Other Icons:
Art and Power in Byzantine Secular Culture
Eunice Dauterman Maguire & Henry Maguire

Honorable Mention, 2006 AAP Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Arts and Art History

Cloth | 2006 | $49.50 / £29.95
232 pp. | 8 1/2 x 9 | 150 halftones. 8 color illus.

Shopping Cart | Endorsements | Table of Contents
Introduction [HTML] or [PDF] | Chapter 1 [PDF]

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.

Eunice Dauterman Maguire is Curator of the Archaeological Collection and Senior Lecturer in Art History at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Weavings from Roman, Byzantine and Islamic Egypt and, with Henry Maguire, the coauthor of Art and Holy Powers in the Early Christian House. Henry Maguire is Professor of Art History at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Art and Eloquence in Byzantium and The Icons of Their Bodies: Saints and Their Images in Byzantium (both Princeton).

Endorsements:

"The new corpus of material assembled here will surely spur further investigation into how all the Byzantine arts, broadly defined, served to reflect, reinforce, and construct a Byzantine worldview. Merely by gathering together so much 'unofficial' art, the Maguires have done a huge service. Even more impressive is their successful attempt to make sense of this disparate body of material by interpreting it consistently, yet flexibly, in relation to the familiar 'official' arts. Byzantine art history, and especially the teaching of Byzantine art history, will never be the same."--Linda Safran, University of Toronto

"Impeccably referenced and beautifully illustrated, Other Icons opens up a new side of Byzantine art at the height of its creativity."--Carolyn Connor, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Table of Contents:

List of Illustrations ix
Preface xxi
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Novelties and Inventions in Byzantine Art 5
Chapter 2: The Marvels of the Court 29
Chapter 3: Animals and Magic in Byzantine Art 58
Chapter 4: Byzantine Art and the Nude 97
Chapter 5: Decorum, Merrymaking, and Disorder 135
Conclusion 157
Notes 169
Frequently Cited Sources 189
Index 193

Another Princeton book by Henry Maguire:

• The Icons of Their Bodies: Saints and Their Images in Byzantium.

Subject Area:

• Art and Architecture

Shopping Cart:

For customers in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Australia
Cloth: $49.50 ISBN13: 978-0-691-12564-0

For customers in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and India
Cloth: £29.95 ISBN13: 978-0-691-12564-0

Prices subject to change without notice

File created: 4/23/2008

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