The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium - Softcover

Pentcheva, Bissera V.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0271035838 ISBN 13: 9780271035833

Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013

Synopsis

For the Byzantine worshipper, "seeing" a relief icon involved the entire range of senses; its surfaces resonated with sound, wind, light, touch, and smell. The Sensual Icon elucidates the way in which this spectacle of changing surfaces under constantly shifting ambient conditions played an important role in the interaction between object and subject, and between icon and viewer.

About this title

About the Author

Bissera V. Pentcheva is Associate Professor of Art History at Stanford University. She is the author of Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium (Penn State, 2006).

From the Back Cover

Today we take the word "icon" to mean "a sign," or we equate it with portraits of Christ and the saints. In The Sensual Icon, Bissera Pentcheva demonstrates how icons originally manifested the presence of the Holy Spirit in matter. Christ was the ideal icon, emerging through the Incarnation; so, too, were the bodies of the stylites (column-saints) penetrated by the divine pneuma (breath or spirit), or the Eucharist, or the Justinianic space of Hagia Sophia filled with the reverberations of chants and the smoke of incense. Iconoclasm (726 843) challenged these Spirit-centered definitions of the icon, eventually restricting the word to mean only the lifeless imprint (typos) of Christ's visual characteristics on matter.

By the tenth century, mixed-media relief icons in gold, repouss, enamel, and filigree offered a new paradigm. The sun's rays or flickering candlelight, stirred by drafts of air and human breath, animated the rich surfaces of these objects; changing shadows endowed their eyes with life. The Byzantines called this spectacle of polymorphous appearance poikilia, that is, presence effects sensually experienced. These icons enabled viewers in Constantinople to detect animation in phenomenal changes rather than in pictorial or sculptural naturalism. "Liveliness," as the goal of the Byzantine mixed-media relief icon, thus challenges the Renaissance ideal of "lifelikeness," which dominated the Western artistic tradition before the arrival of the modern. Through a close examination of works of art and primary texts and language associated with these objects, and through her new photographs and film capturing their changing appearances, Pentcheva uncovers the icons' power to transform the viewer from observer to participant, communing with the divine.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0271035838
• ISBN 13: 9780271035833
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320