Charles Barber

Figure and likeness : on the limits of representation in Byzantine iconoclasm

Introduction 7 1. Matter and Memory 13 2. Icon and Idol 39 3. Truth and Economy 61 4. Figure and Sign 83 5. Form and Likeness 107 6. Word and Image 125 Conclusion 138 Abbreviations 140 Notes 141 Bibliography 175 Acknowledgments 201 Index 203 Photography Credits 207

Reading the garden in Byzantium: nature and sexuality

AbstractThe subject of the Byzantine garden is primarily to be tackled from texts, and is very much a subject of its texts. My research on the Byzantine garden began from an art historians point of view, I wanted to examine the possibilities of interpreting the garden as an example of visual culture. How was the garden represented? What did the garden look like? But the information demanded by such questions proved to be thin.

Contesting the logic of painting : art and understanding in eleventh-century Byzantium

Drawing on a range of philosophical and theological writings produced in eleventh-century Byzantium, this book offers a reading of the icon and Byzantine aesthetics that not only expands our understanding of these topics but challenges our assumptions about the work of art itself.

From Image into Art: Art after Byzantine Iconoclasm

This paper argues that within a history of the medieval image, there remain some stories of art. The changing patterns in the discussion of the image during Byzantine iconoclasm provide the material for this argument. These indicate that later iconophile writers needed to construct a notion of the image that rejected the implications of presence apparent in the writings of earlier iconophiles and iconoclasts. In so doing, these later, ninth-century iconophiles produce theories of the image that suggest echoes of later theories of art in their stress upon the formal relation between the painting and the one painted.

The body within the frame: a use of word and image in iconoclasm

Abstract For one hundred and forty years the Byzantine Empire was ravaged by a ferocious debate about the legitimacy of religious imagery. Initiated in the period around 730, this age of iconoclasm ran with varying degrees of intensity through to the 870s.1 One of the products of this theological crisis was the construction of a distinct and valid visual discourse that legitimated the continuing existence and function of the icon.2 By visual discourse I do not mean the arguments that legitimated the icon, rather I mean that there existed a distinct and legitimate means of expression that was visual. The purpose of this paper is to analyse an instance of the reasoning behind this distinct visual discourse. In this paper I will examine how this discourse was argued for in one of the last worjds in iconoclasm, the third canon of the eighth Oecumenical Council held in Constantinople (Istanbul) in 869–70. The canon reads:

From Transformation to Desire: Art and Worship after Byzantine Iconoclasm

This paper argues against the notion that art was integrated into the transformational practices of the Byzantine liturgy in the post-iconoclastic period of the 9th century. Following an examination of the iconophile rejection of the equation of art and liturgy, the paper proposes that we should think of the icon as a site of desire. As such the icon can be said to resist the full implications of re-presentation, and thus to avoid the pitfalls of idolatry.