Full Description
This book represents a risky experiment in art-history writing. It takes objects of Byzantine art—manuscript illustration, frescos, mosaic, sculpture—and reads them through the lenses of disability studies, media studies, and gender studies in order to reveal something about their significance not only in that historical culture, but also in our own. Moreover, it uses lenses of personal history and self-reflection as a way to model an open-ended and faceted art history. Modern works of film, fiction, and art likewise appear frequently so that the Byzantine objects can emerge as both more strange and more familiar, and as both of the past and of our world. Their capacity for holding multiple times, generating multiple meanings, and for multiple subjectivities is fully embraced, and perhaps a different kind of art history emerges, one that eschews argument and mastery for humility, openness, empathy—thinking with, rather than about.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Bad Byzantinist
Icons, Dolls, Mirrors, and the Risks of Overinterpretation
Some Animality
Dolls and Dwarfs?
More on "Half-Men"
Flawed Messengers and Messages
Living Toys
Over the Line
Under-Interpretation's Risks?
Independent Voices
Hellenism, Museums, Agency's Spread
Lysi, Houston, Nicosia
When They Can't Speak for Themselves
For Your Prayer Closet
Looking at Silence
Funnelling and Water Coursing
Hardy's Sexy Streams
Terraformed
Abjection, Madness, and Memory
The Glenns
Impairment and Invention
Abjection and Healing
One of Us
An Aged Christ
Resurrection
Broken Doors, Locks, and Keys
Impaired Landscape
Towards a Dream Ending in the Forest
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