Ionia
Ionia was an ancient region on the central part of the western coast of Anatolia in present-day Turkey, the region nearest İzmir, Smyrna. It consisted of the northernmost territories of the Ionian League of Greek settlements. Never a unified state, it was named after the Ionian tribe who, in the Archaic Period, settled the shores and islands of the Aegean Sea. Ionian states were identified by their use of Eastern Greek. Ionia proper comprised a narrow coastal strip from Phocaea in the north near the mouth of the river Hermus, to Miletus in the south near the mouth of the river Maeander, included the islands of Chios and Samos, it was bounded by Aeolia to Lydia to the east and Caria to the south. The cities within the region figured large in the strife between the Persian Empire and the Greeks. According to Greek tradition, the cities of Ionia were founded by colonists from the other side of the Aegean, their settlement was connected with the legendary history of the Ionic people in Attica, which asserts that the colonists were led by Neleus and Androclus, sons of Codrus, the last king of Athens.
In accordance with this view the "Ionic migration", as it was called by chronologers, was dated by them one hundred and forty years after the Trojan War, or sixty years after the return of the Heracleidae into the Peloponnese. Ionia was of small extent, not exceeding 150 kilometres in length from north to south, with a breadth varying from 60 to 90 kilometres, but to this must be added the peninsula of Mimas, together with the two islands. So intricate is the coastline that the voyage along its shores was estimated at nearly four times the direct distance. A great part of this area was, occupied by mountains. Of these the most lofty and striking were Mimas and Corycus, in the peninsula which stands out to the west, facing the island of Chios. None of these mountains attains a height of more than 1,200 metres; the district comprised three fertile valleys formed by the outflow of three rivers, among the most considerable in Asia Minor: the Hermus in the north, flowing into the Gulf of Smyrna, though at some distance from the city of that name.
With the advantage of a peculiarly fine climate, for which this part of Asia Minor has been famous in all ages, Ionia enjoyed the reputation in ancient times of being the most fertile of all the rich provinces of Asia Minor. The geography of Ionia placed it in a strategic position, both advantageous and disadvantageous. Ionia was always a maritime power founded by a people who made their living by trade in peaceful times and marauding in unsettled times; the coast was rocky and the arable land slight. The native Luwians for the most part kept their fields further inland and used the rift valleys for wooded pasture; the coastal cities were placed in defensible positions on islands or headlands situated so as to control inland routes up the rift valleys. The people of those valleys were of different ethnicity; the populations of the cities came from many civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean. Ancient demographics are available only from literary sources. Herodotus states that in Asia the Ionians kept the division into twelve cities that had prevailed in Ionian lands of the north Peloponnese, their former homeland, which became Achaea after they left.
These Asian cities were Miletus, Priene, Colophon, Teos, Erythrae and Phocaea, together with Samos and Chios. Smyrna an Aeolic colony, was afterwards occupied by Ionians from Colophon, became an Ionian city — an event which had taken place before the time of Herodotus; these cities do not match those of Achaea. Moreover, the Achaea of Herodotus' time spoke Doric, but in Homer it is portrayed as being in the kingdom of Mycenae, which most spoke Mycenaean Greek, not Doric. If the Ionians came from Achaea, they departed during or after the change from East Greek to West Greek there. Mycenaean continued to evolve in the mountainous region of Arcadia. There is no record of any people named Ionians in Late Bronze Age Anatolia but Hittite texts record the Achaeans of Ahhiyawa, of location not certain, but in touch with the Hittites of that time. Miletus and some other cities founded earlier by non-Greeks received populations of Mycenaean Greeks under the name of Achaeans; the tradition of Ionian colonizers from Achaea suggests that they may have been known by both names then.
