Ruskin at MP I:xxi follows the conventional view of Byzantine art and architecture as primitive. For Vasari the Byzantine Greeks were at least better than those who brought from their 'barbarous races the style now called German' ( Vasari, Le Vite, Testo II.22). The Greeks were the best available though they were 'rough, rude and vulgar'( Vasari, Le Vite, Testo II.30). Unlike Cimabue who was apprenticed to them, they learned not from the study of nature but had 'taught one to the other for many a long year, without ever thinking of bettering their draughtsmanship, or beauty of colouring, or of any invention that might be good'( Vasari, Le Vite, Testo II.37).
For Kugler, ed. Eastlake, Handbook of the History of Painting, Part One, The Italian Schools, First Edition, Byzantine artists had preserved a 'spiritless convention' and the mere 'outward and lifeless forms of the earlier creations'. 'Knowledge of nature is entirely wanting'; folds of drapery 'follow no laws of form, but succeed each other in stiff lines, sharp and parallel; heads have in common 'something of a spectral rigidity, indicating in its type-like sameness, a dull, servile constraint'; figures are 'long and meagre in their proportions'; in mosaics 'total absence of form and action, and the over-loading with tawdry oriental ornaments, betray an utter incapacity for original production' and Kugler explicitly includes in that condemnation representations in mosaic of the Virgin and Child. Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain, I. p. 96, similarly refers to 'heavy, gaudy and hard colours', 'paltry' drapery 'so overladen with barbaric pearl and jewels as to exclude all indication of form', and 'gloomy and ascetic heads'.
Curzon, Visits to Monasteries in the Levant, of 1849 in the introductory chapter, refers to Byzantine book illuminations of the twelfth century which are 'better works of art than those of Italian painters of the same period'. However, he suggests, with some chronological oddity, that since the Turkish 'irruption' 'no improvements have been made' and 'pictures of the Greek school being servile copies one of another, have remained without any change for centuries'. The builders of Byzantine churches were 'not particular as to rules and proportions'; they lacked 'the truly intellectual qualities of proportion, symmetry, and grace'; they attempted to make up for lack of 'good taste' by 'richness of colour'. He did, however, grant that their architects were no worse than British architects of his time.
Ruskin 's work at St. Mark's in Venice, at Torcello, and at Murano began to make clear the absurdity of such ideas, based as they were on a combination of ignorance and chauvinism found still in the responses of many whose roots lie in the Latin tradition when faced with those whose roots lie in the Orthodox tradition.