This volume addresses and problematizes the formation and transformation of the ancient Near Eastern art historical and archaeological canon. The 'canon' is defined as an established list of objects, monuments, buildings, and sites that are considered to be most representative of the ancient Near East. In "testing" this canon, this project takes stock of the current canon, its origins, endurance, and prospects. Boundaries and typologies are examined, technologies of canon production are investigated, and heritage perspectives on contemporary culture offer a key to the future.

Presents the history of the Byzantine Empire from the sixth to the fifteenth century in terms of the political events, art, literature, and thought of Byzantine society.

This volume offers an overview of Byzantine manuscript illustration, a central branch of Byzantine art and culture. Just like written texts, illustrations bear witness to Byzantine material culture, imperial ideology and religious beliefs, as well as to the development and spread of Byzantine art. In this sense illustrated books reflect the society that produced and used them. Being portable, they could serve as diplomatic gifts or could be acquired by foreigners. In such cases they became “emissaries” of Byzantine art and culture in Western Europe and the Arabic world. The volume provides for the first time a comprehensive overview of the material, divided by text categories, including both secular and religious manuscripts, and analyses which texts were illustrated in Byzantium, and how. Contributors are Justine M. Andrews, Leslie Brubaker, Annemarie W. Carr, Elina Dobrynina, Maria Evangelatou, Maria Laura Tomea Gavazzoli, Markos Giannoulis, Cecily Hennessy, Ioli Kalavrezou, Maja Kominko, Sofia Kotzabassi, Stavros Lazaris, Kallirroe Linardou, Vasileios Marinis, Kathleen Maxwell, Georgi R. Parpulov, Nancy P. Ševčenko, Jean-Michel Spieser, Mika Takiguchi, Courtney Tomaselli, Marina Toumpouri, Nicolette S. Trahoulia, Vasiliki Tsamakda, and Elisabeth Yota.

Recent discussions on Byzantine art have been dominated by the question of representing realia. Among these, however, the way works of art reflect the daily life of women have not received much space or attention. The present book studies various images representing women's status and her performative tasks, and their significance from the fourth century to the fall of the Empire, through analysis of archaeological evidence and works of art. It addresses a wide range of questions, some pertaining both to pictorial traditions and to their late antique antecedents, others peculiar to changing and evolving Byzantine culture and mentality. The first chapter deals with the imagery of childbearing, starting with conception and concluding with the care given to the new born and the mother. The second chapter investigates motherhood imagery (breastfeeding, child care, and child-mother intimacy) and the portrayal of women as caretakers and managers of the household (preparing food, bringing water, carding and weaving, or working side by side with their husbands). The third chapter is dedicated to representations of women holding positions outside the house: midwives, maidservants, wet nurses, and mourners. Images of women engaged in disreputable occupations-dancers, musicians, prostitutes and courtesans - complete this chapter. The fourth chapter discusses images of women portrayed in the metaphorical margins - looking out from the gynaikon (the women's apartments), or at their private toilette; it also deals with representations of women who stray from the societal mainstream - concubines; adulteresses, women consenting to sexual acts or being coerced into them - considered symbolically as belonging to the margins of society. The book concludes with a discussion of the degree to which the visual material reliably reflects reality and changing attitudes toward women between Late Antiquity and late Byzantium; and further, to what extent it reveals embedded perceptions and conceptions of women, constructed by canonic regulations and imperial law, popular beliefs and accepted customs. The book aims to lift a veil from known and less known works of art and to present the rarely described picture of the daily life of women in Byzantine art over a very wide chronological span of time, in an effort to expand our knowledge of women in Byzantium and their realia.

The Byzantines used imagery to communicate a wide range of issues. In the context of Iconoclasm - the debate about the legitimacy of religious art conducted between c. AD 730 and 843 - Byzantine authors themselves claimed that visual images could express certain ideas better than words. Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium deals with how such visual communication worked and examines the types of messages that pictures could convey in the aftermath of Iconoclasm. Its focus is on a deluxe manuscript commissioned around 880, a copy of the fourth-century sermons of the Cappadocian church father Gregory of Nazianzus which presented to the Emperor Basil I, founder of the Macedonian dynasty, by one of the greatest scholars Byzantium ever produced, the patriarch Photios. The manuscript was lavishly decorated with gilded initials, elaborate headpieces and a full-page miniature before each of Gregory's sermons. Forty-six of these, including over 200 distinct scenes, survive. Fewer than half however were directly inspired by the homily that they accompany. Instead most function as commentaries on the ninth-century court and carefully deconstructed both provide us with information not available from preserved written sources and perhaps more important show us how visual images communicate differently from words.

Arranged in alphabetical order, these 5 volumes encompass the history of the cultural development of America with over 2300 entries.

The studies reprinted here deal with the Byzantine empire between the 9th and 11th centuries, with a focus on the period of the Macedonian dynasty, and include four translated into English for this volume. They reflect both historical and prosopographical concerns, but Professor Markopoulos's principle interest is in the analysis of literary works and texts. This he combines with the examination of the ideological context of the period, as shaped in the reigns of Basil I and Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos, and the investigation of gender issues and other approaches. The close analysis of the texts shows how, after the close of Iconoclasm, new styles of writing and new attitudes towards the writing of history emerged, for instance in the use of mythological themes, which exemplify the changing intellectual concerns of the time.

A comprehensive study of the process by which certain martyrs of the early church were transformed into military heroes.

Serves as both visual and textual record of the exhibition of the same name, surveying the art of the Middle Byzantine period from the restoration of the use of icons by the Orthodox Church in 843 to the occupation of Constantinople by the Crusader forces from the West from 1204 to 1261. Conceived as a sequel to the 1976 exhibition "Age of Spirituality," which focused on the first centuries of Byzantium. Preceding the catalogue, 17 essays treat the historical context, religious sphere, and secular courtly realm of the empire, and the interactions between Byzantium and other medieval cultures. Abundantly illustrated. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR