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Three Millennia of Greek Literature
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Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The Macedonian epoch (867-1081)

Education, learning, literature, and art 

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The Original Greek New Testament
Page 14

The influence of Byzantine art of the Macedonian period extended beyond the boundaries of the Empire. The most recent painting in the famous Santa Maria Antica at Rome, assigned to the ninth or tenth centuries, may take a place with the best products of the Macedonian Renaissance. St. Sophia of Kiev (A.D. 1037), in Russia, as well as many other Russian churches, belong also to the Byzantine tradition of the epoch of the Macedonian emperors.

The most brilliant period of the Macedonian dynasty (867-1025) was also the best time in the history of Byzantine art from the point of view of artistic vitality and originality. The subsequent period of troubles and the time of the Comneni, beginning with the year 1081, witnessed the rise of an entirely different, drier, and more rigid art.

The Byzantine standards, which had been carried (in the time of Basil II) into Armenia, were by degrees withdrawn; those of the Seljuq Turks advanced. At home there reigned the spirit of immobility which finds its expression in ceremonies and displays, the spirit of an Alexius Comnenus and his court. All this was reflected in the art or the century preceding the invasion of the Crusaders from the West. The springs of progress dried up; there was no longer any power of organic growth; the only change now possible was a passive acceptance of external forces. Religious fervor was absorbed in formal preoccupations. The liturgical system, by controlling design, led to the production of manuals, or painters' guides, in which the path to be followed was exactly traced; the composition was stereotyped; the very colors were prescribed

               Elpenor's note : In this epoch also Symeon the New Theologian was born, one of the greatest saints and fathers of Orthodoxy. His most characteristic and valuable work is the Hymns of Divine Love (Ὕμνοι θείων ἐρώτων).

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