Image Making in Byzantium, Sasanian Persia and the Early Muslim World

Anthony Cutler is the Evan Pugh Professor of Art History at Pennsylvania State University, USA.

Contents: Visual communities in Byzantium and medieval Islam; Silver across the Euphrates: forms of exchange between Sasanian Persia and the late Roman empire; Constantinople and Córdoba: cultural exchange and cultural differences in the 9th and 10th centuries; Ivory working in Umayyad Córdoba: techniques and implications; A Christian ewer with Islamic imagery and the question of Arab gastarbeiter in Byzantium; The image of the word in Byzantium and Islam: an essay in art historical geodesy; Gifts and gift exchange as aspects of the Byzantine, Arab, and related economies; Everywhere and nowhere: the invisible Muslim and Christian self-fashioning in the culture of Outremer; The emperor's old clothes; actual and virtual vesting and the transmission of power in Byzantium and Islam; The parallel universes of Arab and Byzantine art (with special reference to the Fatimid era); Tiles and tribulations: a community of clay across Byzantium and its adversaries; Imagination and documentation: eagle silks in Byzantium, the Latin West, and 'Abbasid Baghdad; Reuse or use? Theoretical and practical attitudes toward objects in the early Middle Ages; Addenda and corrigenda; Index.