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204 Reviewsamount of printing errors: but this, too, is a common plague in our time! Whatmakes this volume valuable is the good—in many cases excellent—quality of thepapers, most of which are dedicated to serious and original investigation, generallyfar from a merely "celebratory" and "occasional" writing of already known subjects,and which, in some cases, offer the publication of previously unknown texts frommedieval and modern literature. For these reasons, the volume should be present inall the major Slavic libraries.Maria Federica LamperiniHarvard UniversityTHE ICON, IMAGE OF THE INVISIBLE: ELEMENTS OFTHEOLOGY, AESTHETICS, AND TECHNIQUE. By EgonSendler. Trans, by Steven Bigham. Redondo Beach, California: OakwoodPublications. 1988. v, 288 pp. + 76 illust., 36 color plates.The last five years have witnessed a spate of publications designed to introduce theEastern Orthodox icon to the nonspecialist reader. From weighty and expensivealbums to modest booklets, these works testify to an enduring interest in the holyimage and its place in Eastern Orthodox spirituality. The 1988 translation of EgonSendler's L'Icône, image de l'invisible... (1981) is thus timely, part of a largerattempt in the United States and Europe to reintroduce the icon, to clarify its spiritualfunction and set right the misconceptions that many Westerners have inheritedfrom uninformed and prejudiced witnesses to Orthodox life over the centuries. Thetext is generously supplied with seventy-six black and white illustrations and figuresand thirty-six colored plates. Nearly all represent panel painting; Sendler's book ingeneral does not address the special problems and techniques of fresco painting,relief sculpture, and carving.The various elements of iconography are parts of a comprehensive spiritual unityfor Sendler: the dimensions of scientific knowledge, artistic value, and theologicalvision must always be kept in mind when one deals with the icon. Accordingly, hedivides the book into three parts: 1) the genesis and theology of the icon; 2) aestheticelements; and 3) the technical aspects of icons.In the first five chapters (Part 1), Sendler traces the history of the religious imagefrom its Jewish and early Christian background through the defeat of Iconoclasm.The landmark Byzantine councils and the major participants are all given their due,with a number of textual citations to help anchor the positions of the Iconodules,most notably Saint Germanus, patriarch of Constantinople, and Saint John ofDamascus. Sendler provides a brief overview of Byzantine society and correlates theOrthodox image and liturgy before turning to a more detailed account of the iconitself. He presents the iconographie typology based on four model types introducedby Onasch (1968): the panegyric, the epic, the dramatic, and the theological. Theend of Part 1 is devoted to the inductive Aristotelian and deductive Neoplatonicapproaches to an understanding of the holy image and its relationship to the divine.