Byzantine art and archaeology / by O.M. Dalton ; with 457 illustrations.

  • Ormonde Maddock Dalton
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Byzantine art and archaeology / by O.M. Dalton ; with 457 illustrations. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    73/756 (page 49)
    plan, the two-towered fa9ade, the vaulted basilica, all seem to have dominated in Anatolia.1 The very use of burned, as opposed to sun-dried, brick may be due to the invention of the Greek builders.2 The Greeks of the Hellenistic cities of Asia Minor probably did more to preserve the decaying art of sculpture than any other people in the Byzantine Empire. The traditions of the period when Scopas and Praxiteles had worked on Anatolian soil, the later traditions of Pergamon and Rhodes, were not easily forgotten in the west of the country where the Greeks were in strength and oriental influences remote. The ‘ Sida- mara group ’ of sarcophagi, visibly inspired by Greek art of the fourth century B. c. yet attracting by a striking originality, may have been produced in Asia Minor, though whether in north or south it is still Fig. 27. Limestone reliefs, fifth-sixth century, in the Cairo Museum. {Catalogue general: Koptische Kunst, No. 7638.) impossible to say (p. 130). The marble quarries of Proconnesos, which supplied the whole Mediterranean area with capitals of columns and closure slabs in the fifth and sixth centuries, may almost be regarded as belonging to the Anatolian province, though here there were numbers of workmen from Syria, Egypt, and other regions.3 Various reliefs with figure subjects found in Asia Minor would seem to show that the art was widely distributed in this region (p. 153), though after the seventh century it sank into insignificance. From Anatolia the Buddhist sculptors of Gandhara may have derived their models (p. 130). The relationships of different schools of painting in the Eastern provinces during the earlier centuries of our era cannot yet be defined with certainty; the surviving material is too scanty; the extent to which the 1 Strzygowski, Kleinasien ; and article in 0. Scheel’s Religion, pp. 385, 393. Strzygowski, Kleinasien, p. 34. Burned brick, unknown to Vitruvius, was introduced into Rome before the time of Augustus. 0. Wulff considers that the Sidamara sarcophagi may have been produced on Proeon- nesos (Berlin Catalogue, i, p. 15). The possible connexion of Anatolian sculptors with the Christian sarcophagi of Gaul and even of Rome raises interesting questions (p. 133). E ] 204