In the absence of archaeological evidence of discontinuity at Miletus the Achaean population whatever their name appears to have descended to archaic Ionia, which does not exclude the possibility of another colonizing and founding event from Athens. In the Indian historic literary texts, the Ionians are referred to as "yavana" or "yona", are described as wearing leather and wielding whips. In modern Turkish, the people of that region and the Greeks were called "yunan" and
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun
Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun known as Madame Lebrun or Madame Le Brun, was a prominent French portrait painter of the late eighteenth century. Her artistic style is considered part of the aftermath of Rococo with elements of an adopted Neoclassical style, her subject matter and color palette can be classified as Rococo, but her style is aligned with the emergence of Neoclassicism. Vigée Le Brun created a name for herself in Ancien Régime society by serving as the portrait painter to Marie Antoinette, she enjoyed the patronage of European aristocrats and writers, was elected to art academies in ten cities. Vigée Le Brun created 200 landscapes. In addition to many works in private collections, her paintings are owned by major museums, such as the Louvre, Hermitage Museum, National Gallery in London, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, many other collections in continental Europe and the United States. Born in Paris on 16 April 1755, Élisabeth Louise Vigée was the daughter of a portraitist and fan painter, Louis Vigée, from whom she received her first instruction.
Her mother, was a hairdresser. In 1760, at the age of five, she entered a convent, where she remained until 1766, her father died. In 1768, her mother married a wealthy jeweler, Jacques-François Le Sèvre, shortly after, the family moved to the Rue Saint-Honoré, close to the Palais Royal. In her memoir, Vigée Le Brun directly stated her feelings about her step-father: "I hated this man, he wore his clothes, just as they were, without altering them to fit his figure." During this period, Élisabeth benefited from the advice of Gabriel François Doyen, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Joseph Vernet, whose influence is evident in her portrait of her younger brother, Étienne Vigée. By the time she was in her early teens, Élisabeth was painting portraits professionally. After her studio was seized for her practicing without a license, she applied to the Académie de Saint-Luc, which unwittingly exhibited her works in their Salon. In 1774, she was made a member of the Académie. On 11 January 1776 she married a painter and art dealer.
Vigée Le Brun began exhibiting her work at their home in Paris, the Hôtel de Lubert, the Salons she held here supplied her with many new and important contacts. Her husband's great-great-uncle was Charles Le Brun, the first director of the French Academy under Louis XIV. Vigée Le Brun painted portraits of many of the nobility. On 12 February 1780, Vigée-Le Brun gave birth to a daughter, Jeanne Lucie Louise, whom she called Julie and nicknamed "Brunette." In 1781 she and her husband toured Flanders and the Netherlands, where seeing the works of the Flemish masters inspired her to try new techniques. Her Self-Portrait with Straw Hat was a "free imitation" of Peter Paul Rubens' La Chapeau de Paille. Dutch and Flemish influences have been noted in The Comte d'Espagnac and Madame Perregaux. In 1787, she caused a minor public scandal when her Self-Portrait with Her Daughter Julie was exhibited at the Salon of 1787 showing her smiling and open-mouthed, in direct contravention of traditional painting conventions going back to antiquity.
The court gossip-sheet Mémoires secrets commented: "An affectation which artists, art-lovers and persons of taste have been united in condemning, which finds no precedent among the Ancients, is that in smiling, shows her teeth." In light of this and her other Self-Portrait with Her Daughter Julie, Simone de Beauvoir dismissed Vigée Le Brun as narcissistic in The Second Sex: "Madame Vigée-Lebrun never wearied of putting her smiling maternity on her canvases." As her career blossomed, Vigée Le Brun was granted patronage by Marie Antoinette. She painted more than thirty portraits of the queen and her family, leading to the common perception that she was the official portraitist of Marie Antoinette. At the Salon of 1783, Vigée Le Brun exhibited Marie-Antoinette in a Muslin Dress, sometimes called Marie-Antoinette en gaulle, in which the queen chose to be shown in a simple, informal white cotton garment; the resulting scandal was prompted by both the informality and the queen's decision to be shown in that way.
