The Many Faces of Christ ― Portraying the Holy in the East and West, 300 to 1300

In The Many Faces of Christ Michele Bacci, who has written extensively on the history of religious images and cult-objects in Byzantium and the Medieval West, examines the complex historical and cultural dynamics underlying the making and final successful establishment of Christ’s image between late Antiquity and the early Renaissance. Unlike earlier studies, the process is described against the background of ancient and biblical conceptions of beauty and the physical look as indicators of moral, ascetic, or messianic qualities. It takes into account a broad spectrum of both iconographic and textual sources and investigates the increasingly dominant role played by visual experience in Christian religious practice, which promoted belief in the existence of ancient documents of Christ’s appearance and resulted in the shaping of portrait-like images, said to be true-to-life. Such phenomena are described in a comparative perspective, with glances at analogous processes in the Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and Taoist traditions.
This book is of interest not only for specialists of Late Antique, Byzantine, and Medieval studies, but also for anybody interested in the historical figure of Jesus and its shifting, controversial conceptions over the course of history.

Michele Bacci is professor of medieval art history in the Faculty of Humanities and director of the Medieval Institute at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He is the author or editor of seven books published in Italian.