"Byzantine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... brought smoking hot from the nasty eating-houses. It is worth while to be acquainted with the two kinds of sauce. The simple consists of sweet oil; which it will be proper to mix with rich wine and pickle, but with no other pickle than that by which the Byzantine jar has been tainted. When this, mingled with shredded herbs, has boiled, and sprinkled with Corycian saffron, has stood, you shall over and above add what the pressed berry of the Venafran olive yields. The Tiburtian ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... makes up the life of the mind in the sense in which it is a vital part of the life of the community. Will the life of the mind in this sense be helped or hindered by Socialism? And will there still be a sufficient spur to progress to prevent a condition of Byzantine immobility? ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... roof"—and I laughed, contentedly. "Meanwhile, about that ring—it should be, I think, a heavy, Byzantine ring, with the stones sunk deep in the dull gold. Yes, we'll have six stones in it; say, R, a ruby; O, an opal; B, a beryl; E, an emerald; R, a ruby again, I suppose; and T, a topaz. Elena, that's the very ring I mean to buy as soon as I've had breakfast, tomorrow, as a token of my ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... Charles and Philip bought masterpieces, and cared Jittle for the crude efforts of the awkward pencils of the necessary men who came before Raphael. There is not a Perugino in Madrid. There is nothing Byzantine, no trace of Renaissance; nothing of the patient work of the early Flemings,—the art of Flanders comes blazing in with the full splendor of Rubens and Van Dyck. And even among the masters, the representation is most unequal. Among the wilderness of Titians and Tintorets you find but two ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... se chamailler pour rien, Pour un oui, pour un non, 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, ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... who passed the plans for the Byzantine shoulder the esplanade thrust out on to the sand on the slender provocation of a bandstand, the man who had built his hotel with a roof covered with cupolas and minarets and had called it "Westward Ho!" must, Ellen thought, be lovely people, like ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... in the history of the extension of this law, is the account of its introduction into the Frankish principality of the Morea. This principality was wrested from the Byzantine empire, in the year 1213, by William of Champlitte, at the head of a band of adventurers, and passed by intrigue into the hands of the family Ville Hardouin. An old chronicler of the times tells us ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... forest a lady at the feet of whom a unicorn lay on the grass, extended above cabinets to the painted beams of the ceiling. He led her to a large and low divan, loaded with cushions covered with sumptuous fragments of Spanish and Byzantine cloaks; but she sat in an armchair. "You are here! You are here! The world may come to ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... great and beloved names; though the authoress, who was an untiring picker-up of scraps of information, has actually consulted (at least she quotes) Sainte-Palaye; there is no faintest flavour of anything really Carlovingian or Byzantine or Oriental about the book, and the whole treatment is in the pre-historical-novel style. Indeed the writer of the Veillees was altogether of the veille—the day just expired—or of the transitional and half-understood present—never of the past seen in some ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... (Mr. Kirkup) throws out such names for them as Cimabue, Ghirlandaio, Giottino, a crucifixion painted on a banner, Giottesque, if not Giotto, but unique, or nearly so, on account of the linen material, and a little Virgin by a Byzantine master. The curious thing is that two angel pictures, for which he had given a scudo last year, prove to have been each sawn off the sides of the Ghirlandaio, so called, representing the 'Eterno Padre' clothed in a mystical garment ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... 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 ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... 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 in telling of things which he did not believe to be true. But henceforward we ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... 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
... the Acropolis Museum, looking down over the city and 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 milky white and ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... 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 aroused the righteous indignation of the Christians of the Western world. The ostensible ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... energy supplies and the lack of significant structural reform have made the Ukrainian economy vulnerable to external shocks. Ukrainian government officials have taken some steps to reform the country's Byzantine tax code, such as the implementation of lower tax rates aimed at bringing more economic activity out of Ukraine's large shadow economy, but more improvements are needed, including closing tax loopholes and eliminating tax privileges and exemptions. Reforms in the more politically sensitive ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... appear more certain from the steps of St. Paul's than that each person is miraculously provided with coat, skirt, and boots; an income; an object. Only Jacob, carrying in his hand Finlay's Byzantine Empire, which he had bought in Ludgate Hill, looked a little different; for in his hand he carried a book, which book he would at nine-thirty precisely, by his own fireside, open and study, as no one else of all these multitudes would do. They have no houses. The streets ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... 