by Gary C. Gibson

Created on: July 11, 2008   Last Updated: January 14, 2009

Byzantine artwork and artists were not as liberal by quite a lot as the Romans before them. They had no tradition of Republicanism and were always an Empire. They did not have thousands and thousands of life color painted marble statues as did the Romans and there writers were never as good as those of Romans such as Julius Caesar, Cicero and others not to mention the biting satires of Juvenal. The Romans were not as skillful of artists as the Hellenic Greeks obviously, yet neither did the Byzantines leave anything for history such as the Odyssey or the Iliad, 'The Secret History' written by Procopius and published after his death is one of the diminished number of quality books of the era comparison to those that were produced in the prior two mentioned civilizations. The Byzantines labored under fear of imperial repression and the dual threat of the assaults of Mohammedan invaders for hundreds of years. Iconoclasm in Byzantium was probably an indirect result of the Muhammadan rule against making of 'engraved' images.

Arnold Toynbee, the last great world historian, said of the Byzantine Civilization it had minimal art but was full of bureaucrats. Treadgold's history of the Byzantine Empire is remarkably deficient in citations of great Byzantine artists because there were so few or none. Compared to the Greek civilization before it the Byzantine is horrendous, worse than the Yankees without Roger Clemens or other former Boston pitchers (including Babe Ruth). Byzantine art in writing was also terrible for its lack of creativity and productivity. You won't find a Sophocles or Aeschylus, a Homer or a Phidias amidst the Byzantine's roster of artists. The Byzantine civilization was a retreating rump state of the former unified Roman Empire that best served the world by keeping the heathen at bay for another 900 years after the fall of Rome.

Some have divided the eras of sparse Byzantine art into the period after its foundation by Constantine, the era of the Emperor Justinian and the later period. Carved ivory dyptches date from the era of Constantine, and beautiful mosaics from the later eras including those of the Haggia Sophia some of which survived the Turkish invasion and occupation of the Byzantine Empire.
Illuminated or painted pictures in books manuscripts were created in the early Byzantine empire. A first fully painted codex of the Bible made in the 6th century a.d. comprising fragments of the Septuagint version of the Bible still exists. The (Vienna, sterreichische

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