ABSTRACT
The Byzantine influence on Italian art of this period is reflected in terms such as ‘Italo-Byzantine’ and ‘maniera greca’, used to describe the style of Italian works from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The orientation towards Byzantium did not mean, however, that contemporary Italian artists were merely under Byzantium’s magic spell and that their interest in Byzantine art resulted in ‘an endless repetition by unimaginative Italian craftsmen of stale and outworn Byzantine formulae’ – as Ernst Kitzinger once phrased it.2
