Please join us for the launch of Thomas F. Mathews' new publication, The Dawn of Christian Art in Panel Paintings and Icons.

The evening will begin at 5pm with a presentation by Thomas F. Mathews, followed by a discussion. The reception and an opportunity to purchase the book at a discount will follow at 6pm – 7.30 pm. 

This event is free and open to the public. It will take place in the Harold Lee Room, Pembroke College.

Event contact: Prof. Theo van Lint.

Professor Thomas F. Mathews has a long association with Pembroke. He was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the College (2009-2010), when he began working collaboratively with Professor Theo Maarten van Lint, Fellow in Armenian Studies. The pair are currently preparing a research project on the recpetion in Armenian art and literature of the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the Throne Chariot. In 2015, they were among the joint organisers of an international workshop held in the College, reassessing 7th century Armenian anti-iconoclasm. 

About the Publication

Thomas F. Mathews with Norman E. Muller, The Dawn of Christian Art in Panel Paintings and Icons. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, October 2016

Staking out new territory in the history of art, this book presents a compelling argument for a lost link between the panel-painting tradition of Greek antiquity and Christian paintings of Byzantium and the Renaissance. While art historians place the origin of icons in the seventh century, Prof. Mathews finds strong evidence as early as the second century in the texts of Irenaeus and the Acts of John that describe private Christian worship.

Through close study of an obscure set of sixty neglected panel paintings from Egypt in Roman times, the author explains how these paintings of the Egyptian gods offer the missing link in the long history of religious painting. Christian panel paintings and icons are for the first time placed in a continuum with the pagan paintings that preceded them, sharing elements of iconography, technology, and religious usages as votive offerings.

Exciting discoveries punctuate the narrative: the technology of the triptych, enormously popular in Europe, traced by the authors to the construction of Egyptian portable shrines, such as the Isis and Serapis of the J. Paul Getty Museum; the discovery that the egg tempera painting medium, usually credited to Renaissance artist Cimabue, has been identified in Egyptian panels a millennium earlier; and the reconstruction of a ring of icons on the chancel of Saint Sophia in Istanbul.This book will be a vital addition to the fields of Egyptian, Graeco-Roman, and late-antique art history and, more generally, to the history of painting.

About the Authors

Prof. Thomas F. Mathews is the John Langeloth Loeb Professor of the History of Art, Emeritus, at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Norman E. Muller is conservator at Princeton University Art Museum and a specialist in painters’ materials and methods.