This book argues that the extraordinary force of the image in contemporary life--the contemporary imaginary--can be traced back to the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries.

The barest awareness of the ubiquity and influence of the media today provides proof enough that our fate is in the hands of the image. But when and how was this fate sealed? _Image, Icon, Economy_ considers this question and recounts an essential thread in the conceptualization of visual images within the Western tradition. This book argues that the extraordinary force of the image in contemporary life—the contemporary imaginary—can be traced back to the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy of the (...) eighth and ninth centuries. It was during this period that the church was compelled to produce an account of the theological status of the religious image that would nevertheless not be open to even the slightest suspicion of idolatry. The solution arrived at was the dual doctrine of the _image_, _invisible_ and the _icon_, _visible_, and thus perfectly fitted to be placed at the center of a pedagogical and political strategy serving the temporal power of the church. The foundations of this immense philosophical enterprise were laid in no less than the multifarious, interwoven strands of the divine _economy_, God's overall plan for the salvation of humanity. (shrink)

In 1396 an inventory of the treasury of Hagia Sophia was commissioned. It was written by three educated laymen who all had experience of court culture, and they listed some 180 items. Their descriptions of the few icons that they listed is of interest for several reasons: they do not mention the date or period of the icons, nor their style, condition, size, donors or any inscriptions that they displayed. Their only way of describing them was by the title of (...) the subject of each icon. This suggests that, at any rate for laymen, the subject of an icon was of overwhelming importance, and this factor alone was thought to be sufficient to identify an icon in an inventory of this kind. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IconsEwa HarabaszArtistEwa Harabasz was born in Czestochowa, Poland. She currently lives and paints in New York City, where she is represented by The Luxe Gallery. Her paintings have been recently featured in several solo shows in Poland, most recently at Galeria BWA in Bielsko Biala, Le Guern in Warsaw, Galeria Miejska Arsenal in Poznan, and Galeria Wozownia in Torun. Her work was also featured in a solo exhibition at (...) the Luxe Gallery in New York. Her paintings have been included in a number of group shows including “Poza” at Real Art Ways in Hartford (see the catalog, “Poza: On the Polishness of Polish Contemporary Art”). Ewa Harabasz's new work will be presented in 2008 as part of the group show “Identity and Otherness in the Face of Anxiety” at the Socio-Political Contemporary Art Museum in Jerusalem, Israel.Harabasz has worked in church and religious art conservation in Italy and Poland, and grew up in Czestochowa, the seat of a Polish national religious shrine—a Byzantine icon called “Black Madonna.” She has been a visiting assistant professor at Cornell University since 2005.StatementThe images painted by Ewa Harabasz present themselves as ambiguous “icons”: it is unclear whether they refer to media representations of present-day war and destruction or to religious or spiritual iconography. Harabasz appropriates mass media images from the wars in Bosnia and Iraq, the Beslan tragedy, and London underground transportation terrorism by using photographic transfer methods combined with painting on wood in the style of inspirational religious art. Harabasz insists that the spectacle inherent in her images is a critical reflection on how the destruction and horror of human suffering in war and terrorism is often glamorized and dramatized, and turned into present-day pseudo-icons by the mass media to be consumed by the public as a “redeeming” experience. Writer Dora Apel cautions viewers to reflect “that these works are less analogous to the Byzantine icons of Harabasz's native Poland than the International Gothic paintings of the late Middle Ages, which demanded of religious art that it correlate with people's everyday experience. Paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries employed an extensive use of gold to create a sumptuous surface but combined it with a radical naturalism. The images ultimately pictured the workings of secular power, combined with religious figures. This came about at a time when religion focused increasingly on human and humane concerns. Similarly Harabasz uses a spiritual lens to focus on worldly experience, achieving, for modern sensibilities, the same elegance, coloristic splendor, narrative detail, and lyricism as those earlier medieval works.”Harabasz says that despite her obvious references to the Madonna images and other religious iconography, she wishes these images to be viewed as “false icons.” While saints and martyrs are immortalized via religious art, the survivors and victims whom media notoriously immortalize had no choice in their suffering. [End Page 81] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 82] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 83] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 84] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 85] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 86] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 87] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 88] Click for larger view View full resolution[End Page 89]Copyright © 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

The Iconoclastic controversies of the Byzantine Era have provided a rich literary tradition of miracle narrations regarding the various magical aspects of the icon. The second period of Iconoclasm however seems to have given rise to a lesser prominent motif of the earlier traditions, namely that of the icon-agent acting as active punisher against its transgressor. The current article explores the development of this motif after a concise survey of the history of icon-miracle narrations, their representative (...) texts and their role in liturgical practice. The starting point of the study were two previously unedited byzantine texts from the manuscript Vaticanus gr. 1587, testifying unique stories of icons as punishers. Finally, these stories are also perfect examples of the rich historical information popular narrations can provide on a topographical and prosopographical level regarding the era within which they were produced. (shrink)

