Description: Eccentric Renaissance shows how El Greco and two other sixteenth-century Cretan artists, Michael Damaskenos and Georgios Klontzas, actively engaged in a re-casting of the Byzantine tradition of icon painting on the Venetian colony of Crete. In so doing, they created art that articulated a point of view that was shaped outside of and against the hegemonic world of Vasari's account of art history. Building upon their own tradition, they developed a highly original understanding of the icon and explored its power to reconcile Byzantine and Renaissance styles of painting and provide a response to the growing presence of Islam.
Review Quotes: "Barber (Princeton Univ.) moves beyond his studies of the history and theory of the icon, iconoclasm, Byzantine aesthetics, and intellectual history by taking his readers on an intriguing study of what happened to the Byzantine icon as Western art advanced into 16th-century style and techniques.... Recommended." -- Choice