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, an art of strikingly secular expression was not only common to Byzantine culture, but also 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 and its dialogue with traditional Christian Byzantine art. This beautifully illustrated book creates an entirely new understanding of the whole of Byzantine art and culture.
 With its wide-ranging examples, the 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.
 By presenting and exploring this profane art for the first time in a scholarly book in English, Other Icons will change the way we look at the art of an entire era.

Other Icons: Art and Power in Byzantine Secular Culture

Arts & Photography

Maguire, Henry

Maguire, Eunice Dauterman

History & Criticism

Princeton University Press

An ancient time brought to life by textiles
While the monumental sculptures of ancient Egypt are more widely known, the simple pleasures of life as it was lived are better portrayed in textiles, which carried designs commemorating the joys of festivals, food, and dancing. Weavings from Roman, Byzantine and Islamic Egypt presents 103 full-color images of the astonishing textile collection of Rose Choron, featuring rare examples from Egypt’s Coptic Christians as well as the Islamic period.
Dating primarily from the third to seventh centuries, these hand-woven fabrics showcase colorful images of dancers, haloed saints with hands raised in prayer, and a plethora of flowers and animals evoking the bountiful ecology of the Nile Delta. Some display Arabic inscriptions celebrating divine power, and all offer insights into a lost world: people’s dress, their interior decoration, and their view of their relationship with the natural and supernatural worlds.
Eunice Dauterman Maguire explains the work by providing a rich historical and mythic context, as well as detailed technical explanations. This volume also features a preface by Rose Choron herself, explaining the origins of the collection and the source of her fascination with the textiles.

Weavings from Roman, Byzantine and Islamic Egypt: The Rich Life and the Dance

Krannert Art Museum

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