Far Eastern calligraphy has always been regarded by the Occident as an “esoteric” issue, laden with a peculiar “mysticism,” which presents spiritual and philosophical aspects too outlandish to truly comprehend. That is probably the reason why calligraphy was amongst the last artistic “disciplines” to gain access to the international world of the arts. This study focuses on Japanese calligraphy as a visual and verbal image, conducting a hermeneutic investigation into the nature and function of this type of image, into the (...) value and significance of this way of representing the sacred in accordance with Japanese spirituality. Undertaking an unusual exploration, this research draws together the symbolism of calligraphic art and that of Byzantine icons, looking for similarities and differences between them, seeing them as intuitive gateways to the mysteries of the universe, to revelations of an ontologically superior nature. (shrink)

As Hegel once said, in Byzantium, between homoousis and homoiousis, the difference of one letter could decide over the life and death of thousands. As the present essay would like to argue, Byzantine thinking was not only attentive to conceptual, but also to iconic differences. The iconoclastic controversy arose from two different interpretations of the nature of images: whereas iconoclastic philosophy is based on the assumption of a fundamental ‘iconic identity’, iconophile philosophy defends the idea of ‘iconic difference’. While (...) the reception in the Latin West of the controversies over the image as a mere problem of referentiality of the Letter explains why its originality has remained underestimated for centuries, re-examining Byzantine visual thinking in the light of today’s ‘iconic turn’ reveals its striking modernity. (shrink)

: In the following extract, Mondzain examines the way in which the spiritual hegemony of the Early Christian and Byzantine church was transformed into political power. The primary tool used in this endeavor was the icon. The representation of the holy figures of Christianity as space-occupying physical beings puts into play a series of spatial operations which aided in the exercise of temporal, imperial authority.

In the following extract, Mondzain examines the way in which the spiritual hegemony of the Early Christian and Byzantine church was transformed into political power. The primary tool used in this endeavor was the icon. The representation of the holy figures of Christianity as space-occupying physical beings puts into play a series of spatial operations which aided in the exercise of temporal, imperial authority.

In the following extract, Mondzain examines the way in which the spiritual hegemony of the Early Christian and Byzantine church was transformed into political power. The primary tool used in this endeavor was the icon. The representation of the holy figures of Christianity as space-occupying physical beings puts into play a series of spatial operations which aided in the exercise of temporal, imperial authority.

In the following extract, Mondzain examines the way in which the spiritual hegemony of the Early Christian and Byzantine church was transformed into political power. The primary tool used in this endeavor was the icon. The representation of the holy figures of Christianity as space-occupying physical beings puts into play a series of spatial operations which aided in the exercise of temporal, imperial authority.

With the advancement of digital technology in contemporary art, new hybrid forms of interaction emerge that invite viewers to make images present in physical space as events that claim a life of their own. In breaking away from representational and performance art theories that have dominated the critique of new media artwork since the 1980s, this article analyses an iconic vision of mobile touchscreens based on the medieval Byzantine chorographic inscription of the sacred in profane spaces. As defined in (...) recent art historical studies on Byzantine icons, chorography builds on a multisensory spatial interaction between the beholders of icons that results in feeling the presence of a divine, invisible image. In light of postmodern critique of digital images’ capacity to manipulate notions of reality, new media aesthetic theory hardly addresses this Byzantine iconic vision that is fundamental to western visual culture. Jeffrey Shaw’s installation, The Golden Calf, is discussed to offer an alternative in understanding how digital and physical spaces function together to evoke something essentially real. (shrink)

The paper presents fragments of a Byzantine icon discovered in 2015 during regular archaeological excavations carried out in Chełm, eastern Poland. Iconographic analyses allow the nine surviving fragments to be interpreted as belonging to a diptych wing with the Great Feasts cycle. The icon represents archaic iconography of the subject, with the scene of Transfiguration placed after Entry into Jerusalem and before the Crucifixion. The artefact was created in the second half or at the close of the (...) 12th century, and it was made from steatite, which has been confirmed by petrographic analyses. The icon was discovered in the remains of a palace complex of King Daniel Romanovich, the greatest ruler of the Galicia-Volhynia Lands. The results of the archaeological research allow the terminus ante quem for the icon’s arrival in Chełm to be determined as before the middle of the 13th century. Various possible explanations as to how the icon found its way to Chełm are also explored in the paper. (shrink)

A very special kind of feast belongs to the Christian Orthodox tradition: there is a specific liturgical celebration of the Images in the so-called Sunday of Orthodoxy. While in many cultures images are employed in order to celebrate an historic event, this is the only feast in which, on the contrary, images are celebrated for themselves. Nonetheless, the role of images in Orthodoxy is not univocally and positively accepted. In fact, the title’s expression.the wolf as a shepherd. belongs to a (...) Desert Father and refers to the role of images in our mental life. This is not reported by a heretical iconoclastic document, but by the well-known Philokalia, a kind of handbook of Orthodox Aesthetics. This paper aims to present these two aspects in their paradoxical partnership. First, I will present some historical, symbolic and liturgical aspects of this feast. Thus, we should be able to understand better why many contemporary authors claimed that the origins of our visual culture can be traced in this Feast. However, if we comprehend the philosophical value of Byzantine icons, we realise that they have little to do with our contemporary images, no matter whether we mean artistic, religious or media images. We often talk about the.power of images., but just to blame them -as if they were autonomous entities- or to praise them, in a generalized aestheticization of contemporary life. Iconophobia and iconodoulia, I claim, are emerging as ontologically impoverished versions of the former Byzantine theoretical models. What falls into oblivion is the paradoxical status of the image as.appearance of the essence of Being. that demands as a condition of its own existence its self-sublation. These dialectics, conceptually inspired by the Hegelian logic, are fully present in Byzantine Aesthetics, where the feast is considered as a precarious image, held in memory of a future image-loss event known as eschaton. (shrink)

