Books like The meaning of icons by Léonide Ouspensky

Iconostasis is Fr. Pavel's final theological work. Composed in 1922, it explores in highly original terms the significance of the icon: its philosophic depth, its spiritual history, its empirical technique. In doing so, Fr. Pavel also sketches a new history of both Western religious art and the Orthodox icon: a history under the direct operation of the Holy Spirit. The work is original, challenging and profoundly articulate. This translation is the first complete English version.

This is a modern classic about the history, doctrine, and sacraments of the Orthodox Church. Its updated version is a carefully nuanced book that is written for the general reader. An Oxford scholar, Ware is likely the most distinguished and knowledgeable living authority on the Orthodox Church.

A new generation of American medieval art historians explores how sacred images were perceived during the Middle Ages in Byzantium and Europe. Focusing on the relationship between a particular type of medieval art - the sacred image - and its audience, the contributors consider the part played in this relationship by the image's context, whether on the page of a book or on the wall of a building. The book allows the reader to see the fluidity of the sacred image, showing how factors including audience, purpose, and setting affected the form it took. The essays cover a full range of images, including panel paintings, altarpieces, manuscripts, and wall paintings, and a rich variety of socioreligious settings, private, monastic, and imperial. Also examined are the differences between images produced for a single viewer and those produced for communities; images produced for private contemplation or devotion and those that functioned within a liturgical setting; and the varying ways in which sacred images affected women and men, religious and secular communities, rulers and the ruled.