Perception and conception: art, theory and culture in ninth-century Byzantium

Icons and Identity: Religious Orthodoxy and Social Practice in Rural Crete

“…A map of the relational and hierarchical relationships between the various sacred images of a given saint also serves as an icon in its own right: an icon of the social relations amongst their users. In attending to this dimension, we would, in agreement with the recent urgings of several art historians (Brubaker 1989a(Brubaker , 1989bCamille 1989: 351;Freedberg 1989: 5;Nelson 1989), separate the images from their museological legitimation as art and reinsert them in the often stormy and divided social and discursive world to which they belong. "1 Once we jettison the attitude that the plain icons of modern church and home are somehow "less artistic" than those we view in museums, even the latter may take on quite new meanings; and this is as good a reason as any for studying the uses to which icons are put today regardless of our own aesthetic evaluation of them.…”

“…For an important shift from signs to sign-functions, analogous in important respects to the shift from structure to structuration in social science (Giddens 1984), see Eco 1976: 48-57. This shift is vital if the semiotic analysis of art is to achieve some degree of social contextualization (as it does in Brubaker 1989aBrubaker , 1989bNelson 1989), rather than to lapse into exactly the sorts of taxonomic aridity that it purports to replace.…”

Substitution by Image: The Very Idea

“…If one were to explain the discrepancy while holding on to the assumption that Byzantine icons served as portrayals, one would either have to deny that Photios is talking about the same icon we see today (for example, Grabar , 496–497; Oikonomidès ) or bite the bullet and declare the discrepancy only apparent because the intended audience of the images was trained to “see more than was actually there” (Onians , 15). However, neither explanation is particularly convincing: archaeological analysis suggests that the icon Photios eulogized is identical with the surviving apse mosaic (Mango and Hawkins , 142–144); besides, it is generally recognized that the typically florid Byzantine ekphrasis did not match the austere and schematic content of the icons (Mango ; Onians ; Brubaker ). And the idea that a large community of beholders can be trained to have pictorial experiences of features that go beyond what the image “actually” shows is confusing, if not confused: it suggests a collective perceptual hallucination.…”

“…It is thus likely that Photios was not involved in giving an accurate account of the icon's rendering of its subject. It could still be the case that his description was just an exercise in a highly conventionalized rhetoric divorced from reality (Mango , 66) were it not for the fact that his emotionally charged description corresponded to the intense reactions the icons were meant to elicit and often elicited from their beholders (Brubaker , 25). As Liz James proposes, Photios's aim might have been to evoke such reactions, facilitated by “the overall environment of the church” (James , 532).…”

The “Hesycastic” Mandorla: Apophatic Art and Hesychast Theology

“…The importance of intercession in the functioning of icons is emphasized in many post-iconoclastic saints' lives 5 . From the time of the early desert fathers, monks had been compared to the bodiless angels, the asomata 6 . body of Christ, nor an icon or type of Christ himself because the divine nature and hypostasis are undepictable.…”