POKROVSKY N.V. (1848-1917) Evangelie v pamyatnikakh ikonografii preimushchestvenno vizantiyskikh i russkikh [The Gospel in Monuments of Iconography, Predominantly Byzantine and Russian]. St Petersburg: Printing House of the Department of Appanages, 1892.

[4], LXI, 496 pp.: ill.; 12 plates; 34.5 x 25.5 cm. With 226 illustrations in the text and 12 plates. In a contemporary half-leather binding. In good condition. Wear to the binding, crack along the rear endpaper, minor soiling, foxing, bookseller’s label on the rear endpaper. Armorial bookplate of the English archaeologist, art historian and Byzantinist David Talbot Rice (1903-1972) on the endpaper. A fundamental and unsurpassed work by Nikolai Vasilyevich Pokrovsky (1848-1917), one of the founders of Russian church archaeology and a historian of Christian art, which sets out to give a church-archaeological explanation of the images of Gospel history in monuments of Byzantine and Russian art. The author examines in detail how the main themes of Christianity took shape on the basis of the earliest Byzantine and Slavonic monuments: catacomb paintings, icons, frescoes, illuminated manuscripts and others. First edition.