Engaged with Byzantine and Medieval Art

Later art that borrows the gold grounds, icons, stained glass and devotional forms of the Byzantine and medieval world.

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About

Artists engaged with Byzantine and medieval art borrow the gold grounds, flat stylised figures, heavy outlines and devotional formats of Christian art made between late antiquity and the 15th century. The appeal is often a longing for the faith and craft that industrial modernity seemed to have lost.

In Rome from 1810, the German Nazarenes lived like a religious brotherhood and painted in the manner of artists before Raphael. In England, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones pursued legend and jewel-like colour, Burne-Jones designing woodcuts for William Morris's Kelmscott Chaucer (1896). Georges Rouault, apprenticed to a stained-glass restorer as a boy, framed figures in thick black lines like leading. Russian modernists looked to icons: Kazimir Malevich hung his Black Square high across a room corner in 1915, the place an icon occupies in a Russian home. Gustav Klimt's gold paintings followed his visit to the mosaics of Ravenna in 1903.