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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Only a Poor Old Man, post: 5393565, member: 111037&quot;]Very nice example, perfect actually. And a great sample to use for explaining how Byzantine art works. Many people say that they don&#039;t like Byzantine coins and that the art is caricature-like. Even though this is a fair point, they wrongly assume that people in that period lost the necessary skills to produce works of art of classical style. The reality is that both styles existed but the classical form was deemed unnecessary and perhaps vulgar to be applied on such as sinful creation as money. The Byzantine empire went through a long period of debate on what is art (see iconoclasm) and one of the main arguments is that it would be regarded scandalous to have realistic portraits of emperors especially on money. [USER=77704]@panzerman[/USER] &#039;s coin is a perfect example of both artistic styles co-existing on the same object. On the obverse, we see a beautiful rendering of Jesus Christ that would satisfy most people&#039;s taste, but on the reverse we see the abstract style used to portray a generic caricature-like image of the emperors in question.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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