Art and Eloquence in Byzantium.

The appearance in paperback of Henry Maguire's 1981 study of the relationship between Byzantine rhetoric and Byzantine religious images is a boon to both scholars and students. In a clearly organized volume, Maguire provides one of the most convincing studies of the relationship between word and image in Byzantine culture. Over the last decade many of us including scholars such as Hans Belting (in his recent Likeness and Presence) have had recourse to Maguire's observations on images such as those of the Virgin and Child.

Although Maguire acknowledges that at times images may have provided the inspiration for written descriptions of religious events such as those from the life of Christ, the preponderance of his discussion argues that rhetorical formulations inherited by Byzantine writers from ancient rhetoric through Byzantine educational practices affected both the content and the form of religious imagery. He provides separate discussions of three important techniques of Byzantine rhetoric: ekphrasis or description, through which artists could "embroider" (109) stories such as the Massacre of the Innocents and the Annunciation; antithesis or the juxtaposition of images, for example the Dormition and the Nativity, which he calls a "habit of thought" (53) as well as a rhetorical technique; and hyperbole or exaggeration for the sake of emphasis. He closes with a discussion of the reverberation of the classical lament through Byzantine art and literature. His comparisons are both visually and intellectually convincing.

Although the primary achievement here may be in the demonstration of the relationship between these two forms of expression, Maguire reaches well beyond a technical argument regarding the structures of Byzantine writing and imagery. At the very least, two additional contributions to the field emerge from his text. First, in cases such as the ensemble of paintings at St. George at Kurbinovo and the Martorana at Palermo, he elucidates the complexity of the program - as he describes the visual and textual interrelationships among both narrative and devotional images. Secondly and more simply, he expands our understanding of the meaning of specific religious images, as he identifies the textual sources and references of numerous images including versions of the Virgin and Chid, the Lamentation, the Presentation in the Temple, and the Forty Martyrs.

Maguire is to be commended for the care with which he approaches his argumentation. Some earlier reviewers were concerned over the few centuries' time lag between the writing of some of the texts he cites and the subsequent appearance of related images. But Maguire himself is cautious in these rare instances, and most of the texts and images he cites are convincingly close in date. Moreover, in an intriguing analysis he indicates that classical revivals in visual culture may have been spurred by the persistence of antique texts, elsewhere describing rhetorical techniques as "a hidden, but long-lasting spring of Hellenism in Byzantine art" (52). Above all he handles carefully the question of the mechanisms by which artists and the patron advisors of visual programs obtained their familiarity with the techniques of rhetoric. He acknowledges that artists may not have known the rhetorical origins of the elements they used in formulating either programs or images, but probably obtained them secondhand from sacred texts they heard, read or learned about from educated patrons. For those of us concerned with explaining the nature and meanings of images in Byzantium and the medieval West, Maguire has provided a valuable model, and in his eminently readable, direct, and clear text he has provided an accessible study of the richness of Byzantine art and culture for our students.

REBECCA W. CORRIE Bates College