L’art de Magritte témoigne du destin icono-logique de l’Homme, qui se joue aujourd’hui sur la pointe de l’Occident écartelé entre l’art sacré byzantin et l’art mourant contemporain. Cette lucidité anachronique a généré des contresens, qu’il a cherché à dissiper en écrivant à Michel Foucault : « Ceci n’est pas une pipe vaut “L’homme est un animal malade” ». Son art agnostique exprime la connaturalité iconique perdue ou retrouvée du Logos et du Monde : « Je peins l’au-delà, mort ou vivant (...) ». (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Texts and Icons in Heidegger’s Metaphysical TraditionMichael James Bennett (bio)[End Page 26]This essay is about texts that draw attention to themselves as texts, that is, as material, graphical figures, rather than as more or less efficiently pellucid semantic relays. In other words, it is about what happens when texts behave like images. In what follows I examine a series of philosophical contexts where this question appears to be at (...) issue. I claim that one way of understanding what’s going on in these contexts is that here the image-form of a text becomes a kind of icon. I begin by reflecting on a prejudice that belongs, according to Heidegger, to the “history of metaphysics”: the notion that it would be better, clearer, and less ambiguous to replace all reliance on images with self-effacing, transparent words. My goal here is to demonstrate the existence of an alternative historical trend that defends an opposite view. I compare a defense of iconography by Byzantine patriarch Nikephoros of Constantinople, as well as the Neoplatonist Porphyry’s commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, with works by two latter-day Heideggerians, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, who respond to the inherited problematic of non-referential, iconic texts. These responses suggest that non-semantic image-creation, as much as non-semantic verbal play, is the pre-conceptual condition of conceptuality. This essay presents a new way of understanding the philosophical issues that connect ancient and medieval discussions about icons and images with twentieth-century concerns about language.In her study of medieval European manuscript illumination, Animating the Letter (1999), Laura Kendrick emphasizes the non-semantic character of illuminated texts. Kendrick argues that the basic distinction between text and image is fundamentally at stake in illumination, and that the distinction is inherited from the Christian church fathers who opposed text and image, privileging the former and denigrating the latter. According to this traditional view, texts are better suited than images to a consideration of the divine on account of writing’s ethereal quality, its “transparency,” which leads the reader beyond the material sign to the immaterial concept. The problem with images, on the other hand, is their materiality, which may lead viewers down a dark path toward an ultimately heretical veneration for the mere image instead of for its referent. It seems to me that we find in Kendrick’s argument an exact homology with the discourse on the icon in the Byzantine Christian church. Emperor Constantine V, for instance, at the time of the “first iconoclast crisis” (the mid-eighth century CE), expresses wariness about the potentially heterodox metaphysics underpinning iconophilia. He objects to icons on the basis that their veneration would be acceptable only if the icon were to share the essence of that of which it is an icon (God), but that this is impossible; infinite divine nature cannot be encompassed within the finite line of human composition. The Byzantine iconophile’s response to this objection is not to deny the infinite, uncircumscribable nature of God, but to affirm that the icon, bound though it is to the register of images, nevertheless does not function in the same manner as an ordinary image. That is, the icon does not refer to its model by means of resemblance alone. In the language of Nikephoros of Constantinople (758–828 CE), the character of the icon consists in consubstantiality (homoousia) prior to resemblance (homoiōsis).1 [End Page 27]The problem of the limits of reference unites the discourse on the icon and the flourishing of the illuminated text. Just as the icon does not refer in the normal way to its referent, so Kendrick contends that the “animated letter” is not reducible to its pure semantic quality, is not to be understood as if it were just a kind of significative relay through which a sublime quantity of something called “meaning” is obliged to pass. “Meaning,” conceived of in what I am inclined to call the narrowly economic sense as the cargo of material vehicles called “words,” meaning that is gambled in words and then “cashed out” again, is not always what is at stake when one writes. Something else is... (shrink)

The question of the simultaneity of relatives is one of the most debated aspects of Aristotle’s theory of relational properties. Are they exceptions to the rules of co-introduction and co-suppression for a pair of relatives? The present article studies a particular chapter of the long history of this problem, the contribution of three Byzantine thinkers of the ninth century. Their discussion is embedded in the complex phenomenon of the Iconoclast crisis. For reinvigorating their discourse on icons, these iconophiles thinkers (...) deployed Aristotelian logic, notably by treating the model and the image as Aristotelian relatives. This move implies tackling the issue of the simultaneity of relatives. Metrophanes, Nicephorus and Theodore solved it in three different ways which the present article reconstructs. (shrink)

A fragment of a relief icon, made of steatite plaque, depicting a female saint,was recently found in Acre (Akko) in northern Israel. The plaque has lost the head of the saint, but enough is left of the figure to discern that the pose of the female saint is typically Byzantine. Moreover, the drapery shows stylistic affinities with Komnenian art. The plaque is the first steatite icon found in Palestine and could have arrived in Acre from abroad. The (...) archeological context suggests that it might have been venerated in Acre anytime between the Crusader and the Ottoman periods. (shrink)

Conservation and exhibition of historical works of art run many risks of misrepresentation of the life and meanings of objects. This paper explores the identities of some particularly compelling examples of Byzantine art restored under special circumstances at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. This examination of the restoration of frescos and icons, and their particular display histories, reveals the contingencies of our encounters with and explanations of historical art.

