This book investigates the origins and transformations of medieval image
culture and its reflections in theology, hagiography, historiography and
art. It deals with a remarkable phenomenon: the fact that, after a
period of 500 years of absence, the tenth century sees a revival of
monumental sculpture in the Latin West. Since the end of Antiquity and
the pagan use of free-standing, life-size sculptures in public and
private ritual, Christians were obedient to the Second Commandment
forbidding the making and use of graven images. Contrary to the West, in
Byzantium, such a revival never occurred: only relief sculpture - mostly
integrated within an architectural context - was used. However, Eastern
theologians are the authors of highly fascinating and outstanding
original theoretical reflections about the nature and efficacy of
images. How can this difference be explained? Why do we find the most
fascinating theoretical concepts of images in a culture that sticks to
two-dimensional icons often venerated as cult-images that are copied and
repeated, but only randomly varied? And why does a groundbreaking change
in the culture of images - the revival of monumental sculpture - happen
in a context that provides more restrained theoretical reflections upon
images in their immediate theological, liturgical and artistic contexts?
These are some of the questions that this book seeks to answer.The
analysis and contextualization of the revival of monumental sculpture
includes reflections on liturgy, architecture, materiality of minor arts
and reliquaries, medieval theories of perception, and gift exchange and
its impact upon practices of image veneration, aesthetics and political
participation. Drawing on the historical investigation of specific
objects and texts between the ninth and the eleventh century, the book
outlines an occidental history of image culture, visuality and fiction,
claiming that only images possess modes of visualizing what in the
discourse of medieval theology can never be addressed and revealed.
