Real Living Painting: Quasi-Objects and Dividuation in the Byzantine World

Abstract

This article examines an issue that has troubled Byzantine art historians: what Byzantines meant by "living painting." It attempts to simplify the problem by accepting the sources at face value (painting was indeed alive) and to complicate our understanding of painting (painting occupied a subject-position just as fully as humans did). It uses the notion of 'dividuals,' which are opposed to discrete entities like individuals, and of 'quasi-object,' so that painting, metal work, stones, and people all appeared in some fashion as objects, but only superficially so. The cases used to establish this position include: Michael Psellos on paintings of Christ; Eucharistic chalices, divine geology and bloods of Christ; and the miraculous stories of interchanging identities among icons and persons. In this way, this article argues for an understanding of Byzantine materiality as relational; it assumed a participatory aspect among all things and persons in that world.

Animism, Materiality, and Museums

“…Burgess 2011, 211n18. 76 Grosdidier de Matons 1964Peers 2004 andPeers 2018b. For more on blood in Western Christianity, see Jansen and Dresen 2012;and Fricke 2013. Matter can be its own selfcrafter, too, so deeply is this vivacity of making woven into the world by God.…”

“…In Peers 2004, I addressed some case studies from this point of view. See also Pentcheva 2010.2Riegl 1982, 28: "The postulate that issues about mankind, peoples, country, and church determined historical value became less important and was almost, but not entirely, eliminated.…”

“A Hand of Ivory”: Moving Objects in Psellos’ Oration for his Daughter Styliane. A Case Study

“…Similarly, taking his cue from Heidegger and Brown, Glenn Peers reads the icon as a "thing" and puts emphasis on the fact that the viewer is in fact a "dividual," a porous, non-discrete being. Icons, connecting the human and the divine, have a transformative and active power; in turn, the act of vision as conceptualized by the Byzantines is an act of engagement and energy exchange with the thing seen (Peers, 2012(Peers, , 2013. On the one hand, the observer cannot be considered as an individual, given such a constant exchange, while on the other hand, objects are, in fact, "quasi objects," ontologically ambiguous, given their ability to act on the user/viewer (Peers, 2021).…”

“…In his recent Other Things (2015), Brown is less radical than in his original essay in breaking down the subject-object binary, although he retains "some version" of it "in behalf of apprehending an object-thing distinction whose explanatory power lies in the cultural fields," so as to show that the attention to material culture/objects and to "thinginess" can fruitfully converge and be productive together. Such an emphasis on the cultural fields speaks to the claim that, to fully understand Byzantium, we should embrace its "animistic worldview" (Peers, 2012). Such a stance, however, entails a problematic overlap between emic and etic points of view (Pike, 1967;with Otto, 2018 for the Middle Ages; and see Nelson, 2007 more specifically for Byzantium and the icon), which prevents conversations with other fields such as historical cognitive studies that engage with the same phenomena.…”