Review: Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art by Slobodan Curčić and Evangelia Hadjitryphonos; with contributions by Kathleen E. McVey and Helen G. Saradi

This ambitious catalogue, which accompanied the 2010 show of seventy-six art works at the Princeton University Art Museum, as the flap copy states, seeks to “challenge major assumptions long held by Western art historians and provide new ways of thinking about, looking at, and understanding Byzantine art in its broadest geographic and chronological framework, from A.D. 300 to the early nineteenth century.”¹ To this end, the catalogue’s essay authors are successful in critically reassessing the place of architecture in sacred art. Each asks new questions of how audiences perceived the representations of cityscapes, domed churches, and even Roman-era bathhouses in icon painting, manuscript illumination, and sculpture made for public and private devotion. Rather...