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WEITZMANN, K., Geistige Grundlagen und Wesen der Makedonischen Renaissance. Westdeutscher Verlag, Köln / Opladen, 1963. 104,(33)p. ills.(B&W photographs and one full colour reproduction). Sewn. 'The present study seeks to free the Paris Psalter of its splendid isolation and to connect it with a humanistic movement which at the time of the Patriarch Photius and the emperors Leon the Wise and Constantine Porphyrogenitus revived classical learning and led to the copying of texts of ancient authors, among them some with illustrations. this explains the sudden appearance of scientific and mythological illustrations, based on Homer, euripides and other classical writers, in manuscripts of the tenth century. This copying of classical subject matter in a classical style was of great consequence for byzantine art in general and affected Christian art to such an extent that the latter fell under the spell of the classical revival movement and became so thoroughly classicized that the traces of this influence were at no time thoroughly eradicated in spite of some counter movement that stressed a more spiritualized and ascetic style. (...) After a certain stagnation and reaction against the classicizing art of the tenth century in the eleventh and twelfth, we have another strong revival in the thirteenth century which, however, seems only in rare cases to have harked back directly to classical sources, but in many cases, as can be proved, was satisfied with copying good tenth-century models. (...) At the sema time, the establishment of the Crusader kingdom in Palestine and Syria and the Latin empire after the conquest of Constantinople in 1204 initiated a period of intensified influence of Byzantine art upon the Latin West and the latter acquainted with the accomplishments of the latest classical revival style of the Eastern capital. In this weay the Macedonian Renaissance had an impact also on the development of West European art that on occasion could even be felt right down to the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.' (K. WEITZMANN, Summary, pp.52-53). From the library of the late Professor Doktor Nikolaus Himmelmann. € 17.50 (Antiquarian)