The Emperor and the World
Exotic Elements and the Imaging of Middle Byzantine Imperial Power, Ninth to Thirteenth Centuries C.E.

Offers a new perspective on Byzantine imperial imagery, demonstrating the role foreign styles and iconography played in the visual articulation of imperial power.

Alicia Walker (Author)

9781107004771, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 April 2012

288 pages, 71 b/w illus.
26 x 18.5 x 1.7 cm, 0.76 kg

"In the most stimulating book on Byzantine art to be published in a long time, Walker(Bryn Mawr College) scrutinizes five objects, or clusters of objects, under the headings "Emulation," "Appropriation," "Parity," 'Expropriation," and "Incomparability." -- A. Cutler, Choice

Byzantine imperial imagery is commonly perceived as a static system. In contrast to this common portrayal, this book draws attention to its openness and responsiveness to other artistic traditions. Through a close examination of significant objects and monuments created over a 350-year period, from the ninth to the thirteenth century, Alicia Walker shows how the visual articulation of Byzantine imperial power not only maintained a visual vocabulary inherited from Greco-Roman antiquity and the Judeo-Christian tradition, but also innovated on these artistic precedents by incorporating styles and forms from contemporary foreign cultures, specifically the Sasanian, Chinese and Islamic worlds. In addition to art and architecture, this book explores historical accounts and literary works as well as records of ceremonial practices, thereby demonstrating how texts, ritual and images operated as integrated agents of imperial power. Walker offers new ways to think about cross-cultural interaction in the Middle Ages and explores the diverse ways in which imperial images employed foreign elements in order to express particularly Byzantine meanings.

Introduction: imaging emperor and empire in the middle Byzantine era
1. Emulation: Islamic imports in the iconoclastic era: power, prestige, and the imperial image
2. Appropriation: stylistic juxtaposition and the articulation of power: the Troyes Casket
3. Parity: a Byzantine-Islamic community of kings: diplomatic gifts in The Book of Gifts and Rarities
4. Expropriation: rhetorical images of the emperor and the articulation of difference: the Darmstadt Casket
5. Incomparability: the Mouchroutas Hall and the aesthetics of imperial power
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500 [HBLC], Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1]