Condition: Fair. Crease to bottom front cover. ==== Explore the extensive imagery and fascinating stories of hundreds of Orthodox Christian icons and saints. An icon (from the Greek wordeikon, "image") is a wooden panel painting of a holy person or scene from Orthodox Christianity, the religion of the Byzantine Empire that is practiced today mainly in Greece and Russia. It was believed that these works acted as intermediaries between worshipers and the holy personages they depicted. Their pictorial language is stylized and primarily symbolic, rather than literal and narrative. Indeed, every attitude, pose, and color depicted in an icon has a precise meaning, and their paintersusually monksfollowed prescribed models from iconographic manuals. Featuring over 400 color images, this book catalogues the vast heritage of images according to iconographic type and subject, from the most ancient at the Monastery of Saint Catherine in the Sinai to those from Greece, Constantinople, and Ru