A beautifully illustrated, new edition of the best single-volume guide to Byzantine art, providing an introduction to the whole period and range of styles.
Finds a correspondence between the evolution of stylistic forms in Early Christian art and the social, religious, and historical developments of the period.
Byzantine art has been an underappreciated field, often treated as an adjunct to the arts of the medieval West, if considered at all. In illustrating the richness and diversity of art in the Byzantine world, this handbook will help establish the subject as a distinct field worthy of serious inquiry. Essays consider Byzantine art as art made in the eastern Mediterranean world, including the Balkans, Russia, the Near East and north Africa, between the years 330 and 1453. Much of this art was made for religious purposes, created to enhance and beautify the Orthodox liturgy and worship space, as well as to serve in a royal or domestic context. Discussions in this volume will consider both aspects of this artistic creation, across a wide swath of geography and a long span of time. The volume marries older, object-based considerations of themes and monuments which form the backbone of art history, to considerations drawing on many different methodologies-sociology, semiotics, anthropology, archaeology, reception theory, deconstruction theory, and so on-in an up-to-date synthesis of scholarship on Byzantine art and architecture. The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Art and Architecture is a comprehensive overview of a particularly rich field of study, offering a window into the world of this fascinating and beautiful period of art.
Questions how political decline refigures the visual culture of empire by examining the imperial image and the gift in later Byzantium (1261-1453). Provides a more nuanced account of medieval artistic cultural exchange that considers the temporal dimensions of power and the changing fates of empires.
An unmanageable, but lovable, eleven-year-old misfit learns to believe in himself when he gets to know the new school counselor, who is a sort of misfit too.
By now a classic, it presents in a single volume a coherent overall view of the history and the changing character of Early Christian and Byzantine architecture, from Rome and Milan to North Africa, from Constantinople to Greece and the Balkans, and from Egypt and Jerusalem to the villages and monasteries of Syria, Asia Minor, Armenia, and Mesopotamia.
For each major period, the developments affecting the entire range of artistic disciplines are placed in context in a brief historical introduction, and the author reveals the diversity and incomparable richness of an art which is essentially religious.