Die Erhaltung und Ausstellung von historischen Kunstwerken geht viele Risiken in Bezug auf die Darstellung des Lebens und der Bedeutungen von Objekten ein. Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Identitäten einiger besonders fesselnder Beispiele byzantinischer Kunst, die in der Menil Collection in Houston, Texas unter besonderen Umständen restauriert wurden. Eine Untersuchung der Wiederherstellung der Fresken und Ikonen sowie ihrer jeweiligen Ausstellungsgeschichten offenbart die Kontingenzen unserer Begegnungen mit und Erklärungen von historischer Kunst. Conservation and exhibition of historical works of art run many risks (...) of misrepresentation of the life and meanings of objects. This paper explores the identities of some particularly compelling examples of Byzantine art restored under special circumstances at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. This examination of the restoration of frescos and icons, and their particular display histories, reveals the contingencies of our encounters with and explanations of historical art. (shrink)

Cretan icons often displayed a precious decoration of golden halos with incised, stippled, and/or impressed designs. The present study points out that these motifs should not be interpreted as manifestations of nostalgic and anachronistic attitudes on the part of post-Byzantine painters working in Candia for Greek Orthodox and Catholic clients. Rather, they appear already in several early Cretan works dating around 1400, which took inspiration from technical devices and ornamental motifs worked out in the workshops of Venice during the (...) second half of the fourteenth century and appropriated in icon painting probably through the mediation of mixed-style works produced in both the lagoon region and Venetian-ruled Candia. (shrink)

Rooted in a tradition of thought and spirituality akin to, yet other than, the onto-theology of the Latin West, the aesthetico-theological experience of the Byzantine icon can help articulate aesthetic and numinous elements of our relation to nature that environmental philosophy should no longer ignore. In contrast to the technical mastery of the natural in Western art inaugurated by the Renaissance, itself related to the emerged technological mastery of nature in the late Middle Ages, the iconic sensibility characteristic (...) of the Byzantine East exhibits an experience of materiality common to non-Western humanity, seeing nature as a visible window to the invinsible, a lintel of the holy. A series of correlations between features of iconic seeing and exemplary encounters with the natural environment by prominent naturalists elaborates this thesis, along with examples from the later writings of Dostoevsky, who looked to divine beauty to save the earth. (shrink)

The article describes manners in which history and culture influenced the details of the iconographic canon in the art of Orthodox church. The author was interested in relations existing between beliefs and their iconographic representation. Changes of the imagery of the damned in historical context portrayed in the Last Judgment icons painted in selected Orthodox churches in Romania came under the investigation of the author. Romanian icon painters using Byzantine characteristics of representation introduced some significant modifications into the (...) canon. We can divide icons of the Last Judgment into two groups – on the one hand we see sinners who rebelled against the moral canon of Christianity, on the other there are some nations unknown to Romanians, foreign people of various nationalities and faiths that can be grouped into a few categories. The largest of them is composed of pagans (Turks, Tartars and Arabs), infidels (Jews) and heretics (Armenians and Latin rite Catholics). With time this tradition turned into customary painting of the Last Judgment icons in Romania. It disappeared in the 20 th century, only to be reborn with the fall of the communist era in new historical contexts. Old enemies of the Orthodox were replaced by new ones, the representatives of the greatest totalitarian systems in the 20 th century – fascists, Nazis, communists; terrorists – the Muslims and their leader (Bin Laden) as well as contemporary Romanian politicians, who are being eternalized in the Last Judgment icons on the walls of Orthodox churches. (shrink)

Among Marian epithets one of the more obscure is the designation "the Egyptian." This article traces the term in modern Greek and Byzantine literature. The investigation centers on an icon reputedly painted by the Apostle Luke while he was living in Egypt. Our researches lead to the city of Attaleia where, according to legend, a Lukan icon had found its way. Textual evidence establishes that around this icon a healing cult of the Virgin Aigyptia flourished in (...) the later 11th century. The written record is confirmed by the seal of a certain bishop Theodosios of Atteleia. The obverse bears a representation of the Virgin accompanied by the epithet Aigyptia. (shrink)

My aim in this essay is to understand why it is that we stomp on images of persons that we hate or dislike and kiss or light candles in front of images of persons that we love, honor, or admire. Far and away the most probing and intense discussion of the nature and significance of such actions was that which took place among the Byzantines in the so-called iconoclast controversy, from early in the eighth century until the middle of the (...) ninth century. The bulk of my essay consists of identifying and analyzing the arguments developed in this period for and against icon veneration. After concluding that the Byzantines did not succeed in developing a plausible account of what goes on in icon veneration, I offer my own account of what is going on when someone kisses an icon or stomps on a picture of her mother. (shrink)

On September 24, 787, the works of the VII Ecumenical Synod were opened in the 'Saint Sophia' Church in Nicaea, after the first attempt, on August 7, 786, had failed. Although the nominal presidency was held by the legates of Pope Adrian I, the effective presidency was exercised by Patriarch Tarasios of Constantinople. A skilful church diplomat, with experience, gained as an imperial secretary and a remarkable theologian whose authority was imposed even during his election as a patriarch amongst the (...) laity, Tarasios meticulously and clairvoyantly prepared for the deployment of the Nicene synod. This is noticeable from the agreement made with the papal legates regarding the reading of the letters of Pope Adrian I whose content directly concerned the persona of the patriarch, agreeing to omit those compromising paragraphs, from the procedure of re-welcoming in the communion of the church of some former iconoclastic bishops, by correctly managing the resistance of the monks to whom he gave satisfaction regarding the patristic and traditional argumentation of the cult of the holy icons and by rejecting point-by-point the dogmatic decision of the iconoclastic synod of Hieria, a rejection of which the patriarch Tarasie is in all probability the author. Satisfied with the success of the synod, whose craftsman he indeed was, Patriarch Tarasios was able to communicate to both Pope Adrian I and the emperors and clergy of Constantinople that the unity of the Church residing in Christ had been restored and that the place in the church and due honour of the holy icons had been restored through the synodal decision of 302 participants. The success of the Seventh Ecumenical Council is unequivocally because of the tactful and competent preparation and management of Patriarch Tarasios. CONTRIBUTION: The perspective we promote on the events highlighted in the study, could contribute to unblocking the theological dialogue between Orthodox and Catholics on the issue of papal primacy, the study thus promotes HTS as an important forum for mediating interfaith dialogue. (shrink)

Daniele Guastini’s book Immagini cristiane e cultura antica is one of the most significant contributions to the current debate on the role of Christian images. The choice of images made by Christianity since the third century – this is the main thesis of the work – represents one of the generative moments of the long-lasting process of secularization that came to characterize Western culture. This essay aims to discuss this thesis, contextualizing it both from a theological point of view and (...) in relation to its philosophical and cultural-historical significance. I then dwell on two questions more directly related to the interpretation of the Christian image in the first millennium: the relationship that the iconographic practice of the Christian origins has with the Jewish and pagan context, and the role that the interpretation of the “Byzantine turn” plays in the overall structure of the Guastini’s book. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Hypothesis Concerning the Character of Islamic ArtAsli GocerWhy Islamic art has the distinctive features it has continues to generate clashing explanations. The Islamic visual treasury has no figural images, for instance, and three-dimensional sculpture or large scale oil painting, but instead contains miniatures, vegetal ornaments, arabesque surface patterns, and complex geometrical designs. To account for the phenomena the following radically opposing theories have been offered: the influence of (...) Judaism, the Quranic prohibition against making images, 1 Islamic resentment of the glory of Byzantine icons, 2 logocentricism of classical Islam, 3 the spiritual dimension of Islam, 4 tacit Islamic assertion of “otherness,” 5 and contingency of history. 6 The merits of these theories have been roundly discussed in the literature, and so I will not repeat the task here. I will insist that none of these theories offer a coherent explanation for all arts, but my presumption is that such an explanation is possible. In nonvisual arts the Muslim prefers simple tunes over that of the symphony, for instance, whirling dervishes over the ballet, and lyric poetry over dramatic literature. In my view what explains the common characteristic of all these arts is a certain kind of Islamic attitude informed by a certain philosophical outlook. Although it would be hasty to suggest the existence of a monolithic [End Page 683] Islamic art, it would be equally rash to deny some striking commonalities among its diverse examples. 7The following observation by a Muslim scholar is notable in this regard: “Whether in the great courtyard of the Delhi Mosque or the Qarawiyyin in Fez, one feels oneself within the same artistic and spiritual universe despite all the local variations in material, structural techniques, and the like.” 8 Some cite geometry as what mediates that feeling to the observer despite the cultural divergences in style. 9 Even those who have given up the search for the universal or the spiritual in Islamic art cannot help but see in it the classical ideal of beauty. 10 It is this classical heritage that in fact holds one of the important keys to the puzzle at hand. In particular I shall claim that Islamic art is the living image of what Plato has in mind for art in a theocratic state. Clearly, to refer to Plato and art in the same breath invites trouble. As is well enough known, giving a general interpretation of Plato’s views on the nature of art is a very complex endeavor. 11 Even in the face of grave difficulties in textual exegesis, however, there is sufficient evidence that Plato has some settled views on art. Those pertinent to our discussion here involve two claims, that beauty and goodness are divine and that all human endeavor (including artistic creation) must imitate the divine. 12 Although Platonic strain in Islam has been noted in other areas, its persistent legacy has been overlooked in art. 13 I shall argue that the Platonic influence on Islamic thought can be traced not only to political philosophy 14 and geometry, 15 as it has been commonly accepted, but also aesthetics. 16 A philosophical explanation of the Islamic attitude toward art may therefore be derivable from the Platonic axiom that god is the paradigm of beauty, which is the cosmological principle of [End Page 684] order and harmony; and as all created things, art, too, must reflect the divine paradigm.Before defending this ahistorical hypothesis on the character of Islamic art so reviled in recent literature, a few caveats are in order. “Islamic art” contains redundant terms. Strictly speaking all art in Islam is “Islamic,” because for the Muslim art is a crucial point of contact with the divine. That art should direct the mind to the divine is also Plato’s view. 17 Second, the categories that have traditionally been used to describe Islamic art such as “aniconic” and “nonrepresentational” are unhelpful for the problem at hand. 18 When it comes to the issue of iconography in Islamic arts, there is no consensus, for Islamicists are notably divided on the semiotic dimension of the Islamic visual language. The question of whether the geometric surface pattern is essentially iconography, for instance, is yet... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image by Thomas PfauThomas ZingelmannPFAU, Thomas. Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022. xxiii + 785 pp. Cloth, $80.00Thomas Pfau reconstructs one of the most traditional and possibly most decisive philosophical debates, [End Page 559] namely, the one about the form and function of appearance (Schein). This debate is taken up (...) on the basis of the concept of image. This means that Pfau concentrates historically as well as systematically on a specific topic within this debate. The book is divided into two major sections.In the first section, Pfau examines how the history of the metaphysics and theology of the image develops, starting with Plato in the first chapter. The basic idea in this section is that the image has a crucial epistemic role in the metaphysical and theological systems of the authors addressed. Here Pfau shows that Plato, at the latest in the Sophist, develops a theory of images that revalues appearance contrary to the assumptions in the Republic. Chapter 1 is about the mediation of unity and multiplicity, as it is also shown in Plotinus. Chapter 2 attempts to show how the Byzantine icon embodies the conviction that the invisible truth of the visual world can be revealed only through images. Pfau's demonstration of various epistemic dimensions of the image then begins with chapter 3: the eschatological vision from Augustine to Bonaventure to Julian of Norwich. Chapter 4, the last of the first section, reconstructs Nicholas of Cusa's position, which attempts to understand mystical visions mediated by images of Christ.The second section examines how the metaphysics of the image—in the sense of an epistemology, which tries to establish ultimate justifications—nevertheless persists and even evolves despite two crucial switches in philosophy. On the one hand, this concerns philosophy that subordinates the visual to the abstract (for example, Hegel) and, on the other, the supposedly nonmetaphysical status of the image in the developing natural sciences. Chapter 5 then attempts to show, through Goethe's botanical investigations and reflections, how, despite the establishment of the natural sciences, Goethe attempts to defend intuition as a scientific method and appearance as a scientific object of investigation. This position is then pursued historically in chapter 6, through the work of Lyell, Darwin, and Ruskin, where the visible is understood as the connecting point of the sciences in general. Gerard Manley Hopkins is then identified in chapter 7 as representing a position that combines theological with proto-phenomenological arguments to highlight the epistemic value of images. The last chapter then deals with decisive developments at the beginning of the twentieth century. In phenomenology (Husserl), painting (Cézanne), and poetry (Rilke), a conception develops that epistemically valorizes sensual and intuitive experience.Generally speaking, Pfau attempts to trace historically what arguments and positions have been developed on the relationship between image and knowledge. His work is based on the conviction that the image is the basis for human orientation in the world and is therefore of great epistemological value. Of outstanding importance for his question is that the epistemological value of images is not to be located in the properties of images, that is, an ontology of the image; rather, Pfau is interested in those positions that reflect on the relationship between knowledge and [End Page 560] experience of images. While clarifying the ontological status of images remains important, the epistemological status of images—what role the experience and usage of images has for humans—is in the foreground. Pfau reconstructs positions that hold that the pictorial is a medium of knowledge. He puts forward the thesis that there is a tradition that is of the opinion that in and through the medium of the image—and this closes the arc to the Schein-debate—being can be experienced by man. In other words, the invisible is to become recognizable through the visible. Of particular importance is his reading of the late Platonic dialogues: While appearance and being are still thought of as distinct in these dialogues, they are not opposed, in the sense of an epistemic opposition. Plato's... (shrink)

While border surveillance produces geopolitical realities and distinctions between types of human life, Richard Mosse’s video installation INCOMING (2017) uses a military high-grade thermal camera to challenge this onto-political project. Recording refugee camps and crossings via the Mediterranean into Europe, his techno-images’ specific mosaic structure, tactility, and luminous flatness evoke the visual mode of Byzantine icons, thus switching from a paranoid, invasive world/view to an economy of mediation and contact with the Other.

While border surveillance produces geopolitical realities and distinctions between types of human life, Richard Mosse’s video installation INCOMING (2017) uses a military high-grade thermal camera to challenge this onto-political project. Recording refugee camps and crossings via the Mediterranean into Europe, his techno-images’ specific mosaic structure, tactility, and luminous flatness evoke the visual mode of Byzantine icons, thus switching from a paranoid, invasive world/view to an economy of mediation and contact with the Other.

Reprise d’un article de G. Durand initialement paru en 1963 dans les Cahiers internationaux de symbolisme. L’auteur examine trois périodes de la culture occidentale où l’image et l’imagination ont été dévalorisées au profit de la pensée rationnelle : le conceptualisme aristotélicien déformé par l’averroïsme médiéval, le dogmatisme de l’Église chrétienne d’Occident opposé à l’iconodulie byzantine, le scientisme issu de la pensée de Descartes. L’analyse conduit à une nouvelle théorie du symbole conçu comme pouvoir heuristique des images. Reprint of an (...) article by G. Durand originally published in 1963 in the Cahiers internationaux du symbolisme. The author examines three periods of Western culture where the image and imagination were devalued in favor of rational thinking: the Aristotelian conceptualism distorted by medieval averroism, the dogmatism of the western Christian Church opposed to the byzantine icons, the modern scientism derived from the thought of Descartes. This analysis leads to a new theory about the symbols, conceived as a creative thinking and an heuristic power of images. (shrink)

Iconic photographs are visual arguments depicting an, often dramatic, particular situation showing victims of disasters. Spectators watching the photo of the particular situation, empathise with it, and project the feelings evoked onto the events that form the context for the scene in the picture. This mobilises them into political action. In the process, however, the depicted personal misery is perused to exemplify the larger events. The tragedy of iconic photographs is analysed not as the misery experienced by the depicted persons, (...) but as the breach of their right to shame which is required for the photo to acquire iconicity. Examples are addressed, as well as the contrast classes of the self-portrait and Byzantine icons. (shrink)

Part of a roundtable on Julia Kristeva's The Severed Head: Chapters Five and Six of Julia Kristeva’s The Severed Head.

In the current American iconoclash, certain monuments are subject to vandalism and municipal removal from their pedestals. Phrases such as “the erasure of history” and “damnatio memoriae” point to concerns that iconoclasm is an attempt to censor history or even remove certain individuals from public memory altogether. Because these phrases beckon the past, this wave of iconoclasm calls for a close examination of previous image-breaking to establish motives. Drawing first from art history, we analyze Byzantine iconoclasm and anxieties over (...) the nature of icons’ power, before contextualizing these findings within image destruction from the Paleolithic to the present day. Each comparison is suggestive of an enduring aesthetic principle: that what appears inanimate is not always inert. Next, drawing from cultural anthropology, we argue that principles of sympathetic magic are at the heart of contemporary iconoclasms, but not in the way media outlets often suggest. Instead, the fear of history’s erasure betrays a deeply rooted equivalence between the representation and the represented. In perceiving their fates as shared, sympathetic magic is seen to persist in the way humans create, interpret, and desecrate images. We conclude with the speculative realist proposition that iconoclasm can produce new, original artworks, which carries implications for the autonomy of art and its distribution between artist and artwork. (shrink)

As Hegel once said, in Byzantium, between homoousis and homoiousis, the difference of one letter could decide the life and death of thousands. As this article seeks to argue, Byzantine thinking was not only attentive to conceptual differences, but also to iconic ones. The iconoclastic controversy (726-842 AD) arose from two different interpretations of the nature of images: whereas iconoclastic philosophy is based on the assumption of a fundamental 'iconic identity', iconophile philosophy defends the idea of'iconic difference'. And while (...) the reception in the Latin West of the controversies over the image as a mere problem of referentiality of the letter explains why its originality has remained underestimated for centuries, reexamining Byzantine visual thinking in the light of today's 'pictorial turn' reveals its striking modernity. (shrink)

Jean-Louis Schefer's study takes as its point of departure Uccello's predella, Profanation of the Host. The painting in question has generally been interpreted within the context of medieval anti-Semitism. However, Schefer argues that the meaning of the work, and of numerous other representations of this particular miracle, must be referred ultimately to the codification by Charlemagne of the dogma of the Real Presence. Uccello's painting in effect makes manifest the requirement that the profaned host should reveal its nature through the (...) gushing of blood. This also involves a political significance, since the Carolingian theology organized around the consecrated host stands in direct opposition to the Byzantine theology of the icon. Schefer's argument leads him to make a thorough investigation not only of the many iconographic precedents, but also of some key Latin texts such as the Libri Carolini, which are published in a French translation. It also advances a methodology that is strikingly at variance with some of the more simple-minded attempts of historians to crack the codes of a complex visual tradition. One of its most original aspects is the new light that the overall thesis casts upon extremely well-known texts like The Merchant of Venice and Dracula. Thus the tendency to identify vampirism as an East European phenomenon, already discernible in Western sources in the eighteenth century, is shown to be closely linked to the historical extension of the myth of Profanation of the Host. In exploring the outcomes of this doctrinal split between East and West, Schefer has identified a deep fault-line in post-antique European history whose consequences are far from being understood at the present day. (shrink)

L’oxymore d’« art apophatique » nous sert ici pour envisager la spécificité de l’icône au-delà des mystifications dont elle fait souvent l’objet. L’art byzantin pourrait être entendu « en négations » par rapport à ce qui fut instauré comme principe esthétique à l’Occident depuis le temps de la Renaissance. En essayant de l’illustrer à travers cette juxtaposition, on constate toutefois que l’attitude « apophatique » loge au cœur de l’esthétique byzantine, conditionnant la vie des formes, ainsi que son socle (...) théorique. On pourrait donc y reconnaître un aspect fondamental de l’icône, qui permet de mieux appréhender la civilisation qui l’engendre. (shrink)

