Title: The Sacred image East and West
Description: A new generation of American medieval art historians explores how sacred images were perceived during the Middle Ages in Byzantium and Europe.

Focusing on the relationship between a particular type of medieval art - the sacred image - and its audience, the contributors consider the part played in this relationship by the image's context, whether on the page of a book or on the wall of a building. The book allows the reader to see the fluidity of the sacred image, showing how factors including audience, purpose, and setting affected the form it took.

The essays cover a full range of images, including panel paintings, altarpieces, manuscripts, and wall paintings, and a rich variety of socioreligious settings, private, monastic, and imperial.

Also examined are the differences between images produced for a single viewer and those produced for communities; images produced for private contemplation or devotion and those that functioned within a liturgical setting; and the varying ways in which sacred images affected women and men, religious and secular communities, rulers and the ruled.
Subjects: Christian art and symbolism, Orthodox Eastern Church, Icons, Byzantine Icons, Christianity and art, Cult, History of doctrines, Catholic Church, History, Religieuze kunst, Geschichte, Malerei, Ikone, Medieval, Christliche Kunst, Kunstreceptie
Time periods: Medieval, 500-1500, Middle Ages, 600-1500