The Icon
Will be published approx. on 30. November 2026
Book
Hardback
586 pages
978-1-108-47141-1 (ISBN)
Description
The Icon offers a comprehensive introduction to an art form that remains integral to the liturgical and devotional practices of Christianity in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and beyond. Written by an international team of scholars, it explores how icons have been used and venerated for two millennia, and considers a range of topics, including historiography, artistic process, theology, use in domestic and ecclesiastical settings, and various typologies. Thematic essays chart the origins and development of the icon from its origins in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages; through the various schools of icon painting that flourished in the Orthodox world during the medieval era; and its prolonged afterlife following the fall of Byzantium in 1453. Richly illustrated with over 300 color and black-and-white illustrations, The Icon provides a magisterial overview of a vital genre of religious art with enduring appeal across time and space.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
ISBN-13
978-1-108-47141-1 (9781108471411)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Charles Barber is the Donald Drew Egbert Professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. He is the author of Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (2002), Contesting the Logic of Painting: Art and Understanding in Eleventh-Century Byzantium (2007), and Eccentric Renaissance: El Greco, Michael Damaskenos, Giorgios Klontzas (2024). He is also the editor of Sources for Byzantine Art History. Maria Vassilaki is Professor Emerita in the History of Byzantine Art and a member of the Benaki Museum Board of Trustees. Her publications include: Cretan Icons and Cretan Painters at Sinai; Working Drawings of Icon Painters after the Fall of Constantinople; The Icons of the Tositsas Mansion: The Collection of Evangelos Averof; and The Painter Angelos and Icon Painting in Venetian Crete. She has curated major exhibitions and edited their catalogues: Mother of God: Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art; Byzantium: 330-1453 (with Robin Cormack); and The Hand of Angelos: An Icon-Painter in Venetian Crete. She recently started a collaboration with St. Catherine's monastery at Sinai aiming to catalog and study the 1,549 icons which are housed in the monastery's store room for icons.
Content
Part I. Introduction; 1. A brief introduction Charles Barber; 2. Historiography Robin Cormack; 3. The theology of the icon Maximos Constas; 4. Neourgia: the restoration of icons in the premodern world Ivan Drpic; 5. The Conservation of icons in the twentieth century: an overview of its history and practice Stergios Stassinopoulos; 6. The artist Anthony Cutler; 7. Model books, painter's guides and drawings in Byzantium Maria Vassilaki; 8. Artists' manuals Emmanuel Moutafov; 9. The trade in and dissemination of icons Daniel Duran i Duelt; 10. Icons in the home Maria Parani; 11. Icons and their Confraternities Charles Barber; 12. Icons of the peripatetic image: the processional icon in late-Byzantine Constantinople and Thessaloniki James Rodriguez; 13. Commemorations, dedications, prayers: Byzantine epigrams on icons Andreas Rhoby; 14. Templon and Proskynesis icons Ioannis D. Varalis; 15. The material embrace: veils and covers for the icon Warren T. Woodfin; 16. Icon exhibition: between object and art Glenn Peers; Part II. Overview: 17. Votive panels in late Antiquity: notes towards the origins of the icon Jas Elsner; 18. Early Icons Charles Barber; 19. Byzantine icons from 843 to 1204 Robin Cormack; 20. Georgian icons Antony Eastmond; 21. Frankish icons Lisa Mahoney; 22. Icon painting in the Middle East Mat Immerzeel; 23. Cypriot icons: Comnenian and post-Comnenian Production (twelfth and thirteenth centuries) Sophocles Sophocleous; 24. Icons of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Annemarie Weyl Carr; 25. Cretan icons and their histories, fifteenth to seventeenth centuries Maria Vassilaki; 26. The Ethiopian Se?el: iconic and aniconic thought between Mariology and royal ideology Claire Bosc-Tiesse; 27. Icons in the western world Michele Bacci; 28. Icons in the Balkans and the Byzantine koine: in search of the role of the monastic centers Athanasios Semoglou; 29. Ottoman era icons Georgios Chr. Tsigaras; 30. Icon painting in Russia in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries Engelina Smirnova; 31. Russian icon painting, fifteenth to the first half of the seventeenth century Aleksandr S. Preobrazhenskii; 32. Later Russian icon painting, seventeenth to nineteenth century Oleg Tarasov; 33. 'The sky was no longer blue. It was shiny gold:' the revival of icon painting in Greece between nineteenth-century romantic nationalism and twentieth-century anti-religious modernism Dimitra Kotoula; 34. Icons and modern art Maria Taroutina; 35. Epilogue Maria Vassilaki.