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 a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... monuments are usually a bad imitation of Irish key patterns and spirals; but many, in addition, show crucifixes in their midst, with pre-Norman figures depicting the Christ in a loose tunic or shirt, his head erect and his body alive, after the Byzantine fashion. The mediaeval mode of carving a corpse on the cross is of much later date and may not be ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... doubting there, no question there whether or no the ground on which you tread was not first called "the mount" by some Byzantine Sophia; whether tradition respecting it can go back further than Constantine; whether, in real truth, that was the hill over which Jesus walked when he travelled from the house of Lazarus at Bethany to fulfil his mission in the temple. No: let ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... from Greek words meaning "purple" and "begotten," hence, born in the purple, royal. This term, or "porphyrogenitus," was applied in the Byzantine empire to children of the monarch born after his accession to the throne. It is not clear whether the word is used here as a descriptive adjective or as the name ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... or rather the remains of one; for a portion of the living rock in which these works were cut had fallen and carried with it half of this curious crypt. Its semicircular vaulted roof, and the pillars in its corners, indicated it to be of Byzantine origin; while a Greek sculptured cross, in the centre of the roof, told that it was a temple dedicated to that religion. The altar, and any sculpture which might have existed near it, are gone, and have long since been burnt into lime, or built into some work at Sevastopol. ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... adopted is Byzantine. The walls are embellished with many and various beautiful marbles. The eastern side has a representation of Pope Gregory sending St. Augustine with his followers to preach the gospel in England. Another scene is St. Augustine's reception by King Ethelbert and Queen Bertha ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... later a Byzantine corn-ship brought from Amorgos to Peiraeus two survivors of the Solon,—the only ones to escape the swamping of the pinnace. Their story cleared up the mystery of the fate of "Glaucon the Traitor." "The ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... satisfied to remain more than a few days in any place or in any occupation. He commands his armies in person. He has won distinction as a writer and a public speaker. He is an excellent shot. He has composed music, written verses, superintended the production of a ballet, painted a picture; the beautiful Byzantine chapel in the Castle of Posen shows his genius for architecture; and, clothed in a clergyman's surplice, he has preached a sermon in Jerusalem. What ruler in all history ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... approval to Don Elijio, who is the head of the firm of Bosch Brothers, our operations begin. The order of architecture which we adopt partakes of the Norman and the early Gothic, with a 'dash,' so to speak, of the Byzantine, to give it a cheerful aspect. It might remind the learned in these matters of York Minster, Temple Bar, or a court in the Crystal Palace; but the Senores Bosch Brothers—whose acquaintance with architectural master-pieces is confined to the governor's palace ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... her arm, and gazed with bated breath. It was all so beautiful and wonderful, and new to his eyes. He had scarcely ever been in a Roman Catholic church before, and had not guessed at the gorgeous beauty of this half-Byzantine shrine. They hardly spoke. She did not weary him with details like a guide-book—that would be for his after-life visits—but now he must see it just ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... have been produced by Dr. Thayer, of Cambridge, on New Testament Greek; by Professor Francis Brown, of New York, in conjunction with Canon Driver, of Oxford, on the languages of the Old Testament; and by Dr. Sophocles, of Cambridge, on the Byzantine Greek. ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... temples of the pagans, or have known the strange faces of the gods of Egypt and of ancient Greece and Rome; they have been in the churches of the early Christians, or have seen the statues of tortured martyrs, and the images of the transfigured Christ, crowned with the Byzantine aureole. They have been present at battles, at the downfall of kingdoms, at hecatombs, at sacrileges; and now brought together promiscuously in these mosques, they behold on the walls of the sanctuary simply the thousand little designs, ideally pure, of that Islam which wishes ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... jaw, a hair of his beard, a particle of the bread used in the Last Supper, and a portion of the royal purple worn by him before Pilate. Naturally clerical adventurers among the occidental Crusaders, pending the sacking of the Byzantine city, sought out most zealously these valuable remnants of pristine glory, and in obtaining them were by no means scrupulous with menaces and violence. When scattered through Western Europe, in the monasteries ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... consistently. Next to this I would class the The Eulogium of St. Hanno (Lobgesang auf den heiligen Anno) as the best of the religious kind; but this is of a far more secular character, differing from the first as the portrait of a Byzantine saint differs from an old German one. As in those Byzantine pictures, so we see in Barlaam and Josaphat the utmost simplicity; there is no perspective side-work, and the long, lean, statue-like forms and the idealistic ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the appearance of this new royal family in 2,047, giving it forty-nine sovereigns and 458 years of duration. We are thus brought down to the conquest of Mesopotamia by the Egyptian Pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty. The names of the Chaldaean princes have been transcribed by those Byzantine chroniclers to whom we owe the few and short fragments of Berosus that ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... has climbed up the stone steps lending to the fortress, there is a glorious prospect before him. Prague, with its spires and towers, lies in the valley below, through which curves the Moldau with its green islands, disappearing among the hills which enclose the city on every side. The fantastic Byzantine architecture of many of the churches and towers, gives the city a peculiar oriental appearance; it seems to have been transported from the hills of Syria. Its streets are full of palaces, fallen and dwelt ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... the Roman Empire; and its temples became 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 ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... corresponding size surround a bottle of kuemmel, or cordial of caraway-seed. This, at least, was the zakouski on board the Valamo, and to which our valiant captain addressed himself, after first bowing and crossing himself towards the Byzantine Christ and Virgin in either corner of the cabin. We, of course, followed his example, finding our appetites, if not improved, certainly not at all injured thereby. The dinner which followed far surpassed our ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... 