Byzantine art summary

Cimabue was a painter and mosaicist, the last great Italian artist in the Byzantine style, which had dominated early medieval painting in Italy. Among his surviving works are the frescoes of New Testament scenes in the upper church of S. Francesco, Assisi; the Sta. Trinità Madonna (c. 1290); and

Hagia Sophia, an important Byzantine structure in Istanbul and one of the world’s great monuments. It was built as an Eastern Orthodox church between 532 and 537 ce under the direction of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I. In subsequent centuries it became a Roman Catholic cathedral, an Eastern

Byzantine Empire, the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which survived for a thousand years after the western half had crumbled into various feudal kingdoms and which finally fell to Ottoman Turkish onslaughts in 1453. The very name Byzantine illustrates the misconceptions to which the empire’s