Vigée Le Brun's Marie-Antoinette and her Children was evidently an attempt to improve the queen's image by making her more relatable to the public, in the hopes of countering the bad press and negative judgments that the queen had received. The portrait shows the queen at home in the Palace of Versailles, engaged in her official function as the mother of the king's children, but suggests Marie-Antoinette's uneasy identity as a foreign-born queen whose maternal role was her only true function under Salic law. On 31 May 1783, Vigée Le Brun was received as a member of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, she was one of only fifteen women to be granted full membership in the Académie between 1648 and 1793. Her rival, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, was admitted on the same day. Vigée Le Brun was refused on the grounds that her husband was an art dealer, but the Académie was overruled by an order from Louis XVI because Marie Antoinette put considerable pressure on her husband on behalf of her portraitist.
As her reception piece, Vigée Le Brun submitted an allegorical painting, Peace Bringing Back Abundance, instead of a portrait. As a consequence, the Académie did not place her work within a standard category of painting—either history or portraiture. Vigée Le Brun's membership in the Académie dissolved after the French Revolution because female acad
Theodosius I
Theodosius I known as Theodosius the Great, was a Roman Emperor from 379 to 395, the last emperor to rule over both the Eastern and the Western halves of the Roman Empire. On accepting his elevation, he campaigned against Goths and other barbarians who had invaded the Empire, his resources were not sufficient to destroy them or drive them out, Roman policy for centuries in dealing with invaders. By treaty, which followed his indecisive victory at the end of the Gothic War, they were established as foederati, autonomous allies of the Empire, south of the Danube, in Illyricum, within the Empire's borders, they were given lands and allowed to remain under their own leaders, a grave departure from Roman hegemonic ways. This turn away from traditional policies was accommodationist and had grave consequences for the Western Empire from the beginning of the century, as the Romans found themselves with the impossible task of defending the borders and deal with unruly federates within. Theodosius I was obliged to fight two destructive civil wars, successively defeating the usurpers Magnus Maximus in 387-388 and Eugenius in 394, though not without material cost to the power of the Empire.
He issued decrees that made Nicene Christianity the official state church of the Roman Empire. He neither prevented nor punished the destruction of prominent Hellenistic temples of classical antiquity, including the Temple of Apollo in Delphi and the Serapeum in Alexandria, he dissolved the Order of the Vestal Virgins in Rome. In 393, he banned the pagan rituals of the Olympics in Ancient Greece. After his death, Theodosius's young sons Arcadius and Honorius inherited the east and west halves of the empire and the Roman Empire was never again re-united, though Eastern Roman emperors after Zeno would claim the united title after Julius Nepos's death in 480. Theodosius is considered a saint by the Armenian Apostolic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church, his feast day is on January 19. Flavius Theodosius was born in Cauca, Hispania or in Italica, Hispania, to a senior military officer, Theodosius the Elder. Theodosius learned his military lessons by campaigning with his father's staff in Britannia where he went to help quell the Great Conspiracy in 368.
In about 373, he became governor of Upper Moesia and oversaw hostilities against the Sarmatians and thereafter against the Alemanni. He was military commander of Moesia, a Roman province on the lower Danube, in 374, when the empire faced a formidable eruption of the Quadi and Sarmatians, the neighboring province of Illyricum being in fact overrun. Theodosius is reported to have defended his province with marked success. However, shortly thereafter, at about the same time as the sudden disgrace and execution of his father, Theodosius retired to Hispania; the reason for his retirement, the relationship between it and his father's death is uncertain, though probable. The death of Valentinian I in 375 created political pandemonium. Fearing further persecution on account of his family ties, Theodosius abruptly retired to his family estates in the province of Gallaecia where he adopted the life of a provincial aristocrat. From 364 to 375, the Roman Empire was governed by two co-emperors, the brothers Valentinian I and Valens.
