The Sensual Icon

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Imprinted Images: Eulogiai, Magic, and Incense

2. Icons of Sound: Hagia Sophia and the Byzantine Choros

3. Eikon and Identity: The Rise of the Relief Icon in Iconophile Thought

4. The Imprint of Life: Enamel in Byzantium

5. Transformative Vision: Allegory, Poikilia, and Pathema

6. The Icon’s Circular Poetics: The Charis of Choros

7. Inspirited Icons, Animated Statues, and Komnenian Iconoclasm

Epilogue: The Future of the Past

Appendix 1: The Icons in the Monastic Inventories of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries

Appendix 2: Byzantine Enamel Icons and the West, Eleventh–Twelfth Centuries

Notes

Bibliography

Index

“Pentcheva’s preferred direction is away from ‘lifelikeness’ towards the ‘living icon’, an image that ‘was literally ‘in-spirited’ (empsychos, empnous, from pneo and pneuma, ‘to breathe and breath’), receiving human breath and responding with a spectacle of shimmer and glimmer’ (p. 122). Her works trace the philosophical and sensual emergence of the living image, the eikon, no longer understood as the flat painted panel of the sixth to ninth centuries, nor only as the metal bas-relief icon that dominated in eleventh-century Constantinople, but rather as the ideas that shaped both.”

—Paul Stephenson, Oxford Art Journal