Studies of the icon in Byzantium have tended to focus on the iconoclastic era of the eighth- and ninth-centuries. This study shows that discussion of the icon was far from settled by this lengthy dispute. While the theory of the icon in Byzantium was governed by a logical understanding that had limited painting to the visible alone, the four…

Figure and Likeness presents a thought-provoking new account of Byzantine iconoclasm—the fundamental crisis in Christian visual representation during the 8th and 9th centuries that defined the terms of Christianity's relationship to the painted image. Charles Barber rejects the conventional means of analyzing this crisis, which seeks…

Charles Barber, professor of art and archaeology at Princeton University, and Stratis Papaioannou, associate professor of classics and director of the Program of Medieval Studies at Brown University, have co-edited a book titled Michael Psellos on Literature and Art: A Byzantine Perspective on Aesthetics. Psellos has long been known as a key…

Dans le système des beaux-arts, l’architecture, en tant qu’art utile, a toujours occupé une place singulière. Issue des arts du dessin, elle côtoyait sur un pied d’égalité la peinture et la sculpture dans les premières académies fondées par les humanistes de la Renaissance. Ces institutions connurent leur âge d’or au siècle des…

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A new revolutionary approach to architecture and the city emerged in France during the Enlightenment. This book shows how a novel architectural expression informed by ancient precedents and universal forms together with a new urbanism brought about a sense of what the city might be; a rational, hygienic, symbolic and evident deployment of a…

Architectural drawings of the Italian Renaissance were largely devoid of color, but from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth, polychromy in architectural representation grew and flourished. Basile Baudez argues that colors appeared on paper when architects adapted the pictorial tools of imitation, cartographers’ natural signs,…

Textile in Architecture From the Middle Ages to Modernism investigates the interconnections between textile and architecture via a variety of case studies from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century and from diverse geographic contexts. Recently, architects have shown a renewed interest in the textile medium due to the use of…