Week #6- Daily #3- How does Early Christian and Byzantine portraiture represent both a continuation of and a break from the past? Look up the Fayum Portraits and the Ravenna Portrait of Justinian as a starting point for your thinking.

Early Christian and Byzantine portraiture represents a continuation and break from the past. The art is a continuation because it portrays an event that has happened by showing a scene. It represents life from the past and things that were in the past. The Ravenna Portrait of Justinian is of a real person in history. Justinian was an important figure of Late Antiquity. He was illustrated as what he would look like in his time period. This art was also a break from the art because of artists’ creativity in their work. They use different resources to make their art, too. The Fayum Portraits are sometimes accompanied with contemporary and modern mummy overings and masks, jewelry, and funerary stelae. The artists focused more on the details of the faces in the portraits rather than an actual scene for the picture. There was a lot more detail in Early Christian and Byzantine portraiture than there was in the past. Many things led Christian and Byzantine portraiture to either continue or change from the past.