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.
