to England in 1070, he had as a young man been on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and doubtless profited by his travels and the opportunity afforded of inspecting some of the architectural marvels of the Romano-Byzantine engineers. Although Gundulf had rebuilt the cathedral of Rochester, to which he added the large detached belfry tower that still bears his name, built other church towers at Dartford, and St. Leonard's, West Malling (long erroneously supposed ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... instance, the Holy Families, etc., the aim is more complete realization, in 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
... 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 ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... littleness of the national character, its self-conceit, and its formality, are further instances of an effete civilization. They remind the observer vividly of the picture which history presents to us of the Byzantine Court before the taking of Constantinople; or, again, of that material retention of Christian doctrine (to use the theological word), of which Protestantism in its more orthodox exhibitions, and still more, of which the Greek schism affords the specimen. Either a state of deadness ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... pre-dynastic Egyptian art, or archaic Greek, or the Wei and 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 the coming ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... we have seen if Christianity (which was impossible) had continued in the habits of thought and feeling of the earlier Middle Ages? Byzantine icones become frightfuler and frightfuler, their theological piety perhaps sometimes relieved by odd wicked Manichean symbolism; all talent and sentiment abandoning painting, perhaps to the advantage of music, whose ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... of rhetoric, it is only sober truth to say that the persevering absorption 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 ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... well, as we drifted by: A strange old ship, with her poop built high, And with quarter-galleries wide, And a huge beaked prow, as no ships are builded now, And carvings all strange, beside: A Byzantine bark, and a ship of name and mark Long years and generations ago; Ere any mast or yard of ours was growing hard With the seasoning of long Norwegian snow. * * * * * "Down her old black side poured the water in a tide, As they toiled to get the better of a leak. We had got a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... vassals respectively they were. And so, before many months, Abu Bekr found his generals opposed by great and imposing armies on either side. He was, in fact, waging mortal combat at one and the same moment with the Kaiser and the Chosroes, the Byzantine emperor and the great king of Persia. The risk was imminent, and an appeal went forth for help to meet the danger. The battle-cry resounded from one end of Arabia to the other, and electrified the land. Levy after levy, en masse, started up at the call from every quarter of the peninsula, and the ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... Theodoric and inspirited by the fame of his success. A few years made them masters of the North Italian plain still known as Lombardy. Within three-quarters of a century they had demonstrated the hollowness of the Byzantine power. The power of their kings, whose capital was Pavia, extended on the one side into Liguria and Tuscany, on the other into Emilia and Friuli; far away in the south, behind the line of fortresses which linked Rome with Ravenna, the semi-independent dukes of Spoleto and Benevento ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... comparison of the piece of Byzantine sculpture, Fig. 20, with the more elaborate treatment of foliage shown in Fig. 21, from late Gothic capitals, in Southwell Minster, it will be seen how an increasing desire for imitative resemblance has taken the place of a patterned foundation, and how, in consequence, the ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... them, partly because human emotions must have something to attach themselves to, they are said to be developing a fierce local patriotism, and West Bromwich is said to hate Aston as the Blues hated the Greens in the Byzantine theatre. In London, largely under the influence of the Birmingham instance, twenty-nine new boroughs were created in 1899, with names—at least in the case of the City of Westminster—deliberately selected ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... 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
... their churches, its halls of justice 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 world, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... history knows, it was within this territory that the Macedon of Philip and Alexander was situated, their capital being not far from the present city of Saloniki. Then came the great eastern Roman Empire, which later developed into the Byzantine Empire, whose inhabitants were the degenerated descendants of the ancient Greeks. Western Rome was constantly threatened by the northern barbarian tribes, so the Greek emperors of Byzantium were in perpetual ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... degenerated from century to 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 qualities. Finally every figure ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... represented here, more or less favorably, all the great masters, the pride of royal galleries. But the most remarkable thing in this collection is the very numerous and very complete collection of the primitive painters of all countries and all schools, from the Byzantine down to those which immediately precede the Renaissance. The old German school, so little known in France, and on many accounts so curious, is to be studied to better advantage here than anywhere else. A rotunda contains tapestries after designs ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... destroyed by Constantine.] and the Oriental tone and standard established by these two emperors, though disturbed a little by the plain and military bearing of Julian, and one or two more emperors of the same breeding, finally re-established itself with undisputed sway in the Byzantine court. ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... 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, is still there. ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... 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 ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... was renamed Dumbarton Oaks, a museum was built as a wing on the west to house a library and a collection of Byzantine and pre-Christian material, and in 1940 the estate was given by Mr. and Mrs. Bliss to Harvard University, with the exception of the part along the stream at the back, which was donated to the District of Columbia as a park. The Dumbarton Oaks Conference which led to ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... through political intrigue, a French army, raised to take part in the fourth crusade for the rescue of Jerusalem from the Mohammedans, joined with a Venetian army in an attack on Constantinople, then a Christian city, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. The city fell, but later was recovered. Then, on April 12, 1204, the invaders secured it again, and subjected it to a despoilment without parallel. Delacroix's picture portrays a scene in this despoilment. One of the invading barons, attended by his escort, rides on to a terrace, ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... give style of building, using words Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Modern, etc., ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... pause. 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
... as in prayer, his hands clasped, his expression rapt. A landscape is seen at the back. The Virgin Surrounded by Virgins, by an unknown master of the fifteenth century (school of Bruges), is one of the most amazing pictures in the collection. It has a nuance of the Byzantine and of the hieratic, but the portraits are enchanting in their crystalline quality. Quentin Matsys' Legend of St. Anne is much admired, though for sincerity we prefer The Passion of the Master of Oultremont. Gerard David's Adoration of the Magi is no longer attributed to him. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... 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 onward ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... understand, and when the creative age was succeeded by the age of criticism and Alexandria began to take the place of Athens as the centre of culture for the Hellenistic world, Homeric dictionaries and glossaries seem to have been constantly published. Indeed, Athenaeus tells us of a wonderful Byzantine blue-stocking, a precieuse from the Propontis, who wrote a long hexameter poem, called Mnemosyne, full of ingenious commentaries on difficulties in Homer, and in fact, it is evident that, as far as the language is concerned, such a phrase as 'Homeric simplicity' would have rather ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... on the Porta Marina: "Hic Antenoridae Corcyrae prima Melanae fundamenta locant." The early Greek geographers include it in the territory of Narenta or Liburnia. From Augustus to Heraclius (642 A.D.) it was Roman or Byzantine, and from that date till 998 Narentine. From the victory of Orseolo II. till 1100 it was Venetian, when the Genoese possessed it for twenty-eight years. In 1128 the Venetians, under Popone Zorzi, took it again, and it remained ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... the pipe 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 mistress with whom he spent so many ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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 ...
— Aesop's Fables - A New Revised Version From Original Sources • Aesop
... also, that I meant him to be ugly—as ugly as any creature can well be. In time, I hope to show you prettier things—peacocks and kingfishers,—butterflies and flowers, on grounds of gold, and the like, as they were in Byzantine work. I shall expect you, in right use of your aesthetic faculties, to like those better than what I show you to-day. But it is now a question of method only; and if you will look, after the lecture, first at the mere white relief, and then see how much may be gained by ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... 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
... of Fiesole were held, it gradually grew from a huddle of booths to a town, and then to a city, which absorbed its ancestral neighbor and became a cradle for the arts, the letters, the science, and the commerce[2] of modern Europe. For her Cimabue wrought, who infused Byzantine formalism with a suggestion of nature and feeling; for her the Pisani, who divined at least, if they could not conjure with it, the secret of Greek supremacy in sculpture; for her the marvellous boy Ghiberti proved that unity of composition and grace of figure and drapery were never beyond the reach ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... naturally, the subject class, no factor at all. It was these two things which produced that exhibition of barbarity on the part of the South and impotence on the part of the government which make us go to Roumania and the Byzantine ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... altogether the glories of Nicomedia. Metrophanes, bishop of Byzantium, was detained by old age and sickness, but Alexander, his presbyter, himself seventy years of age, was there with a little secretary of the name of Paul, not more than twelve years old, one of the readers and collectors of the Byzantine Church. Alexander had already corresponded with his namesake on the Arian controversy, and was apparently attached firmly ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... each main branch (as represented in the general branch structure shown at b, Fig. 18, p. 68), we shall have the form Fig. 42. This I consider the perfect general type of tree structure; and it is curiously connected with certain forms of Greek, Byzantine, and Gothic ornamentation, into the discussion of which, however, we must not enter here. It will be observed, that both in Figs. 41 and 42 all the branches so spring from the main stem as very ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... able to drive away the defenders of the walls by missiles. He succeeded in driving the citizens of this strong town into the city, and it would have shared the fate of Olynthus, had it not been relieved by the Byzantine and Grecian mercenaries. Philip was baffled, after a siege of three months, and turned his forces against Byzantium, but this town was also relieved by the Athenians, and the inhabitants from the islands of the AEgean. These operations lasted six mouths, and were the greatest ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... 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
