My cousin gave me a book on Byzantine art, and it was love at first sight.
Byzantine art started in the decline of the Western Roman Empire in the mid-1400s. Mostly, artists were beholden to the church, creating religious iconography and retelling biblical stories. Though artists painted mythological stories, and semi-human religious figures, too. A mix of refined beauty and macabre images. The ancient and contemporary world are intertwined in the Byzantine concerns and aesthetics, God, love, fear and brutality. The images lend themselves to modern interpretation.