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. However, an art of strikingly secular expression was not only common to Byzantine culture, but also key to defining it. In "Other Icons", Eunice Dauterman Maguire and Henry Maguire offer the first comprehensive view of this "unofficial" Byzantine art, demonstrating the role it played and its dialogue with traditional Christian Byzantine art.This beautifully illustrated book creates an entirely new understanding of the whole of Byzantine art and culture. With its wide-ranging examples, the book vividly demonstrates how the surprise of this "profane" art is not only in its subjects of mythic creatures, exotic imagery, and eroticism, but also in the ubiquity and beauty of their placement - within churches and without, woven into silk, illuminated on manuscripts, engraved into pottery, painted in frescoes, and taking life in marble, bone, and ivory.
By presenting and exploring this profane art for the first time in a scholarly book in English, "Other Icons" will change the way we look at the art of an entire era.
- ISBN10 0691125643
- ISBN13 9780691125640
- Publish Date 15 October 2006
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 11 October 2012
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Princeton University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 224
- Language English
- URL https://press.princeton.edu/titles/8289.html