section_path: Arts/Art
section_name: Art
paragraph_text: Art
  
  Constantine's sponsorship produced an exuberant burst of Christian art and architecture, frescoes and mosaics for church walls, and hieroglyphic type drawings. While classical and Christian culture did coexist into the seventh century, Christian imagery gradually replaced classical images, which had undergone a short revival under Julian the Apostate and in the Theodosian renaissance.
  
  In the 720s, the Byzantine Emperor Leo III banned the pictorial representation of Christ, saints, and biblical scenes. Bishops, the army and the civil service supported the emperors, while monks, sometimes at the cost of their lives, and the western papacy, refused to participate, leading to further separation between the East and West. Lasting for over one hundred years, this ban led to nearly all figurative religious art being destroyed. It wasn't until the tenth and early eleventh centuries that Byzantine culture fully recovered and Orthodoxy was again manifested in art.
  
  Surviving Byzantine art is mostly religious and, with exceptions during certain periods, is highly conventional, following traditional models that translate carefully controlled church theology into artistic terms. Painting in fresco, illuminated manuscripts and on wood panels and mosaics, especially in earlier periods, were the main media, and figurative sculpture was very rare except for small carved ivories. Manuscript painting preserved some of the classical realist tradition that was missing in larger works till the end of the empire. Byzantine art was highly prestigious and sought-after in Western Europe, where it maintained a continuous influence on medieval art till the near end of the period. This was especially true in Italy, where Byzantine styles persisted in modified forms through the 12th century, and became formative influences on Italian Renaissance art. However, few incoming influences affected the Byzantine style. With the expansion of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Byzantine forms and styles spread throughout the Orthodox world and beyond.