Search

This article examines the shifting iconographical meaning and purpose of the Latin phrase ecce homo in visual art in the later Middle Ages. As told in John 19: 4–5, ecce homo was the terse two-line sentence exclaimed by Pontius Pilate as he presented Christ to the people of Jerusalem: "Behold, [the] man!" Beginning in the early fifteenth century, it became common for artists in Northern and Central Europe to integrate the phrase ecce homo directly into depictions of this presentation scene, first in narrative-images and eventually in stand-alone devotional icons. Initially, these brief inscriptions served to visualize Pilate's climactic two-word speech. In the latter half of the century, however, ecce homo became unmoored from its original scheme. What once had a precise narrative function had, by 1500, expanded to become a message directed at the viewer, an epithet for the specific aspect of Christ represented in the narrative, and a title for the narrative itself. This unmooring happened in conjunction with a shift in the function of the figure of Christ within these images and the adaptation of this type of figure into an en buste portrait. Research presented in this article, the first to address these inscriptions in any way, affords new insight into long-standing questions about the typological relationship linking narrative-images and icons. The article challenges the "genetic" model of typological development established by Erwin Panofsky and Sixten Ringbom, both of whom used the iconography of the Ecce Homo as a case study for how to explain the pictorial forms of devotional images in late medieval and early modern art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenon of adding a new, larger panel to an older work, thus creating a work of art consisting of two pieces from different periods, is well known in Western European art and is often referred to by the German term Einsatzbild. A similar type of reuse by insertion can be observed in Byzantine and post-Byzantine art, although it has received far less scholarly attention. Panayotis L. Vocotopoulos was the first to note its occurrence in icon painting and to propose a classification, calling such panels "composite icons" (σύνθετες εικόνες). Since then, these works have been sporadically mentioned, usually in conjunction with the methods for preserving icons in good condition, although it seems that the production of icons of this type was also driven by the desire to distinguish and draw attention to the inserted element. The relationship between the two panels can be compared to that between a relic and a reliquary, which allows the sacred object to be transported, presented, and venerated more effectively. This study analyzes some examples of composite icons in more detail and draws attention to the question of their past functions and uses, but also proposes a second line of investigation by asking how they are used today. It therefore raises further questions about composite icons, different from those posed by Vocotopoulos, and suggests possible areas for investigation. It highlights the internal diversity of the phenomenon and shows how different approaches can open up new areas for further research into composite icons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the role of Sukraniti, a Sanskrit treatise compiled in the 19th century, in the views of art historian Ananda K. Coomaraswamy concerning the production of sacred icons, and the translation of Sukraniti by sociologist Benoy Kumar Sarkar. Topics discussed include influence of the English Arts and Crafts Movement in the formation of views of an ideal society, Coomaraswamy's interpretation of passages in the Sukraniti, and Sarkar's proposal for a universal grammar of art.

Besides their undoubted aesthetic value, monuments possess an ideological function. They are meaningful forms built to commemorate significant deeds or events or to celebrate individuals who are prominent within a community. Monuments become essential for the articulation of cultural identity and memory, through which political powers and intellectual élites seek legitimation and support. As historical objects operating in fluid and transformative cultural environments, their significance is constantly renegotiated to suit new ideological agendas. Rhetoric, and in particular rhetorical descriptions or ekphraseis, may offer insights into the way in which monuments have been seen and communicated over the course of time. While representing selective verbal–visual narratives, these texts can convey specific conceptions of the monuments and encourage interpretations that are distant from the original intentions of those who had them installed. On this premise, this paper proposes a more comprehensive interpretive framework for the analysis of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, a Byzantine monument recently brought to international attention by the Turkish government's decision to change back its status from museum to mosque. This framework resorts to rhetoric and its unique capacity to unveil, across time and space, how the monument has been perceived, expressed, appropriated, reframed, and negotiated by people as an indivisible component of their culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Placed on the altar of the Cappella Altemps in the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere (Rome) in 1593, the medieval icon of the Virgin and Christ known as the Madonna della Clemenza was the focal point of a newly decorated space. The chapel's pictorial program underscores that decisions ratified at the Council of Trent were not only situated in the context of biblical history, but were also directly connected to the presence of the cult image of the Madonna della Clemenza. This article will explore the late sixteenth-century architectural and decorative reframing of the icon as a means of understanding the potential experiential value of the chapel's devotional space. This analysis will underscore the continuing significance of medieval cult images in the context of Church reform that characterized the Counter-Reformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author developed a method for representing data from eye-tracking recordings: a form of graphical analysis that illustrates hierarchical densities of visual regard without obscuring the original pictorial stimulus. Across three different case studies, subjects' fixation patterns were used to propagate Voronoi generating points. Integrating both fixation locations and their respective dwell times, randomized Gaussian distribution provided a technique to augment Voronoi generating seeds and enhance graphical resolution. Color pixel values were then used to fill in resultant Voronoi cells in relation to color values provided by the original stimulus. This analysis allowed for effective differentiation of viewing behaviors between different subjects, with emphasis on a subject's attentional distribution rather than on graphic icons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Challenging dominant historical narratives that gloss over the history of colonialism and slavery, black collectives in the Netherlands are increasingly turning to the history of history writing (metahistory) by black radical thinkers. Counter histories in which transatlantic slavery features central, serve to situate ongoing practices of institutional racism and to articulate claims to citizenship and national memory. Placing different mobilizations of these histories in an international context, we identify two repertoires through which activists invoke them: iconicity and articulation. While both emphasise the importance of tradition, iconicity highlights the canonisation of persons and events and suggests that they can be drawn upon for inspiration in all times, and places. Traditions formed through articulation are brought into existence as part of the cultural-political work of mobilisation, when the mobilisation ends they may be reinterpreted and rearticulated to a new political context. These repertoires are not mutually exclusive and may even be mutually constitutive. However, this article shows different uses of alternative histories in the Netherlands and highlights the tensions between the two registers to understand ongoing formations of antiracist and anticolonial political subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Review of Ioan Chirilă (coord.), Enciclopedia Imaginariilor din România. IV. Imaginar religios [The encyclopaedia of the imaginary from Romanian space. IV: Religious imaginary], Iași: Editura Polirom, 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Augustine famously believed fallen human sex to be inescapably bound up with sinful lust. In every sexual act, lust embodies both the sin of the fall (prideful idolatry) and that sin's consequences. John C. Cavadini has extended Augustine's conception of lust to include domination, and even violence. This leaves us with a disturbing question: is sex without violence possible? Building upon Jean-Luc Marion's distinction between idol and icon, this paper locates a solution to the problem of lust in Augustine's conception of friendship. Identifying the beloved as an icon of God entails relating to the beloved without lustful domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses three successive exhibitions of Orthodox ecclesiastical objects, such as icons, liturgical vessels, and textiles. The analysis combines both art historical and museological viewpoints to focus on the dichotomy between sacred and profane by examining sacred artefacts in a secular