The Byzantine Arts and Byzantine Literature

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines the relationships between literary and visual forms in Byzantium. Both in the Early and in the later Byzantine periods there were clear parallels between the ways that literary and visual compositions were structured, whether through the rhetorical techniques of repetition, variation, and acrostic in Early Byzantine art, or through comparison and antithesis along with the selective realism of ekphrasis and ethopoiia, after Iconoclasm. These parallels involved both fundamental principles of design and organization and more isolated instances of quotation, raising the complex question of whether one medium can be said to have exerted influence on the other, or whether the same forms occurred in literature and the visual arts as parallel expressions of common habits of thought.