In 378, after the disastrous Battle of Adrianople where Valens was killed, Gratian invited Theodosius to take command of the Illyrian army. As Valens had no successor, Gratian's appointment of Theodosius amounted to a de facto invitation for Theodosius to become co-Augustus of the eastern half of the Empire. After Gratian was killed in a rebellion in 383, Theodosius appointed his own elder son, Arcadius, to be his co-ruler in the East. After the death in 392 of Valentinian II, whom Theodosius had supported against a variety of usurpations, Theodosius ruled as sole Emperor, appointing his younger son Honorius Augustus as his co-ruler of the West and by defeating the usurper Eugenius on 6 September 394, at the Battle of the Frigidus he restored peace. By his first wife, the Spanish Aelia Flaccilla Augusta, he had two sons and Honorius, a daughter, Aelia Pulcheria. Both Aelia Flaccilla and Pulcheria died in 385, his second wife was Galla, daughter of the emperor Valentinian I and his second wife Justina.
Theodosius and Galla had a son, born in 388 and who died young, a daughter, Aelia Galla Placidia. Placidia was the only child who survived to adulthood and became an Empress; the Goths and their allies entrenched in the provinces of Dacia and eastern Pannonia Inferior consumed Theodosius's attention. The Gothic crisis was so dire that his co-Emperor Gratian relinquished control of the Illyrian provinces and retired to Trier in Gaul to let Theodosius operate without hindrance. A major weakness in the Roman position after the defeat at Adrianople was the recruiting of barbarians to fight against other barbarians. In order to reconstruct the Roman Army of the West, Theodosius needed to find able bodied soldiers and so he turned to the most capable men at hand: the barbarians settled in the Empire; this caused many difficulties in the battle against barbarians since the newly recruited fighters had little or no loya
Jericho
Jericho is a city in the Palestinian Territories and is located near the Jordan River in the West Bank. It is the administrative seat of the Jericho Governorate, is governed by the Fatah faction of the Palestinian National Authority. In 2007, it had a population of 18,346; the city was occupied by Jordan from 1949 to 1967, has been held under Israeli occupation since 1967. It is believed to be one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world and the city with the oldest known protective wall in the world, it was thought to have the oldest stone tower in the world as well, but excavations at Tell Qaramel in Syria have discovered stone towers that are older. Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of more than 20 successive settlements in Jericho, the first of which dates back 11,000 years to the beginning of the Holocene epoch of the Earth's history. Copious springs in and around the city have attracted human habitation for thousands of years. Jericho is described in the Hebrew Bible as the "city of palm trees".
Jericho's name in Hebrew, Yeriẖo, is thought to derive from the Canaanite word reaẖ, but other theories hold that it originates in the Canaanite word for "moon" or the name of the lunar deity Yarikh for whom the city was an early centre of worship. Jericho's Arabic name, ʼArīḥā, means "fragrant" and has its roots in Canaanite Reaẖ; the first excavations of the site were made by Charles Warren in 1868. Ernst Sellin and Carl Watzinger excavated Tell es-Sultan and Tulul Abu el-'Alayiq between 1907 and 1909, in 1911, John Garstang excavated between 1930 and 1936. Extensive investigations using more modern techniques were made by Kathleen Kenyon between 1952 and 1958. Lorenzo Nigro and Nicolò Marchetti conducted excavations in 1997–2000. Since 2009 the Italian-Palestinian archaeological project of excavation and restoration was resumed by Rome "La Sapienza" University and Palestinian MOTA-DACH under the direction of Lorenzo Nigro and Hamdan Taha, Jehad Yasine since 2015; the Italian-Palestinian Expedition carried out 13 seasons in 20 years, with some major discoveries, like Tower A1 in the Middle Bronze Age southern Lower Town and Palace G on the eastern flanks of the Spring Hill overlooking the Spring of'Ain es-Sultan dating from Early Bronze III.