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 much more ancient building—probably ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... menacing kittens, Clovis may be observed, with finger on lip, begging of the intelligent reader that he will not give things away. Of the present collection of stories I like best "A Touch of Realism," "The Byzantine Omelette," "The Boar-Pig," and "The Dreamer;" but all are good, and I can only hope that it will not be too long before Clovis once again invites us to further ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... sacred pictures placed there for the occasion by the hunters. One of them, which represented St. Nicholas, was very valuable, the material being embossed silver gilt. Before the lamps hung large dinted old copper lamps or rather light-holders, resembling inverted Byzantine cupolas, suspended ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... being the first nation to formally adopt Christianity (early 4th century). Despite periods of autonomy, over the centuries Armenia came under the sway of various empires including the Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Persian, and Ottoman. During World War I in the western portion of Armenia, Ottoman Turkey instituted a policy of forced resettlement coupled with other harsh practices that resulted in an estimated 1 million Armenian deaths. The eastern area of Armenia ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... was interrupted by Cyrus, who added it to the Persian empire about five centuries and a half before our era; it was only regained about two centuries after by Alexander the Great. It subsequently became a Roman province, then yielded to the Byzantine empire, and now owns the rule of the Turk. This eventful history gives an interest to the country that has excited the curiosity of the learned for ages. The period of its greatest prosperity ensued upon its being reconquered by Alexander, when it included no less ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... of painting. Their works, considered as a subordinate branch of pictorial art, though frequently grotesque and barbarous, are singularly characteristic of the epoch in which they lived, whether we retrace the art to its Byzantine origin in the earliest ages of Christianity, or follow it to its most complete and harmonious development in the two centuries which preceded the discovery ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... the Transvaal; but America exhibited it worse in the war with Spain. There was exhibited more sharply and absurdly than anywhere else the ironic contrast between the very careless choice of a strong line and the very careful choice of a weak enemy. America added to all her other late Roman or Byzantine elements the element of the Caracallan triumph, ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... quietly about on voyages of exploration and discovery, they were duly rewarded at the hands of the custodian of the chapel, who rather encouraged the seeming sacrilege. He left his prayers unsaid to pilot us from nook to nook; he exhibited the old paintings of Byzantine origin, and in broken English endeavored to interpret their meaning. He opened antique chests that we might examine their contents; and when a volume of prayers printed in rustic Russian type and bound with clumsy metal clasps, was bartered for, he seemed quite willing ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... and for the perfect preservation in which they have come down to us. The deep recess of a round-arched porch of the twelfth century is covered with quaint figures which have not lost a nose or a finger. An angular Byzantine-looking Christ sits in a diamond-shaped frame at the summit of the arch, surrounded by little angels, by great apostles, by winged beasts, by a hundred sacred symbols and grotesque ornaments. It is a dense embroidery ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... the end of the last Crusade when Italy began to produce the inspired artists who broke the bonds of Byzantine traditions and turned back to the inspiration of all art, which is Nature. Giotto, tending his sheep, began to draw pictures of things as he saw them, Savonarola awoke the conscience, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio—a string of names to conjure with—all roused the intellect. ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... North Shore colony. We took our servants with us. After my mother died I went to boarding-school, and to Europe in summer, and when my school days were ended, and I acquired a stepmother, I set up an apartment of my own. It has Florentine things in it, and Byzantine things, and things from China and Japan, and the colors shine like jewels under my lamps—you know the effect. And my kitchen is all in white enamel, and the cook does things by electricity, and when I go away in summer my friends have Italian villas—like ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... grand churches and the public buildings are located; the cathedral, after the Romano-Byzantine style of architecture; the Palacio, built after Spanish notions of magnificence, around a courtyard shaded by rare trees; and many other edifices, used for official and ecclesiastic purposes. The streets are paved with cobblestone ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... 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 ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... 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 nearly to suggest their united radiation from the root R. This is by no means universally the ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... transmutation of metals, more especially the base metals, into silver and gold. It seems that this secondary principle became the dominant idea in alchemy, and in this sense the word is used in Byzantine literature of the 4th century; Suidas, writing in the 11th century, defines chemistry as the "preparation of silver and gold" ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... not until the decline of the glorious Byzantine Empire that the Slavs embraced Christianity. For nine hundred years the Greeks were the principal representatives, protectors, elaborators and explorers of Christianity. When the Greeks visited the Slav country with their divine message, the Slavs were ...