museum context. Since the founding of the Finnish Orthodox Church Museum in 1957, the historical, antiquarian, and aesthetic qualities of artefacts were emphasized in both exhibition and display policy. Major differences can be discerned between the three exhibitions, for instance in design, layout, and style, but to date the substance has remained quite unchanged. However, the religious meaning and value – fundamental elements of an ecclesiastical collection – have remained unarticulated in the exhibition language. The article raises the possibility of revaluing the collection policy with the concept of cultural heritage. The ecclesiastical cultural heritage of the Finnish Orthodox Church consists of tangible and intangible elements, from church architecture to ecclesiastical objects, from icons and liturgical chanting to cultic practices. While the curators have focused on placing artefacts into a museological context, the alternative would be to foster cultural heritage outside the museum walls in cooperation with the Orthodox community, with its congregations and monasteries. The focus of this should be on both cultic and cultural aspects in order to preserve the sacred cultural heritage of the Finnish Orthodox Church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a preliminary exploration of a cultural and religious phenomenon detectable during the past few decades: the dispersion of neo-Byzantine iconography beyond the traditional boundaries of Eastern Orthodox cult, theology, and spirituality. This phenomenon appears fragmentary and multiple, and it is difficult to point out its specific, comprehensive margins. Accordingly, attention is drawn to examples of icons in various non-Orthodox contexts, and study their “new” or unusual positions, functions, and emerging meanings in these new settings. This is analysed from a combination of semiotic and phenomenological perspectives. With these methodological approaches, neo-Byzantine icons appear to migrate into Catholic and Protestant religious and spiritual uses, commercial enterprises, and hobby and recreation activities. &is raises the large and multifaceted question of cultural appropriation: on the one hand Orthodox imagery is obviously being appropriated by different actors. On the other hand, the icons themselves have emigrated to new grounds and surroundings. By their presence, they have visually shaped their new locations, as well as creating agencies and new practices. By their idiosyncratic characteristics, they have brought Byzantine and Orthodox-like presence and influences to various new contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an overview of recent contributions to the history policy of the Finnish nation state and its control of memories concerning the Russian Orthodox cultural heritage. It also includes a historiography of inclusions into and exclusions from icon studies. Returning to the theme of his article “The Icon Studies of a Neophyte Scholar. Lars Pettersson’s War-Time Revisited” (Studies in Art History 46), and to Finland’s engagement during the 1941–1944 occupation of Soviet Karelia, the author draws attention to commonplace nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century icons and some instances of demotic interplay with them. Photographs from 1942 show an array of icons from an installation created by Ukrainian peasants who, once deported by Bolshevik authorities, were, at the time, interned by Finns. At a schoolhouse, the Ukrainians furnished a room with images that they had rescued and carried along to confinement. Photographs showing two worn-out icons are linked with Pettersson’s field notes about “restoration” and believers, who brought damaged works to a craftsman, entrusting him with the double task of transferring motifs onto new panels, and of destroying or hiding the originals. Pettersson was one of the very few scholars to record the religious roles of holy images, but during the Cold War he chose to play down this pioneering performance. The present article aims at a revised reading of Pettersson’s silence as well as of Finnish historiography of Russia’s icons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon recent ethnographic research (interviews and participant observation) conducted among members of an Orthodox Christian parish (Orthodox Church in America or OCA) located in the southern United States, I explore the ways that contemporary digital and other mechanical modes of reproduction complicate how contemporary American Orthodox Christians integrate icons, two-dimensional images essential to Orthodox worship, into their devotional lives. While theologians have traditionally emphasized hand-painted icons as fundamental to the Orthodox liturgical experience, mass-produced print and digitally downloaded reproductions have largely supplanted such traditionally crafted images in the lived, everyday experience of American Orthodox Christians. A key theme of this paper is the way these developing technologies enhance the agency of my informants as they make critical decisions regarding which images (within a prodigious visual landscape) to accept as "icons" over and against others simply dismissed and disposed of as mere "pictures." The inherent tensions informants confront in the process of this decision-making as well as the ways they appeal to Orthodox tradition in sanctifying their iconographic selections will be featured in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the orthodox behaviour and ecclesiastical ecumenism of the Church of St Cyril of Alexandria in Kyiv, Ukraine. Topics discussed include achievements of Rus in the visual arts; influence of iconoclastic debates and their resolutions on the appearance of icons; and increase in monumental hagiographical cycles.

The article offers step-by-step instructions on creating a visual narrative of the Ganesha creation story.

In 1936, Itō Shinjō established the modern lay esoteric Buddhist group known today as Shinnyo-en, The Garden of Truth. This article surveys the ways in which Itō used image and text to reimagine Japanese esoteric Buddhism throughout the twentieth century. It examines not only Itō's iconographic innovations, but also his own autobiographical account called The Path to Oneness (Inchinyo no michi) in order to chart the major institutional, ritual, and doctrinal developments of Shinnyo-en. Specifically, this article argues that Itō's veneration of the King of Immovable Wisdom, Fudō Myōō, from 1935–1936 onwards, as well as Fudō's two acolytes (ryōdōji), helped him to make doctrinal sense and personal meaning out of the tragic death of his own two sons. It also argues that his addition of gendered dharma protectors and the Diamond and Womb World mandalas further expanded Itō's personalized worldview, and that his addition of the Buddha in Nirvana in 1957 and the Eleven-Headed Kannon Bodhisattva of Compassion in 1979 further filled out the so-called three wheel bodies of esoteric Buddhism. These images, and the institutional and ritual developments associated with them, reinforced Itō's remarkable doctrinal claim that Shinnyo-en represents the third culminating sect of esoteric Buddhism in Japan. This case study thus provides rare insight into the use of image and text to imagine, illustrate, and shape the major contours of a "new" religious movement in the modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Imperial icon of Jesus Christ portrays Him as prophet and teacher, blessing with his right hand, and holding the Holy Scriptures in His left hand. The representation of the Savior, just like in the case of the Holy Mother, Mary, in the iconographic repertoire of the Imperial (Holy) icons, is depicted in the most personal and unique way, due to the importance of these icons for the church. The icon was investigated by several analytical methods both for the wooden support and for the painting materials. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and differential scanning calorimetry were employed for studying the nature and conservation state of the wooden support. The wooden species of the icon base was determined to be fir and fungal attack of this wood was evidenced by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and differential scanning calorimetry. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy and x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy were used for the investigation of the painted materials. Gypsum was used as ground and the following paint materials were used: red by lead and red iron; green by Scheele green; blue by Vivianite; and white by gypsum and lead white. A protein binder was employed. The icon is considered to be manufactured after 1704. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Vimānārcanakalpa, a text of around the 10th century C.E., belongs to the Vaikhānasa medieval corpus of ritual manuals. It contains a wealth of ritual and iconographic prescriptions about man-made icons of Visnu and his manifestations, management of power in icons, atonements for ritual shortcomings, etc. According to the Vimānārcanakalpa, the duty of the founder patron, the priests and the whole society is to perpetuate ritual and preserve the integrity of icons as defectless bodily forms in an unsullying environment, because the benefits aspired to by them through the installation of icons are constantly threatened. Dependent on numerous internal (material damage, ritual defects, etc.) and external (theft, defilement, etc.) factors, icons are forever prone to troubles and can become troubling when deprived of ideal conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hans-Georg Gadamer has claimed, first, that in religious painting the image does not merely copy its prototype but is in "ontological communion" with it; and second, that in this respect the religious painting is exemplary for painting in general. I examine these claims with specific reference to Eastern Orthodox icons, drawing on both classical and modern Orthodox theological accounts of the icon to support and amplify Gadamer's claim about "ontological communion." I then consider accounts by Jean-Luc Marion and by the theologian Paul Evdokimov of how the icon can be exemplary for painting in general. I argue that Marion's discussion leads to some unacceptable conclusions, and that Evdokimov provides a more convincing account. This commits him to a strong and controversial thesis that all art (consciously or otherwise, and whatever its explicit subject-matter) is in a sense religious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to intervene in the critical conversations surrounding Black Lives Matter (BLM) to urge scholars to challenge the very political calculus from which we (dis)count lives and ascribe value or matter as a mechanism of anti-Black power. I argue that we must abandon the axiological framework of the Human, by situating the Human as the centerpiece of rituals of anti-Blackness that occur in the most basic of social interactions. We must center the ritual of iconolatry, the creation and extreme veneration of icons, in order to understand how BLM has become an icon of resistance that is deployed in service of the anti-Black status quo. I end with the gesture towards an alternative praxis of Black Iconoclasm that ritually enacts a shattering of various icons of Humanism in favor of what Christina Sharpe calls the hold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay proposes a notion of "icon" understood, according to the paradigm born of the Second Council of Nicaea (787 AD), as a visible image of the invisible qua invisible. In this light, the distinctive feature of the icon-image is its ability to manifest the paradoxical identity-difference relationship that links visible and invisible, and, consequently, representable and unrepresentable, immanence and transcendence, eternity and time. By offering itself as the privileged place for the presentation of an absence and of a "withdrawal" (the withdrawal of the invisible from the visible through the visible), the icon is distinguished in the first place by its apophatic and kenotic character. In this sense, the salient trait of the icon is its constitutive disquiet: it is founded on the "relational economy" of the image, which implies the need of an incessant articulation of the relation between visible and invisible. We can thus see in the icon the paradigm itself of "great art": indeed, like the icon, great art is always primarily characterised by its disquiet, that is its ability to make transcendence appear in immanence, the Other of the visible appear in the visible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we will emphasize the physical, chemical and biological investigations as well as a detail the process of restoration. Before establishing any treatment or maintenance procedures, it was necessary to obtain complete information about the components of the icon and its condition. Keeping in mind the original aesthetic aspect of the Icon. In this effort an integrated analytical approach was used. In order to evaluate the icon's components and degree of degradation, surface and bulk techniques were used. X-ray fluorescence using a Philips Minipal PW4025 spectrometer was used to identify the elemental composition of the preparation layer and background. For the chemical analysis X-ray diffraction (XRD) was conducted using a Shimadzu 6000 Spectrofluorophotometer. The Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) technique was also used to identify the media (bonding material) used in the application of the icon layers, either with the preparation layer or the gilding layer, as well as the type of varnish used to insulate the icon using a Bruker-Tensor 27 device. The cleaning process is a key point in the conservation process although it is one of the most important aspects for an artwork and is considering a series of deteriorations and degradations. XRF results of the preparation layer sample revealed it consisted of Gypsum (CaSO4.2H2O), since it contains calcium (Ca) and Sulfate, analysis of red pigments showed that it was comprised of red-lead (Pb3O4). The overall efficiency of all conservation process including cleaning seems to be effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, also known as Our Lady of Guadalupe, has been reproduced countless times since its supposed miraculous creation in 1531. In the early modern period, artists often established the accuracy of a copy through the use of templates, careful analysis and physical contact with the original image. In more recent decades, the use of digital images has offered potentially limitless reproduction of the original seemingly without a degradation in quality in subsequent digital copies. By situating the creation of digital copies within the broader framework of the historical reproduction of the Virgin of Guadalupe, this article will examine how digital reproductions have affected religious experience and how they are negotiated by the Catholic Church. A digital reproduction of the Virgin of Guadalupe known as thePeregrinawill serve as a case study for understanding how specific digital images are legitimized through a careful balancing of tradition and innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The creation and interpretation of symbols is one of the few activities that could be properly defined metasocials and are, at the same time, metabiological. Still, the fate of symbols -- and especially of religious ones -- appears nowadays to be clearly in danger. As a matter of fact, someone would permanently remove them from the public space, imagining a city composed exclusively of lay and therefore neutral spaces. Examining the difference between symbol and sign, places and (non) places secularism and laicism, the present study intends to criticize the iconoclastic posture assumed by a part of the doctrine. In order to safeguard religious symbols from an unfair exile and justify their presence in public places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines select paintings by Holocaust survivor and painter Samuel Bak from his recent Just Is series. The essay explores ways Bak's art bears witness to suffering. He creatively interrogates and reanimates the iconic figure of Lady Justice and the biblical principle of the lex talionis ("eye for an eye") in order to fashion alternative icons fit for an age of atrocity and loss. Bak's artwork gives visual expression to Theodor Adorno's view of the precariousness of art after Auschwitz. It is art's responsibility to attend to the burden of real suffering experiences (the burden of the empirical) and to think in contradictions, which renders art both adequate and inadequate in standing up against the injustice of other's suffering. Through inventive juxtaposition of secular and sacred symbols, Bak displays the paradox of representation after the Holocaust and art's precarious responsibility giving voice to suffering. Bak fashions visual spaces in which barbarity and beauty coincide and collide. He invites viewers into this space and into dialogue about justice's standing and promises. Do Bak's remade icons of Just Is lament a permanent loss of justice and peace, or do they point tentatively to possibilities of life lived in a damaged world with an alternative Just Is? Bak's artwork prompts such vexing questions for his viewers to contemplate and leaves them to decide what must be done. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the devotion of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in urban Ghana and the role of mass-produced pictures of the Sacred Heart as animated agents in the relationship between object and subject. It offers information on the history of the devotion in Ghana, the use of heart as a symbol of the love and compassion of Christ and perceptions of Ghanaian Catholics on the symbolism of heart as a comforting emblem of Christ's sacrifice.

This study reflects on the current “material turn” in religious studies, in particular on the issue of material agency. Some scholars, such as Ingold and Latour, have seen the concept as both a form of naivety and anthropocentrism. On the other hand, exponents of the so-called “new materialisms” have banned phenomenology, understood as the way in which material agency can impact humans, as anthropocentrically biased. Through the adoption of the notion of focal object, as formulated by Morgan (2014) and informed by Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh,” this paper investigates the epistemological implications of a materialist approach to religion. Comparison between Rajasthani folk Hinduism and Byzantine Christianity aims to stimulate a broader reflection on the role of images in regulating the relationship between the worshipper and the holy, which in this paper is understood in phenomenological terms as a mutual exchange of gazes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role do material objects play in the formation of religious subjects? Drawing from an ethnographic investigation of the evolving relationships between a group of Eastern Orthodox converts and their religious icons, this article develops a theoretical approach to this question that conceptualizes material artifacts as 'plot devices' in the formation of religious identity narratives. Integrating insights from studies of material religious culture with narrative theories of identity, this article argues that religious artifacts become significant to religious identity construction to the extent they act as resources for the configuration of a narrative structure in which transcendent or sacred others play a part. As the empirical details of this study demonstrate, attending to how religious objects' symbolic meanings (i.e., who or what they represent) are mediated by their unique material characteristics (how they make meanings physically present to social actors in embodied social interaction) is of vital importance for explaining the significant role material artifacts play in the religious emplotment of action and experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of aniconism has begun to receive more attention within the past 20 years. In Travis Mettinger's No Graven Image? Israelite Aniconism in Its Ancient Near Eastern Context (1995), he subdivided the field into two distinct categories: material aniconism and empty space aniconism. The former typically refers to stelai, unhewn pieces of wood etc., whereas the latter may refer to empty thrones, a saddled horse without a rider, or the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem. In short, empty space aniconism refers to a space where the god is perceived to be positioned. This paper seeks to answer the question: how useful are these categories? To answer it, the altar is offered as one possible type of aniconism. This was first proposed by Milette Gaifman in her 2005 dissertation, refined and expanded in Aniconism in Greek Antiquity (2012), where she makes the case that some altars can be considered as examples of material aniconism. This paper starts from the opposite premise: that altars can be considered forms of empty space aniconism. After demonstrating many instances where altars do fit the criteria of empty space aniconism, examples that might fit Gaifman's premise are addressed as well. This paper ultimately arrives at the conclusion that altars fall into both categories, thereby showing that these categories are insufficient. Altars, like so many other forms of aniconism, are merely a means to denote divine presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ecclesiastical art and architecture of early twelfth-century Rome are often interpreted as communicating political positions in a period of conflict between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. This article addresses the processes and ramifications, medieval and modern, of this politicization of Rome's ecclesiastical landscape through three interwoven cases. The first is the monastic church of Sant'Elia, built about 1125 near Nepi. Earlier studies of Sant'Elia's architecture, frescoes, and Cosmati marble work generally dismiss the church as a provincial emulation of Roman structures, but art historical and historical evidence reveals a fully Roman church built by an important patron to demarcate the northern limit of papal territory, a meaning lost through both historical change and scholarly bias. A fresco in Sant'Elia of the Madonna della Clemenza, the famous icon of Sta. Maria in Trastevere, is a primary sign of the church's