Books about Byzantium

The cross stirs intense feelings among Christians as well as non-Christians. Robin Jensen takes readers on an intellectual and spiritual journey through the two-thousand-year evolution of the cross as an idea and an artifact, illuminating the controversies―along with the forms of devotion―this c...

Two lavish, illustrated histories confronted and contested the Byzantine model of empire. The Madrid Skylitzes was created at the court of Roger II of Sicily in the mid-twelfth century. The Vatican Manasses was produced for Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria in the mid-fourteenth century. Through close anal...

Examining how God and eventually Christ are portrayed in early Christian art, Jensen explores questions of the relationship between art and theology, conflicts over idolatry and iconography, and how the Christological controversies affected the portrayals of Christ. Since much of this art comes from...

The churches of the Byzantine era were built to represent heaven on earth. Architecture, art and liturgy were intertwined in them to a degree that has never been replicated elsewhere, and the symbolism of this relationship had deep and profound meanings. Sacred buildings and their spiritual art unde...

Byzantine Art and Renaissance Europe discusses the cultural and artistic interaction between the Byzantine east and western Europe, from the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 to the flourishing of post-Byzantine artistic workshops on Venetian Crete during the fifteenth and sixteen...

The Virgin Mary embodied power rather than maternal tenderness in the Byzantine world. Known as the Mother of God, she became a guarantor of military victory and hence of imperial authority. In this pioneering book, Bissera Pentcheva connects the fusion of Marian cult and imperial rule with the powe...

These seven chapters, originally given as lectures honoring the fiftieth anniversary of Dumbarton Oaks, cover a wide range of topics, from the relationship of Byzantium with its Islamic, Slavic, and Western European neighbors to the modern reception of Byzantine art.