The Palaeologan Renaissance or Palaiologan Renaissance is the final period in the development of Byzantine art. Coinciding with the reign of the Palaiologoi, the last dynasty to rule the Byzantine Empire (1261–1453), it was an attempt to restore Byzantine self-confidence and cultural prestige after the empire had endured a long period of foreign occupation. The legacy of this era is observable both in Greek culture after the empire's fall and in the Italian Renaissance. Scholars of the time utilized several classical texts.
History
Following the Sack of Constantinople in 1204, the Crusaders established a Latin Empire to rule what had been Byzantine territory. Extensive looting took place in the fallen capital, and many relics and art treasures were shipped back to Western Europe. Prior generations of Western Europeans had been heavily influenced by Byzantine art, but the sack coincided with the appearance of a more independent creative outlook. Crusader art mixed Western and Byzantine aesthetic traits, and new buildings put up in the Latin Empire were in the Gothic style.
Seeking refuge in unconquered remnants of their empire, the Byzantine elite formed governments-in-exile at Nicaea, Trebizond, and Epirus. These new political entities continued to commission works of art, which however bore marks of limited resources and fragmented imperial authority. Craftsmen worked with less rare and expensive materials than before— an example is the use of steatite in sculptures that would formerly have been made of ivory— and sponsorship came from a multitude of private patrons instead of being dominated by the emperor. One of the emperors of Nicaea, John III Doukas Vatatzes (r. 1222–1254), undertook projects to ensure the survival of traditional culture. He commissioned public libraries in all the cities of his possessions and ordered municipal leaders to allocate salaries to scholars of medicine, mathematics and rhetoric. In 1238, he also instituted a school of philosophy directed by Nikephoros Blemmydes.
Constantinople was recaptured in 1261 by Michael VIII Palaiologos (r. 1261–1282), founder of the Palaeologan Dynasty and former co-emperor of Nicaea. Amid a round of triumphal ceremonies, he declared the Byzantine Empire restored and instituted a campaign of renovation in the capital. On a practical level this renovation had been made necessary by the damage done to the city under Latin rule, but it was also intended to symbolize the empire's recovery from the destitution and humiliation it had just undergone. The conception of the Palaeologan period as a cultural "renaissance" owes much to Michael's efforts to revive the glory of Constantinople; in Byzantine lands unconquered by the Crusaders, art production had never been so seriously disrupted as to require a period of "rebirth".
Certain conditions established by the sack were not dispelled by the recovery of Constantinople. The Byzantine Empire had been permanently diminished by the events of the early thirteenth century: some of its territories were lost to foreign powers, and the remaining Byzantine lands were further divided by the continued independence of the rulers of Trebizond and Epirus. In the aftermath of the Crusades the Greek world maintained unprecedentedly close contact with Western Europe, both from the Crusader states surviving on its borders and through the Palaeologan emperors' sporadic attempts to ally with Catholic powers in the fight against the Ottoman Turks. Even within the imperial boundaries, many immigrant westerners had integrated with eastern communities, sometimes through intercultural marriage, and continued their residence after the Latin occupiers were driven away. Byzantine and Western artists borrowed each other's techniques; above and beyond their usefulness in catering to a more diverse group of patrons, these borrowings were motivated by a genuine interest in foreign artworks and a desire to learn from them. As in the era of exile, much Palaeologan art was funded by the aristocracy instead of the emperors. Pictorial works from this era feature an unprecedented number of non–imperial donor portraits.