The earliest settlement was located at the present-day Tell es-Sultan, a couple of kilometers from the current city. In both Arabic and Hebrew, tell means "mound" – consecutive layers of habitation built up a mound over time, as is common for ancient settlements in the Middle East and Anatolia. Jericho is the type site for the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Pre-Pottery Neolithic B periods. Epipaleolithic construction at the site appears to predate the invention of agriculture, with the construction of Natufian culture structures beginning earlier than 9000 BCE, the beginning of the Holocene epoch in geologic history. Jericho has evidence of settlement dating back to 10,000 BCE. During the Younger Dryas period of cold and drought, permanent habitation of any one location was impossible. However, the Ein es-Sultan spring at what would become Jericho was a popular camping ground for Natufian hunter-gatherer groups, who left a scattering of crescent-shaped microlith tools behind them. Around 9600 BCE, the droughts and cold of the Younger Dryas stadial had come to an end, making it possible for Natufian groups to extend the duration of their stay leading to year-round habitation and permanent settlement.
The first permanent settlement on the site of Jericho developed near the Ein es-Sultan spring between 9,500 and 9000 BCE. As the world warmed up, a new culture based on agriculture and sedentary dwelling emerged, which archaeologists have termed "Pre-Pottery Neolithic A", its cultures lacked pottery, but featured the following: small circular dwellings burial of the dead under the floor of buildings reliance on hunting of wild game cultivation of wild or domestic cerealsAt Jericho, circular dwellings were built of clay and straw bricks left to dry in the sun, which were plastered together with a mud mortar. Each house measured about 5 metres across, was roofed with mud-smeared brush. Hearths were located outside the homes. By about 9400 BCE, the town had grown to more than 70 modest dwellings; the Pre-Sultan is sometimes called Sultanian. The site is a 40,000 square metres settlement surrounded by a massive stone wall over 3.6 metres high and 1.8 metres wide at the base, inside of which stood a stone tower, over 8.5 metres high, containing an internal staircase with 22 stone steps and placed in the centre of the west side of the tell.
This tower and the older ones excavated at Tell Qaramel in Syria are the oldest to be discovered. The wall may have served as a defence against flood-water, with the tower used for ceremonial purposes; the wall and tower were built during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period around 8000 BCE. For the tower, carbon dates published in 1981 and 1983 indicate that it was built around 8300 BCE and stayed in use until c. 7800 BCE. The wall and tower would have taken a hundred men more than a hundred days to construct, thus suggesting some kind of social organization; the town contained round mud-brick houses, yet no street planning. The identity and number of the inhabitants of Jericho during the PPNA period is still under debate, with estimates going as high as 2,000–3,000, as low as 200–300, it is known that this population had domesticated emmer whea
Sculpture
Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sculptural processes used carving and modelling, in stone, ceramics and other materials but, since Modernism, there has been an complete freedom of materials and process. A wide variety of materials may be worked by removal such as carving, assembled by welding or modelling, or molded or cast. Sculpture in stone survives far better than works of art in perishable materials, represents the majority of the surviving works from ancient cultures, though conversely traditions of sculpture in wood may have vanished entirely. However, most ancient sculpture was brightly painted, this has been lost. Sculpture has been central in religious devotion in many cultures, until recent centuries large sculptures, too expensive for private individuals to create, were an expression of religion or politics; those cultures whose sculptures have survived in quantities include the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and China, as well as many in Central and South America and Africa.
The Western tradition of sculpture began in ancient Greece, Greece is seen as producing great masterpieces in the classical period. During the Middle Ages, Gothic sculpture represented the agonies and passions of the Christian faith; the revival of classical models in the Renaissance produced famous sculptures such as Michelangelo's David. Modernist sculpture moved away from traditional processes and the emphasis on the depiction of the human body, with the making of constructed sculpture, the presentation of found objects as finished art works. A basic distinction is between sculpture in the round, free-standing sculpture, such as statues, not attached to any other surface, the various types of relief, which are at least attached to a background surface. Relief is classified by the degree of projection from the wall into low or bas-relief, high relief, sometimes an intermediate mid-relief. Sunk-relief is a technique restricted to ancient Egypt. Relief is the usual sculptural medium for large figure groups and narrative subjects, which are difficult to accomplish in the round, is the typical technique used both for architectural sculpture, attached to buildings, for small-scale sculpture decorating other objects, as in much pottery and jewellery.