— The Religious Spirit of the Slavs (1916) - Sermons On Subjects Suggested By The War, Third Series • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... explain to us the difference between the Sassanian and Byzantine motives in Carolingian art; but the Manager has sent up word that the two new Creole dancers from Paris have arrived, and her Serene Highness wants to pop down to the ball-room and take a peep at them.... She's sure the ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... colouring, though it has a gold background, is not rich, for the gold is pale, even to a straw colour, and the pattern on it rather gives it a straw texture. We presume it is meant to represent the dry Byzantine style of colouring, purposely avoiding the richer colours; as power is lost, by this adoption, it is impossible to give either the tones or colours of nature—there is no transparency. To preserve this old simplicity, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... The Roman alphabet was discarded and Roman law was written in Greek characters 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
... the two Roundles of the Metals, which are flat discs: 1, The Bezant, or golden Roundle, No. 151, which has apparently derived its name from the Byzantine coins with which the Crusaders, when in the East, would have been familiar. 2, The Silver Roundle, or Plate, is from the Spanish "Plata"—silver. When Bezants or Plates appear in considerable numbers, the field on which they are charged ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... Everywhere their conquests, colonization, and commercial relations have followed the downstream course of their rivers. The Dnieper carried the Rus of Smolensk and Kief to the Euxine, into contact with the Byzantine world, and brought thence religion, art, and architecture for the untutored empire of the north. The influence of the Volga has been irresistible. Down its current Novgorod traders in the twelfth century ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... native land. From that time we have but imperfect and uncertain accounts touching the progress of the building. All we know is, that in 1028 they had built up to the roof. It seems likely from that account that this monument, built in the byzantine style, at once so elegant and so simple, was soon after completed by the erection of a tower, and that it remained in the same state till, owing to sundry circumstances and, perhaps, to bad construction, it began to need important repair. ...
— Historical Sketch of the Cathedral of Strasburg • Anonymous
... the legitimate resources of the composer, and have so prescribed his course in nearly every possible position, that music is made almost more of a mathematical problem than the free expression of emotions and aesthetics. "Correct" music has now hardly more liberty than Egyptian sculpture or Byzantine painting once had. Certain dissonances are permitted, and certain others, no more dissonant, forbidden, quite arbitrarily, or on hair-splitting theories. It is as if one should write down in a book a number ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... the hall, Bibbs saw heroic wreckage, seemingly Byzantine—painted colossal fragments of the shattered torso, appallingly human; and gilded and silvered heaps of magnificence strewn among ruinous palms like the spoil of a barbarians' battle. There had been a massacre in the oasis—the Moor had been ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... carried with them the religion, the poetry, and the laws of their race, and on this desolate volcanic island they kept these records unchanged for hundreds of years, while other Teutonic nations gradually became affected by their intercourse with Roman and Byzantine Christianity." These records, carefully collected by Saemund the learned, form the Elder Edda, the most precious relic of ancient Northern literature, without which we should know comparatively little of ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... Yuan Shih-kai's nervous collapse was known to all the Legations which were exceedingly anxious about the possibility of a soldiers' revolt in the capital. The arrival of a first detachment of the savage hordes of General Chang Hsun added Byzantine touches to a picture already lurid with a sickened ruler and the Mephistophelian figure of that ruler's ame damnee, the Secretary Liang Shih-yi, vainly striving to transmute paper into silver, and find the wherewithal ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... published an elaborate account of his discoveries. Far toward the west stretched the ruins where had been the markets, the stadium and the ports, with crumbling walls and towers of all stages of antiquity, Greek, Roman and Byzantine. One of the towers or forts, on an elevation to the westward, and of somewhat cyclopean construction, passes ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... 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 face to face with Europe, Russia was led to enter into diplomatic ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... —nothing in its composition is domestic. Its hoary traditions make it an object of absorbing interest to even the most careless stranger, and thus far it had interest for me; but no further. I could not go into ecstasies over its coarse mosaics, its unlovely Byzantine architecture, or its five hundred curious interior columns from as many distant quarries. Every thing was worn out—every block of stone was smooth and almost shapeless with the polishing hands and shoulders of loungers ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... obedience of the Egyptians by his moderation, pardoned their ingratitude when they offended; but he was the last Byzantine emperor who governed Egypt with wisdom, and the last who failed to enforce the decrees of the council of Chalcedon. It may well be doubted whether any wise conduct on the part of the rulers could have healed the quarrel between ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... supposing they had got some tremendous sacred sanction—some holy thing, some book or gospel or some new prophet from the desert, something which would cast over the whole ugly mechanism of German war the glamour of the old torrential raids which crumpled the Byzantine Empire and shook the walls of Vienna? Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other. Supposing there is some Ark of the Covenant which will ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... Bulgars, a Central Asian Turkic tribe, merged with the local Slavic inhabitants in the late 7th century to form the first Bulgarian state. In succeeding centuries, Bulgaria struggled with the Byzantine Empire to assert its place in the Balkans, but by the end of the 14th century the country was overrun by the Ottoman Turks. Bulgaria regained its independence in 1878, but having fought on the losing side in both World Wars, it fell within the Soviet sphere of influence and ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... in his will, for the town, in gratitude for his benefactions, had furnished twenty-eight "ships" to help him pursue his enemies, out of the fleet which had already begun to exploit the rich commercial possibilities of Britain, and to enter into trading engagements even with the Byzantine emperors. With the second coming of Charlemagne at the dawn of the ninth century, the next period in the history of Rouen closes. At his death the semblance of an empire, into which his mighty personality had welded the ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... 1. L. Fris., 17, 5. Decree of 960 concerning the abolition of the trade in Christian slaves between Germany, Italy and the Byzantine Empire. Tafel und Thomas, Urkunden der Staats-und Handelsgeschichte von ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... succeeded in bringing out by the arts of dress in this Bleeding Nun, framing the ascetic olive face in thick bands of hair as black as the fiery eyes, and making the most of the rigid, slim figure. Lisbeth, like a Virgin by Cranach or Van Eyck, or a Byzantine Madonna stepped out of its frame, had all the stiffness, the precision of those mysterious figures, the more modern cousins of Isis and her sister goddesses sheathed in marble folds by Egyptian sculptors. It was granite, basalt, porphyry, with life ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... Fall, the Flood, and the second entry of Sin into the world, demonstrating the need for a scheme of Salvation, promised by the Prophets and Sibyls in the second part of the decoration. The series represented is an old invention, and all the scenes may be found in Byzantine and early Italian works; but the new treatment gives them a character of grandeur only equalled by the Old Testament narrative which they illustrate. All the human figures and most of the angels appear to be dominated by an idea of impending doom, but they nobly act their ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... Childebert annexed the kingdom of Burgundy, and even contemplated seizing Clotaire's estates and becoming sole king of the Franks. He died, however, in 595. Childebert II. had had relations with the Byzantine empire, and fought in 585 in the name of the emperor Maurice against the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... when well directed—as by sorrow, when well used—by sentiment, I say, great nations live. When sentiment dies out, and mere prosaic calculation of loss and profit takes its place, then comes a Byzantine epoch, a Chinese ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... Understand this, once for all: if you hold fast this great connecting clue, you may string all the types of successive architectural invention upon it like so many beads. The Doric and the Corinthian orders are the roots, the one of all Romanesque, massy-capitaled buildings—Norman, Lombard, Byzantine, and what else you can name of the kind; and the Corinthian of all Gothic, Early English, French, German, and Tuscan. Now observe: those old Greeks gave the shaft; Rome gave the arch; the Arabs pointed and foliated the arch. The shaft and arch, the frame-work and strength of architecture, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... warlike epic, but has little in it that is really comic or of literary merit, except perhaps the list of quaint arms assumed by the warriors. The text of the poem is in a chaotic condition, and there are many interpolations, some of Byzantine date. ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... the Osmanlis 2. Expansion of the Osmanli Kingdom 3. Heritage and Expansion of the Byzantine Empire 4. Shrinkage and Retreat 5. Revival 6. Relapse 7. Revolution 8. The Balkan War ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... 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 ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Dandolo. Its aim, however, was not the recovery of Palestine, but the conquest of Constantinople. At the close of the crusade, Venice received the Morea, part of Thessaly, the Cyclades, many of the Byzantine cities, and the coasts of the Hellespont, with three-eighths of the city of Constantinople itself, the Doge taking the curious title of Duke of three-eighths ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... destinies of mankind in general, it depends upon the wisdom and courage of each nation individually, whether that great deluge shall issue, as the Reformation did, in a fresh outgrowth of European nobleness and strength or usher in, after pitiable confusions and sorrows, a second Byzantine age of stereotyped effeminacy and imbecility. For I have as little sympathy with those who prate so loudly of the progress of the species, and the advent of I know-not-what Cockaigne of universal peace and plenty, as I have with those who believe on the strength of "unfulfilled prophecy," the ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... 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, ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... famous. Mr. Ruskin couples it with another drawing, both of which we have been fortunately able to reproduce in our pages. These "two perfect early drawings," he writes, "are of A Lemon Tree, and another of the same date, of A Byzantine Well, which determine for you without appeal, the question respecting necessity of delineation as the first skill of a painter. Of all our present masters Sir Frederic Leighton delights most in softly-blended ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... infirmity in the eyes it is intolerable. It is true, Antigonus would joke upon himself, and once, receiving a petition written in great letters, he said, This a man may read if he were stark blind. But he killed Theocritus the Chian for saying,—wh Byzantine to Pasiades saying, Sir, your eyes are weak, replied, You upbraid me with this infirmity, not considering that thy son carries the vengeance of Heaven on his back: now Pasiades's son was hunch-backed. And Archippus the popular Athenian was much displeased with Melanthius for ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... Etruscan city 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 ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... delight to the few archaeologists who find their way to the almost forgotten village of Carennac. The composition, which fills the tympan of the scarcely-pointed arch, represents Christ surrounded by the twelve Apostles. The influence of Byzantine art is perceptible in the treatment. Very few such masterpieces of twelfth-century carving have been so well preserved as this. The seated figure of Christ in the act of blessing His Apostles, the