Byzantium Tondo

This image is of the interior space of a Byzantine church with light streaming through. Byzantine architecture utilized more of everything—more clerestory windows, mosaics, columns, domes, and it was all done in a grandiose manner.

Byzantium was an ancient Greek city in classical antiquity that became known as Constantinople in late antiquity and Istanbul today. The Greek name Byzantion and its Latinization Byzantium continued to be used as a name of Constantinople sporadically and to varying degrees during the thousand year existence of the Byzantine Empire. Byzantium was colonized by Greeks from Megara in the 7th century BC and remained primarily Greek-speaking until its conquest by the Ottoman Empire in AD 1453.

A tondo is a Renaissance term for a circular work of art, either a painting, print or a sculpture. The word derives from the Italian rotondo, "round". The term is usually not used in English for small round paintings, but only those over about 60 cm (two feet) in diameter, thus excluding many round portrait miniatures – for sculpture the threshold is rather lower.