The Living Icon In Byzantium And Italy 1st Edition Paroma Chatterjee by Paroma Chatterjee 9781107034969, 1107034965 instant download after payment.

The Living Icon in Byzantium and Italy is the first book to explore the emergence and function of a novel pictorial format in the Middle Ages, the vita icon, which displayed the magnified portrait of a saint framed by scenes from his or her life. While the East used the vita icon for depicting the most popular figures in the Orthodox calendar, the Latin West deployed it most vigorously in the service of Francis of Assisi. This book offers a compelling account of how this type of image embodied and challenged the prevailing structures of vision, representation, and sanctity in Byzantium and among the Franciscans in Italy between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Through the lens of this format, Paroma Chatterjee uncovers the complexities of the philosophical and theological issues that had long engaged both the medieval East and West, such as the fraught relations between words and images, relics and icons, a  representation and its subject, and the very nature of holy presence.