right hand upraised, the left resting upon a clasped book, impresses the beholder by its majesty ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... which professes to delineate the scenery, sentiments, and incidents of shepherd life,[1] is, like most other literary forms, Greek in origin. It goes back at least to the "Daphnis and Chloe" of Longus, the Byzantine romancer of the fifth century A.D. Longus represents the romantic spirit in expiring classicism, the longing of a highly artificial society for primitive simplicity, and the endeavor to create a corresponding ideal. Indeed the pastoral has always ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... conditions, but accepted it in principle as imposed for the serving of the national rights." [1] By his organs, too, the King was described as "a worthy successor of the Constantines who created the mighty Byzantine Empire—imbued with a sense of his great national mission—Greek in heart and mind." [2] So anxious, indeed, was M. Venizelos not to lose votes by any display of ill-feeling against the popular sovereign that he even took some pains to have himself ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... 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 to ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... published the first number of a new work, The Decorative Arts of the Middle Ages, the object of which is to exhibit the peculiar features and general characteristics of decorative art, from the Byzantine or early Christian period to the decline of that termed the Renaissance. This beautiful work—for beautiful it is—is extremely well timed, as it appears at a moment when our manufacturers who desire to display their skill at the great exhibition ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.26 • Various
... to study it when inspecting the Conciergerie. Alas! for the Conciergerie has invaded the home of kings. One's heart bleeds to see the way in which cells, cupboards, corridors, warders' rooms, and halls devoid of light or air, have been hewn out of that beautiful structure in which Byzantine, Gothic, and Romanesque—the three phases of ancient art—were harmonized in one building by the architecture of ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... 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 belonged ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... age-old souls—the gigantic trees of which we are all the leaves and the fruit—the nations. From the pages there arose the superhuman figure of the Mother—she who was before us, she who will be after us. She who reigns, like the Byzantine Madonnas, lofty as the mountains, at whose feet kneel and pray ant-like human beings. The poet was hymning the homeric struggle of the great goddesses, whose lances had clashed together since the beginning of the ages: the eternal Iliad which is to that of Troy what ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... Palermo. It was in the year 1131 or thereabouts that Roger began the Cathedral at Cefalu and the Chapel Royal at Palermo; it was about the year 1174 that his grandson William began the Cathedral of Monreale. No art—either Greek or Byzantine, Italian or Arab—has ever created two religious types so beautiful, so serious, so impressive, and yet so different, as Mont- Saint-Michel watching over its northern ocean, and Monreale, looking down over its forests of orange and lemon, on Palermo ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... Constantinople. Though in no single instance has the Greek original been discovered of any of these romances, the mere name of their heroes would be in most cases sufficient to prove their Hellenic or Byzantine origin. Heracles, Athis, Porphirias, Parthenopeus, Hippomedon, Protesilaus, Cliges, Cleomades, Clarus, Berinus—names such as these can come but from one quarter of Europe, and it is as easy to guess how and when they came as whence. The first two crusades brought the flower of European chivalry ...
— Old French Romances • William Morris
... or Gothic, unless you feel the imperious call for the special harmony of either, all the measurements and all the formulas will not avail. While, on the contrary, people without any formula or any attempt at imitation, like the Byzantine architects and those of the fifteenth century, merely because they are obeying their own passionate desire for congruity of impressions, for harmony of structure and function, will succeed in creating brand-new, harmonious, organic art ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... Natura' (On the Nature of Animals), is a medley of his own observations, both in Italy and during his travels as far as Egypt. For several hundred years it was a popular and standard book on zooelogy; and even as late as the fourteenth century, Manuel Philes, a Byzantine poet, founded upon it a poem on animals. Like the 'Varia Historia', it is scrappy and gossiping. He leaps from subject to subject: from elephants to dragons, from the liver of mice to the uses of oxen. There was, however, method in this disorder; ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... inner arch is carved with chevrons, and the outer with conventional foliage and medallions. The capitals are richly carved with foliage and grotesques. On the abacus and arch of this doorway occurs a leaf pattern strongly suggesting the Byzantine influence which at one time was found in Norman decoration. Here again, on the door itself, we have a fine specimen of very elaborate and characteristic Norman iron-work. The second, known as the Priors' Door, opens into the south aisle from the eastern alley of the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Durham - A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief History of the Episcopal See • J. E. Bygate
... event occurred which abolished forever the authority of the Byzantine Emperors in Italy, and established on a sure and lasting basis the ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... demands for ancient documents of any kind spread over Europe and portions of Asia, bringing into Florence a great quantity of them, as well as many scholars and copyists. Shiploads of the works of the Byzantine historians arrived from the Golden Horn, and the city became a vast manufactory for duplicating or forging ancient MSS. Parchment and vellum were too costly to employ very much, so most of them were of paper. Vespaciano, ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... 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 ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... it has been unable to use them, the magnetic needle, gunpowder, and printing. The 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
