Description
Book SynopsisArgues that donor portraits in Byzantine art should instead be considered as contact portraits. Contends that the most important feature of the scenes of supplication between mortals and holy, supernatural interlocutors consists in the active role that they play within the belief systems of the supplicants.
Trade Review'This is a book that takes a broadly synchronic look across the Byzantine world, a view that different works of art in different media from different times and places nonetheless speak to the same broad Christian world-view, to similar structures … This is a perspective that makes us think and it makes us question, and that is what the best scholarship should do.' Liz James, The English Historical Review
Table of ContentsIntroduction: methodologies for the study of donor portraits; 1. The history and problematic of the donor portrait; 2. On meaning in portraits. The knot of intention and the question of the patron's share; 3. Awaiting the end after the end. Sin, absolution, and the afterlife; 4. Exchange and non-exchange. The gift between human and divine; 5. The literal, the symbolic, and the contact portrait. On belief in the interaction between human and divine; Postscript: the problem of terminology again. Donor portraits and contact portraits.
