Art and Text in Byzantine Culture

Art and Text in Byzantine Culture explores the relationship between images and words, and examines the different types of interactions between pictures and texts in Byzantine art. Byzantium is the only major world power to have experienced political upheaval on a vast scale as a result of an argument about art during the Iconoclasm period. The dynamic between art and text in Byzantium is essential to understanding Byzantine art and culture and allows us to explore the close linking of image and word in a society where the correct relationship between the two was critical to the well-being of the state. Composed of specially-commissioned essays written by an international team of scholars, this volume analyzes how contemporaries wrote about art, how images and text work together in Byzantine art, and how the words written on art works contribute to their meaning.

• First collection on the relationship between art and text in Byzantium • Contributions by major Anglo-American scholars in the field • Takes various theoretical and methodological approaches

Introduction: art and text in Byzantium Liz James; 1. Accomplishing the picture: Ekphrasis, mimesis, and martyrdom in Asterios of Amaseia Ruth Webb; 2. The rhetoric of buildings in the De Aedificiis of Procopius Jas Elsner; 3. Every cliche in the book: the linguistic turn and the text-image discourse in Byzantine manuscripts Leslie Brubaker; 4. In the presence of the text: a note on writing, speaking and performing in the Theodore Psalter Charles Barber; 5. Image and inscription: pleas for salvation in spaces of devotion Robert S. Nelson; 6. Epigrams on icons Bissera V. Pentcheva; 7. Eufrasius and friends: on names and their absence in Byzantine art Henry Maguire; 8. Echoes of orality in the monumental inscriptions of Byzantium Amy Papalexandrou; 9. ‘And shall these mute stones speak?’ Words as art Liz James.