The Icon

Charles Barber is the Donald Drew Egbert Professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. He is the author of Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (2002), Contesting the Logic of Painting: Art and Understanding in Eleventh-Century Byzantium (2007), and Eccentric Renaissance:  El Greco, Michael Damaskenos, Giorgios Klontzas (2024). He is also the editor of Sources for Byzantine Art History.

Maria Vassilaki is Professor Emerita in the History of Byzantine Art and a member of the Benaki Museum Board of Trustees. Her publications include: Cretan Icons and Cretan Painters at Sinai; Working Drawings of Icon Painters after the Fall of Constantinople; The Icons of the Tositsas Mansion: The Collection of Evangelos Averof; and The Painter Angelos and Icon Painting in Venetian Crete. She has curated major exhibitions and edited their catalogues: Mother of God: Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art; Byzantium: 330–1453 (with Robin Cormack); and The Hand of Angelos: An Icon-Painter in Venetian Crete. She recently started a collaboration with St. Catherine's monastery at Sinai aiming to catalog and study the 1,549 icons which are housed in the monastery's store room for icons.