Other Icons: Art and Power in Byzantine Secular Culture

An entirely new perspective on Byzantine art and culture through the lens of secular art

A winged centaur with the spotted body of a leopard playing a lute; a naked man with an animal head; a goat-footed Pan; a four-bodied lion; sphinxes and hippocamps. Few would associate these forms of art with the Byzantine era, a period dominated by religious art. However, art of strikingly secular expression was not only common to Byzantine culture but key to defining it. In Other Icons, Eunice Dauterman Maguire and Henry Maguire offer the first comprehensive view of this unofficial Byzantine art, demonstrating the role it played in dialogue with traditional Christian Byzantine art.

With wide-ranging examples, this beautifully illustrated book vividly demonstrates how the surprise of this profane art is not only in its subjects of mythic creatures, exotic imagery, and eroticism but also in the ubiquity and beauty of their placement—within churches and without, woven into silk, illuminated on manuscripts, engraved into pottery, painted in frescoes, and taking life in marble, bone, and ivory.

Presenting and exploring this profane art, Other Icons offers a surprising new way of seeing Byzantine art.

© 2023 Princeton University Press (Ebook): 9780691258874

Release date

Ebook: 14 November 2023