Description
Book SynopsisThis selection of seventeen papers by Professor Anthony Cutler falls into three broad groups, all including topics with which the author has been concerned for many years. Chapters III-VIII are concerned primarily with Byzantine subjects, and with their historiography. The last of this group also probes Italian relations with Byzantium which, in one manner or another, is also the theme of the next four papers. Chapters XIII-XVI are devoted to Scandinavia without, however, abandoning the focus on interconnections between 'works of art' and the societies that they represented.
Over the course of thirty years, the author has reverted frequently to the broad theme of the relation between artefacts and the cultures from which they emerged, prompted to respond to the art historian's characteristic lack of concern with the reasons for (as against the 'sources' of) the objects that he or she studies. These papers are linked by Professor "Cutler's general impatience with an attitude set out long ago by Henry Adams: 'We can admire a cathedral without comprehending the force of the Cross that produced it'.
Table of ContentsIntroduction
Stalking the Beast: Art History as Asymptotic Exercise
Originality as a Cultural Phenomenon
Under the Sign of the Deesis. On the Question of Representativeness in Medieval Art
In the Margins of Byzantium? Some Icons in Michael Psellos
The Christian Wall Paintings in the Parthenon: Interpreting a Lost Monument
Sacred and Profane: The Locus of the Political in Middle Byzantine Art
The Pathos of Distance: Byzantium in the Gaze of Renaissance Europe and Modern Scholarship
The Cult of the Galaktotrophousa in Byzantium and Italy
La 'questione bizantina' nella pittura italiana: una visione alternativa della maniera greca
Two New Venetian Fragments and the Study of Italo-Byzantine Mosaic
From Loot to Scholarship: Changing Modes in the Italian Response to Byzantine Artifacts
The Disputà Plate in the J. Paul Getty Museum and its Cinquecento Context
The Mulier Amicta Sole and her Attendants
Garda, Källunge and the Byzantine Tradition on Gotland
The Sculpture and Sources of 'Byzantios'
Byzantine Art and the North: Meditations on the Notion of Influence
Misapprehensions and Misgivings: Byzantine Art and the West in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
Additional Notes
Index
