The Temple Gallery recommends this new publication:

Robin Cormack, ICONS, The British Museum Press, 2007, ISBN-13: 978-0-2655-5 144 pages, 170 colour illustrations. Price: £15.99. (Please note this book is not for sale at the Temple Gallery. Of course it can be bought from the British Museum Bookshop).

I strongly recommend this attractively produced book - the colour reproductions are very good indeed and the text, from a classical art-history approach, is one of 'exemplary scholarship'. The author has a good eye for key historical facts and events of the Byzantine era and this gives him the authority to take the reader through the iconoclast controversy and the Triumph of Orthodoxy showing how the historical and theological circumstances are reflected in the iconography. Other topics, among them Saint Catherine's monastery at Sinai and icons of the sixth century, the great church of Saint Sofia in Constantinople, the imagery of church feasts and of saints, the fractious relations between Constantinople and Rome, the 'Crusader School' of icon-painting, the sack of the imperial city in 1204, the origins of Christ's 'likeness' and other significant themes all come under the historian's magisterial eye. There is a useful chapter on the techniques of how icons are constructed and revealing inventory lists from the 11th and the 14th centuries.

Running through the book is the idea of the function of icons in medieval Byzantine society. The author calls us to consider how people thought about, and saw, icons differently from us. His chapter 'Reading icons' discusses in detail two sixth century icons in carved ivory and a fourteenth century painted diptych, analyzing geographical, cultural and political ideas that were highly significant at the time and which, he insists, relate to how the icons should be understood today. Theological questions are seen in this light, with citations from Photius, the great patriarch of Constantinople in the ninth century, to the present Archbishop of Canterbury. To the historian, both believers and non-believers - like iconoclasts and iconophiles or Orthodox and heretics - are players in the arena of history whose actions, insofar as the surviving records permit, are to be classified in an orderly and intelligible manner. Nobody does this better than Dr Cormack. The hundred-odd pages of text are densely packed with data drawn from a comprehensive and penetrating search of 'the literature' supported by a bibliography that will aid the interested reader to go further.

This book is obviously not intended for those seekers of spiritual truth who consider that icons have a special meaning for them, though the reference to Maximos the Confessor, should a reader follow it up, would lead to Dionysius the Areopagite, Neoplatonism and the Philosophia Perennis that pervades the mysticism of both Christians and Pagans in the Hellenistic period, and continuously thereafter, up to the Renaissance. It is misleading to refer to Hesychasm as a 'spiritual movement of the fourteenth century'; the Philokalia, the classic collection of texts on the subject dating from the fourth century, show clearly that there was a continuous tradition of contemplative interior prayer and spiritual practice throughout the entire Byzantine period. It also flowered in Russia and some would regard it as the key to the art of some of its masters in the fifteenth century.

The reader will be disappointed if he or she visits the British Museum in the expectation of seeing a display of icons corresponding to what is so beautifully laid out in this book. Until recently a handful were exhibited in Room 42, the gallery (currently closed) covering all of European medieval art. The museum's website tells us that the room, 'due to open in 2008, will include examples of Byzantine art, Romanesque and Gothic metalwork and ivory, as well as coinage, jewellery, arms and armour, leather work, tiles, scientific instruments and prints'. Many people, including a wealthy patron who offered to pay for it, feel that the icons should have their own space rather than be treated just as cultural artifacts. In such a gallery, even if it were small, what Cormack calls their enduring 'power' could be experienced in the heart and the soul rather than just the mind. In a note at the end of the book on the history of the collection, he cites the satisfaction of the museum authorities a hundred and fifty years ago when 'Byzantine, Oriental, Mexican and Peruvian antiquities were stowed away in the basement' and he states that 'things - thankfully - have changed'. People who love icons may feel they have not changed enough. It would be truer to say things are changing and for that let us be grateful as we are grateful for the appearance of this book.

Dick Temple