Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium

This title was first published in 2003. Icons are traditionally regarded as timeless, motionless and eternal: windows onto Heaven. But it is not enough to simply wonder at their unchanging portrayal of divinity. How did they work? What did Byzantine culture want icons for? In what ways did Byzantines conceive these images as more meaningful and more powerful than simply pictures? What was the nature of the divinity of icons? "Icon and Word" brings together the work of a group of scholars to re-examine these notions. The resulting papers demonstrate the dynamism of the image in the medieval world. They explore not just what an icon is, but how it functions in different contexts, periods and cultures, and look at images in a broad range of media, in addition to the traditional format of painted panels: ivory carvings, manuscript illuminations and monumental wall paintings.