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Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium: Studies Presented to Robin Cormack. Edited by Antony Eastmond and Liz James. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2003. xxiv + 302 pp. $84.95 cloth.
The honoree of this collection of essays is found at the end of the rather awkward tripartite title, but one could justly ignore all that comes between icon and Robin Cormack and understand the keywords that matter here. For Cormack has done more, perhaps, than any other medieval art historian of the last twenty-five years to make the icon-what we understand to be an art-historical genre-the object of genuine historical analysis. The exhibitions of the past few years have only compounded the mystery of the icon, as it were, because they have both revealed how closely icons guard and hide their individuality, and also how inadequate our methods of explanation remain when confronted by their essential foreignness. Annemarie Carr's eloquent essays of recent years, for instance her contribution to the Metropolitan Museum catalog of the 2004 show, Byzantium: Faith and Power, demonstrate the necessary poetics of careful, sympathetic looking to make these objects speak again. Cormack at his best performs this service nonpareil, and readers are well recommended to go to his essay in the Mother of God catalog (2000) for an extraordinarily precise and compelling analysis of the mosaics in Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. Nearly all of the essays in this collection are motivated by that need for incisive viewing, which the contributors, former students...