Relief sculpture may decorate steles, upright slabs of stone also containing inscriptions. Another basic distinction is between subtractive carving techniques, which remove material from an existing block or lump, for example of stone or wood, modelling techniques which shape or build up the work from the material. Techniques such as casting and moulding use an intermediate matrix containing the design to produce the work; the term "sculpture" is used to describe large works, which are sometimes called monumental sculpture, meaning either or both of sculpture, large, or, attached to a building. But the term properly covers many types of small works in three dimensions using the same techniques, including coins and medals, hardstone carvings, a term for small carvings in stone that can take detailed work; the large or "colossal" statue has had an enduring appeal since antiquity. Another grand form of portrait sculpture is the equestrian statue of a rider on horse, which has become rare in recent decades.
The smallest forms of life-size portrait sculpture are the "head", showing just that, or the bust, a representation of a person from the chest up. Small forms of sculpture include the figurine a statue, no more than 18 inches tall, for reliefs the plaquette, medal or coin. Modern and contemporary art have added a number of non-traditional forms of sculpture, including sound sculpture, light sculpture, environmental art, environmental sculpture, street art sculpture, kinetic sculpture, land art, site-specific art. Sculpture is an important form of public art. A collection of sculpture in a garden setting can be called a sculpture garden. One of the most common purposes of sculpture is in some form of association with religion. Cult images are common in many cultures, though they are not the colossal statues of deities which characterized ancient Greek art, like the Statue of Zeus at Olympia; the actual cult images in the innermost sanctuaries of Egyptian temples, of which none have survived, were evidently rather small in the largest temples.
The same is true in Hinduism, where the simple and ancient form of the lingam is the most common. Buddhism brought the sculpture of religious figures to East Asia, where there seems to have been no earlier equivalent tradition, though again simple shapes like the bi and cong had religious significance. Small sculptures as personal possessions go back to the earliest prehistoric art, the use of large sculpture as public art to impress the viewer with the power of a ruler, goes back at least to the Great Sphinx of some 4,500 years ago. In archaeology and art history the appearance, sometimes disappearance, of large or monumental sculpture in a culture is regarded as of great significance, though tracing the emergence is complicated by the presumed existence of sculpture in wood and other perishable materials of which no record remains; the ability to s
Donor portrait
A donor portrait or votive portrait is a portrait in a larger painting or other work showing the person who commissioned and paid for the image, or a member of his, or her, family. Donor portrait refers to the portrait or portraits of donors alone, as a section of a larger work, whereas votive portrait may refer to a whole work of art intended as an ex-voto, including for example a Madonna if the donor is prominent; the terms are not used consistently by art historians, as Angela Marisol Roberts points out, may be used for smaller religious subjects that were made to be retained by the commissioner rather than donated to a church. Donor portraits are common in religious works of art paintings, of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the donor shown kneeling to one side, in the foreground of the image. Late into the Renaissance, the donor portraits when of a whole family, will be at a much smaller scale than the principal figures, in defiance of linear perspective. By the mid-15th century donors began to be shown integrated into the main scene, as bystanders and participants.
The purpose of donor portraits was to memorialize the donor and his family, to solicit prayers for them after their death. Gifts to the church of buildings, altarpieces, or large areas of stained glass were accompanied by a bequest or condition that masses for the donor be said in perpetuity, portraits of the persons concerned were thought to encourage prayers on their behalf during these, at other times. Displaying portraits in a public place was an expression of social status. Furthermore, donor portraits in Early Netherlandish painting suggest that their additional purpose was to serve as role models for the praying beholder during his own emotional meditation and prayer – not in order to be imitated as ideal persons like the painted Saints but to serve as a mirror for the recipient to reflect on himself and his sinful status, ideally leading him to a knowledge of himself and God. To do so during prayer is in accord with late medieval concepts of prayer developed by the Modern Devotion.
