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The political decline of the Byzantine
Empire at the end of the 12th and during the first half of the 13th centuries
brought changes that favorably affected the arts, particularly iconography.
Cool mosaic figures with their fixed, staring eyes and motionless faces, often
clad in rich vestments and set in luxurious gold and marble, began to be
replaced by inexpensive but warm, colorful, delicate and vibrant frescoes and
icons. Those who revived the art of frescos painting - one of the oldest forms
of pictorial art and who brought it inside Christian churches were not artists
from Constantinople but simple monks from Mount Athos. Here on the Holy Hill in
the 4th century Greek monks established a settlement which grew into a
remarkable religious colony of about five thousand members grouped around some
twenty monasteries. Most of the monasteries were Greek, but one was Serbian,
one Russian and one Bulgarian. Each one was governed by it abbot and each one
represented a sort of a small confederate republic within the frame of the
entire community, known at one time as the Monastic Republic of Mount Athos.
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