This is a highly efficient survey and analysis of late Byzantine sculpture, by which is meant monumental sculpture produced in Eastern Europe between 1261 and 1453 (mostly in marble). The book is based on a 2008 Athens University PhD dissertation, but has been extended and documented systematically since then. It is undoubtedly destined to become the standard reference book on this medium, superseding André Grabar's Sculptures byzantines du moyen âge, II: XIe–XIVe siècle (1976) and a number of other studies. The text sets out the history of the period, the information to be gained from primary texts, particularly the poems of Manuel Philes, and the contexts within which sculpture was employed, particularly, but not entirely, in the sanctuary screens of churches and for funerary monuments. The text is completed with a catalogue of sixty-nine churches which contained materials with descriptions and photographs. Chapters cover questions of context, style, iconography and patronage and audience.

For those who thought that there was no Byzantine church sculpture this is the ideal antidote, but at the same time there is nothing in Byzantium to match the monumental Gothic sculptures in the West in this period. This book does not cover western sculptors who came east to work in the Crusader kingdoms, though the question of such contact is mentioned. One of the problems of this field of study is to understand the sources of materials and how sculptors were trained. The major quarries of antiquity, such as those on the island of Proconnesos and the Dokimeion quarries in Phrygia, fell out of use by the seventh century. Consequently one might assume that all late Byzantine sculpture, like for example that at Arta, was derived from re-used spoils from ancient cities, like in this case Nikopolis. Melvani argues that perhaps some quarries were occasionally still worked, such as on the island of Thasos as well as on Mount Parnon (for the churches of Mistra). There is also the possibility that the Prokonnesian quarries were occasionally worked: for example the Chora monastery at Constantinople in the early fourteenth century contains some spoils and some reworked marbles, but maybe its fine wall revetments were recently quarried.