The Living Icon in Byzantium and Italy
The Vita Image, Eleventh to Thirteenth Centuries

Explores the development and diffusion of the vita image which emerged in Byzantium in the twelfth century and spread to Italy and beyond.

Paroma Chatterjee (Author)

9781107034969, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 March 2014

297 pages, 34 b/w illus. 16 colour illus.
26.2 x 18.8 x 1.5 cm, 0.81 kg

'… a thoughtful, nuanced, theoretically sophisticated, and provocative study that will challenge the reader.' Anne Derbes, Hood College

This 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. The vita icon was used for depicting the most popular figures in the Orthodox calendar and, in the Latin West, was deployed 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. 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.

Introduction: the metaphor of the 'living icon'
1. The saint in the text
2. The saint in the image
3. 'Wrought by the finger of God'
4. Depicting Francis' secret
Epilogue: Francis in Constantinople.

Subject Areas: Religious subjects depicted in art [AGR], History of art: Byzantine & Medieval art c 500 CE to c 1400 [ACK]