... dress altogether such as might befit a bride. Below, on the same wall, was a figure of a pope in his robes, with the name "S[e][s] Urbanus" painted at the side: and close to this figure, a large head of the Saviour, of the Byzantine type, with a glory in the form of a Greek cross. The character of the paintings showed that they were of comparatively late date, probably not earlier than the sixth century, and obviously executed at a time when the chapel was frequented by worshippers, and before the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... "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, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... in Italy, or no sculptures carved. The tradition of the arts survived, like the tradition of Latin poetry, with the same result, that rude works were produced in the early churches and convents. But there was no life in those things; and when, after a long time, after the early Crusades, Byzantine artists came to Italy, their productions were even worse than those of the still ignorant Italians, because they were infinitely more pretentious, with their gildings and conventionalities and expressionless types, and were not really so near the truth. What I mean is that the revival ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... founded the Vatican library, then and long after the most precious and the most extensive collection of books in the world. By him were carefully preserved the most valuable intellectual treasures which had been snatched from the wreck of the Byzantine empire. His agents were to be found everywhere, in the bazaars of the farthest East, in the monasteries of the farthest West, purchasing or copying worm-eaten parchments, on which were traced words worthy of immortality. Under his patronage were prepared ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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
... domes on the palace belong to the Byzantine school of architecture, such domes as one sees in the mosques of Constantinople ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... covered with writing, lay before him, headed, "The Byzantine Poets." The books were all in Greek. It was the library of ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... to determine which is the Catholic Church; whether it is the body which possesses and administers Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, or the bodies claiming to represent purer and finer or more authentic and authoritative forms of Catholic teaching which have erected that new Byzantine-looking cathedral in Westminster, or Whitfield's Tabernacle in the Tottenham Court Road, or a hundred or so other organized and independent bodies. It is still more perplexing to settle upon the Catholic Church ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... 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 seemed at enmity with them. The sky was ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... no longer paints Those "squint-eyed Byzantine saints" Mr. ORROCK so disparages. Martyrdoms and Cana Marriages Over-stock our great Art Gallery, Giving ground for ORROCK'S raillery. Scenes in desert dim, or dun stable, Than Green English lanes by CONSTABLE ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... was built in the Byzantine style and presented, from the broad carriage drive that led from the road, a confusion of roofs, windows and bastions, as though the designer had left the working out of his plan to fifty different architects, ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... national forms that illustrated its rise and fall. Egypt, India, China, Assyria, Greece, Etruria, and Rome, would stand each by itself as a component part of a great whole: so with Christianity, in such shapes as have already taken foothold in history, the Latin, Byzantine, Lombard, Mediaeval, Renaissant, and Protestant art, subdivided into its diversified schools or leading ideas, all graphically arranged so as to demonstrate, amid the infinite varieties of humanity, a divine unity of origin and design, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... interesting book. There is not a dull page in it. It is made up of various lectures delivered by the accomplished author, at different times, on the Greek language and history. Magnificent as Gibbon's work is on the Byzantine Empire, the contemptuous tone he uses toward it has much misled modern writers and readers in their estimation of that wonderful monarchy. A state which lasted as that did in the face of so many difficulties, could not have been so badly governed as Gibbon implies. That Dr. ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... 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 ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... 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 ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... collection of Byzantine ivories, you would consider that they were an important link in the ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Mesopotamia, Africa, or Spain, 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 ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... 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 ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... 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 promulgation of the higher culture, the effete and already discredited ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... the chain of the High Alps and the peaks of La Salette," said he to himself; "that huge white hotel, that church coloured with dirty yellow lime-wash, vaguely Byzantine and vaguely Romanesque in its architecture, and that little cell with the plaster Christ nailed to a flat black wooden Cross—that tiny Sanctuary plainly white-washed, and so small that one could ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans |
