Glenn Peers

Real Living Painting: Quasi-Objects and Dividuation in the Byzantine World 1

Abstract This article examines an issue that has troubled Byzantine art historians: what Byzantines meant by “living painting.” It attempts to simplify the problem by accepting the sources at face value (painting was indeed alive) and to complicate our understanding of painting (painting occupied a subject-position just as fully as humans did). It uses the notion of ‘dividuals,’ which are opposed to discrete entities like individuals, and of ‘quasi-object,’ so that painting, metal work, stones, and people all appeared in some fashion as objects, but only superficially so. The cases used to establish this position include: Michael Psellos on paintings of Christ; Eucharistic chalices, divine geology and bloods of Christ; and the miraculous stories of interchanging identities among icons and persons. In this way, this article argues for an understanding of Byzantine materiality as relational; it assumed a participatory aspect among all things and persons in that world.

Vision and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium. Image as Exegesis in the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus

No other book in the field of Byzantine art history has been as long and eagerly awaited as Leslie Brubakers study of the Paris Gregory (paris. gr. 510). Her book is based on a 1983 dissertation, and she has published several important articles about the manuscript and its cultural context since then. But the book is much more than the sum of those parts. Addressing the questions she initially raised in that dissertation, she has, as with the others, left that preliminary study behind. She provides the perfect answer to the sometimes unfortunate trend of quickly publishing ones dissertation, the sine qua non of academic advancement. Nuanced, sophisticated, compelling, the book which resulted in this case makes dispatch in publishing the labours of a graduate career unseemly. Now much more than a book for a narrow range of Byzantine specialists, Brubaker has provided a necessary study for any art historian concerned with the relationship between image and text in a work of art, and, especially for those freshly vindicated partisans, with the ascendancy of the visual over the textual.