Bissera V. Pentcheva

The Performative Icon

The medieval icon was experienced not simply through sight, as in visual studies and museums today, but also through touch, sound, smell, and taste. Nor was it static: the icon became animated in its interaction with the faithful. Its rich, highly reflective materials and surface textures, combined with its setting—flickering candles and oil lamps, sounds of music and prayer, the fragrance of incense, and the approach and breath of the faithful—saturated the material and sensorial to excess. It led to a vision that transcended this materiality and gave access to the intangible: a taste of the divine.

Hagia Sophia and multisensory aesthetics

Focusing on the sixth-century interior of the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, this article explores the way marble and gold appear and their psychological effect on the spectator as recorded in Byzantine ekphrasis and liturgical texts. In turn, this optical shimmer, in Greek, marmarygma, ij linked to the acoustic properties of marble, especially its capacity to reflect sound waves. The meaning of the optical and acoustic reflection is related to the Eucharistie rite and, more specifically, to the concept of animation, empsychosis. The exploration of acoustics is further deepened by the use of the sound of exploding balloons and modern digital technology to measure the reverberation time of the interior and to generate with its aid computer auralizations of Byzantine chant, recorded anechoically (with minimal room acoustics). Combining literary analysis, philological inquiry, and scientific research, this study uncovers the multisensory aesthetics of Hagia Sophia and recuperates the notion of aural architecture.

The supernatural protector of Constantinople: the Virgin and her icons in the tradition of the Avar siege

Abstract Previous scholarship has maintained that icons of the Virgin were carried in procession during the Avar siege of Constantinople in A.D. 626. Based on a close reading of the primary sources from the seventh to the fourteenth centuries, this paper will argue in contrast that a tight linkage between Marian icons and protection of the Byzantine capital did not occur until after Iconoclasm. The larger implications of this conclusion concern the evolution of the cult of the Virgin in Constantinople from its initial focus on relics to a cult centered on icons and icon processions as it emerged in the second half of the tenth century.

Icons of Sound: Auralizing the Lost Voice of Hagia Sophia

The interdisciplinary project Icons of Sound (2008–present) is codirected by Bissera Pentcheva (Department of Art andArtHistory) and JonathanAbel (Center forComputer Research inMusic andAcoustics [CCRMA]) at StanfordUniversity. Bridging humanities and exact sciences, this research focuses on Emperor Justinian’s sixthcentury church of Hagia Sophia, uncovering the synergy that once existed among acoustics, chant, and aesthetics (Fig. 1). The liturgical rite, celebrated within this monument from late antiquity until at least the Fourth Crusade in 1204, was known as the ekklēsiastēs (“cathedral”) or more commonly referred to as the asmatic, or sung, rite. As a museum today, the interior of Hagia Sophia is off limits for any performance involving the human voice; this ban pertains both to religious and artistic initiatives. Digital technology has become our only means to restore and experience the lost voice of the Great Church. Icons of Sound has collected acoustic data on site using inflated balloons popped in the interior. Extracting from these samples the impulse response of the space, the team has successfully imprinted Hagia Sophia’s acoustic signature on live performance of Byzantine chant, first in a studio setting in 2011 and then at Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall in 2013 and 2016. This article presents the method and the results of this research.

Performing the Sacred in Byzantium: Image, breath and sound

A twenty-first century audience approaches the concept of ‘image’ as ‘representation’ and as such it sustains the continuity of the term’s meaning from the ancient Greco-Roman tradition to the present. Art history further fosters the same line of thinking because it conceives of images primarily as pictorial representations. Being an art historian and a Byzantinist, I will challenge this identification by showing how Christian theologians in late antiquity severed ‘image’ from representation and sought to promote an alternative model linked to performance and ritual enactment (Pentcheva forthcoming b). The story of Adam in Genesis (Genesis 1:25–6, 2:7) offers the ontological platform of the performative image; the first human is allegedly made of inert matter quickened into life by divine breath. Greek further connects ‘breath’ to ‘Holy Spirit’, for it designates both with the same word – pneuma. I call this Christian form of iconicity ‘performative’. Yet, I do not use the term in the same way as performance studies scholars do; they associate it with speech-act theory or its later uses especially in gender studies (Austin 1962; Butler 1999). By contrast, I employ ‘performative’ as a marker of the process through which the inanimate starts to be perceived as alive and this liveliness is manifested in the change of appearance such as glitter, reverberation, phenomenal shadow, smoke. As such my use of ‘performative’ engages the spatial and temporal aspects of the liturgical ritual of in-spiriting and recognizes the synergistic role the viewing/participating subject plays in engendering the perceived animation of the inert. My analysis probes further into the image-making operations of pneuma activated by the Byzantine liturgy. In uncovering the medieval non-representational ‘performative’ image, this paper will show how iconicity becomes the product of the mouth and breath (inhalation and exhalation). Through chant, I will approach the body of the faithful and the material fabric of the building as instruments of breath and slowly shift an art historical discourse to musicology, entering the domain where modulated breath exhaled in chant stirs the acoustics of the space, producing a sentient, yet ineffable, presence of divinity. By turning to phenomenology of sound and the sixth-century church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey), this study uncovers the role of chant in engendering the sacred, transforming both singers and listeners into ‘icons of God’. So what Byzantium offers us today is an access to a culture that defined the process of image-making not as an artistic modelling of representational mimesis, but as a sensually saturated experience of the divine accessible to both actors (that is, singers) and audience (that is, congregation). For the past decade my work has uncovered and explored the phenomenon of animation in Byzantine art (Pentcheva 2010, 2006). My focus has been the mixed-media relief icon (here ‘image’ understood as a portrait and representation). I have argued that its rich material texture of gold filigree, glass mosaic and enamel is optically polymorphous. These complex surfaces become alive with the changes Performing the Sacred in Byzantium Image, breath and sound