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The Sensual Icon - Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,223
Discovery Miles 12 230
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The Sensual Icon - Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium (Paperback)
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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, repoussé, 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.
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