Athens, Greece-based artist Fotis Varthis has created The Byzantine Series, a collection of historic Byzantine-style paintings of modern-day pop culture characters. You can view more paintings from his series on Behance.
Byzantine painting is a language as any kind of art and it doesn’t necessarily express a religious statement. For me this concept of illustrating known -fantasy- characters in Byzantine way began as a mistake when I was trying to draw a prophet and the face reminded me of Saruman! Then I thought that it would be fun to try to depict a variety of characters in that way and I will continue this project as long as it goes. Nothing to do with Orthodoxy or any other religion though.
Gandalf the Grey, Lord of the Rings
images via Fotis Varthis
via it8Bit
