Ultimately Peers' approach is inspired by a short phrase in Derek Walcott's poem Tiepolo's Hound, quoted as a prologue: "one epiphanic detail illuminates an entire epoch." In each case study, Peers searches each image for its "one epiphanic detail" that can act as a catalyst to elucidate the whole. In a way, Peers thereby emerges from the book as a sort of post-modern Morelli. For just as Morelli sought to identify the whole artist from those small, unconscious artistic flourishes--the drawing of the earlobe or kneecap--so too Peers seeks to reveal fundamental aspects of the processes of viewing in Byzantium through the intense scrutiny of small, sometimes incidental details of individual works of art. Inevitably, you are left wondering, as with Morelli, whether the detail can bear the weight of the whole apparatus of meaning that is built on top of it.
Prologue Of Ohrid.pdf
2ff7e9595c
Comments