Byzantine art.

Byzantine (pronounced BIZ-uhn-teen) art describes any art made in the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine Empire between 330 and 1453 CE. Although located in the far eastern regions of the Roman Empire—its former capital of Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) is located in present-day Turkey, for example—the early rulers of the Byzantine Empire were culturally Roman. They were inheritors of the political legacies of the Roman Empire. Despite its links to the Romans, the region had been colonized by the Greeks centuries earlier, and most of its residents spoke Greek rather than the state language of Latin. In addition, the heart of the Byzantine Empire sat on the geographic and political divide between Europe and Asia and included a broad cross-section of other indigenous cultural groups. The Christ Pantocrator of the Deesis mosaic (13th-century) in Hagia Sophia (Istanbul, Turkey) Photo: Myrabella / Wikimedia Commons, via Wikimedia Commons A 10th c. carved ivory casket. Walters Art Museum [Public domain, CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons