Note 124 — Chapter IV · THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY
Charles Francis Atkinson translation
Phidias, and through him his patron Pericles, were attacked for alleged introduction of portraits upon the shield of Athene Parthenos. In Western religious art, on the contrary, portraiture was, as everyone knows, a habitual practice. Every Madonna, for instance, is more or less of a portrait.
With this may be compared again the growing resistance of Byzantine art, as it matured, to portraiture in sacred surroundings, evidenced for instance in the history of the nimbus or halo—which was removed from the insignia of the Prince to become the badge of the Saint—in the legend of the miraculous effacement of Justinian’s pompous inscription on Hagia Sophia, and in the banishment of the human patron from the celestial part of the church to the earthly.—Tr.