Enamels, Crowns, Relics and Icons

Book excerpt: This volume gathers together 17 articles published over the last 30 years, together with one appearing here for the first time. Their focus is primarily on enamel, the brilliant and colourful art form for which the Byzantines were famous throughout the medieval world, but sculpture and glyptics also figure. The author examines not only works which have retained the form in which they were first created, but others which have had their original Byzantine elements re-used, often by artists in the West. While most of the works featured here have been known to scholars before, one was unknown prior to its first publication in 2006.