In the summer of 1985 my children, Laura and Aurélien, then seven and five, knelt before a Barbie doll standing at the foot of a Ken doll on an imaginary cross. I remember vividly the scene because I took a picture of it. We were vacationing in Ticino and visiting the local churches, so I assumed that this play imitated the iconography to which they were being exposed. After reading Moshenska's Iconoclasm as Child's Play, however—whose cover shows “Josh McBig,” a (...) bearded version of Ken with outstretched arms and severed legs, photographed by the Jackson sisters as part of their “Doll Games” project—I have to wonder: was there not in this play an element of parody or blasphemy, of iconoclasm even, prompted perhaps by my working at the time on contemporary “vandalism”? Or, on the contrary, was there an element of devotion, of faith produced by mimicking the ritual? I am now faced with the conundrum of “the adult's imagination of the child's imagination,” to borrow a phrase (from Michael Taussig) that resonates through Moshenska's strange and fascinating book.Sometime in the 1530s, in Redcliffe Cross in Bristol, in the west of England, a preacher named Roger Edgeworth denounced what he regarded as a current upsurge of impiety and singled out as evidence that “many Images” taken from the dissolved monasteries “haue bene caryed abrod, and gyuen to children to playe wyth all,” so that when their parents ask them what it is that they are playing with, they make them laugh by answering: “I haue here myne ydoll.” “Ydoll” is a portmanteau word—as Lewis Carroll would have said—combining “doll” and “idol,” and Moshenska finds “scattered but definite evidence... that holy things were made into playthings with sufficient frequency for it to be considered an established and recognized part of iconoclastic practice in the early modern period.” He analyzes a few other examples, but Edgeworth's sermon supplies him with the primal scene of his book: he admits to “having been seduced by this passage..., caught up in its folds, brought back to it time and again,” so that Iconoclasm as Child's Play bears some structural resemblance to Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw. Consistently—and at times obtrusively—self-reflective, it also wonders whether its approach can be regarded as “a kind of iconoclasm” or is intended “as a form of play”—lusus serius, naturally.Iconoclasm as Child's Play explores with great ingenuity the complex relationships between the Christian rite, iconoclasm, and child's play: a Byzantine empress enables her icons to survive the Quarrel of Images by calling them her “dolls”; Protestants trivialize the Roman Catholic ritual by comparing it to “trifles” and the “mere playing of children”; in The Praise of Folly, Erasmus embraces the “foolishness” of Christianity, centered on the figure of a broken body that renders attacks against its images and iconoclastic theory itself—as Bruno Latour has shown—deeply equivocal. A further turn of the screw takes place in the missionary and mercantile context of Malacca, where the Dutch settlers impute childishness both to the Portuguese Jesuits who preceded them and to the local religions. The notions of “fetish” and “fetishism,” as Moshenska shows, charge their targets with a misattribution to objects of agency, responsibility, and desires.The object of Moshenska's inquiry, which he claims less convincingly to include “art-things,” is “polysemic and polychronic,” and a leitmotif of the interpretations he proposes is the instability of the status and meaning of what is interpreted, be it a thing, an action, or a word. Among the many epistemic virtues he attributes to iconoclasm as child's play is the questioning of “the sharp... divisions between modern and premodern” implied by historical narratives such as Max Weber's account of the Reformation as the “expulsion of play” and “disenchantment” of the world. A long meditation on the temporality of play concludes by pointing out the “toy potential of all things” and referring to James Gibson's notion of “affordance.” Indeed, child's play, whatever adults want to do with it, often consists in multiplying and inventing affordances, and it is capable of turning not only “idols” into “dolls,” but also “dolls” into “idols.”. (shrink)

This paper is about the specific character of the aesthetic experience of icons. I am arguing for the idea that the aesthetic experience of icons is a necessary condition of their role and function in Christian worship, and, moreover, that this particular aesthetic experience is of an apophatic kind. My arguments will be developed on the background of the Byzantine iconoclastic debate and the apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Also, they should present the very debate from the perspective (...) of aesthetics, often overlooked in favour of more theological or ontological issues related to it. (shrink)

This article seeks to highlight the relevance of Marie-José Mondzain's trailblazing writings on Byzantine image theory and its modern legacy, with particular reference to Image, icône, économie (Im...

According to the written sources, the Iconoclast controversy was all about the veneration of icons. It started in the late seventh century, after most iconodule provinces had been lost to Byzantine rule, and lasted until the turn of the millennium or so, when icon veneration became generally established in the remaining parts of the Byzantine Empire. However, as far as material evidence and actual images are concerned, the Iconoclast controversy centred on apse images and other, equally large (...) and monumental representations, none of which were ever venerated. Prior to Iconoclasm, such images had not been customary at Constantinople, where the early Christian tradition had been largely aniconic and focused on the symbol of the cross. Thus, the introduction of monumental Christian imagery to Constantinople appears to have been a major aspect of the Iconoclast controversy. This paper asks why and finds that the images in question, whilst not for veneration and therefore not essential to the theological debate, stood out for imperial propaganda. They led to close visual integration of the emperor and the church that had previously been kept apart, because aniconic traditions used to limit imperial presence inside Constantinopolitan church buildings. It seems, then, that the Iconoclast controversy, although conducted in religious terms, was partly driven by a hidden agenda of imperial appropriation and power play. (shrink)