The Icon

Charles Barber is the Donald Drew Egbert Professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. He is the author of Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (2002), Contesting the Logic of Painting: Art and Understanding in Eleventh-Century Byzantium (2007), and Eccentric Renaissance:  El Greco, Michael Damaskenos, Giorgios Klontzas (2024). He is also the editor of Sources for Byzantine Art History. Maria Vassilaki is Professor Emerita in the History of Byzantine Art and a member of the Benaki Museum Board of Trustees. Her publications include: Cretan Icons and Cretan Painters at Sinai; Working Drawings of Icon Painters after the Fall of Constantinople; The Icons of the Tositsas Mansion: The Collection of Evangelos Averof; and The Painter Angelos and Icon Painting in Venetian Crete. She has curated major exhibitions and edited their catalogues: Mother of God: Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art; Byzantium: 330–1453 (with Robin Cormack); and The Hand of Angelos: An Icon-Painter in Venetian Crete. She recently started a collaboration with St. Catherine's monastery at Sinai aiming to catalog and study the 1,549 icons which are housed in the monastery's store room for icons.

• Part I. Introduction: 1. A brief introduction Charles Barber; 2. Historiography Robin Cormack; 3. The theology of the icon Maximos Constas; 4. Neourgia: the restoration of icons in the premodern world Ivan Drpić; 5. The conservation of icons in the 20th century: an overview of its history and practice Stergios Stasinopoulos; 6.The artist Anthony Cutler; 7. Model books, painters' guides, and working drawings in Byzantium Maria Vassilaki; 8. Artists' manuals Emmanuel Moutafov; 9. The trade in and dissemination of icons Daniel Duran i Duelt; 10. Icons in the home Maria Parani; 11. Icons and their confraternities Charles Barber; 12. Icons of the peripatetic image: the processional icon in late Byzantine Constantinople and Thessaloniki James A. Rodriguez; 13. Commemorations, dedications, prayers: Byzantine epigrams on icons Andreas Rhoby; 14. Templon and proskynesis icons Yannis D. Varalis; 15. The material embrace: veils and covers for the icon Warren T. Woodfin; 16. Icon exhibition: between object and art Glenn Peers; Part II. Overview: 17. Votive panels in late antiquity: notes toward the origins of the icon Jaś Elsner; 18. Early icons Charles Barber; 19. Byzantine icons from 843 to 1204 Robin Cormack; 20. Georgian icons Antony Eastmond; 21. Frankish icons Lisa Mahoney; 22. Icon painting in the Middle East Mat Immerzeel; 23. Cypriot icons: comnenian and post-comnenian production (12th and 13th centuries) Sophocles Sophocleous; 24. Icons of the 13th and 14th centuries Annemarie Weyl Carr; 25. Cretan icons and their histories: 15th to 17th centuries Maria Vassilaki; 26. The Ethiopian Śeʿel: iconic and aniconic thought between Mariology and royal ideology Claire Bosc-Tiessé; 27. Icons in the western world Michele Bacci; 28. Icons in the Balkans and the Byzantine Koine: in search of the role of the monastic centers Athanasios Semoglou; 29. Ottoman era icons Georgios Chr. Tsigaras; 30. Icon painting in Russia in the 11th to 14th centuries Engelina Smirnova; 31. Russian icon painting: 15th to the first half of the 17th centuries Aleksandr S. Preobrazhenskii; 32. Later Russian icon painting: 17th to 19th centuries Oleg Tarasov; 33. 'The sky was no longer blue. It was shiny gold': the revival of icon painting in Greece between 19th-century romantic nationalism and 20th-century anti-religious modernism Dimitra Kotoula; 34. Icons and modern art Maria Taroutina; 35. Epilogue Maria Vassilaki.