The Painter’s Manual (Hermeneia)

A working handbook compiled on Athos by Dionysius of Fourna around 1730, and the nearest thing the tradition has to a written standard for painting. Half of it is craft: how to prepare a panel, grind pigments, lay gold, build flesh from the dark underpaint upward. The other half is iconography proper, scene by scene, saying who stands where in each feast, what each saint looks like and what his scroll says. It is descriptive rather than legislative, recording what was already done, which is why it is useful and why no council ever had to approve it.