ABSTRACT
The art historian who is offered an afterword on a symposium about the Byzantine outsider is likely to feel out of place. Is not Byzantine art one medium within the culture which entirely colluded with the cultural £Mte to communicate the 'norm', the centre, the insider? Is it not so often treated as the vehicle of 'official' attitudes that to suggest that art acts as more than a definition of the conventions of the 'establishment* might seem a perverse exercise? Byzantine art so regularly features as the 'orthodox' art of the Orthodox church, and is assumed so naturally to be state art, that any question of 'otherness' might seem out of place. In exploring how far the papers in this volume might be able to subvert this traditional art historical attitude, it will be useful to ask first how the contributing art historians treated the issues, and then move on to the cultural historians.