... of Venetian painting link themselves to the last, stiff, half-barbaric splendours of Byzantine decoration, and are but the introduction into the crust of marble and gold on the walls of the Duomo of Murano, or of Saint Mark's, of a little more of human expression. And throughout the course of its later development, always subordinate ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... the founder of Constantinople and the Byzantine empire, and one of the most gifted, energetic, and successful of the Roman emperors, was the first representative of the imposing idea of a Christian theocracy, or of that system of policy which assumes all subjects to be Christians, connects civil and religious rights, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... mere 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
... which Mr. Finlay has acquired by his History of Greece, and his Greece under the Romans, will unquestionably be increased by his newly published History of the Byzantine Empire from DCCXVI. to MLVII. The subject is one of great interest to the scholar; and the manner in which Mr. Finlay has traced the progress of the eastern Roman empire through an eventful period of three centuries and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 190, June 18, 1853 • Various
... 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 ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... grew older by the Venetians and Genoese, and throughout the world's history no point possessed a more constant and unchangeable attraction from its geographical position and natural advantages than the island of Cyprus, which in turn was occupied by Phoenicians, Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Romans, Byzantine rulers, Saracens, Byzantine rulers again, English, Lusignans, Venetians, Turks, and once ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... constitutions cure the same symptoms in people in general. Then in another note to the same paragraph he quotes the following fact from one of the last sources one would have looked to for medical information, the Byzantine Historians. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... supposed to be the first country to weave patterned silks. India, Persia, Syria, and Byzantine Greece followed. Those were known as "diaspron" or diaper, a name given them at Constantinople. In the twelfth century, the city of Damascus, long famed for her beautiful textiles, outstripped all other places for beauty of design and gave the Damascen or damask, so we have in modern times all ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... aspect of this church, which the architect, fettered by the rockbound site, had been obliged to make circular and low, so that it seemed crushed beneath its great cupola, which square pillars supported. The worst was that, despite its archaic Byzantine style, it altogether lacked any religious appearance, and suggested neither mystery nor meditation. Indeed, with the glaring light admitted by the cupola and the broad glazed doors it was more like some brand-new corn-market. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... in truth, that is my humble function—have recovered a considerable knowledge of a bygone life of mine. This life ended in times that are comparatively recent, namely, early in the ninth century, as is fixed by the fact that the Byzantine Empress, Irene, plays a part in ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... began or ended with a eucharistic celebration. The earlier usage of the Armenians is expressed in the two following rules recorded against them by a renegade Armenian prelate named Isaac, who in the 8th century went over to the Byzantine church: "Christ did not hand down to us the teaching to celebrate the mystery of the offering of the bread in church, but in an ordinary house, and sitting at a common table. So then let them not sacrifice the offering of bread in churches. It was after ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... either of the elder or the younger Pola. Like all cities of this region, Pola kept up its importance down to the days of the Carlovingian Empire, the specially flourishing time of the whole district being that of Gothic and Byzantine dominion at Ravenna. A barbarian king, the Roxolan Rasparasanus, is said to have withdrawn to Pola after the submission of his nation to Hadrian; and the panegyrists of the Flavian house rank Pola along with Trier and Autun among the cities which the princes of that house had adorned or strengthened. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... habitations rich with varied colors, a strange compound of palaces and cottages, churches and bell-towers, woods and lakes, Western and Oriental architecture, the Gothic arches and spires of Europe mingled with the strange forms of Byzantine and Asiatic edifices. Outwardly, a line of monasteries flanked with towers appeared to encircle the city. Centrally, crowning an eminence, rose a great citadel, from whose towers one could look down on columned temples and imperial palaces, embattled walls crowned with majestic domes, from whose ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... begins to appear in the east like a silver circle gleaming through the sky, and the avenue of poplars is wrapped in the uncertain dusk of twilight.... The monastery bell, the only one that still hangs in its ruined Byzantine tower, begins to call to prayers, and one near and one afar, some with sharp metallic notes, and some with solemn, muffled tones, the other bells of the hillside towns reply.... It seems like a harmony that falls from heaven ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... 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
... then, for our art, Messer Cavaliere, that at San Donato, our mother church, we workmen of Murano have our Lady in that old Byzantine type; there is none earlier—nor in all Venice more perfect of its time—and the setting is ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... extant of Antiphilus, a Byzantine, to the memory of a certain Agricola, is supposed by the learned to refer to the great man who is the subject of this work. It is in the Anthologia, ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... missive:—"In the name of 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
