Life giving resources. Faithfully delivered.
FREE delivery on orders over £10
Serving over 2 million Christians in the UK
with Bibles, Books and Church Supplies
Our Buy-Now-Pay-Later accounts used
by over 4,000 UK Churches & Schools
Excellent 4.8 out of 5

Trustpilot

You now have 0 of this item in your basket

The Dawn of Christian Art in Panel Painings and Icons

[Hardback]

by Norman Muller, Thomas F. Mathews

Authors
Norman Muller +1
Book Format
Hardback
Publisher
Getty Trust Publications
Published
December 2016

Read full description

Click to expand

Today's Price

£29.00

Save 36%

Free UK Delivery

Available - Usually dispatched within 4 days

Buying for a school or church? Upgrade to a FREE Eden Advance Account

Enter the product quantity

The Dawn of Christian Art in Panel Painings and Icons

Today's Price £29.00

Frequently Bought Together

The Dawn of Christian Art in Panel Painings and Icons

by Norman Muller +1

Hardback

Stories in Light: A Guide to the Stained Glass of the Basilica at the University of Notre Dame

by Cunningham Cavadin

Paperback

Add both to basket for £46.88 and save £20.11

Product Description

Staking out new territory in the history of art, this book presents a compelling argument for a lost link between the panel-painting tradition of Greek antiquity and Christian paintings of Byzantium and the Renaissance. While art historians place the origin of icons in the seventh century, Thomas F. Mathews finds strong evidence as early as the second century in the texts of Irenaeus and the Acts of John that describe private Christian worship. In closely studying an obscure set of sixty neglected panel paintings from Egypt in Roman times, the author explains how these paintings of the Egyptian gods offer the missing link in the long history of religious painting. Christian panel paintings and icons are for the first time placed in a continuum with the pagan paintings that preceded them, sharing elements of iconography, technology, and religious usages as votive offerings. Exciting discoveries punctuate the narrative: the technology of the triptych, enormously popular in Europe, traced by the authors to the construction of Egyptian portable shrines, such as the "Isis" and "Serapis" of the J. Paul Getty Museum; the discovery that the egg tempera painting medium, usually credited to Renaissance artist Cimabue, has been identified in Egyptian panels a millennium earlier; and the reconstruction of a ring of icons on the chancel of Saint Sophia in Istanbul. This book will be a vital addition to the fields of Egyptian, Graeco-Roman, and late-antique art history and, more generally, to the history of painting. "