A Lost Art Rediscovered includes a fully illustrated catalogue of all known tiles produced in the region of Constantinople, including the substantial collection owned by the Walters Art Museum, as well as those belonging to museums and private collections around the world. Some tiles included in the catalogue are now lost; the discovery of others is reported here for the first time. A series of scholarly essays gives the ceramics their rightful place in the study of Byzantine art and treats aspects of patronage, manufacture, function, ornament, and cultural significance. This comprehensive publication heralds the first large-scale, permanent installation of the Byzantine tiles in the collection of the Walters Art Museum. Book jacket.

The 28 papers examine questions relating to the extent and nature of Byzantine trade from Late Antiquity into the Middle Ages. The Byzantine state was the only political entity of the Mediterranean to survive Antiquity and thus offers a theoretical standard against which to measure diachronic and regional changes in trading practices within the area and beyond. To complement previous extensive work on late antique long-distance trade within the Mediterranean (based on the grain supply, amphorae and fine ware circulation), the papers concentrate on local and international trade. The emphasis is on recently uncovered or studied archaeological evidence relating to key topics. These include local retail organisation within the city, some regional markets within the empire, the production and/or circulation patterns of particular goods (metalware, ivory and bone, glass, pottery), and objects of international trade, both exports such as wine and glass, imports such as materia medica, and the lack of importation of, for example, Sasanian pottery. In particular, new work relating to specific regions of Byzantium's international trade is highlighted: in Britain, the Levant, the Red Sea, the Black Sea and China. Papers of the 38th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, held in 2004 at Oxford under the auspices of the Committee for Byzantine Studies.

Iconoclasm, the debate about the legitimacy of religious art that began in Byzantium around 730 and continued for nearly 120 years, has long held a firm grip on the historical imagination. Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era is the first book in English to survey the original sources crucial for a modern understanding of this most elusive and fascinating period in medieval history. It is also the first book in any language to cover both the written and the visual evidence from this period, a combination of particular importance to the iconoclasm debate. The authors, an art historian and a historian who both specialise in the period, have worked together to provide a comprehensive overview of the visual and the written materials that together help clarify the complex issues of iconoclasm in Byzantium.

Thousands of intact ceramic bowls and plates as well as fragments made in the medieval Byzantine empire survive to this day. Decorated with figural and non-figural imagery applied in a variety of techniques and adorned with colourful paints and glazes, the vessels can tell us much about those who owned them and those who looked at them. In addition to innumerable ceramic vessels, a handful of precious metal bowls and plates survive from the period. Together, these objects make up the art of dining in medieval Byzantium. This art of dining was effervescent, at turns irreverent and deadly serious, visually stunning and fun. It is suggestive of ways in which those viewing the objects used a quotidian and biologically necessary (f)act – that of eating – to reflect on their lives and deaths, their aspirations and their realities. This book examines the ceramic and metal vessels in terms of the information offered on the foods eaten, the foods desired and their status; the spectacle of the banquet; the relationship between word and image in medieval Byzantium; the dangers of taste; the emergence of new moral and social ideals; and the use of dining as a tool in constructing and enforcing hierarchy. This book is of appeal to scholarly and non-scholarly audiences interested in the art and material culture of the medieval period and in the social history of food and eating.

Recent discussions on Byzantine art have been dominated by the question of representing realia. Among these, however, the way works of art reflect the daily life of women have not received much space or attention. The present book studies various images representing women's status and her performative tasks, and their significance from the fourth century to the fall of the Empire, through analysis of archaeological evidence and works of art. It addresses a wide range of questions, some pertaining both to pictorial traditions and to their late antique antecedents, others peculiar to changing and evolving Byzantine culture and mentality. The first chapter deals with the imagery of childbearing, starting with conception and concluding with the care given to the new born and the mother. The second chapter investigates motherhood imagery (breastfeeding, child care, and child-mother intimacy) and the portrayal of women as caretakers and managers of the household (preparing food, bringing water, carding and weaving, or working side by side with their husbands). The third chapter is dedicated to representations of women holding positions outside the house: midwives, maidservants, wet nurses, and mourners. Images of women engaged in disreputable occupations-dancers, musicians, prostitutes and courtesans - complete this chapter. The fourth chapter discusses images of women portrayed in the metaphorical margins - looking out from the gynaikon (the women's apartments), or at their private toilette; it also deals with representations of women who stray from the societal mainstream - concubines; adulteresses, women consenting to sexual acts or being coerced into them - considered symbolically as belonging to the margins of society. The book concludes with a discussion of the degree to which the visual material reliably reflects reality and changing attitudes toward women between Late Antiquity and late Byzantium; and further, to what extent it reveals embedded perceptions and conceptions of women, constructed by canonic regulations and imperial law, popular beliefs and accepted customs. The book aims to lift a veil from known and less known works of art and to present the rarely described picture of the daily life of women in Byzantine art over a very wide chronological span of time, in an effort to expand our knowledge of women in Byzantium and their realia.