Description: The Byzantines surrounded themselves with their saints invisible but constant companions, who were made visible by dreams, visions, and art. The composition and presentation of this imagined gallery followed a logical structure, a construct that was itself a collective work of art created by Byzantine society. Here Henry Maguire analyzes the logic of the saint's image in Byzantium, both in portraits and in narrative scenes. He argues that the Byzantines gave to their images differing formal characteristics of movement, modeling, depth, and differentiation, according to the tasks that the icons were called upon to perform in the all-important business of communication between the visible and the invisible worlds.

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