Product Description: In this volume, twelve specialists examine the role of graphic signs such as cross signs, christograms, and monograms in the late Roman and post-Roman worlds and the contexts that facilitated their dissemination in diverse media. The essays collected here explore the rise and spread of graphic signs in relation to socio-cultural transformations during Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, focusing in particular on evolving perceptions and projections of authority...read more

Product Description: Nature and Illusion is the first extended treatment of the portrayal of nature in Byzantine art and literature. In this richly illustrated study, Henry Maguire shows how the Byzantines embraced terrestrial creation in the decoration of their churches during the fifth to seventh centuries but then adopted a much more cautious attitude toward the depiction of animals and plants in the middle ages, after the iconoclastic dispute of the eighth and ninth centuries...read more

Product Description: Written by specialists in several disciplines, this volume explores the parameters and significance of magic in Byzantine society, from the fourth century to after the empire's fall. The authors address a wide variety of questions, some of which are common to all historical research into magic, and some of which are peculiar to the Byzantine context...read more

Product Description: The twelve studies contained in this second collection by Henry Maguire are linked together by a common theme, namely the relationship of Byzantine art to the imaginary. They show how art enabled the Byzantines not only to imagine the sacred events of the past, but also to visualize the invisible present by manifesting the spiritual world that they could not see...read more

Product Description: Dynamic Splendor introduces a cycle of sixth-century mosaics little known to scholars, though they are comparable in quality and interest to famed mosaics in Italy and elsewhere. Ann Terry and Henry Maguire provide the first comprehensive account of the history and meaning of the mosaics along with the first high-quality photographic documentation of the ensemble...read more

Product Description: A winged centaur with the spotted body of a leopard playing a lute; a naked man with an animal head; a goat-footed Pan; a four-bodied lion; sphinxes, and hippocamps. Few would associate these forms of art with the Byzantine era, a period dominated by religious art...read more

The imperial court in Constantinople has been central to the outsider's vision of Byzantium. However, in spite of its fame in literature and scholarship, there have been few attempts to analyze the Byzantine court in its entirety as a phenomenon. The studies in this volume aim to provide a unified composition by presenting Byzantine courtly life in all its interconnected facets. One important theme that unites these studies is the attention paid to describing the effects of a change in the social makeup of the court during this period and the reflection of these changes in art and architecture. These changes in social composition, mentality, and material culture of the court demonstrate that, as in so many other aspects of Byzantine civilization, the image of permanence and immutability projected by the forms of palace life was more apparent than real. As this new work shows, behind the golden facade of ceremony, rhetoric, and art, there was constant development and renewal.

Product Description: Individual essays discuss Byzantine conceptions of paradise, the textual evidence for monastic horticulture, animal and game parks, herbs in medicinal pharmacy, and the famous illustrated copy of Dioskorides's herbal manual in Vienna...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The Byzantines surrounded themselves with their saints, invisible but constant companions, who were made visible by dreams, visions, and art. The composition and presentation of this imagined gallery followed a logical structure, a construct that was itself a collective work of art created by Byzantine society. The purpose of this book is to analyze the logic of the saint's image in Byzantium, both in portraits and in narrative scenes. Here Henry Maguire argues that the Byzantines gave to their images differing formal characteristics of movement, modeling, depth, and differentiation, according to the tasks that the icons were called upon to perform in the all-important business of communication between the visible and the invisible worlds. The book draws extensively on sources that have been relatively little utilized by art historians. It considers both domestic and ecclesiastical artifacts, showing how the former raised the problem of access by lay men and women to the supernatural and fueled the debates concerning the role of images in the Christian cult. Special attention is paid to the poems inscribed by the Byzantines upon their icons, and to the written lives of their saints, texts that offer the most direct and vivid insight into the everyday experience of art in Byzantium. The overall purpose of the book is to provide a new view of Byzantine art, one that integrates formal analysis with both theology and social history. (view table of contents)

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Product Description: In this interdisciplinary study, Henry Maguire examines the impact of several literary genres and rhetorical techniques on the visual arts of Byzantium. In particular, he shows that the literary embellishments of the sermons and hymns of the church nourished the imaginations of artists, and fundamentally affected the iconography, style, and arrangement of their work...read more

Product Description: One of the most distinctive characteristics of Byzantine art of the later fifth and the sixth centuries AU. is its fondness for imagery drawn from natural history. Wherever the visitor looks in churches of this period, whether it be to the floors, the walls, the furnishing, or the ceilings and the vaults, there may be representations of birds, beasts, sea creatures, and plants...read more