This process may be intensified. When a whole building was financed, a sculpture of the patron might be included on the facade or elsewhere in the building. Jan van Eyck's Rolin Madonna is a small painting where the donor Nicolas Rolin shares the painting space with the Madonna and Child, but Rolin had given great sums to his parish church, where it was hung, represented by the church above his praying hands in the townscape behind him. Sometimes, as in the Ghent Altarpiece, the donors were shown on the closed view of an altarpiece with movable wings, or on both the side panels, as in the Portinari Altarpiece and the Memlings above, or just on one side, as in the Merode Altarpiece. If they are on different sides, the males are on the left for the viewer, the honorific right-hand placement within the picture space. In family groups the figures are divided by gender. Groups of members of confraternities, sometimes with their wives, are found. Additional family members, from births or marriages, might be added and deaths might be recorded by the addition of small crosses held in the clasped hands.
At least in Northern Italy, as well as the grand altarpieces and frescos by leading masters that attract most art-historical attention, there was a more numerous group of small frescoes with a single saint and donor on side-walls, that were liable to be re-painted as soon as the number of candles lit before them fell off, or a wealthy donor needed the space for a large fresco-cycle, as portrayed in a 15th-century tale from Italy: And going around with the master mason, examining which figures to leave and which to destroy, the priest spotted a Saint Anthony and said:'Save this one.' He found a figure of Saint Sano and said:'This one is to be gotten rid of, since as long as I have been the Priest here I have never seen anyone light a candle in front of it, nor has it seemed to me useful. Donor portraits have a continuous history from late antiquity, the portrait in the 6th-century manuscript the Vienna Dioscurides may well reflect a long-established classical tradition, just as the author portraits found in the same manuscript are believed to do.
A painting in the Catacombs of Commodilla of 528 shows a throned Virgin and Child flanked by two saints, with Turtura, a female donor, in front of the left hand saint, who has his hand on her shoulder. Another tradition which had pre-Christian precedent was royal or imperial images showing the ruler with a religious figure Christ or the Virgin Mary in Christian examples, with the divine and royal figures shown communicating with each other in some way. Although none have survived, there is literary evidence of donor portraits in small chapels from the Early Christian period continuing the traditions of pagan temples; the 6th-century mosaic panels in the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna of the Emperor Justinian I and Empress Theodora with courtiers are not of the type showing the ruler receiving divine approval, but each show one of the imperial couple standing confidently with a group of attendants, looking out at the viewer. Their scale and composition are alone among large-scale survivals.
In Ravenna, there is a small mosaic of Justinian originally of Theoderic the Great in the Basilic
Faiyum
Faiyum is a city in Middle Egypt. Located 100 kilometres southwest of Cairo, in the Faiyum Oasis, it is the capital of the modern Faiyum Governorate. Called Shedet in Egyptian, the Greeks called it Koine Greek: Κροκοδειλόπολις Krokodilópolis, the Romans Arsinoë, it is one of Egypt's oldest cities due to its strategic location. Its name in English is spelled as Fayum, Faiyum or Al Faiyūm. Faiyum was officially named Madīnet Al Faiyūm; the name Faiyum may refer to the Faiyum Oasis, although it is used by Egyptians today to refer to the city. The modern name of the city comes from Coptic ̀Ⲫⲓⲟⲙ /Ⲡⲉⲓⲟⲙ epʰiom/peiom, meaning the Sea or the Lake, which in turn comes from late Egyptian pꜣ-ymꜥ of the same meaning, a reference to the nearby Lake Moeris. Archaeological evidence has found occupations around the Fayum dating back to at least the Epipalaeolithic. Middle Holocene occupations of the area are most studied on the north shore of Lake Moeris, where Gertrude Caton Thompson and Elinor Wight Gardner did a number of excavations of Epipalaeolithic and Neolithic sites, as well as a general survey of the area.
The area has been further investigated by a team from the UCLA/RUG/UOA Fayum Project. In ancient Egypt, the city was called Shedet; the 10th-century Bible exegete, Saadia Gaon, thought el-Fayyum to have been the biblical city of Pithom, mentioned in Exodus 1:11. It was the most significant centre of the cult of the crocodile god Sobek. In consequence, the Greeks called it "Crocodile City", borrowed into Latin as Crocodīlopolis; the city worshipped a tamed sacred crocodile called in Koine Petsuchos, "the Son of Soukhos", adorned with gold and gem pendants. The Petsoukhos lived in a special temple pond and was fed by the priests with food provided by visitors; when Petsuchos died, it was replaced by another. Under the Ptolemaic Kingdom, the city was for a while called Ptolemais Euergétis. Ptolemy II Philadelphus renamed the city Arsinoë and the whole nome after the name of his sister-wife Arsinoe II, deified after her death as part of the Ptolemaic cult of Alexander the Great, the official religion of the kingdom.
Under the Roman Empire, Arsinoë became part of the province of Arcadia Aegypti. To distinguish it from other cities of the same name, it was called "Arsinoë in Arcadia". With the arrival of Christianity, Arsinoë became the seat of a bishopric, a suffragan of Oxyrhynchus, the capital of the province and the metropolitan see. Michel Le Quien gives the names of several bishops of Arsinoë, nearly all of them associated with one heresy or another; the Catholic Church, considering Arsinoë in Arcadia to be no longer a residential bishopric, lists it as a titular see. Fayyum was the seat of governor of the Sasanian Egypt. Faiyum is the source of some famous death masks or mummy portraits painted during the Roman occupation of the area; the Egyptians continued their practice of burying their dead, despite the Roman preference for cremation. While under the control of the Roman Empire, Egyptian death masks were painted on wood in a pigmented wax technique called encaustic—the Faiyum mummy portraits represent this technique.
While believed to represent Greek settlers in Egypt, modern studies conclude that the Faiyum portraits instead represent native Egyptians, reflecting the complex synthesis of the predominant Egyptian culture and that of the elite Greek minority in the city. Faiyum has several large bazaars, baths and a much-frequented weekly market; the canal called Bahr Yussef runs through its banks lined with houses. There are two bridges over the river: one of three arches, which carries the main street and bazaar, one of two arches, over, built the Qaitbay mosque, a gift from his wife to honor the Mamluk Sultan in Fayoum. Mounds north of the city mark the site of Arsinoe, known to the ancient Greeks as Crocodilopolis, where in ancient times the sacred crocodile kept in Lake Moeris was worshipped; the center of the city is on the canal, with four waterwheels that were adopted by the governorate of Fayoum as its symbol. Hanging Mosque, built when the Ottomans ruled Egypt Hawara, archeological site 27 km from the city Lahun Pyramids, 4 km outside the city Qaitbay Mosque, in the city, was built by the wife of the Mamluk Sultan Qaitbay Qasr Qarun, 44 km from the city Wadi Elrayan or Wadi Rayan, the largest waterfalls in Egypt, around 50 km from the city Wadi Al-Hitan or Valley of whales, a paleontological site in the Al Fayyum Governorate, some 150 km southwest of Cairo.
It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Köppen-Geiger climate classification system classifies its climate as hot desert; the highest record temperatures was 46 °C on June 13, 1965 and the lowest record temperature was 2 °C on January 8, 1966. Tefta Tashko-Koço, well known Albanian singer was born in Faiyum, where her family lived at that time. Saadia Gaon, the influential Jewish teacher of the early 10th century, was from Faiyum, called al-Fayyumi. Youssef Wahbi, a notable Egyptian actor, well known for his influence on the development of Egyptian cinema and theater. List of cities and towns in Egypt Book
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