Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes: Hermeneutics of Spiritual Vision.

This exceptional and quite brilliant study takes a large theme—the affinity that has been perceived between the aspirations of modernist art and the canons of the Orthodox icon, recovered contemporaneously a century ago—and explores it by tracing Byzantine fresco and icon painting from the eleventh century to El Greco (controversially perceived as belonging to that tradition), on the way drawing in the fourteenth-century hesychast understanding of the prayer of the heart—as well as bringing the presuppositions of Byzantine iconography to bear on understanding the modernism of Kandinsky, Malevich and Rothko. Original in his insights and methodology, Todorović displays an intellectual rigour, not blunted by the range of his imagination, while his imaginative flights are supported, rather than reined in, by the integrity of his intellect.

Archpriest Andrew Louth, Professor Emeritus, University of Durham UK