Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins; The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1961 The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Good/Fair. l, 175 pages followed by 341 monochrome Illustrations. Five color plates in the main text. Selective Bibliography. Index. DJ has wear, tears, soiling and chips. Name of previous owner (Barbara L. Vogt), address and date in ink on fep. Ink notes on a rear end paper. No marks to text observed, a there are one ink check mark in the index. There are three Parts, each with its own Preface. Part One has chapters on The First Steps and The Assimilation of Contemporary Imagery. Part Two has chapters on The Portrait and The Historical Scene. Part Three has chapters on Dogmas Expressed in a Single Image and Dogmas Represented by Juxtaposed Images. This is Bollingen Series XXXV; The A. W. Mellon Lectures Number 10. The term iconography, in short, relates to the subject, meaning or symbolism of an artwork. Apart from classifying themes, motifs, attributes, allegories, and symbols, iconography also traces their historical development focusing for example on the perpetuation of certain visual traditions and the resulting standardization of image formulas. Iconography is usually divided into religious and secular themes. To demonstrate how paleo-Christian images were created and what role they played alongside other forms of Christian piety in their day, Grabar explores the limits of originality in such art, and the influence of figurative art in the Roman Empire. André Nicolaevitch Grabar (July 26, 1896 - October 3, 1990) was an historian of Romanesque art and the art of the Eastern Roman Empire and the Bulgarian Empire. Born in Ukraine and educated in Kyiv, St. Petersburg and Odessa, he spent his career in Bulgaria (1919-1922), France (1922-1958) and the United States (1958-1990), and wrote all his papers in French. Grabar was one of the 20th-century founders of the study of the art and icons of the Eastern Roman Empire, adopting a synthetic approach embracing history, theology and interactions with the Islamic world. He began his university studies in Kyiv, moving to St. Petersburg (then known as Petrograd) in 1915. While there he began to think about the connection between religious life and art, which would become his life's work. Discussing the connection between the Orthodox Christian faith and conservative aesthetics of the creators of Christian icons, Grabar explained, "Their role can be compared to that of musical performers in our day, who do not feel that their importance is diminished by the fact that they limit their talent to the interpretation of other people's work, since each interpretation contains original nuances." He left St. Petersburg in November 1917, a few days after the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution, and completed his studies at Odessa, Ukraine, in 1919. Grabar realized it would not be possible for him to pursue his career in what was becoming the Soviet Union and he left for Sofia, Bulgaria in January 1920. He spent three years surveying the medieval monuments of the country for the National Museum. He moved to Strasbourg, France in 1922, first teaching the Russian language. He earned a Ph. D. at the University of Strasbourg in 1928, and taught art history there until 1937. He wrote his books in the French language, but many of his more than 30 titles were translated into English and other languages. From 1937 to 1958 he became the center of a school of young art historians, as a Director of Studies in Christian Archaeology at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (1937-1946) and as a professor at the Collège de France (1946-1958). In 1958 Grabar moved to the United States, becoming a central figure at the Dumbarton Oaks Institute of Harvard University. He was a research professor at Dumbarton Oaks from 1950 to 1964. In 1961 he gave the A. W. Mellon lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, published as Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins (1968). He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.