romanitas and connections to the early twelfth-century popes Calixtus II and Anacletus II. Examination of the icon's history demonstrates how it came to symbolize Calixtine and Anacletan authority and the repercussions of this link after Anacletus's postmortem redefinition as antipope to Innocent II. Applying the results of these two cases to Sta. Maria suggests that the Trastevere church was built by Anacletus to honor its icon but was later claimed by Innocent through the insertion of an apse mosaic that both annulled the icon's Anacletan symbolism and replaced that pope's patronal memory with that of Innocent—an act of historical erasure perpetuated by medieval and modern authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the prominence of gold ground in Byzantine icons, this article puts into dialogue recent investigations on the phenomenology of icons with classical, late antique, and Byzantine conceptions of space and gold. Through its play with ambient light, gold operates in the same manner as the medium of sight, understood by Aristotle to be a diaphanous substance that surrounds a visible object and, when activated by light, transmits colors from the object to the viewer. By considering the manner in which contemporaneous thinkers understood the materiality and composition of gold and air, this article argues that the icon's gold embodies the very air that surrounds the bodies of the figures represented, rather than being a mere symbol for an eternal heavenly realm. The aim here is to use this argument to consider how we can think of medium in an expanded field as not merely the physical substrate or materiality of an artwork, but rather as that imperceptible action of representation that mediates between the image as a mere potentiality of form in the artist's repertoire and the image as an actualized reality in a material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the making of iconicity through religious architecture in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Examining the Fatih Mosque housed in a former Catholic church in the city center, we show in what ways the efforts at making this mosque iconic are shaped by the building’s iconic field, by which we denote its entanglement with other (religious and non-religious) sites in the past and the present. This iconic field is characterized by the conversion chains that preceded the mosque, material and discursive legacies of “hiddenness” and contemporary symbolic interactions with nearby sites such as the Western Church. By developing an analysis of the mosque’s temporal and spatial entanglements in Amsterdam’s urban space, we seek to revitalize a relational and diachronic approach that has suffered from neglect, particularly in social-scientific studies of mosques in the West. Rather than looking at a singular place of worship at a particular moment in time, we draw attention to the relations between Islamic and other religious architecture and to the ways in which this mosque intersects with broader genealogies and geographies of religion, not only by association but also by actual links in relationships, politics or material culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the figure of St. Michael on top of the front façade of St. Michael’s Church, which is situated in the Mitte district of Berlin, Germany, formerly called Luisenstadt. Following a relational approach, according to which single elements only get an explicit and distinct meaning in connection to other elements, the contribution first. describes the site in which the figure of St. Michael is embedded and reconstructs its spatial iconicity. Second, it analyzes the statue as a polysemic and thus contested icon and shows how political, artistic, touristic, and religious meanings interact with each other in and through the figure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In order to understand current dynamics of religious diversity, a focus on the tangible presence of religion and the co-existence of new and longstanding religious buildings, sites and artifacts in urban spaces is a fruitful starting point. Launching the notion of iconic religion, this introduction seeks to contribute to developing a scholarly framework for the nexus of religion and the city from a spatial, material, aesthetic and semiotic angle. Situated in the interface between matter and religious meaning, religious icons are not simply carriers of meaning, but make it present. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Hungarian Studies (02366568) is the property of Akademiai Kiado and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)