... not till the seventeenth century that the chapel was dedicated to the Madonna di San Brizio, on account of a Byzantine miraculous picture of the Virgin, ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... the Ambrosian chant is evident if we look at the following; and we must also bear in mind that the Ambrosian chants were very simple in comparison with the florid tours de force of the Byzantine church: ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... 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 ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... is the only man in England who understands how to make a Byzantine omelette. I engaged him specially for the Duke of Syria's visit, and it would be impossible to replace him at short notice. I should have to send to Paris, and the Duke loves Byzantine omelettes. It was the one thing we talked about ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... careless observer regarding the age of a building. It is a peculiar sensation to find yourself in these mysterious sanctuaries, where personages familiar to the Roman Catholic cult, mingle with the saints peculiar to the Greek Calendar, and seem in their archaic Byzantine and constrained appearance to have been translated awkwardly into gold by the childish devotion of a primitive race. These images that you view across the carved and silver-gilt work of the iconostas, where ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... of clapping palms, songs about ducks and parrakeets, dances full of shuffling and leaping. Even the movements of the sumptuous "Persian Dances" in "Khovanchtchina" are singularly naive and simple and unpretentious. Sometimes, however, the full gorgeousness of Byzantine art shines through this music, and the gold-dusty modes, the metallic flatness of the pentatonic scale, the mystic twilit chants and brazen trumpet-calls make us see the mosaics of Ravenna, the black and gold ikons of Russian churches, the aureoled saints upon bricked walls, the minarets of the ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... summit is nearly 500 metres above the sea-level, and here no antique building seems ever to have been erected. No traces of old life are visible save some fragments of Roman pottery which may have found their way up in early Byzantine days, even as modern worshippers carry up the ephemeral vessels popularly called "caccavelle" [18] and scatter them about. With the exception of one fragment of white Pentelic marble, no materials ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... Horticulture, a combination of French Renaissance with the Byzantine, is consistently flowery in decoration. It has been given a carnival expression. The general sculptured adornments are heavy garlands and overflowing baskets, and profuse ornamentations of flowers. Large flower-decked ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... 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, and each architect had interpreted the scheme ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... be an end of its pretentious counterfeits. The alphabet, decrepit with its long and vast labors, would at last be released. The whole army of writers would take their place among the curiosities of history. The Alexandrian thaumaturgists, the Byzantine historians, the scholastic dialecticians, the serial novelists, and the daily dissertationists, strung together, would make a glittering chain of monomaniacs. Social life is a mutual joy; reading may be rarely indulged without danger to sanity; but writing, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... knocking at the door. Then they rise up; their craft is laden with invisible beings; on their return it is lighter. Several of these features reproduced by Plutarch, Claudian, Procopius, [Footnote: A Byzantine historian of the fifth and sixth centuries.] and Tzetzes [Footnote: A Greek poet and grammarian of the twelfth century.] would incline one to believe that the renown of the Irish myths made its way into classical antiquity about the first or second century. Plutarch, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... eastward. By following the course of the Obi two versts further, he reached a picturesque little town lying on a small hill. A few churches, with Byzantine cupolas colored green and gold, stood up against the gray sky. This is Kolyvan, where the officers and people employed at Kamsk and other towns take refuge during the summer from the unhealthy climate of the Baraba. According to the latest news ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... 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 ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... home Egyptian civilization; the "old masters," that of Europe in the fifteenth century; the ruins of the Colosseum, Roman art and barbarism, as they never were by Livy or Gibbon. Lady Russell's letters tell us of the Civil War in England,—Saint Mark's, at Venice, of Byzantine taste and Oriental commerce,—the Escurial and the Alhambra, Versailles, a castle on the Rhine, and a "modest mansion on the banks of the Potomac," of their respective eras and their characteristics, social, political, religious,—more than the most elaborate register, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... he probed himself he understood that to attract, a work must have that character of strangeness demanded by Edgar Allen Poe; but he ventured even further on this path and called for Byzantine flora of brain and complicated deliquescences of language. He desired a troubled indecision on which he might brood until he could shape it at will to a more vague or determinate form, according to the momentary state of his soul. In short, he desired a work ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... Italy. He reminds one of Cavour much more than of the master-builder of German unity. Whilst Bismarck won his spurs in the embassies of Germany and Russia, Buelow received his main training as Ambassador in Latin countries. He served for five years in Paris. In Bucharest he imbibed the Byzantine influences of the East. He spent six years in the Eternal City, which for three thousand years has been the centre of statecraft, and which even to-day remains the best training-school of diplomacy. His marriage with an Italian Princess is another indication of ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... as grotesque, as monstrous, unearthly as the stone griffens and gargoyles that are cut up among the unvisited niches and towers of Notre Dame, stories as poetic and delicately beautiful as the golden lace work chased upon an Etruscan ring. He fitted his words together as the Byzantine jewelers fitted priceless stones. He found the inner harmony and kinship of words. Where lived another man who could blend the beautiful and the horrible, the gorgeous and the grotesque in such intricate and ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... subjects. The poor old man, after dwelling long and tearfully on the woes of his fellow-believers, looked cautiously in every direction, locked the door, and after exacting an oath of secresy drew from a hiding-place a little antique brass figure of Byzantine origin, representing our Saviour in the act of benediction with two fingers only raised, according to the form cherished by ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... 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 ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack |
