Iconoclasm as Discourse: From Antiquity to Byzantium
Author(s): Jaś Elsner
Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 94, No. 3 (September 2012), pp. 368-394
Published by: CAA
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23268277
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Iconoclasm as Discourse: From Antiquity to Byzantium
Jas Eisner
Byzantine iconoclasm remains of perennial interest to the
historian, the theologian, and the historian of art. The sub
ject appears to be well attested by documentary sources—
only for us to find these extremely and intriguingly difficult
to use, since they are largely couched in a theologically or
hagiographically inflected language of apology and polemic
that is not only very distant from modern habits of mind but
also nearly impossible to pin down in factual terms. The
result has been a plethora of explanations—indeed, what was
already in the 1970s branded "a crisis of over-explanation."1
Clearly, the advent of iconoclasm in Byzantium partakes of a
multistranded series of causes,2 which are perhaps impossible
to unpack in their entirety, some of them proximate and
some belonging to a very long historical process. Moreover,
because the issues are so fraught around a topic of such
central religious importance to the cultural history (and his
toriography) of Western Europe,s the attraction for scholars
of every religious persuasion (Protestant, Catholic, Ortho
dox, not to speak of Jewish) as well as of no persuasion, or
even of militantly secular atheism, is compelling.
Both key concepts in my title, "iconoclasm" and "dis
course," are controversial. To take the second first, I am
indebted to Averil Cameron's work on the development of
Christian discourse, but my definition necessarily differs from
her formulation "all the rhetorical strategies and manners of
expression that I take to be particularly characteristic of
Christian writing," since I am concerned with characteristics
as much material and cultural as rhetorical or literary.4 My
focus is on images, their making and breaking (and stories,
often fictional, of such making and breaking), and only
partially on writing. My interest extends, for comparative
reasons, to a scope and range of activity that are not exclu
sively Christian. Some parallels to the discursive nature of
iconoclasm in the late antique and Byzantine context may be
found in the study of the European Reformation, whose
iconoclasm has been characterized as "an expected cultural
routine" in which both art and its experience are "preceded
and succeeded by iconoclasm."5 The advantage of the model
of discourse is that it includes, without prejudicing one be
fore the other, both theory and practice. Scholars tend to
emphasize either practices of image veneration over the the
ology that appears to justify them, or intellectualist theolog
ical positions over the acts of devotion that may have pre
ceded the theory but certainly also came to depend on it. By
cultural discourse, I mean in part the mutual reinforcement
of theory and practice, with each implying and underpinning
the other, although, of course, they may reflect different
social and cultural milieus, depending on the literacy and
education of those concerned.
The term iconoclasm carries many meanings—from a pe
riod in Byzantine history,6 via a set of events that are meant to
have occurred at that time, to a form of activity involving
damage to images at any time and place in human history. I
will use it specifically to mean physical attack on images
within the Greco-Roman-Byzantine world, from archaic an
tiquity up to and including the period known as the Icono
clastic era in Byzantium. But my interest is in how the process
of theorizing both iconoclasm and the iconophile response
to it enabled a long tradition of thinking about what an image
was, a tradition going back deep into pre-Classical Greek
antiquity, to come to a clear and mature conceptual position
on the issue of the relation of a visual image to the model or
prototype that it imitated through representation. The range
of positions on the nature of images offered during Byzantine
iconoclasm constitutes a fundamental conceptual contribu
tion to the problem of image as representation as it devel
oped in the Western tradition. In my reading, the conceptual
developments of Byzantine iconoclasm—cast as theological
arguments in a deep dispute that had numerous entailments
in politics, society, and ritual—are the final completion of the
process of philosophical thinking about images in the Greco
Roman heritage. What came to matter is that a particular
form of image—the icon of Christ—should have been taken
(perhaps invented, or deemed necessary) for the job of hav
ing been destroyed. The justifications of, recriminations
about, and responses to this destruction from all sides in the
dispute were in themselves revealing of theoretical positions
(explicit or implied) about representation as well as of
changes and developments in such positions at a key point of
transition between antiquity and the Middle Ages.
In a deep way, much of how one interprets the subject and
formulates the questions depends on the disciplinary frame
from which one starts. Historians have tended to be inter
ested in proximate or immediate as opposed to long-term
causes, theologians in the span of argument reaching back to
the early church. One of the dividing lines in interpretation
is whether we should see the question of images, which our
sources stress, as central to iconoclasm or as a form of cul
tural sublimation for a range of other problems and anxie
ties.7 Needless to say, as an art historian, I will take the
internalist emphasis on the image, and the understanding of
what was an appropriate sacred image in the context of a long
history of such images, to be central. A second great division
is whether we should see Byzantine iconoclasm in a relatively
narrow historical context as the result of watershed develop
ments of the seventh century or in a much longer time frame,
reaching back into early Christianity or even pagan antiqui
ty8—that is, whether we highlight proximate causes or longer
term processes. The profound discussion, ongoing for at least
half a century, about when exactly the rise of the cult of
images, or its intensification, in Byzantium took place is
precisely a debate about this issue, since iconoclasm is always
seen (and surely rightly) as in part a response to the religious
devotion to icons. If you see the cult of images as taking a
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ICONOCLASM AS DISCOURSE: FROM ANTIQUITY TO BYZANTIUM 359
significant step forward in the sixth,9 or the seventh,10 or the
later seventh century,11 or even within and as a result of
iconoclasm itself,12 then you circumscribe (to use a nice
iconoclastic term) the appropriate historical limits of the
inquiry. It is worth noting at the outset that all parties in the
arguments for and against images (that is, our sources) are
very keen on situating themselves within the tongue duree—not
only of Christian history but also of the pagan and Jewish
sources, which the early church fathers and apologists both
cited and refuted.13
The range of citations is extremely complex for us to
handle because all have done violence to their original con
text, which in many cases no longer survives except for what
is offered by the citation, and the text's original meaning,
through the process of selection and excision. Some have
been significantly adapted (which may involve being wildly
interpreted or rewritten, by our standards), some have been
forged outright. To criticize such varieties of fabrication is, of
course, to apply anachronistic standards of scholarly objec
tivity and source criticism to a rhetorical culture whose con
cern was persuasion within a polemically and apologetically
inflected model of discourse, where the florilegium occupied
something of the authority in valorizing the arguments made
that the substructure of footnotes has today in scholarly
writing.1'1 Moreover, such anthologies constituted an ex
tremely ancient forum for conducting learned, scholarly, and
philosophical discussions, and they have to be read with
respect for their genre.15 The issue raised by such anthologies
is not so much authenticity or accuracy as authority—al
though each party could indeed undermine the authority of
his opponents' arguments by questioning their authenticity.
However, for my purposes (and I write unashamedly as a Clas
sicist interloper in the history of Byzantine art), in taking a
tongue duree approach, it may be said that the tongue duree model
is at least in part based on an internalist view of the place of
Byzantine iconoclasm in the long Christian culture of the Ro
man Empire, as adopted by all sides in the controversy.
I have to come clean that my approach, in concentrating
largely on attitudes formulated in Constantinople, is metro
politan and reductive in that it does not treat the full scope of
views and actions across the Byzantine world (let alone the
West or Islam). Clearly, the variety of positions and responses
in the eastern Mediterranean (especially the world that had
been Byzantine until the mid-seventh century but was by the
eighth under the political control of Muslim conquer
ors)—in Egypt and Syria, in languages like Coptic, Syriac, and
Armenian as well as Greek, in Jewish, pre-Islamic, and Muslim
as well as Christian cultures—would add a vast and variegated
richness to the story. There is no doubt that at least two
gestures from the East—the anti-imagistic acts of the early
eighth-century caliphs and the theological defense of images
conducted by Saint John of Damascus—had a significant
effect on players in the Byzantine imperial center. However,
my reason for focusing mainly on Constantinople—on
church councils, their surrounding theology, and their pro
nouncements—is that this is where most of the key Christian
theorizations of the image took place.
One core point needs to be emphasized. Iconoclasm in all
premodern contexts from antiquity to the Byzantine icono
clastic controversy was about "real presence."1 The damage
done to the image is an attack on its prototype, at least until
Byzantine iconoclasm, and it presupposes some kind of as
sault on real presence as contained in the image.1' This has
proved hard for many modern thinkers to accept—not least
because real presence in pre-Christian antiquity was both as
sumed and undertheorized, so that ancient theorists would not
have been entirely clear (should they have thought to ask) in
what sense, to what extent, and in what way a person's memory
or a god's divinity was contained inside an image. It is my
contention that part of the contribution of Byzantine icono
clasm (by which I mean arguments advanced by both icono
phobes and iconophiles) was to help clarify these questions.
My specific aim here in setting some of the issues into a
tongue duree historical context is to show how the overt and
conceptually astute reconsideration of a series of ancient
problems about images, worship, and theology could be
transformative for how those problems came to resonate in
the succeeding culture. The age-old themes, to which I argue
the Iconoclastic era addressed itself, resonate on several lev
els. First, there are the fundamental questions of representa
tion, real presence, animation, and worship in relation to
images, which can be traced back to archaic antiquity.18 Not
heavily theorized in antiquity, these come through largely as
instinctive attitudes and responses among those who used
images, especially in a religious or epiphanic context.19 But it
needs to be said that some aspects of representation had
been theorized much earlier—especially in the accounts of
mimesis by Plato and Aristotle, the variety of takes on these
theories (some philosophically serious and many playful) in
the Hellenistic and Roman eras, and especially the theories
and practices of statue animation among the Neoplatonists,20
which certainly underscored divine presence in images.
These are models of thought and argument that proved
influential on the church fathers right up to iconoclasm.21
Second, the Iconoclastic period was preceded by a long his
tory of image breaking as a legal sanction in the Roman
system (in both the republic and the empire), which cannot
be entirely separated from assumptions about real presence
in images. Third, the particular interpretative takes that
Christianity, partly in relation to its Jewish heritage,
brought to this twofold problematic (as did Islam in a later
and different context) were inherited from polytheistic
antiquity.
Within this thought world, reaching back to the pre-Socrat
ics in Greece and to ancient Judaism, pretty well every possi
ble position—iconic, aniconic, anti-iconic—had been tried.
We are looking, in the developments of the sixth to the ninth
centuries, less at innovations than at reformulations, nuances,
and changed emphases. This is the case in terms not only of
expressed views about images but also of varieties of ritual,
image cultivation (which includes all forms of devotion to im
ages, from the uses of kissing, candle lighting, and worship to
dressing, framing, covering, and exposing them), and practiced
religion, which are rarely overtly theoretical but always carry the
thrust of an implicit theological perspective.
The Longue Duree: Representation and Real Presence,
Memoria and Memory Sanctions
Let us take these three areas one by one. First, the problem
of representation and especially the question of whether an
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370 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2012 VOLUME XCIV NUMBER 3
image, as an imitation of its referent in a pictorial medium, is
not the same as its referent and thereby expresses the absence
of that referent even as it refers to it, or whether it is a site for
the real presence of its prototype, embodied in the image.22
Both attitudes were common in antiquity—even if we may
think them contradictory—and the questions they raised
were never fully resolved. From the beginnings of the earliest
Christian art in the third century CE, the theme of presence
and absence remained in play. In all periods characterized by
the hegemonic religious dominance of pagan polytheism and
Christianity, the main marker of real presence is the cultiva
tion of images: that is, a matter of particular practices—the
use of images as items in ritual, their place as recipients of
ritual, even of worship, their ability to embody a kind of
charisma as a result of or in response to such cultivation.
Notably, the violent denial of the appropriateness of such
cultivation—namely, the act of iconoclasm—is itself often a
tribute to the perceived power and potency of real presence
inside an image.23 There is no doubt at all that part of the
problematic of Byzantine iconoclasm in the eighth and ninth
centuries was a very direct concern with real presence in the
icon, but my point is that this concern was a very old one,
reaching back to archaic times.
Second, in the Roman world, the potency of images to
carry at least some aspects of a person's presence into pos
terity, through his or her memoria, made them a prime object
of memory sanctions as early as the Middle Republic.24 In her
recent history of this theme, Harriet Flower traces the ways
that a disgraced aristocrat could be denied a funerary mask
or the accompaniment of the masks of his ancestors at his
burial,25 how the banning of all portraits in all media and all
locations came to accompany the postmortem penalties im
posed on enemies of the state,26 how by the Late Republic
various conflicts between different aristocrats and factions in
Rome were conducted through the creation, veneration, and
destruction of images.27 By the time the Principate was in full
swing after Augustus, a discourse of image destruction and
memory erasure for those who were rivals or former favorites
of emperors, including women, became normal, rising to
special and comprehensive treatment in the destruction, de
molition, and recutting of portraits in the cases of disgraced
former emperors.28 Such destruction—going frequently by
the modern name of damnatio memoriae in scholarship29—
involved all kinds of monuments and inscriptions but cen
tered on statues, which might be demolished, or have their
heads recut, or simply have new inscriptions added to replace
those of the disgraced (or a combination of the last two).30
The discourse rapidly became highly sophisticated, with sig
nificant differences in representation between a complete
airbrushing of the condemned to leave the impression that
he or she had never existed versus a marked erasure making
it quite clear that the condemned should be noted and
remembered as condemned.81 In the case of the destruction
of multiple statues of one individual, it appears that by late
antiquity one or two examples were usually allowed to re
main; to be effective, the attack on memory had to tolerate
exceptions so that the condemnation itself would be remem
bered.32
The development of a discourse of iconoclasm in the Roman
world—that is, the erasure of images in response to condem
nation of memory—is extremely important for the context of
the cult of images and its oppositions in late antiquity and the
early Middle Ages. While scholarly work on Byzantine icono
clasm has explored most aspects of the controversy, from the
artistic to the sociopolitical,33 the status of iconoclasm as a
discourse in Byzantine society and culture has hardly been
touched. By the word "discourse," I mean an exchange or
communication between two or more parties in a society, in
which all the parties concerned understand the rules by
which they are playing. In this sense, a discourse is rather like
a game of Monopoly: it implies the complicity of the people
involved in playing the game, even if they are playing against
one another.
On this definition of iconoclasm as a discourse, we find
that it recurs as a normal strategy in both ecclesiastical and
imperial politics outside the period generally defined as
"Iconoclastic" and reaching back through Byzantine history
to Roman practices of damnatio memoriae. On the fall of an
emperor, it was normal practice to order that his images be
removed (or, particularly if his throne had been usurped,
destroyed) and to replace them with images of the new
Basileus. In fact, such a political strategy is not at all surpris
ing, given that the Byzantines believed that the image of the
emperor in some sense was the emperor and that the honor
offered to it was transmitted to its model (the emperor
himself).34 No new usurping Basileus would want his prede
cessor's image—which is not simply a memory but a very
presence—interfering with his own reign. Parallel to this
political iconoclasm of the destruction and replacement of
imperial images is a persistent trend of religious iconoclasm
in the early Byzantine period, in which ecclesiastical politics
was conducted in part through a discourse of destroying and
setting up images. The sixth-century Syriac historian John of
Ephesus records that images of Monophysite church fathers
were replaced "everywhere" by those of John III Scholasticus,
the patriarch of Constantinople (r. 565-77), and that on
John's death his portraits were replaced by those of Euty
chius, his predecessor and successor on the patriarchal
throne. John of Ephesus certainly accepted this iconoclastic
strategy as normal in ecclesiastical politics.35
More striking still is the evidence of Deacon Agathon on
the rampant politico-theological iconoclasm of the early
eighth century. In 712, before his solemn entry into the city
of Constantinople, the new Monothelete emperor of Byzan
tium, Philippicus Bardanes, ordered the destruction of the
image (in the vestibule of the imperial palace) of the Sixth
Ecumenical Council (681-82), which had anathematized
Monotheletism. Further, he replaced it with images of Patri
arch Sergius I of Constantinople (r. 610-38) and Pope Hono
rius I (r. 625-38), who had accepted Monotheletism and
been anathematized by the Sixth Council. In addition, he
placed images of the first five ecumenical councils (accom
panied by images of himself and Sergius) in the vault of the
Milion, the great domed mile-marker monument that re
corded distances across the empire from the imperial center
at Constantinople, arguing through this continuity of concil
iar images that his faith was the true Orthodox faith and
asserting by his act of iconoclasm that the Sixth Council was
heretical.36 This is a formidable testimony to the power of the
image in the early medieval period. In a sense, the gist of
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ICONOCLASM AS DISCOURSE: FROM ANTIQUITY TO BYZANTIUM V)h]\
Philippicus's religious and political stances was presented in
terms of what images had been set up and what destroyed.
His successor, Emperor Anastasius, as a proclamation of his
Orthodoxy, proceeded to destroy all the images of Philippi
cus, Honorius, and Sergius, to replace that of the Sixth
Council in the palace vestibule, and to add the Sixth Council
to the other five in the Milion. Again, we see images and their
destruction proclaiming policy. Anastasius, while utterly de
nying the theology of his predecessor, nevertheless accepted
wholeheartedly the strategy of his discourse.
Scholars attempting to explain the cult of icons in Byzan
tium have had frequent recourse to these topics—especially
the cult of the imperial image—as an explanatory factor.37
The point here is that Byzantine society (up to and including
the period known as Iconoclastic) conducted its public ges
tures of political action and power through a discourse of
images related both to the dominance of particular emperors
or bishops and to the ascendancy of particular theological
positions adopted by the ruling party. This discourse is the
developed and the developing form of discursive practices in
the late Republic and early Principate, themselves derived
from ancient civic and cult traditions in the Mediterranean
world.38 A scintillating example of where the cultural politics
of iconoclasm and of representation coincide, in the Helle
nistic world, is offered by an inscription of the fourth century
BCE from Delphi. In an act of liquidating the past, the
Delphians recorded their payments to Eucrates (eight drach
mas and three obols) to remove (exagagein) from the precinct
(exos hierou) the bases (bathra) and the images (eikonas) of the
Phocian generals Onomarchus and Philomelus, who had
earlier ransacked the sanctuary.39 Further, they agree to pay
Cleon seven drachmas to destroy (anelein) the horses (hip
pous) and the statues of the men (andriantas),40 In play—as
early as the 340s BCE—is the kind of iconoclasm we find
continuously in Byzantium until the eighth century CE: that
is, the political and public announcement of condemnation
of enemies and simultaneously the assertion of identity by the
destroyer. The act of iconoclasm is accompanied by the need
to record its effect so that the act of forgetting will be remem
bered (found here in a sanctuary inscription excavated by the
French in 1894) and by a remarkable linguistic emphasis on
the eikon. The eikon is described as separate from its base
(which carries the inscription identifying the two condemned
Phocians) and from the specific elements that make it up—
namely, the bronze equestrian statues of the two generals,
which are described as "horses" and andriantas, which is a
word one would normally render as "statues" but must mean
here the statues of the men as opposed to the horses. The
Delphic inscription divides the iconoclastic process into re
moving and destroying, giving different elements to different
executors at different sums. It also shows—more than a mil
lennium before the iconoclastic controversy in Byzantium—a
potential for systematic and analytic thought about what an
eikon is and what its constituents are.
The Longue Duree: Judeo-Christian Positions
Late antiquity witnessed a significant change in the particular
problematic of Christian attitudes to idolatry, inherited from
Jewish Scripture and possibly some strands of Jewish prac
tice,41 and the complications of this problematic in relation
both to pagan images (which were themselves, of course, by
definition idols) and Christian images (which might or might
not be). It should be said that Jewish and Christian positions
differ from pagan polytheist ones in terms of the weight
accorded to dogma, since pagan religion is more open-ended
theologically, perhaps largely because so litde is written
down. The traditional view42 that the early church was hostile
to the visual arts43 has been strongly resisted in the last
generation.41 The modern consensus is that the attacks on
idols by the early fathers and Christian apologists are primar
ily directed against pagan polytheist practices in the Greco
Roman environment rather than against the Christian culti
vation of religious images.45 But strong versions of the
modern view need a certain amount of nuance.46 We possess
patristic writings, such as the letter of Epiphanius of Salamis
to John of Jerusalem (and a number of other works by
Epiphanius, who died in 403 CE), that represent the doubts
of at least one significant fourth-century bishop and distin
guished theologian as to the appropriateness of image wor
ship by Christians (as well as attesting to its widespread prac
tice) and articulate an iconophobic if not fully iconoclastic
position—although Epiphanius tore down a curtain inside a
church decorated, as he tells us, "with an image of Christ or
one of the saints."47 This text and others—such as the letter
of Eusebius (263-339, bishop of Caesarea and Constantine's
biographer) to Constantine's half sister Constantia arguing
against the use of an image of Christ—may be forgeries
contrived by the iconoclasts in a much later period as patristic
evidence for their position,48 but they may also be genuine.49
It seems to me reasonable to argue that on the theoretical
and philosophical level, the early church (if we may use that
generalization for the variety and range of locally, ritually,
doctrinally, and linguistically diverse Christianities) had no
consistent view on the matter of images.50 As in Judaism, a
certain low-level iconophobic unease, rooted in, or at least
justifiable through Scripture, could easily manifest on occa
sion. What Christians certainly did not do is to elevate images
to the level of Scripture, because that is what Mani, the
Manichean prophet (ca. 216-276) had done,51 and perhaps
some other Gnostic sects.52 Yet the range of attitudes, from
strong approval at one end of the spectrum to resistance at
the other, appears to have been as broad as the range of
practices, from the worship of Christian images to their tear
ing down and destruction.
At the same time, a number of Early Christian texts—both
pre-Constantinian and fourth-century (like the Epiphanus
examples just cited)—appear also to give evidence of signif
icant image cultivation by people who saw themselves as
Christians. Notably, as early as the second century CE, the
apocryphal Acts of John reports that a portrait (eikon) of the
apostle is worshiped in private with garlands and candles.53
Likewise, in the same period, Irenaeus of Lyons railed against
Carpocratian Gnostics (and we must ask in what sense are
such people not to count as Christians?), who venerated
images not only of Jesus but also of various ancient philoso
phers such as Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle.54 On the level
of material culture, we have no images from the early period
that we can definitively prove to have been devotional icons,
but equally, we cannot prove any of our surviving images were
not usable as icons for veneration by someone. We have some
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372 art bulletin September 2012 volume xciv number 3
1 Gold glass medallion of Saint Agnes in the orans posture,
between doves, 4th century CE. Pamphilus Catacomb, Rome
(artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the
Pontificia Commissione di Archeologia Sacra, Rome)
portraits of saints (for example, the gold glass medallions of
Christ and a number of saints from the Roman catacombs,
Fig. I)55 that have no obvious narrative context. There is
every possibility that these kinds of images were put to private
devotional use, whether in a funerary context, where the
surviving materials were found, in a liturgical space, or in the
domestic arena.01' Such Christian images appear to have pa
gan precursors—not only in the devotions performed before
portraits57 but also in the corpus of votive or cult panels
depicting deities or heroes, of which more than fifty survive
from late antiquity and which are currently being assembled
into a corpus (Fig. 2).58
The early evidence is important. Since the 1970s it has
been assumed that the "rise of the cult of icons in the sixth
and seventh centuries [Figs. 3, 4], and not the origins of
Iconoclasm, ... is the central problem of the Iconoclast Con
troversy."59 This model of historical explanation (based on
proximate causes—that is, a posited recent rise in the cult of
icons—and in opposition to longue duree causes, such as the
persistence of forms of damnatio memoriae) is fundamentally
realist. That is, it assumes that because we have more textual
evidence about the cult of images for the sixth to the eighth
2 Panel of a bearded god in military dress with halo (the
Thracian god Heron?), 2nd or 3rd century CE, tempera on
wooden panel, 15V6 X 10 in. (38.4 X 25.3 cm). Aegyptisches
Museum, Berlin (artwork in the public domain; photograph
provided by Constantine J. Mathews)
centuries, it means there really was more of a cult of images
in that period rather than a shift in what texts decided to
highlight: a shift, in other words, in rhetoric rather than
reality. I do not myself see any reason for preferring reality to
rhetoric as an interpretative historical move in this context,
given the rich earlier evidence—up to the third and fourth
centuries, say—for varieties of image cultivation, both pagan
and Christian. The choice to privilege realism is a value
judgment, and I myself would prefer to leave the matter
open. It is possible there was no rise in the cult of images, just
a rise in the textual noise about the cult in the materials that
have survived to us.60
The mix of attitudes in the relations of Christians to images
and worship, that is, to the complex arena where idolatry
might be seen as a problem,61 encompasses not only their
own images but also those of the pagan environment.1'" From
the fourth century and certainly the fifth—the moment of
Christian hegemonic ascendancy—there is plenty of evi
dence, both literary and in the archaeological record, for
Christian destruction of pagan idols and sanctuaries.63 Yet
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ICONOCLASM AS DISCOURSE: FROM ANTIQUITY TO BYZANTIUM 373
evidence also exists that even cult images could be cared for
with intense antiquarian enthusiasm—looked after, restored,
collected, and brought to adorn the multiple private and
public spaces of late antique Constantinople.64 The extent to
which such images were successfully stripped of their reli
gious meanings and pagan connotations is moot, and cer
tainly in the course of Byzantine history, such ancient dedi
cations were always capable of showing demonic possession.br>
There is even evidence—in the case of the Parthenon it
self—of the same monument being both the target for Chris
tian iconoclasm and the object of a long history of antiquar
ian affection and preservation.66
3 Icon of Christ with a jeweled Gospel book adorned with a
cross, 6th century, wax encaustic on wooden panel, 33% X
17% X in. (84 X 45.5 X 1.2 cm). Monastery of St. Catherine,
Mount Sinai (artwork in the public domain; photograph
provided by the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine at Mount
Sinai)
4 Icon of Saint Peter holding a cross and keys, with medallio
of Christ, the Virgin, and perhaps John the Evangelist at t
top, 6th century, wax encaustic on wooden panel, 36% X 2
X Vi in. (93.4 X 53.7 X 1.2 cm). Monastery of St. Catheri
Mount Sinai (artwork in the public domain; photograph
provided by the Holy Monastery of St. Catherine at Moun
Sinai)
The evidence discussed so far provides two conclus
about the Byzantine strategy of iconoclasm. In the first p
it involves not simply the breaking but also the setting
images: it is a process of creation as much as destruc
Second, the strategy surely reflects the impact of image
major form of propaganda and polemic on both the polit
and ecclesiastical levels, and, for numerous church fathers
East and West as well as even the iconoclast emperors Mi
chael II and Theophilus (in their letter to Louis the Pious in
824), a crucial didactic tool.67 In effect, what this implies is
that the discourse of the image—or rather, the use of images
as a discourse in society to make statements that were heavily
loaded, either politically or theologically—was prevalent and
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374 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2012 VOLUME XCIV NUMBER 3
5 Gold solidus of Justinian II: obverse showing the imperial
portrait; reverse showing the true cross on steps, minted in
Constantinople before 692. The American Numismatic Society,
1986.177.1 (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided
by the American Numismatic Society)
completely normal from Roman imperial times through to
the eighth century and beyond.
Specific archaeological evidence points to the relatively
sophisticated and subtle uses of images in the seventh and
eighth centuries as part of the discourse of international
politics, especially in the paintings surviving from the seventh
and eighth centuries in the church of S. Maria Antiqua in
Rome.68 This material is strongly supportive of the impor
tance of images as a means of discourse not only in Constanti
nople but also among the church hierarchy of the West. The
most impressive argument for the power of image discourse
in the seventh century comes from the numismatic evidence.
A "polemic of images" undoubtedly was carried on between
the coin issues of Caliph 'Abd al-Malik and Justinian II in his
first reign (Figs. 5-13).69 The caliph appears to have imitated
the Byzantine coinage (Fig. 5) but to have changed Justini
an's portrait on the face of the coin, borrowing from earlier
Sassanian and Byzantine types, including the coinage of Em
peror Heraclius (r. 610-41) (Fig. 6).70 On the back, Abd
al-Malik replaced the cross—which always had the potential
for devotional use among Christians (Fig. 7)—with the lance
or scepter of the Prophet, whether on a stepped base or in an
arched niche (Figs. 8, 9).
The radical nature of Justinian's response can hardly be
overestimated (Fig. 10). In a unique gesture, he replaced his
own image on the coin's obverse with that of Christ, bearing
the text "rex regnantium" (King of Kings). On the reverse,
Justinian is represented as "servus christi" (Slave of Christ),
itself possibly a Byzantine appropriation of an Arabic formu
lation, since Abd is Arabic for "slave." Thus, Abd al-Malik
means "slave of the chief' and Abdallah means "slave of
God."71 It was unprecedented for a Byzantine emperor to be
represented as a slave and on the back of a coin. Yet a slave
of the King of Kings is better than one who rejects him
altogether, and in terms of an image war, Justinian had won.
There was no image that could outdo his. Abd al-Malik's
initial response, an image, on both gold and cheaper alloy
coins, of a standing figure with a sword or scabbard on the
front of the coin, which may represent the caliph but may
equally be intended to show the Prophet himself (Figs. 11,
12), gave way swifdy to a wholly aniconic coinage in which the
use of images altogether was rejected (Fig. 13). His response
6 Gold solidus of Heraclius: obverse showing the emperor
flanked by his sons Heraclius Constantine and Heraclonas, all
crowned and carrying orbs with crosses; reverse showing the
true cross on steps, minted in Constantinople, 629-41. The
British Museum, London, 1922.0623.4 (artwork in the public
domain; photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum)
7 The Wilton Cross, gold solidus of Heraclius (dated 613-30)
in a cruciform pendant setting of gold and garnets, probably
made in East Anglia in the first half of the 7th century. The
British Museum, London, 1859.0512.1 (artwork in the public
domain; photograph © the Trustees of the British Museum).
Either the coin has been set upside down so that it would
appear right-side-up from the wearer's viewpoint or the design
was interpreted as showing a pendant cross so that the coin
image echoed the Anglo-Saxon function. This object shows th
sacred and devotional potential for coins of this type and
those with the image of Christ.
to Justinian's master stroke was an equal master stroke: the
decision to coin an entirely nonfigurative, epigraphic coin
age, replacing images with Qur'anic texts, and, in effect, to
deny that the game could any more be played by the old
rules. His new kind of nonfigurative image heralded Islamic
art's break from the Greco-Roman representative tradition.
This dialogue over coinage was itself prefatory to the attemp
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ICONOCLASM AS DISCOURSE: FROM ANTIQUITY TO BYZANTIUM 375
VCW;
V
'' "
%
8 Gold dinar of 'Abd al-Malik: obverse showing three standing
figures with orbs but without crosses or crowns; reverse showing
the scepter of the Prophet on steps, minted in Syria, ca. 690.
The British Museum, London, 1954.1011.1 (artwork in the
public domain; photograph © The Trustees of the British
Museum)
9 Silver drachm of 'Abd al-Malik: obverse showing a portrait
bust (of the caliph?); reverse showing the lance of the Prophet
in an arched niche, perhaps a mihrab, minted in Syria, mid
6908. The American Numismatic Society, 1944.100.612
(artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the
American Numismatic Society)
10 Gold solidus of Justinian II: obverse showing the bust of
Christ in benediction holding the Gospels and inscribed "Jesus
Christ, King of Kings"; reverse showing the standing emperor
holding the cross on steps, inscribed 'Justinian, slave of Christ,"
minted in Constantinople, 692-95. The British Museum, London,
1852.0903.23 (artwork in the public domain; photograph © The
Trustees of the British Museum)
to cover up the mosaics of the Great Mosque in Damascus
with white cloths by Caliph Umar II (who reigned from 717 to
720 and was the defeated party when Emperor Leo III broke
the Muslim siege of Constantinople in 717-18) and to the
subsequent edict against images by Umar's successor, Yazid II
(r. 720-24),72 although doubt has been cast on whether this
edict really happened.' '
11 Gold dinar of 'Abd al-Malik: obverse showing a standing
figure with a sword; reverse showing the scepter of the Prophet
on steps, minted in Jerusalem, 695. The British Museum,
London, 1954.1011.2 (artwork in the public domain; photo
graph © The Trustees of the British Museum)
12 Alloy coin of 'Abd al-Malik, minted in Syria, mid-690s. The
British Museum, London, OR.7282 (artwork in the public
domain; photograph © The Trustees of the British Museum)
I \)l I hK\
\ ~l
13 Aniconic gold dinar of 'Abd al-Malik with Qur'anic inscrip
tions, minted in Damascus, 696-97. The British Museum,
London, 1874.0706.1 (artwork in the public domain; photograph
© The Trustees of the British Museum)
One interesting aspect of these various polemics of images
is the ways they cut across and relate different societies func
tioning in different languages. Although the papacy was pri
marily occupied by Greeks in this period,74 its main congre
gation was Latin-speaking. The caliphate was Arabic-speaking
but operated in the seventh and eighth centuries in the
broadly Syriac- and Greek-speaking Christian culture of con
quered Syria and the Levant. Byzantium was, of course,
Greek. But the question of the place of images in Islam is
tantalizing. At the same time as the rise of Byzantine icono
clasm, and in response to the same long dynamic of discur
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376 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2012 VOLUME XCIV NUMBER 3
sive practices inherited from antiquity (that is, in part from
Classical antiquity, but modulated by the Achaemenid, Par
thian, and Sassanian models of imperial culture to the east),
Islam also responded to the ancient image both with icono
clasm and with a rethinking of the nature of what images
should be and how they relate to the divine economy. Islam's
choices and conceptual approaches would prove very differ
ent from those of Byzantium. Effectively, Islam moved away
from the figurative toward the decorative, away from the
idolatrous dangers of real presence associated with the icon.
By contrast, Byzantium would ultimately affirm real presence
in response to the iconoclasts and develop a full visual econ
omy of the icon.75 The fact that both cultures confronted the
great inheritance of antiquity in this matter at the same
time—and with such different results—remains fascinating
and the reasons for it unresolved.
Byzantine Iconoclasm and the Theorization of the Image:
From the Ontology of the Icon to the Epistemology of
Knowing God
It is within this context of the regular creation and destruc
tion of images as a visual discourse pervading the competition
for imperial authority and religious doctrine (both within
Christian factionalism and between Christianity and Islam)
that we need to place the specific developments of Byzantine
iconoclasm. The key issues have less to do with the cult of
images as such or attacks on images than with two fundamen
tal interruptions to the discursive structures that had pre
vailed since before the beginnings of the Christian imperium.
The first of these is the move to the full theorization of the
image, both as a justification for images and as a justification
for the attack on them. We may place this with the theological
positions articulated by John of Damascus, writing at some
point between 730 and 750 in defense of images, and by the
iconoclast Council of Hiereia, which met in 754 and styled
itself the Seventh Ecumenical Council. As usual in this game,
the arguments of Hiereia do not survive in their own right
but only as excerpted and represented by the opponents who
anathematized everything the iconoclasts stood for—not
ideal territory for objective assessments on our part. More to
the point is that from both sides in the debate, images
acquired a level of philosophical theorization to which they
had never before been subjected in the entire tradition of
Greco-Roman image making, reaching back to archaic antiq
uity. From the art historian's point of view, and from that of
anyone trying to understand the cultural significance of im
ages in a society, this is a huge development. It meant that the
discourse of images would never again be conducted without
potential recourse to rigorous theological arguments and
justifications, effectively a structure of pseudolegalistic prec
edent, which would extend in somewhat different modula
tions to the Western Roman Empire7'' and would, of course,
come to be central to the arguments of the European Refor
mation.
Side by side with this fundamental shift—and hardly sepa
rable from it—went a profound change in Byzantine theol
ogy, which has been insufficiently stressed.'7 Byzantine eccle
siastical life proceeded through a series of church councils,
many of which claimed to be ecumenical and only seven of
which were accorded that distinction by the tradition as it
developed, but we may differentiate between the focus of the
theological debates these councils were summoned to re
solve. Until the iconoclast Council of Hiereia of 754 and the
Council of Nicaea of 787, which reversed Hiereia's pro
nouncements and justified images, the fundamental course
of Byzantine theology in its church councils was primarily
ontological—sorting out correct designations for the nature
of God and attempting to find resolutions for disputes about
such designations. Especially after the Fourth Ecumenical
Council of Chalcedon in 451, which saw an ultimately irrep
arable division of Christian communities between those who
insisted on distinguishing two natures in the person of Christ
(the Dyophysites, whom we call Orthodox) and those whom
their opponents accused of accentuating the Divine Nature
(whom we tend to call Monophysite or Miaphysite), there was
huge political pressure to find compromises, such as Moner
gism or Monotheletism.'* All of these attempt ever more
precisely to define the ontological nature of Christ's being,
which is also his relation to the other members of the Trinity.
What has gone surprisingly unremarked, either in connec
tion with the study of the development of Byzantine theology
or the study of the theorization of images, is the significance
of the shift in the eighth and ninth centuries to icons as the
subject of theological dispute, not only at Hiereia and the
Second Council of Nicaea but also in the iconoclast Council
of 815 and the iconophile Council of 843, which resulted in
the so-called Triumph of Orthodoxy. It signaled a change
from an emphasis on ontology (that is, the being of God) to a
greater accent on epistemology (that is, how God is to be
known). This is no less substantive and meaningful a trans
formation of the thrust of theological thinking since the first
Ecumenical Council of 325 than is the rigorous theorization
of the image after millennia of ritual uses and practice.
It should be stressed that I do not mean there was no
epistemology before Hiereia and no ontology after. Rathe
both in the focus of theology and in the discussion of imag
(which at this moment turn out to be the same thing), ther
is a movement in interest and priority toward epistemologi
questions and interpretations over ontological ones. A go
example of the combined discussion of ontology, epistem
ogy, and images in relation to thinking about the divine from
a much earlier era is an excerpt from the philosopher A
tisthenes (ca. 445-365 BCE), a student of Socrates, which
survives—like so many of the texts discussed here—only as
citation in a number of church fathers (Clement, Protrepti
6.71.2 and Stromata 5.14.108.4; Eusebius, Praeparatio evangel
13.13.35, 15-16): "God is like no one (or nothing)" [an
ontological statement], he said, "and on account of this no
one is able to know him through a likeness" [an epistemo
logical statement]. This is a rich text, which puns on the
etymological link between "to be like" (eoikenai) and "like
ness" or "image" (eikonos).79 The point is that the epistemo
logical tradition offered by the likes of Antisthenes is taken
up and reversed by iconophiles like John of Damascus, so that
because God is man (through the Incarnation) and because
we may know other men and women through their likenesses
and images, so God is knowable through his likenesses: im
ages are a means for knowing God and for opening a route to
approach him.
Before directly addressing these issues, it is worth noting in
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ICONOCLASM AS DISCOURSE: FROM ANTIQUITY TO BYZANTIUM 377
passing the outbreak of iconoclasm on the part of priests
against Christian images that appears to have taken place in
late sixth- or early seventh-century Armenia,80 as well as a
series of defenses of images against either iconophobic
doubters or outright iconoclasts during the sixth and seventh
centuries.81 All these instances are complex, since the sources
that report them are often later and always partisan, if not
polemical, while the sociopolitical and intellectual contexts
of such outbursts of iconoclasm are uncertain and at best
hypothetically reconstructed. They include the justification
of images and "material adornments in sanctuaries" that
survives among the Miscellaneous Inquiries of Hypatius, bishop
of Ephesus, in the 530s,82 the early seventh-century sermons
delivered against the Jews in Cyprus by Leontius of Neapolis,
whose fifth sermon includes a defense of images,83 and the
Armenian defense of images associated with the figure of
Vrt'anes K'ert'ogh.84 All these texts have been doubted—
both as to date and as to authenticity—as one might expect in
so polemicized an arena and with our survivals being often in
secondary contexts and fragmentary forms.85 Beside the rise
of an apologetics of the image after the sixth century (which
can be paralleled in the West with both Serenus of Mar
seilles's attack on images and Gregory the Great's riposte)86
and alongside the iconophobic positions that such apologies
seem to respond to, we must place the significant commen
tary on images embodied in three canons from the Quinisext
Council of 692. These are not a wholesale theology of the
image, nor are they a full turn to the epistemological themes
implicit in theologizing the image, but they have been rightly
singled out (and only rather recently) as key steps toward a
fully theological articulation of images within church prac
tice.87 The three canons—all effectively restrictive of what the
council saw as excesses—forbade the placing of crosses on
the floor (Canon 73), placed a premium on the representa
tion of Christ as a man rather than as a symbol such as a lamb
(Canon 82), and perhaps somewhat vaguely objected to any
images that "corrupt the mind and excite base pleasures"
(Canon 100).88
The Breaking of a Discourse
It is within this discourse of image politics, often involving
iconoclasm (particularly in Constantinople), that the act her
alding the rise of Byzantine iconoclasm (agreed on by all our
sources) took place. That act was, of course, the breaking of
an image. In 726 or 730 (our two best sources disagree on the
precise date)89 Leo III, Byzantine emperor from 717 to 741
and a superb general who had defeated the Arab assault on
the city of Constantinople in 717, had the image of Christ
above the Chalke Gate to the imperial palace removed (it has
been supposed to resemble the iconography of the bust of
Christ as seen in Figs. 3, 4, 10, 14) .9H Until about 1990, no one
doubted the written evidence of our sources: history was
realist and sought, after removing any rhetorical excess from
highly polemical documents, to come to a judicious sifting of
the nuggets of truth amid the dross. However, after 1990 a
series of reviews of the evidence make it quite possible—
perhaps even very likely—that the Chalke Christ is a fabrica
tion of the late eighth or early ninth century,91 a phantasma
goric prefiguration of an icon of Christ that really was set up
by the iconophile Empress Irene in the wake of the Second
Council of Nicaea in 78792 and was then removed by Em
peror Leo V about the time of the second iconoclast council
of 815.93 If this is true, then it offers the delicious irony that
Irene's icon, replacing an earlier image of the cross,94 was
itself an act of iconophile iconoclasm within the charged
context of the image polemics of the last years of the eighth
century. At any rate, the Chalke Christ was restored in a
full-length standing version in mosaic after the Triumph of
Orthodoxy (and the final restitution of icons) in 843.95
Our sources report rioting and image destruction at the
purported outbreak of iconoclasm in the 720s or 730s, which
is what one would expect from writings of a violently icono
phile bias.96 They fail to report any other iconoclastic out
burst during the rest of Leo's reign, or executions or perse
cutions in relation to the two attested iconoclastic acts. Even
more awkward for those who would portray Leo as a rabid
iconoclast, there is no mention in his Ecloga or legal code of
741 of images at all—either penalties for making them or
penalties for venerating them.97 What is important is how
little iconoclasm we can in fact establish for the first decades
of the period we call Iconoclastic; in fact, there is hardly any
attested in the first ten years of Constantine V, until the
iconoclast council of Hiereia in 754.98
What is interesting is lhat within the folklore of icono
clasm, the Chalke Christ shortly became the key icon whose
destruction would be forever associated with the inception of
iconoclasm. In the mythology concocted within the eighth
century, iconoclasm was made to stand or fall by an image.
We might say that this is no more than the same discourse of
images and iconoclasm that was a normal part of Byzantine
politics in the period before iconoclasm. It is not especially
iconoclastic. And yet the destruction of the Chalke Christ is
not quite comparable to any iconoclastic strategy that pre
ceded it. Leo had not just come to the throne. He was not
attacking an image that was theologically controversial, as was
the Sixth Council to a Monothelete or Patriarch Sergius to an
Orthodox. On the contrary, Leo had made a completely
unproblematic image into a controversial one. What Leo had
done is not parallel to the to-and-fro iconoclasms of Philip
picus and Anastasius, whose theological disagreements none
theless involved an acceptance of the rules of the game of
image discourse. It is much closer to the act of Abd al-Malik,
who, when faced with the figurative sign for the transcenden
tal absolute, the image of Christ as Rex Regnantium, had
refused to play by the rules that allowed that sign to exist at
all. Leo's act, as reported by the folklore, in destroying the
Chalke Christ makes a similar gesture. It says that this dis
course—the discourse of images for theology, of images as
theology—is unacceptable. The mythical attack on the
Chalke Christ is not an attack on images so much as an assault
on the discourse of Byzantine society, a discourse that had
been unproblematically accepted and that was a part of that
society's self-definition. Small wonder, then, that it was so
outrageous—or rather, if the Chalke icon is a late eighth
century fabrication, that so outrageous an object for the
break in discourse had to be invented in the folklore. Leo's
iconoclasm lies not so much in image breaking as in the
wider metaphoric sense that the word carries in English
today. Leo was iconoclastic in the wholesale negation of the
image discourse implicit in the destruction of the Chalke
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378 art bulletin September 2012 volume xciv number 3
Christ and of the self-image of Byzantine society that was in
some way predicated on the acceptance of an image dis
course for the sacred. It may be added that the folklore's
focus on the image of Christ is a genuflection to the key
ontological justification for the sacredness of Christian im
ages, namely, the myth of the acheiropoieton, the image not
made by human hands. Supremely, such images were mirac
ulous icons of Christ—Veronica's cloth, the Mandylion or
shroud in which the dead Christ had been wrapped, and so
forth. I have not drawn attention to this theme because the
acheiropoieton is an exceptional—indeed, unique—image, a
kind of relic, while the attack on and the defense of icons in
Byzantium turned ultimately on images that had been made
by human hands."
Whatever replaced the imagined icon of the Chalke
Christ—a cross, a nonreligious image, or nothing at all—the
result was the same: at a stroke, the entire discourse of
figurative images as a means of enunciating or representing
the holy was thrown into question. What Leo had done was to
deny its validity. However, it was only after the act (what may
itself, as we have seen, been a later invention) that the
theology came—both the justification for the Tightness of the
act (which is to say, the wrongness of images) and the attack
on the wrongness of iconoclasm, which was also the defense
of icons. In fact, on the level of texts, it was the mature
statement in defense of images that came first, in the form of
the three orations written by John of Damascus, a monk in
Palestine, perhaps based at the Monastery of Mar Saba near
Jerusalem, and hence living under the caliphate and never
within Byzantine imperial jurisdiction.100 These have been
dated as early as 726 (that is, as an immediate response to
Leo's destruction of the Chalke Christ, depending on when
one dates this, if it happened at all) or as late as the 750s, that
is, before the iconoclast Council of Hiereia in 754.101 The
three orations may be read as separate works (in which case
there is a great deal of self-plagiarism on John's part) or as
three versions of the same treatise for different occasions or
purposes.10"
For and Against Images: The Turn to Epistemology
John of Damascus opens his defense in the first oration by
confronting head-on an issue central to the whole Christian
discourse on images and the history of the reluctance to give
them full play, namely, the problem of idolatry. At 1.4-7
(repeated at 3.6-7 and partially at 2.8), he quotes a series of
the Old Testament prohibitions on images and concludes
"that He forbids the making of images because of idolatry
and that it is impossible to make an image of the immea
surable, uncirumscribed, invisible God." Then he turns to
the Incarnation as the special case that justifies images:
"When He who is bodiless and without form ... is found in
a body of flesh, then you may draw his image and show it
to anyone willing to gaze upon it" (1.8; 3.8). This leads
directly to the question of worship: "Use every kind of
drawing, word, or color. Fear not; have no anxiety; discern
between the different kinds of worship. . . . For adora
tion [ T) Tfjs XaTpeias TTpooKWTiais ] is one thing, and that which
is offered in order to honor [r| 6K Ti|ifjs Ttpocrayo^evTi ] some
thing of great excellence is another" (1.8). This leads to a long
and careful distinction between image and prototype (1.9-13),
which is followed by the distinction within worship between that
which is appropriate for God alone (latreia, or adoration, 1.14)
and that which is appropriate for images (proskynesis, honor or
veneration, 1.15-16).103 In a brilliant and passionate summary,
which is much quoted and may be said to encapsulate the later
theology of the icon, John wrote, "I do not worship [ouproskynd\
matter; I worship the Creator of matter who became matter for
my sake, who accepted to dwell in matter, who worked out my
salvation through matter. Never will I cease adoring the matter,
which wrought my salvation!." (1.16; 2.14)104 The line of argu
ment is admirably clear, and it is developed explicidy in the
second half of the third oration (introduced at 3.11-15), where
John concentrates first on what an image is (3.16-26) and then
on the nature of veneration (3.27-42). The emphasis on what
images are refutes the charge of idolatry, but the shift to the use
of images in the process of approaching and honoring the
Godhead is key. The image is "a likeness, a paradigm, an ex
pression of something, showing in itself what is depicted in the
image" (3.16), and this means that "images reveal and make
perceptible those things which are hidden" (3.17). The image
"was devised that man might advance in knowledge, and that
secret things might be revealed and made perceptible" (3.17).
Effectively, although he opens on a question of the ontology of
the image, John shifts the parameters of the argument to an
epistemological claim about how images work within the divine
economy to take man toward God.10''
It is important to note that Christology—that is, the precise
definition of what the Incarnation means in terms of Jesus
being both man and God—is the crucial mechanism for
John's argument.""' Because Christ was fully man, then he
must be capable of representation, as any other man may be.
Because Christ can be represented in images, the images that
portray him give access to the Godhead within. This is hardly
unrelated, of course, to the special focus of the iconoclastic
attack on the image of Christ (whether actually or in later
folklore).10' In theological terms, the shift to Christology was
a clever move not only because of its centrality to John's
Incarnational defense of the icon but also because Christol
ogy had been the traditional and key language of theological
argument since the First Ecumenical Council's pronounce
ments in 325. That is, the icon's validity is dependent on its
justification through Christological ontology, but its purpose
and function within the divine economy were epistemologi
cal—-a means to know and approach the hidden God, where
the worship given to the image is transferred to the prototype
(see 1.21 and 1.36, wherejohn quotes Saint Basil directly).108
The icon is ontologically validated through its Incarnational
participation in Christ's two natures, and it is through its
quality as matter—fully accessible to humanity—that its ac
cess to Christ's divine nature is made possible. The Christol
ogy both justifies the icon on ontological grounds as accept
able and gives it its epistemological position as conduit by
which one may know God.
It is frequently asserted that iconoclasm was about idola
try.109 And it is certainly true that iconoclasts used polemical
accusations of idolatry against iconophiles, just as iconophiles
accused iconoclasts of being Arian heretics.110 But this kind
of heresiological mudslinging is what we would expect in the
world of Byzantine theological polemics. The best evidence
for the fundamental shift (effected by John of Damascus)
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ICONOCLASM AS DISCOURSE: FROM ANTIQUITY TO BYZANTIUM 379
from issues of idolatry to issues of Christology is that in the
horos or definition of its decisions, pronounced by the
iconoclast Council of Hiereia in 754,111 relatively little
attention is given to the icon as idol, although idolatry is
mentioned explicitly in relation to the Devil's misleading
of Christians into worshiping the creation rather than the
Creator, especially at 221D.112 Rather, the horos of the
council, as it survives in the sixth session of the acta of
the Seventh Ecumenical Council, whose primary purpose
was to refute it, is concerned with an attack on images
couched in the Christological discourse introduced by
John. After affirming its communion with the six earlier
Ecumenical Councils and their long list of anathemas, the
horos of Hiereia proclaims: "Having looked into these matters
with great diligence and deliberation under the inspiration of
the all-holy Spirit, we have found also that the unlawful art
of painters [Tfjv a0ep.iTov tSv £<j)ypd<t>wv TexvTjv] constitutes a
blasphemy. . . ." (240C). Blasphemy and the issue of idolatry
are construed not ontologically—as in "an image is an
idol"—but epistemologically, as an inappropriate act of
cultivation, a mistaking of creation for the Creator. This
leads to the "error of those who make and those who pay
respect" to icons (245D), an argument that has been con
nected with the Peuseis, or Inquiries of Emperor Constan
tine V, which themselves survive only in very fragmentary
form within the refutation conducted by the ninth-century
Patriarch Nicephorus.113
The argument of the horos of Hiereia then turns, with
some acuity and theological brilliance, to the icon of
Christ (252A). That is, it confronts both the Christological
basis of John of Damascus's defense of images and (implic
itly) the specific icon of the Chalke Christ, which at least
later tradition identified with the first act of image break
ing.114 Christ, the horos tells us, is both man and God.
Thus, in "describing created flesh," the painter has either
"circumscribed the uncircumscribable character of the God
head [<jt>|nTepieypai|je ... to dtrepiypa^ov rfjs 0e6rriTOs]" or he
has "confused that unconfused union [ auvexee tt|v aatiyxuTov
evwaiv], falling into the iniquity of confusion."115 These two
errors—circumscription and confusion—are described as "blas
phemous" against the Godhead, again focusing not on the icon
as an ontological problem, an idol that is the site of a presence
that is not God, but on the icon's appropriateness as a means for
approaching or knowing God. Interestingly, those who venerate
icons are guilty of the same error as those who make them. An
imagined iconophile riposte (256AB) that "It is the icon of the
flesh alone that we have seen and touched. . .." is dismissed as
equally heretical, since it represents a splitting of the two natures
of Christ (human and divine), which is "impious and an inven
tion of the Nestorian misfortune." One might object that the
iconoclasts have hardly offered the best theological case that an
iconophile could make for icons,111' but certainly, it has the
effect of opening a theological double bind for the adherents of
icons. Either they think "that the divinity is circumscribable and
confused with the flesh" (a heresy and a blasphemy) or they
think "that the body of Christ was without divinity and divided,"
and hence they worship only the image of the flesh (also a
heresy and a blasphemy; 260AB).
Therefore, whatever an icon may be, it is a product of
heresy. The only true image is the Eucharist (261E-264C),
for it alone has been sanctified by a prayer in the Apostolic
tradition."' There is no consecrating prayer for an icon
(268C and 269D). The rejection of the icon of Christ then
allows the rejection of images of the Virgin and the prophets,
apostles, and martyrs (272B, 272D), but on the relatively
weak grounds that since the icon of Christ "has been abol
ished, there is no need for" the others (272D). This position
would in principle call for much more argument than we are
given, especially because all these other figures are "not of
two natures, divine and human" (272B, 272D). It is possible
such argument was given in the acts of the Council of Hiereia
(which do not survive) and even in a segment of the horos not
preserved.118 But it is also of minimal importance. For all
sides agreed that the epistemological case for the image as
acceptable representation lay in the icon of Christ: Could it
be a correct means for access to the divine, or, by being a false
means, was it effectively a barrier to such access?119 That
Christological case, although couched in the language devel
oped over centuries by the church to define the ontology of'
the Second Person of the Trinity, which is to say the nature of
the Incarnation and of the process of salvation that depends
on the Word becoming flesh in the Christian dispensation, is
now used epistemologically to determine whether God may
be approached through images.
Following these arguments (all too baldly put, perhaps,
which is in part the result of their being in the form of a final
conciliar definition but may in part be the effect of the cuts
and selections made by the iconophile council of Nicaea on
what survives of the declarations of the iconoclast council of
Hiereia, not only in the horos itself but also in relation to the
loss of the rest of the documentary materials presented at
Hiereia), the council proceeded to an examination of biblical
and patristic testimonia in favor of its position and then to a.
series of anathemas, some related to earlier condemnations
pronounced by previous ecumenical councils and many re
lated to the specific case of images. These latter include
anathemas on anyone who attempted to make or venerate an
icon or set one up in a church, a private home, or in hiding
(328C). This is interesting both for the repeated conflation
of making and worshiping images as one sin and for the
range of spaces in which icons abound and need to be
resisted. Further anathemas are directed at anyone who
turned to understand God (katanoesai) "through material
colors" (336E), who tried to "circumscribe with material col
ors in icons, in an anthropomorphic way, the uncircumscrib
able essence" (337D), who tried to "paint in an icon the
undivided hypostatic union of the nature of God the Word
along with that of the flesh" and thus confuse the two natures
(340C), or who thought of the Incarnate God as "mere flesh
and consequently, endeavors to describe it in an icon"
(341 A), and so on. We might be tempted to agree with the
iconophile refuters of Hiereia in commenting on these
anathemas that "repeating in cycles the same kinds of things,
they make so many pronouncements that what they chatter
will be almost beyond numbering" (341D). Yet the range of
anathemas concerns not whether an icon per se is an idol or
bad in its own right but the range of (in the view of the
iconoclasts) mistaken positions about what God is and how
he may be approached, which the use of icons may entail—
and those positions are many and subtle.
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380 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2012 VOLUME XCIV NUMBER 3
14 Hexagonal censer with figural busts, front with a medallion
showing Christ holding a book, Peter holding a cross to the
right and Paul to the left, probably Constantinople, first decade
of the 7th century, found in Cyprus, silver, 2¥s X 4!4 in. (6.7 X
10.9 cm). The British Museum, London, 1899.04925.3 (artwork
in the public domain; photograph © The Trustees of the
British Museum)
Particularly significant, it seems to me, and fundamentally
underemphasized in the excessively Protestant literature on
the iconoclast position is an ordinance that appears after the
first anathema but is not in itself an anathema. The council
says:
At the same time we ordain that no one in charge of a
church or pious institution shall venture, under pretext of
destroying the error in regard to images, to lay his hands
on the holy vessels in order to have them altered, because
they are adorned with figures. The same is provided in
regard to the vestments of churches, cloths, and all that is
dedicated to divine service. However, should anyone,
strengthened by God, wish to have such church vessels and
vestments altered, he must do this only with the assent of
the holy Ecumenical patriarch and at the bidding of our
pious Emperors. So also no prince or secular official shall
rob the churches, as some have done in former times,
under the pretext of destroying images. (329E-332E)120
This injunction, related to figurally decorated liturgical ves
sels and fitments (such as seen in a range of objects from
pre-Iconoclast times, Figs. 14-20), does not anathematize
existing images or icons in liturgical use, nor does it allow
anyone, including priests and other officials, any kind of free
rein on iconoclasm (meaning the destruction of such im
ages), in part to protect church property,121 although alter
ations may be made with the consent of higher authority.
Certainly, it conceives of churches operating with icons in the
key utensils of divine service even under the dispensation of
the iconoclast Council of Hiereia. The Second Council of
Nicaea finds such a conclusion a piece of absurd contradic
tion: "While they defame the holy Church of God and decree
she is wrong in accepting iconographic representations
. . . now as if forgetting their own wicked decision, they
15 Back view of Fig. 14, showing a medallion of the Virgin,
Saint John the Evangelist to the right and Saint James to the
left. The British Museum, London, 1899.04925.3 (artwork in
the public domain; photograph © The Trustees of the British
Museum)
reckon that these should stay" (332C). But this is polem
The passage seems to give substantial support to the view t
the iconoclast position in 754 is about not icons per se b
their inappropriateness epistemologically for approachi
God. What is needed, according to Hiereia, is not wholes
destruction but the end of new production. As far as icons a
concerned, Hiereia was about making and not break
images. In terms of liturgy, what Hiereia called for w
implicitly a gradual reform that would translate the churc
from an institution dependent on icons to one where,
rather than use "the forms [ideas] of the saints in inani
mate and speechless icons made of material colors
[ev e'lKoaiv ou)jiixols Kai avau8ois e£ uXlkwv xPWf-^Twv], which
bring no benefit," the worshiper should "paint in himself
their [the saints'] virtues as living icons [en4>iJX0US e'lKOvas],
consequently to incite in himself the zeal to become like
them" (345CD). The true icon is not a painted image but the
virtues of the saints painted in oneself, as well as the Eucharist
that the worshiper eats (which is described as "the icon
of his body, the giver of life [ r| eiKWV toO Cwottoiou aai(iaTOs],"
264A).122
The theoretics of the first Iconoclastic era, then, both in
the defense of images mounted by John of Damascus and in
the assault on images conducted by the Seventh Council of
754, constitutes a move away from ontological issues, both in
theology and in the definition of holy images (as potential
idols) toward epistemological concerns about how images
may or may not be appropriate as a means for accessing the
hidden God. The image is ontologically justified by means of
the Incarnation, but its purpose or function-—the reason it
matters at all—is epistemological, to direct the worshiper
toward the divine, to help the pious know the divine, and to
be an appropriate channel for veneration of the divine.
The death of Constantine V's heir, Leo IV, in 780 brought
to the throne his iconophile wife, Irene, and their nine-year
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ICONOCLASM AS DISCOURSE: FROM ANTIQUITY TO BYZANTIUM
16 Chalice showing grapevines and
images of Christ amid aposdes, probably
the vicinity of Antioch, ca. 400-ca. 530,
found near Antioch, silver-gilt, T/2 X
5% in. (19 X 15 cm). The Metro
politan Museum of Art, New York,
The Cloisters Collection, 1950, 50.4
(artwork in the public domain; image
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
provided by Art Resource, NY)
old son Constantine VI. A shift in theological policy, blamed
on Irene (at any rate, by the iconoclast synod of 815), led in
786-87 to the calling of the Second Council of Nicaea, which
has come subsequently to be regarded as an Ecumenical
Council.125 It has been argued—correctly, I think, and strik
ingly—that Nicaea II sought to lower the stakes and the
temperature of the argument about images by avoiding the
clamorous levels of Christological debate,124 and effectively
aimed to circumvent disputed questions with an appeal to
tradition and a rejection of Hiereia on the procedural
grounds that it failed to do its job properly and misrepre
sented most of its citations by taking them out of their literary
or historical context.125 The horos or definition of Nicaea II
makes two fundamental claims in relation to icons.126 First, it
ordains,
with all exactitude and diligence that, like the image of the
revered and life-giving Cross, so too sacred and holy icons,
whether of paint, of mosaic or other suitable materials,
should be offered and dedicated to the holy churches of
God, on sacred vessels and vestments, on walls and on
wooden panels, at home and in the streets, whether of the
image of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ or of
our immaculate Lady the Mother of God or of the blessed
angels and all saints and holy men.12'
The aim here is clearly to enumerate the range of materials
in which icons may be made and on which they may appear,
as well as the spaces where they may be erected and the
variety of holy beings who may be accorded them. All this is
clearly in response to the limitations, restrictions, and prohi
bitions imposed by Hiereia. At some issue has been the
question of whether the horos of Nicaea II ordains that icons
may be dedicated in addition to the cross or ought to be set
up!128
At least as significant is the follow-up statement in the horos
of the Nicene Council of 787:
For the more often they [the saints] are seen through
pictorial representations [ eiKOVLKfjs waTUTTwaews ], the
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382 art bulletin September 2012 volume xciv number 3
17 Book cover showing the apostle Paul in an arch holding a
book, with a surrounding frame of grapevines and peacocks in
the upper corners, 6th century, found near Antioch, silver,
10% X 8V2 in. (27.3 X 21.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1950, 50.5.1 (artwork in the
public domain; image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
provided by Art Resource, NY)
more are those who contemplate them aroused to
the remembrance and the desire of the prototypes
[TT|y twv npuTOTUTTui'iivTiiiTiy T6 Kal eTTiTToGriaiv], to offer
them kisses and prostrations though not true adoration
[dXT|9ivr)v Xcrrpeiav], which according to our faith is due
to the divinity alone, but the kind of veneration that we
accord to the holy and life-giving Cross and to the holy
books of the Gospel and the rest of the holy dedicated
offerings, and to proffer incense and lights in their
honor as was the revered custom among the ancients,
because the honor to the icon passes to the prototype,
and prostrations before the icon are prostrations to the
person represented in the icon.
Most striking about this passage, clearly a direct riposte to the
claim of Hiereia that the true icon is the virtue of the saint in
the worshiper's heart, is the complete avoidance of onto
logical argument about what an icon is or even of Chris
tology. Instead, following the affirmation of the range of
icons permitted and the spaces in which they are allowed,
it gives a firm statement of the nature and variety of
worship that may be directed to and through them. In the
end, the whole rationale of Nicaea's argument rests on its
implicit reference to Saint Basil's dictum about the honor
being transferred to the prototype, which John of Damas
cus had explicitly cited.
The iconophile dominance lasted only until the ascent to
the throne of Leo V (813-20), who in 815 caused the abdi
cation of the iconophile Patriarch Nicephorus and the calling
of a second iconoclast council, at St. Sophia.129 The second
Iconoclastic era seems to have been a very different phenom
enon from the first. While the Council of 815 ratified and
therefore appeared to accept all the arguments of the Hiere
Council of 754, its concerns seem to have been very diff
ent.130 It accepted that images are not idols, and it essentia
abandoned the heavy-duty Christological arguments of
Hiereia. Does this mean that the bishops of 815 though
Hiereia's Christology had effectively been defeated
John of Damascus and the arguments of 787? In short
iconoclasm was now wholly a debate about appropriate
epistemology—about how the holy is to be known, wo
shiped, and approached. The real criticism of the Seven
Ecumenical Council offered in 815 is that Nicaea "con
founded worship [ tt|v XaTpevTiKT|v r||j.wv irpoaKwria
bitrarily affirming that what is fit for God should be
to the inanimate matter [ d^iJXWL uXtil] of icons."1
horos of St. Sophia ostracized "from the Catholic
the unwarranted manufacture of spurious icons,
are "unfit for veneration and useless."132 It annulled
Nicaea II on the grounds that it "bestowed exaggerated
honor to painting [chromasi, literally, "to colors"], namely,
the lighting of candles and lamps and the offering of
incense, these marks of veneration being those reserved
for the worship of God [latreia]."133 It explicitly pro
nounced that "we refrain from calling them [icons] idols
since there is a distinction between different kinds of
evil."134
Here, "iconoclasm" did not mean a rejection of icons, or
their breaking, or even necessarily their removal. The letter
of the iconoclast emperors Michael II and Theophilus to
Louis the Pious of 824, which admittedly is a document
targeted to a Carolingian readership and may be highly se
lective and careful about what it chooses to argue, accepts the
use of icons for didactic purposes but removes them from
positions near the ground to places high up, so as to prevent
worship.1 !:> What mattered about worship was proximity, a
sense of mediation with the spiritual through the material.
But this was unacceptable as far as icons are concerned; the
letter objects to the veneration of images, to their use in place
of the altar or cross, and to a series of practices including the
mixing of paint scraped off images with the Eucharistic bread
and wine and the use of images as baptismal godfathers.136
The icon itself is the least controversial element here. The
second Iconoclastic era is not about images at all but abo
what counts as abuse in worship.
It should be added that the ninth century is a time that ha
been seen as generative of a liturgical revolution.15' As part o
his reform of the monasteries, Theodore of Studion adopted
the new monastic liturgy finalized in Mar Saba in Palestine
little less than a century earlier.138 This liturgy, infused wit
poetic hymnography, was more mystical. When art resurge
in the later part of the century, one main difference with th
pre-Iconoclastic era was its new liturgical character. The sec
ond Iconoclastic era played a vital part in the debate that led
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ICONOCLASM AS DISCOURSE: FROM ANTIQUITY TO BYZANTIUM 333
.* «V .
if \ > ;
" kLH** 'J
-Tj •
t,.i
i*i: ; ■& A*f^r::'
V ? . • r' * ."""•'- /1' ire .
'*'■ »*
" 9» ^ flBDIEW?*? su^aEfiS^^lfe«' J5 9i^: r^TM ;!2:.,"r-:
fck .« ,r- .- ' r '» "S» ft. ^ r% *.. &■
■ *Sf
ri 7 ■ •
M
r m
\ 4 i K , .»• ««■ * |,'
r r i ,- A
i, : _ , ; - *«nr
18 Painted cloth with Old Testament scenes, probably Egypt, 4th century, line
Riggisberg (artwork in the public domain; photograph by Christoph von Virag
19 Detail of Fig. 18 from the upper
left of the cloth showing life in the
form of a winged soul coming to
Adam and Eve. Abegg-Stiftung,
Riggisberg (artwork in the public
domain; photograph by Christoph von
Virag, ©Abegg-Stiftung)
(with the defeat of the iconoclasts) to a radical liturgical
dispensation that is the distinctive feature of the arts in the
medieval Byzantine period.1'9
Image and Prototype
It may be worth revisiting the fundamental steps in the con
tribution of Byzantine iconoclasm to thinking about images,
including their significance and the impulse to break them.
Riffing on the key text of Saint Basil by which the iconophiles
from John of Damascus to the horos of the Second Council of
Nicaea have justified images, one of the greatest modern
experts on iconoclasm has defined the demolition of images
thus: "The dishonor paid to the image . . . does not simply
pass to its prototype, but actually dam
itself."140 This formulation is right for
iconoclastic action, what I have called a discourse of icono
clasm, reaching back from Greek antiquity (wonderfully at
tested in the Delphic inscription about the condemnation of
the Phocian generals Onomarchus and Philomelus) via dam
natio memoriae in the Roman world to the early eighth century
CE in Constantinople when Emperor Philippicus demolished
the image of the Sixth Ecumenical Council and subsequently
had his own images destroyed by his successor, Anastasius.
On this model, some element of real presence inhered in the
image—not fully theorized, to be sure, but potent enough to
be worthy of attack through iconoclasm. The key point is that
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384 art bulletin September 2012 volume xciv number 3
20 Textile icon showing the Virgin
and Child between angels and, in
the upper section, Christ enthroned
between angels, with a border
including the twelve apostles, probably
6th century, wool, 70'/x X 4314 in.
(178 X 110 cm). The Cleveland
Museum of Art, Leonard C. Hanna,
Jr., Fund, 67.144 (artwork in the
public domain; photograph © The
Cleveland Museum of Art)
when Leo III destroyed the icon of the Chalke Christ
(whether in reality or in later legend), this discourse had
irreparably changed. No one—iconoclast or iconophile—
wished to dishonor, let alone to damage, the prototype, that
is, Christ himself.141 The issue had moved from a direct tie to
prototypes, and therefore the potential for a direct attack on
prototypes through their images, to whether the image itself,
as representation, was an appropriate means of making the
prototype present. It was formulated by asking whether the
icon was an appropriate means for knowing, honoring, and
accessing the hidden God through his Incarnate Son, the
Trinity through its Second Person.
Or, to put it another way: Was the image's existence in its
own right an act of dishonor to the prototype (because the
icon falsely represented it), or was it a locus of real presence
and therefore the correct recipient of veneration? In other
words, the shift in the ancient discourse of iconoclasm to
the image of Christ—which is also the shift, engineered by
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ICONOCLASM AS DISCOURSE: FROM ANTIQUITY TO BYZANTIUM 3g5
the arguments of John of Damascus and the iconoclasts at the
Council of Hiereia, to Christology as the philosophical lan
guage with which to think about images—is a move to con
sider the image entirely as representation. This is a transforma
tive moment in the discourse of images, signaling the
semiotic liberating of the image from an unarticulated and
generally assumed ontological tie to its referent to place the
image instead in an epistemological relation to its referent
(as either a true or a false way of knowing God). That
epistemology was for iconophiles always grounded ontologi
cally in the Incarnational logic that God had become matter,
meaning that matter could lead back to God. By the second
Iconoclastic era, all discussion of idolatry and even Christol
ogy had been superseded by questions of ritual—how close
icons might be to viewers, whether offerings should be made
to them at all, and, if so, of what sort. From the specific assault
either on the prototype or even on the image itself, the issue
had become the status of the icon in its own right as a means
of mediation in the wider sacred economy. The end result,
after the final defeat of iconoclasm in 843, was that John of
Damascus's Incarnational theory of images, refined by Nice
phorus and Theodore of Studion in the early ninth century,
enabled a fully thought-through theoretics of the image in
which its materiality, sanctified by God having become matter
in the person of Jesus, allowed epistemological access
through ritual to the holy.142 The conceptualization of real
presence in images had never been fully articulated or justi
fied before.
To return to the key text from Saint Basil on which the
iconophile case in the end came to rest, when it was first
articulated, as an illustration within a sermon on the Holy
Spirit,143 it offered a formulation of something that was pa
tently accepted in the culture but not necessarily theorized or
overtly stated. Basil represented the relations of image and
prototype in the positive as honor transferred from one to
the other, but clearly the discourse of iconoclasm partici
pated in the same assumptions—the prototype being dam
aged through damaging the image. What Byzantine icono
clasm did, in the probable myth of the removal of the Chalke
Christ, in the theological works of Constantine V (his Peuseis),
and in the pronouncements of Hiereia, was to break the link
of image and prototype and to announce that far from dam
aging the prototype, the destruction of its false and blasphe
mous images was itself a form of honor. The defense of
images, arguing that their very materiality was the guarantee
of their being an appropriate way of honoring and accessing
the divine in the aftermath of the Incarnation, reaffirmed,
justified, and grounded real presence and the logic by which
it operated as never before in the ancient Greek or Roman
worlds. That defense set up the space that would be chal
lenged by the iconoclasts of the Reformation—but it must
not be supposed that theirs was precisely the same target as
that of the Byzantine iconoclasts. For no Byzantine wanted to
damage Christ, the Virgin, or the saints, whereas many in the
Protestant north were opposed to anything except the imma
terial God and his Scriptural witness.
In discursive terms, the logic of Byzantine iconoclasm re
plays that of the numismatic "wars" of 'Abd al-Malik and
Justinian II at the end of the seventh century, but on a
philosophical level of theoretical argument rather than in
purely visual terms. Justinian's move to place the icon of
Christ on the coinage is analogous to John of Damascus
ratcheting up the stakes of the icon by making its validity
depend on the Incarnation and on a full Christological ar
gument. 'Abd al-Malik's abandonment of figural images on
the coinage altogether is analogous to the image denial of
iconoclasm (justified Christologically at Hiereia). We may say
that the structure of the two arguments in terms of image
making, raising the stakes, and image denial are utterly par
allel, although in the earlier case of the coinage we have only
images themselves to do the arguing, while in the later case of
Byzantine iconoclasm we have almost no images at all but a
veritable flood of textual polemic and theology. The first
"image war" (in numismatics) is between cultures and be
tween rival empires—one in which effectively a shared late
antique heritage of portraiture and coinage came to be dis
avowed, with the Muslims going for aniconism while the
Christians went for the affirmation of the image of Christ.
The second "image war"—Byzantine iconoclasm itself—is in
ternal to Eastern Christianity, although it is interesting that
the most potent advocate of the strongest Incarnational rais
ing of the stakes was a monk writing from within the caliph
ate. But the two sets of arguments over images, in the coinage
and in polemical theology, coming so close together and
being so alike in structure, point to a period when the image
as object and as object-to-think-with was as powerful a discur
sive and polemical weapon as it would ever be in the Western
tradition.
There is no doubt that the variety of positions offered
during Byzantine iconoclasm constitutes one of the deepest
conceptual contributions to the problem of the image as
representation ever conducted.144 The difficulty for us is that
the formulation of these discussions, in highly theological
terms that, to secularly educated moderns, seem abstruse at
best and repugnant to many, has prevented Byzantium's
developed theoretical interrogation of the image from being
appreciated by those with an interest in the issue in other
areas of the history of art. To grasp the depth and effect of
the theoretics of the icon in the period of iconoclasm, let us
start again from the longue duree and isolate three moments in
European culture when the image takes on significant po
tency as the object of reflection in the intellectual environ
ment.
The rise of naturalism in Greek art during the fifth
BCE in visual terms marks the birth of representati
West. That is, the archaic image as double (both sign
referent and container of that referent), figuring pr
absence and presence as absence,145 was supplem
the naturalistic image, which is effectively a comm
the life it represents—no longer usually the full,
ence of its referent but instead a representation of
referent is and the world in which he or she operates
shift, "the Greek Revolution," long recognized and e
to the rise of naturalism, is in part a move from the
of the object as potential container of its refer
potentially active player in a divine or magic sense w
real world, to the epistemology of the image as com
on the real world. It includes the fascinating effect
commenting on the workings of images—and esp
the making, stealing, and cultivation of cult images,
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386 art bulletin September 2012 volume xciv number 3
usually stylized as archaic by contrast with the Classical style of
the representation of people. This fundamental development
of ancient Greek art in the move to mimesis, and the long
continuity of archaic-type nonnaturalisdc images (both ani
conic and nonmimetic) alongside naturalism made for a
deep play of visual theology and commentarial exegesis en
tirely performed through images themselves.147 This is
largely a world of experience not subjected to theorization,
but it is significant that the new status of the image under the
regime of naturalism—both aesthetically and conceptually—
gave rise to Plato's worries about mimesis.148 By the Hellenis
tic and Roman periods, in the creative free play of literary
epigram, epideictic rhetoric, and fictional prose—especially
in that class of texts we call ekphrastic—these questions were
subject to a remarkable degree of implicit (though playful
and fictionalizing) interpretation, but hardly to systematic
philosophizing.149 Since the image itself was not fully theo
rized, it was adapted to specifically Stoic epistemologies about
how one might know the world through the ways images
impact on the senses and on the imagination.150
If we fast forward to the Reformation, we find the third
great moment when the image appeared as a central issue,
bringing with it the trauma of Catholic idolatry for Protestant
thinkers and solidifying as the bedrock of traditional religion
for Catholics, in forms justified and extended after the Coun
ter-Reformation. Either the image was, for Protestants, a
wholly degenerate and idolatrous misconception of how to
approach God,1''1 or it was, for Roman Catholics, a key tra
ditional and long-sanctioned means for accessing the di
vine.152 One of the interesting side effects of the Protestant
attack on the real presence of Christian images was the
triumph of text over image in the German (Protestant) tra
dition of writing about art, which ultimately became the
discipline of art history.153 Again, for all the fundamental
concerns about idolatry, the real issue, as it was in Classical
Greece and in Byzantium, is epistemological—that is, a ques
tion of how to access the real (as seen in sacred terms)
through its representations, and whether one can appropri
ately do so through images.
Between these two great moments in the culture of the
image in the West stand the developments of Byzantine icon
oclasm in relation to the theoretics of the making and the
worshiping of icons. The Iconoclastic period brought the
final conceptual theorization of the image in the Greco
Roman tradition (and in the Greek philosophical terminol
ogy inherited from Plato) cast in the then dominant philo
sophical structures of Byzantine theology and especially
Christology. Above all, it generated the developed and theo
rized version of the shift from ontology to epistemology
already implicit in naturalism's ability to comment on how
our world works and to ask what our images are. But, notably
in the works of John of Damascus, composed in the 730s or
740s, it brilliantly used epistemology (that is, the place of the
image within the divine economy as a means for knowing
God and opening a route of access to him) to justify, indeed,
to establish theoretically on sound theological grounds, the
image's ontology as icon—as container, through an identity
of person with the referent represented, of a divine presence,
while still being no more than matter, the matter sanctified
by the Incarnation. This theory, systematically tested by the
iconoclasts at the Council of Hiereia in 754 CE and ultimately
upheld in the later resistance to Hiereia, was to serve as the
basis for a medieval view of the image as fully equal with
Scripture and any other articulation of the holy and as a
dominant constituent of the sacred economy of both the
Byzantine and the Western Middle Ages. And precisely this
high standing and this understanding of the image would
attract the opprobrium of northern Europe's iconoclasts in
the sixteenth century.134
I have attempted to reposition Byzantine iconoclasm into a
longue duree analysis as a discursive strategy, both better to
understand its historical nexus of causation (which is in my
view very deep and long: effectively no less than a considered
revision of the entire Classical tradition's relations with im
ages) and to show the special importance of what the difficult
arguments of eighth- and ninth-century theologians were
actually doing in relation to the longer history of how images
have been conceived in the West.
Let me end by returning to the question of historical
explanation. Our understanding of iconoclasm suffers less
from a crisis of overexplanation than from an impasse in our
assumptions about what history should be. The range of
evidence is fissile, fragmentary, highly rhetorical, whether as
apology or polemic. For those wedded to a realist view of the
task of history, and that includes most of those who have
devoted attention to the topic, finding the fire for which the
various wisps of smoke must be evidence has been the prin
cipal aim. Yet after an extraordinary amount of scholarship,
we remain pretty unclear about what, if anything, happened
around the breaking of images in the Iconoclastic era and
about what its causes (whether proximate or remote) actually
were. However, if one explores the evidence we have as
discourse, that is, as the visual and literary production of a
society's self-reflections about how it related to itself and its
God in a time of crisis in the face of the threat of Islam and
the loss of great swaths of territory in the east and south,155 at
a time when the great fissure within Byzantine culture be
tween antiquity and the Middle Ages took place,151' then the
issues are less about what really may or may not have taken
place (which we will never know) than about how perceived
problems and changes were articulated, invented, and my
thologized. In this sense, it matters little whether or not there
really was a Chalke Christ for Leo III to destroy, but it matters
much that such an image—and specifically the image of
Christ (as opposed to the Virgin and Child or a saint) should
have been invented or deemed necessary for the job of
having been destroyed. That is, for the modern historian,
what iconoclasm provokes—and part of its perennial inter
est—is an examination of what we think we are doing in
writing history at all.
Jas Eisner is Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art
and Archaeology at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and visiting
professor of art history at the University of Chicago. He works on all
aspects of the production and reception of Roman and Early Chris
tian art [Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 0X1 4JF, U.K., jas
. elsner@ccc. ox. ac. uk].
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ICONOCLASM AS DISCOURSE: FROM ANTIQUITY TO BYZANTIUM 3g7
Notes
I have been working on this theme on and off for the last twenty-five years.
Robin Cormack supervised my master's thesis at the Courtauld Institute on
Byzantine iconoclasm in 1985-86, and I should like to dedicate this piece to
him, as a small token of the many things I have learned from him both as a
student and later as a colleague. It has been a signal aspect of my career as a
Classicist to have spent much time with Byzantinists. That part of my doctoral
work spent in Rome was in the close company of Charles Barber, companion
on many a trip and interlocutor in many a conversation; and that part spent
at the Warburg Institute was enlivened by the presence of Liz James and Ruth
Webb. I have been fortunate to have worked as a teacher and researcher at the
Courtauld with Robin Cormack and with John Lowden, in Chicago with Rob
Nelson and Walter Kaegi, in Corpus Christi College with James Howard
Johnston and Mark Whittow: I am grateful to all of them for conversations
and stimulation in this field over a long period. This particular paper origi
nates as a response to a day on Iconoclasms in Corpus organized by Neil
McLynn and me, with Leslie Brubaker, Barry Flood, and John Haldon,
sponsored generously by Paul Pheby. Versions have subsequently been given
in Basel, University of California, Los Angeles, Cornell, Chicago, and the
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. I especially thank Averil Cameron,
Simon Ditchfield, Barry Flood, Garth Fowden, Milette Gaifman, James How
ard-Johnston, Tom Mathews, and Rob Nelson for their comments on and
critiques of a first draft, as well as Karen Lang and two very helpful anonymous
reviewers for The Art Bulletin.
Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.
1. Peter Brown, "A Dark-Age Crisis: Aspects of the Iconoclastic Contro
versy," English Historical Review 88 (1973): 1-34, at 3; cf. Averil Cam
eron, "The Language of Images: The Rise of Icons and Christian Rep
resentation," in The Church and the Arts, ed. Diane Wood, Studies in
Church History, vol. 28 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 1-42, at 1: "Byzan
tine Iconoclasm, a subject which, we may feel, has been done to
death...."
2. On this issue see Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book (London:
Collins Hamill, 1988), 42-53, 77-79; see also Cameron, "The Lan
guage of Images," 41-42: "The Iconoclastic movement in Byzantium
is a perfect illustration of how history proceeds by multiple factors, all
of which must be given their due."
3. See David Freedberg, "The Structure of Byzantine and European
Iconoclasm," in Iconoclasm, ed. Anthony Bryer and Judith Herrin (Bir
mingham: Center for Byzantine Studies, 1977), 165-77.
4. See Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Develop
ment of Christian Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991), 5.
5. See Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (London: Reak
tion Books, 2004), 11.
6. Notably, this is the approach of Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon,
Byzantium in the Iconoclastic Era, c. 680-850: A History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), who take the word to refer to a
period "between late antiquity (or the early Byzantine period, de
pending on one's view) and the medieval world" (773).
7. The point is well made by Marie-Jose Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy:
The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2005), 1-2. So, for instance, Brown, "A Dark-Age Cri
sis," 5, emphasizes the holy—"The Iconoclast Controversy was a de
bate on the position of the holy in Byzantine society"—but turns out
to imply centrifugal tendencies, local and individual attachments, and
the loyalty of cities (18-24); and Patrick Henry, "What Was the Icono
clastic Controversy About?" Church History 45 (1976): 16-31, suggests
the debate was about "the meaning of the incarnation for history,
about the definition and interpretation of Christian worship, and
about conflicting claims to the title of the city of God" (21). For brief
discussion of the question, see Leslie Brubaker, "On the Margins of
Byzantine Iconoclasm," in Byzantina-Metabyzantina: La peripherie dans le
temps et Vespace, ed. Paolo Odorico, Dossiers Byzantines, vol. 2 (Paris:
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2003), 107-17, esp.
108-9.
8. One might divide historical interpretations of Byzantine iconoclasm
between those that take a broad approach to its causes over a long
period and those focused rather more narrowly on events in the sev
enth and eighth centuries. For the first group, the first source tracing
the story from the early church, the last four from much earlier antiq
uity, as I would, see Ernest Kitzinger, "The Cult of Images in the Age
before Iconoclasm," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 8 (1954): 84-150; Norman
Baynes, "Idolatry and the Early Church," in Byzantine Studies and Other
Essays (London: Athlone Press, 1960), 116-43; Moshe Barasch, Icon:
Studies in the History of an Idea (New York: New York University Press,
1992); Alain Besan^on, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of
Iconoclasm (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 11-146; or
Jan Bremmer, "Iconoclast, Iconoclastic and Iconoclasm: Notes to
wards a Genealogy," Church History and Religious Culture 88 (2008):
1-17. For the second group, see Leslie Brubaker, "Icons before Icono
clasm?" Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sullAlto Medioevo
45 (1998): 1215—54; and Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium in the Icono
clastic Era, 50-66, 774-82. For an overview, see Robin Cormack, "Art
and Iconoclasm," in The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, ed. Eliza
beth Jeffreys, John Haldon, and Cormack (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), 751-57, esp. 753-54.
9. Kitzinger, "The Cult of Images," 128-29; and Andre Grabar, L'icono
clasme byzantine: Dossier archeologique (Paris: Flammarion, 1957), 77-91,
both argue for a date after about 550 CE for the rise of the cult of
icons. Brown, "A Dark-Age Crisis," 10-11, goes for the "sixth and sev
enth centuries"; Averil Cameron, "Images of Authority: Elites and
Icons in Late Sixth-Century Byzantium," Past and Present 84 (1979):
3-35, emphasizes the late sixth century (cf. Cameron, "The Language
of Images," 4-15, esp. 4: "It is mainly during the later sixth century
and seventh century that the veneration of icons seems to have taken
off); John Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century (Cambridge: Cam
bridge University Press, 1990), 405-24, focuses on developments in
the seventh century; and T. Noble, Images, Iconoclasm and the Carolin
ians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 31,
claims, "A consensus so broad that it requires no elaboration holds
that icons spread tremendously in the sixth and seventh centuries"—
but one might worry about consensus in any academic matter, since it
often speaks of what appeals to collective contemporary ideology
within the academy rather than historical actuality.
10. See Brubaker, "Icons before Iconoclasm?" 1216-17, for the rise of the
holy portrait after 600.
11. Ibid., 1253: "There is little evidence for a 'cult of sacred images' in
pre-Iconoclast Byzantium. The textual and the material evidence
agrees that sacred portraits existed, but there is little indication that
these images received special veneration in any consistent fashion be
fore the late seventh century. . . and see Brubaker and Haldon, By
zantium in the Iconoclastic Era, 62-63, for about 680. This position fol
lows arguments by Paul Speck, Ich bins nicht, Kaiser Konstantin ist es
gewesen: Die Legenden vom Einfluss des Teufels, des Juden und des Moslem
auf den Ikonoklasmus, Poikila Byzantina, vol. 10 (Bonn: R. Habelt,
1990); and Marie-France Auzepy, "Manifestations de la propagande
en faveur de l'Orthodoxie," in Byzantium in the Ninth Century: Dead or
Alive? ed. Leslie Brubaker (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1998), 85-99.
12. Brubaker, "Icons before Iconoclasm?" 1254: "What we might legiti
mately call a cult of images did not lead to Iconoclasm; it was gener
ated by the discourse of the debate about Iconoclasm itself."
13. For an acute study of iconophile florilegia in the context of the an
thological tradition of Byzantine Orthodoxy, see Alexander Alexakis,
Codex Parisinus Graecus 1115 and Its Archetype (Washington, D.C.:
Dumbarton Oaks, 1996), esp. 1-42 on florilegia in general, and 92
233 on varieties of iconophile anthologies, including those in John of
Damascus and the Second Council of Nicaea.
14. This did not prevent parties from using the accusation of selectiv
quotation against their opponents. As the Seventh Ecumenical Cou
cil of Nicaea nicely pronounced in 787: "A characteristic of hereti
to present statements in fragmented form"; in Giovan-Domenico
Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, 53 vols. (Gra
Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1961), vol. 13, 301E; and D
iel Sahas, Icon and Logos (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 19
125, the source of all my translations from Mansi. On forgery and
rilegia, see Leslie Brubaker, "Byzantine Art in the Ninth Century:
Theory, Practice and Culture," Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies
(1989): 23-83, esp. 52-56.
15. For some thoughtful and playful accounts of various ancient and
medieval encyclopedic and anthological projects, see Trevor Murph
Pliny the Elder's "Natural History The Empire in the Encyclopaedia (O
ford: Oxford University Press, 2004); John Henderson, The Mediev
World of Isidore of Seville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007); and Erik Gunderson, Nox Philologiae: Aulus Gellius and the P
tasy of the Roman Library (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
2009).
16. Because this essay focuses on issues of representation and presenc
cannot venture into the wider thematics of violence, fanaticism, and
so forth, which have come to dominate the more recent literature on
iconoclasm generally, and especially that of the modern era. Impor
tant recent discussions of the theme include Dario Gamboni, The De
struction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution
(London: Reaktion Books, 1997); Alexander Demandt, Vandalisms:
Gewalt gegen Kultur (Berlin: Siedler, 1997); Besangon, The Forbidden
Image; Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Iconoclash: Beyond the Im
age Wars in Science, Religion and Art (Karlsruhe: ZKM; Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2002); Anne McClanan and Jeffrey Johnson, eds.,
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388 art bulletin September 2012 volume xciv number 3
Negating the Image: Case Studies in Iconoclasm (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate,
2005); and Stacy Boldrick and Richard Clay, eds., Iconoclasm: Contested
Objects, Contested Terms (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2007).
17. For discussion of the question of real presence, see David Freedberg,
The Power of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 27
40; and Robert Maniura and Rupert Shepherd, eds., Presence: The In
herence of the Prototype within Images and Other Objects (Aldershot, U.K.:
Ashgate, 2006), is a good collection but striking in having no paper
on Byzantium.
18. See Barasch, Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea, 23-91, tracing
themes of the animation of the image, objections to images, and the
ories of resemblance in pre-Christian antiquity; Christopher Faraone,
Talismans and Trojan Horses: Guardian Statues in Ancient Greek Myth and
Ritual (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), on varieties of talis
manic and apotropaic images in ancient Greece; Jas Eisner, Roman
Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton: Princeton Uni
versity Press, 2007), 11-48, 225-52; and Joannis Mylonopoulos, ed.,
Divine Images and Human Imaginations in Ancient Greece and Rome
(Leiden: Brill, 2010), for a recent collection of essays.
19. For some issues around real presence and epiphany in ancient reli
gious art, see Richard Gordon, "The Real and the Imaginary: Produc
tion and Religion in the Graeco-Roman World," Art History 2 (1979):
5-34; Eisner, Roman Eyes, 29-48; Milette Gaifman, "Visualized Rituals
and Dedicatory Inscriptions on Votive Offerings to the Nymphs,"
Opuscula 1 (2008): 85-103; Emma Aston, Mixanthrdpoi: Animal-Human
Hybrid Deities in Greek Religion, Kernos suppl. 25 (Liege: Centre Inter
national d'Etude de la Religion Grecque Antique, 2011), 312-37, on
the problem of representing the divine and facilitating divine pres
ence; and Verity J. Piatt, Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in
Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni
versity Press, 2011), 1-211, for images within a culture of epiphany.
For further on the ontological slippage between statues and what they
represent in Greco-Roman antiquity, see Clifford Ando, The Matter of
the Gods: Religion and the Roman Empire (Berkeley: University of Califor
nia Press, 2008), 41-42; and A. Hunt, "Priapus as a Wooden God:
Confronting Manufacture and Destruction," Cambridge Classical Journal
57 (2011): 29-54, esp. 31-33, 48-51.
20. Particularly illuminating for discussion of Plato's Republic is Myles
Burnyeat, "Culture and Society in Plato's Republic," Tanner Lectures for
Human Values 20 (1999): 217-324, and available as a pdf at http://
www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/atoz.html. On Neoplatonism,
see Mark Edwards, "Pagan and Christian Monotheism in the Age of
Constantine," in Approaching Late Antiquity, ed. Simon Swain and Ed
wards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 211-34, esp. 219-20,
on the fragments of Porphyry's De statuis as a polemical riposte to
Christian anti-idolism; and more generally, Algis Uzdavinys, "Anima
tion of Statues in Ancient Civilizations and Neoplatonism," in Late
Antique Epistemology: Other Ways to Truth, ed. Panayiota Vassilopoulou
and Stephen Clark (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan, 2009), 118-40.
21. Excellent discussions include Catherine Osborne, "The Repudiation
of Representation in Plato's Republic and Its Repercussions," Proceed
ings of the Cambridge Philological Society 33 (1987): 53-73, esp. 53—55,
67-72, on the church fathers and iconoclasm; Stephen Halliwell, The
Aesthetics of Mimesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), esp.
334-40, on John of Damascus's use of this material; and Ando, The
Matter of the Gods, 27-41, for the tradition of worrying about images
between Plato and Augustine. For a careful account of the philosophi
cal and theological issues in the history of pre-Christian Greek and
earlier Christian thought, see Kenneth Parry, Depicting the Word: Byzan
tine Iconophile Thought of the Eighth and Ninth Centuries (Leiden: Brill,
1996), 22-63, 89-98; also Besangon, The Forbidden Image, 14-62.
22. For some discussions of these problems in medieval art, see William
Loerke, "Real Presence in Early Christian Art," in Monasticism and the
Arts, ed. Timothy Verdon (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press,
1984), 29-52; Herbert L. Kessler, "Real Absence: Early Medieval Art
and the Metamorphosis of Vision," in Morfologie sociali e culturali in
Europa fra tarda antiquita e alto medievolo, 2 vols. (Spoleto: Centro Ital
iano di Studi sull'Alto Medioevo, 1998), vol. 2, 1157-211; Charles Bar
ber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Icono
clasm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 121, for "directed
absence"; Bissera V. Pentcheva, "The Performative Icon," Art Bulletin
88 (December 2006): 631-55, passim ("present absence," 639).
23. For some discussion of pre-Christian iconoclastic polemics in relation
to ancient cult images (xoana), see Alice Donohue, Xoana and the Ori
gins of Greek Sculpture (Atlanta: Scholas Press, 1988), 85-103, 121-37.
24. For a brief survey of the precedents for Roman imperial damnatio me
moriae, see E. Varner, Mutilation and Transformation: Damnatio Memoriae
and Roman Imperial Portraiture (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 12-20.
25. Harriet Flower, The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Po
litical Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006),
64-65, for the case of D.Junius Silanus in 140 BCE.
26. Ibid., 81-85, for the cases of L. Appuleius Saturninus in 99 BCE and
Sextus Titus in 63 BCE.
27. Ibid., 88-95 on the era of Sulla, 116-21 on Octavian's decision not to
seek erasure for Antony's statues after Actium, by contrast with the
total excision of the poet and prefect of Egypt, Cornelius Gallus, after
his fall in 27 or 26 BCE (125-29).
28. See ibid., 148-49 on Gaius, 199-228 on the complicated case of
Nero, 235-62 on Domitian and the "limits of disgrace." On the Sever
ans, see Harriet Flower, "Les Severes et l'image de la memoire: L'arc
du Forum Boarium a Rome," in Un discours en images de la condamna
tion de m&moire, ed. Stephane Benoist and Anne Daguet-Gagey (Metz:
Centre Regional Universitaire Lorrain d'Histoire, 2008). For the con
tinuing story into late antiquity, see especially Charles Hedrick, History
and Silence: Purge and Rehabilitation of Memory in Late Antiquity (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2000), 98-101. On the principate in partic
ular, see Thomas Pekary, Das romische Kaiserbildnis in Staat, Kult und
Gesellschaft, Das romische Herrscherbild, vol. 3 (Berlin: Mann Verlag,
1985), 134-42; and the outstanding catalog and discussion of Varner,
Mutilation and Transformation.
29. On damnatio, see especially Hedrick, History and Silence, xi-xix, 89
130. The classic account is Friedrich Vittinghoff, Der Staatsfeind in der
romischen Kaiserzeit: Untersuchungen zur "damnatio memoriae" (Berlin:
Junker und Diinnhaupt, 1936).
30. See especially H. Blanck, Wiederverwendung alter Statuen als Ehrendenk
maler bei Griechen und Romern (Rome: Bretschneider, 1969); Erik Var
ner, ed., From Caligula to Constantine: Tyranny and Transformation in
Roman Portraiture (Atlanta: Michael G. Carlos Museum, 2000); and
Peter Stewart, Statues in Roman Society (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2003), 54-56.
31. On issues of discourse in relation to damnatio memoriae, see the two
excellent collected volumes by Stephane Benoist and Anne Daguet
Gagey, eds., Memoire et histoire: Les procedures de condemnation dans
VAntiquitt romaine (Metz: Centre Regional Universitaire Lorrain
d'Histoire, 2007); and idem, Un discours en images. Specifically on im
age, iconoclasm, and discourse, see Peter Stewart, "The Destruction of
Statues in Late Antiquity," in Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity, ed.
R. Miles (London: Routledge, 1999), 159-89; Stewart, Statues in Ro
man Society, 267-83; Jas Eisner, "Iconoclasm and the Preservation of
Memory," in Monuments and Memory: Made and Unmade, ed. Robert
Nelson and Margaret Olin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003), 209-31; Valerie Huet, "Images et damnatio memoriaeCahiers
Glotz 15 (2004): 237-53; Stephane Benoist, "Le pouvoir et ses repre
sentations, en jeu de la memoire," in Benoist and Daguet-Gagey, Un
discours en images, 25-39; Erik Varner, "Memory Sanctions, Identity
Politics and Altered Portraits," in ibid., 129-52; Caroline Vout, "The
Art of Damnatio Memoriae," in ibid., 153-72; Valerie Huet, "Spolia in
re, spolia in se et damnatio memoriae. Les statues et les empereurs julio
claudiens chez Suetone, ou de veritables jeux de tetes," in ibid., 173
211; and Lauren Hackworth Petersen, "The Presence of Damnatio Me
moriae in Roman Art," Source: Notes in the History of Art 30 (2011): 1-8.
For specific accounts of particular objects, see Marianne Bergmann
and Paul Zanker, " 'Damnatio Memoriae': Umgearbeitete Nero- und
Domitiansportrats; Zur Ikonographie der flavischen Kaiser und des
Nerva," and H. Jucker, "Iulisch-Claudische Kaiser- und Prinzenportrats
als 'Palimpseste,' " Jahrbuch des deutschen Archaologischen Instituts 96
(1981): 317-412, and 236-316; and John Pollini, "Damnatio Memoriae
in Stone: Two Portraits of Nero Recut to Vespasian in American Mu
seums," American fournal of Archaeology 88 (1984): 547-55.
32. See Hedrick, History and Silence, 108-11.
33. Key items include Edward J. Martin, A History of the Iconoclastic Contro
versy (London: Macmillan, 1930); Brown, "A Dark-Age Crisis"; Bryer
and Herrin, Iconoclasm; Henry, "What Was the Iconoclastic Contro
versy About?"; Jaroslav Pelikan, Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for
Icons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Leslie Brubaker and
John Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (c. 680-850): The Sources:
An Annotated Survey (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2001); Barber, Figure
and Likeness, and Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclastic
Era. Cormack, "Art and Iconoclasm," offers a useful and up-to-date
summary.
34. Among the key texts on this (themselves repeatedly cited by icono
philes in defense of the icons, although technically they describe the
relations of the emperor with his portrait) are Athanasius, Third Dis
course against the Arians, in Patrilogia cursus completus: Series graeca (here
after, PG), ed. J.-P. Migne, 161 vols. (Paris: Migne, 1857-66), vol. 26,
col. 332B: "He who venerates the image, venerates the emperor repre
sented in it"; Basil, On the Holy Spirit 17.44, in PG, vol. 32, col. 149C:
"For the imperial image too is called the emperor, and yet there are
not two emperors: neither is the power cut asunder nor the glory di
vided ... since the honor shown to the image is transmitted to the
prototype"; Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion 65.8.10, in Epiphanius III,
ed. Karl Holl (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1985), 12: "For the emperors
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ICONOCLASM AS DISCOURSE: FROM ANTIQUITY TO BYZANTIUM 339
are not two emperors through having an image but the emperor and
his image." See, for example, Kenneth Setton, Christian Attitudes to the
Emperor in the Fourth Century (New York: Columbia University Press,
1941), 196-211; and Ambrosios Giakalis, Images of the Divine: The The
ology of Icons at the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 34
36.
35. See Robert Payne Smith, The Third Part of the Ecclesiastical History of
John, Bishop of Ephesus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1860), 135
36; and Cyril Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 312-1453 (To
ronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 133.
36. See Grabar, L 'iconoclasme byzantine, 48, 55-56; and Mango, The Art of
the Byzantine Empire, 141. On Philippicus, see Julia Herrin, "Philippikos
the Gentle," in From Rome to Constantinople: Studies in Honour of Averil
Cameron, ed. Hagit Amirav and B. ter Haar Romeny (Louvain: Peeters,
2007), 251-62.
37. See, for example, Kitzinger, "The Cult of Images," 90-92, 122-25; or
Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of
Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 102-14.
38. For examples of Classical iconoclasm in the material record, see R.
Ross Holloway, "The Mutilation of Statuary in Classical Greece," in
Miscellanea Mediterranea (Providence, R.I.: Center for Old World Ar
chaeology and Art, 2000), 77-82; and Nurten Seving et al., "A New
Painted Graeco-Persian Sarcophagus from Can," Studia Troica 11
(2001): 383-420, esp. 394-95. My thanks to Richard Neer for alerting
me to this literature.
39. The details are complicated. Philomelus orchestrated the robbery of
the sanctuary in order to pay the mercenaries who were to fight on
behalf of the Phocians against the forces of the Amphictyonic League,
led latterly by Philip of Macedon. The outcome of the battles was ulti
mately comprehensive defeat for the Phocians and their allies, as well
as the deaths of the Phocian generals. The Delphic act of iconoclasm,
a replay of the shameful treatment of the corpses of Onomarchus and
Philomelus, was both an act of vengeance against their depredations
of the sanctuary and a political gesture of consonance with Philip, the
new de facto master of Greece. For discussion, see Pierre Ellinger, La
legende nationale phocidienne, Bulletin de Correspondance Hellenique,
suppl. 27 (Athens: Ecole Frangaise d'Athenes; Paris: Diffusion de Boc
card, 1993), 326-32.
40. See Emile Bourget, Les comptes du IVe si&cle, Fouilles de Delphes, vol. 3,
fasc. 5 (Paris: De Boccard, 1932), 107, no. 23, "Comptes de Naopes,"
lines 41-47; and Georges Roux, "Les comptes du IVe siecle et la re
construction du temple d'Apollon a Delphes," Revue Archeologique,
1966, 245-96, esp. 272-73. My thanks to John Ma for this reference
and discussion.
41. On the deep complications of Jewish "aniconism" in late antiquity
and its relations to the rise of Jewish art, see Steven Fine, Art and Ju
daism in the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), 69-81, 95-97, 110-23; and Lee Levine, "Figural Art in
Ancient Judaism," Ars Judaica 1 (2005): 9-26. For the medieval and
modern historiography of Jewish aniconism, see Kalman Bland, The
Artless Jew (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). On questions
of iconoclasm in late antique Judaism, see Steven Fine, "Iconoclasm
and the Art of Late Antique Palestinian Synagogues," in From Dura to
Sepphoris, ed. L. Levine and Zeev Weiss (Portsmouth, R.I.: Journal of
Roman Archaeology, 2000), 183-94; and Annabel Wharton, "Erasure:
Eliminating the Space of Late Antique Judaism," in ibid., 195-214.
For the intriguing suggestion that attitudes to image worship in Rab
binic Judaism ventriloquize those in the hegemonic Christian culture,
to the extent of tracing a rising trajectory in the cult of images toward
the Iconoclastic period, see Rachel Neis, "Embracing Icons: The Face
of Jacob on the Throne of God," Images 1 (2007): 36-54, esp. 47-54.
42. This is effectively a Protestant idealization, which saw early Christian
ity as a pure and aniconic religion, close to an ideally aniconic Juda
ism, later to be corrupted by various forms of idolatrous and paganiz
ing accretions (to be identified with what became Roman Catholi
cism). Of course, the real issue here is an internal Protestant-Catholic
argument about German culture projected back onto its Christian
ancestry. For an acute discussion of the inevitable Protestant and
Catholic apologetics in relation to the study of the early church, see
Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christi
anities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chi
cago Press, 1990); and for the art history of this period, see Jas Eis
ner, "Archaeologies and Agendas: Jewish and Early Christian Art in
Late Antiquity," Journal of Roman Studies 83 (2003): 114-28.
43. See especially Ernst von Dobschutz, Christusbilder: Untersuchungen zur
christlichen Legende (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1899), chap. 2; Hugo
Koch, Die altchristliche Bilderfrage nach den literarischen Quellen (Gottin
gen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1917); W. Elliger, Die Stellung der
alten Christen zu den Bildern in den ersten vier JahrhuncLerten (nach den
Angaben der zeitgenossischen kirchlichen Schriftsteller) (Leipzig: Dieterich,
1930); idem, Zur Entstehung und fruhen Entwicklung der altchristlichen
Bildkunst (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1934); and Ernest Bevan, Holy Images: An
Inquiry into Idolatry and Image-Worship in Ancient Paganism and in Christi
anity (London: Allen and Unwin, 1940). This position, established as
a Protestant ideal on the basis of a (selective) series of texts, was ac
cepted by a generation of art historians such as Kitzinger, "The Cult
of Images," 88-89; and Theodore Klauser in a series of articles under
the general title "Studien zur Entstehungsgeschichte der christlichen
Kunst," published in the 1950s and 1960s in vols. 1-10 of the Jahrbuch
fur Antike und Christentum. See the discussion by Helmut Feld, De Iko
noklasmus des Westens (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990), 2-6; and Paul Corby
Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994), 7-10.
44. Notably, by Mary Charles Murray, "Art and the Early Church," Journal
of Theological Studies 28 (1977): 305-45; Sister Charles Murray, Rebirth
and Afterlife: A Study of the Transmutation of Some Pagan Imagery in Early
Christian Funerary Art (Oxford: BAR, 1981); and Finney, The Invisible
God.
45. Arguably, the pattern of their attitudes parallels those of the rabbis in
relation to the visual arts, which included the active toleration of im
ages within late antique Judaism. See Fine, Art and Judaism, 82-123.
46. Strong versions, in addition to those cited in n. 44 above, include
Margaret Miles, Image as Insight (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 43-48;
Robin Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art (London: Routledge,
2000), 8-31; and Andrew Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition and Orig
inality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002),
194-96.
47. The relevant texts are in Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 16-18
41-43.
48. As argued in relation to Eusebius by Murray, Rebirth and Afterlife, 25
30. The iconophiles in the eighth century did not need to resort to
accusations of forgery in this case: Eusebius's Arianism disqualified his
views on the grounds of heresy (Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova, vol.
13, 316A; and Sahas, Icon and Logos, 135). The case for Ephiphanius's
opposition to images being "fictitious and inauthentic," "spurious, and
written by someone using Epiphanius' name, as has often happened,"
was already made by John of Damascus in his Orations on the Divine
Images 1.25, 2.18, in, for example, Louth, St John Damascene, 202, 206.
John was followed by the Seventh Ecumenical Council of 787 (in
Mansi, vol. 13, 292E-296E; and Sahas, 117-20). Likewise, many of the
texts adduced by iconophiles (such as the florilegia collected by John
of Damascus at the end of each of his Orations on the Divine Images)
are open to similar accusations as either wholly fictitious or at least
elaborations: for the case of Nilus of Sinai, see Hans Georg Thummel,
"Neilos von Ancyra und die Bilder," Byzantinische Zeitschrift 71 (1978):
10-21; and Noble, Images, Iconoclasm and the Carolinians, 18. The ma
jor modern advocate of the theory of interpolation and rewriting
across the testimonia is Paul Speck: see the various items referred to
by Barber, Figure and Likeness, 145 n. 4 (which, for the sake of brevity,
I will not list here). Skepticism like Speck's (which in my view is in
danger of overstating the case for doubt in several cases) is strongly
influential on Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclastic Era,
for example, 45-50, 94, 208-10, 772, 775. For doubts about following
Speck too closely, see Beat Brenk, The Apse, the Image and the Icon
(Wiesbaden: Reichart, 2010), 96-97; and Averil Cameron, "The Anxi
ety of Images: Meanings and Material Objects," in Images of the Byzan
tine World: Visions, Messages and Meanings; Studies Presented to Leslie Bru
baker, ed. Angeliki Lymberopoulou (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2011),
47-56, esp. 49.
49. The case for Eusebius's letter being genuine has now been made with
force: see Stephen Gero, "The True Image of Christ: Eusebius' Letter
to Constantia Reconsidered," Journal of Theological Studies 32 (1981):
460-70; it has been accepted (contrary to her earlier position) by
Mary Charles Murray, "Le probleme de l'iconophobie et les premiers
siecles Chretiens," in Nicee II, 787-1987: Douze sttcles d'images religieuses,
ed. Francois Boespflug and Nicolas Lossky (Paris: Cert, 1987), 39-50,
esp. 44-49; Hans Georg Thummel, "Eusebios' Brief an Kaiserin Kon
stantia," Klio 66 (1984): 210-22; and Claudia Sode and Paul Speck,
"Ikonoklasmus vor der Zeit? Der Brief des Eusebios von Kaisareia an
Kaiserin Konstantia," Jahrbuch der osterreichischen Byzantinistik 54 (2004):
113-34, with serious doubts about reconstituting anything that might
resemble the original text.
50. This is broadly the position elaborated by Noble, Images, Iconoclasm
and the Carolingians, 10-45.
51. On image as Scripture among the Manichaeans, see Hans-Joachim
Klimkeit, "On the Nature of Manichaean Art," in Studies in Mani
chaean Literature and Art, by Manfred Heuser and Klimkeit (Leiden:
E.J. Brill, 1998), 270-90, esp. 270-75. The key texts include Keph
alaion 92 (234.24-236.6), in Iain Gardner, The Kephalaia of the Teacher
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), 241-42; and Kephalaion 151 (371.25-30), in
Gardner and Samuel Lieu, Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 266.
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390 ART BULLETIN SEPTEMBER 2012 VOLUME XCIV NUMBER 3
52. Origen, Contra Celsum 6.24-38, discusses the diagrams said to have
been used by the Ophite Gnostics.
53. For the text, see Acts of John 26-29, in Edgar Hennecke and Wilhelm
Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2 (London: Lutterworth,
1964), 220-21. For discussions, see J. Breckenridge, "Apocrypha of
Early Christian Portraiture," Byzantinische Zeitschrift 67 (1974): 101-9;
Siri Sande, "The Icon and Its Origins in Greco-Roman Portraiture," in
Aspects of Late Antiquity and Early Byzantium, ed. Lennart Ryden and
Jan Rosenqvist (Stockholm: Swedish Research Institute, 1993), 75-84,
esp. 77-78; Thomas Mathews, "The Emperor and the Icon," Acta ad
Archaeologiam et Atrium Historiam Pertinentia 15 (2001): 163-77, esp.
167; and idem, The Clash of Gods, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton Uni
versity Press, 2003), 178. On early icons and apocryphal texts, see now
P. Dilley, "Christian Icon Practice in Apocryphal Literature: Consecra
tion and the Conversion of Synagogues into Churches," Journal of Ro
man Archaeology 23 (2010): 285-302.
54. Irenaeus, Adversus haereses 1.23.4, 1.25.6, in Mathews, The Clash of Gods,
177-78; and Bremmer, "Iconoclast, Iconoclastic and Iconoclasm," 6.
55. The largest category of our surviving gold glasses (about 50 percent
of the 278 whose iconography can be distinguished) are portraits of
Christ, the apostles, saints, and orants: for illuminating discussion, see
Lucy Grig, "Portraits, Pontiffs and the Christianization of Fourth Cen
tury Rome," Papers of the British School at Rome 72 (2004): 203-301, esp.
205-6, with Table 1 and 215-30. Discussions of the relation of icons
to portraiture include Andre Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of
Its Origins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 60-86; Robin
Jensen, Face to Face: Portraits of the Divine in Early Christianity (Minneap
olis: Fortress Press, 2005); and Karen Marsengill, "Portraits and Icons:
Between Reality and Holiness in Byzantium" (PhD diss., Princeton
University, 2010).
56. See Brenk, The Apse, the Image and the Icon, 66-71, for the use of im
ages in private veneration of the Virgin in the fourth century, 66-68
on gold glasses.
57. On the roots of icons in ancient portraiture, see, for example, Siri
Sande, "Pagan pinakes and Christian Icons: Continuity or Parallelism,"
Acta ad Archaeologiam et Atrium Historiam Pertinentia 18 (2003): 81-100,
esp. 98-99; and Jensen, Face to Face, 35-68 on pre-Christian culture,
131-99 for portraits of Christ and the saints.
58. See Marguerite Rassart-Debergh, "De l'icone paienne a l'icone chre
tienne," Le Monde Copte 18 (1990): 39-70; Mathews, "The Emperor
and the Icon," for an initial list; and Reiner Sorries, Das Malibu-Tripty
chon (Dettelbach: Roll, 2003). V. Rondot is currently creating a cata
logue raisonne, I gather.
59. Brown, "A Dark-Age Crisis," 10; his line is broadly followed by most
discussions since, such as those cited in nn. 8-11 above, even where
the dates given to the rise of the cult of icons may differ.
60. A rare voice against the idea that image veneration was "a sudden in
novation in the sixth century (or even the fourth)" is Andrew Louth,
Greek East and Latin West: The Church AD 681—1071 (Crestwood, N.Y.:
St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2007), 43-46, at 45. If the so-called Dia
logue of the Monk and Recluse Moschos belongs to the second third of
the fifth century, as its most recent editor has argued, then that is sig
nificant textual support for an Orthodox cult of icons well before the
sixth century. See Alexander Alexakis, "The Dialogue of the Monk and
Recluse Moschos Concerning the Holy Icons: An Early Iconophile Text,"
Dumbarton Oaks Papers 52 (1998): 187-224, esp. 209-10 on the date,
and 210-16 on iconophile arguments.
61. Idolatry is a vast field, of course. See, for example, L'idolatrie, Rencon
tres de l'Ecole du Louvre (Paris: Documentation Frangaise, 1990);
specifically on icons, Anthony Eastmond, "Between Icon and Idol:
The Uncertainty of Imperial Images," in Icon and Word: The Power of
Images in Byzantium: Studies Presented to Robin Cormack, ed. Eastmond
and Liz James (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2003), 73-85.
62. For an interesting and subtle account of the relations of Early Chris
tian apologetics with the image culture of the Greco-Roman environ
ment, see Laura Nasrallah, Christian Responses to Roman Art and Archi
tecture: The Second-Century Church amid the Spaces of Empire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010). But this book is oddly reticent
about idols or issues of idolatry, arguably underplaying the polemical
counterpart to the culture of apology.
63. See Frank Trombley, Hellenic Religion and Christianization, c. 370-529,
2 vols. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993-94), vol. 1, 207-22 on Gaza, also vol.
2, 12-15; Eberhard Sauer, The Archaeology of Religious Hatred in the Ro
man and Early Medieval World (Stroud, 2003); the papers collected by
Johannes Hahn, Stephen Emmel, and Ulrich Gotter, eds., From Temple
to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late An
tiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2008), esp. the essay by David Frankfurter and
the two by Hahn; the papers collected by Elise Friedland, Sharon
Herbert, and Yaron Eliav, eds., The Sculptural Environment of the Roman
Near East (Louvain: Peeters, 2008), esp. those by Frank Trombley, Da
vid Frankfurter, and John Pollini; and R. R. R. Smith, "Defacing the
Gods at Aphrodisias," in Historical and Religious Memory in the Ancient
World, ed. Beale Dignas and Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), 283-326 (I am very grateful to Bert Smith for letting me see
this in advance of publication). Most work has been on the East, but
see Rachel Kousser, "A Sacred Landscape: The Creation, Maintenance
and Destruction of Religious Monuments in Roman Germany," Res
57, no. 8 (2010): 120-39.
64. For a history of the late antique cramming of Constantinople with
earlier statuary, see Sarah Bassett, The Urban Image of Late Antique Con
stantinople (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), with cata
log, discussion, and bibliography. For the interesting evidence of the
fourth-century life of Saint Abercius using a number of much earlier
epigraphic monuments in Hierapolis in Phrygia to create the image
of a Christian culture of cherishing the ancient past, see Peter Thone
mann, "Abercius of Hierapolis: Christianization and Social Memory in
Late Antique Asia Minor," in Dignas and Smith, Historical and Reli
gious Memory, 257-82 (my thanks to Peter Thonemann for letting me
see this in advance of publication).
65. See, for example, Cyril Mango, "Antique Statuary and the Byzantine
Beholder," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 17 (1963): 55-75; Helen Saradi
Mendelovici, "Christian Attitudes to Pagan Monuments in Late Antiq
uity and Their Legacy in Later Byzantine Centuries," Dumbarton Oaks
Papers 44 (1990): 47-61; and Liz James, " 'Pray Not to Fall into Temp
tation and Be on Your Guard': Pagan Statues in Christian Constanti
nople," Gesta 35 (1996): 12-20.
66. For iconoclasm, see John Pollini, "Christian Desecration and Mutila
tion of the Parthenon," Athenische Mitteilungen 122 (2007): 207-28; for
affection, see Anthony Kaldellis, The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and
Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009). For an overview of the range of Christian responses to pagan
statuary in the East, see Ine Jacobs, "Production to Destruction? Pa
gan and Mythological Statuary in Asia Minor," American Journal of Ar
chaeology 114 (2010): 267-303.
67. For the letter, see Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 157-58; with
Noble, Images, Iconoclasm and the Carolingians, 260-63.
68. For discussion of the image conflict over Monotheletism between
Pope Martin I (r. 649-53) and Emperor Constans (r. 641-68), see G.
Rushworth, "The Church of Santa Maria Antiqua," Papers of the British
School at Rome 1 (1902): 1-123, esp. 68-73; Per Jonas Nordhagen, "S.
Maria Antiqua: The Frescoes of the Seventh Century," Acta ad Archaeo
logiam et Atrium Historiam Pertinentia 8 (1978): 89-142, esp. 97-100;
and Beat Brenk, "Papal Patronage in a Greek Church in Rome," in
Santa Maria Antiqua al Foro Romano: Centi anni dopo, ed. John Os
borne, Rasmus Brandt, and Giuseppe Morganti (Rome: Campisano,
2004), 67-81, esp. 77-79. For nuanced visual resistance by Pope Ser
gius I (r. 687-701) to the 82nd Canon of the Quinisext Council of
692, which banned the use of the image of the lamb for Christ, see
on Saint Peter's Liber pontificalis 86.11, in G. Bordi, "L'Agnus Dei, I
quattro simboli degli evangelisti e i ventiquattro seniors nel mosaico
della facciata di San Pietro in Vaticano," in La pittura medievale a
Roma, vol. 1, ed. Maria Andaloro, L'orizzonte tardoantico e le nuove im
magini (Milan: Jaca, 2006), 416-18; Andrew Ekonomou, Byzantine
Rome and the Greek Popes (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2007), 222
25; and Paolo Liverani, "St Peter's: Leo the Great and the Leprosy of
Constantine," Papers of the British School at Rome 76 (2008): 155-72,
esp. 161—64. For the uses of images by Pope John VII (r. 705—7) at S.
Maria Antiqua, see Per Jonas Nordhagen, "The Frescoes of John VII
(AD 705-707) in S. Maria Antiqua in Rome," Acta ad Archaeologiam et
Atrium Historiam Pertinentia 3 (1968): 41-54, 75-78, 84, 97; Leslie Bru
baker, "100 Years of Solitude: S. Maria Antiqua and the History of
Byzantine Art History," in Osborne et al., 41-49, esp. 44-45; with his
torical context in James Breckenridge, "Evidence for the Nature of
Relations between Pope John VII and the Byzantine Emperor Justin
ian II," Byzantinische Zeitschrift 65 (1972): 364-74; and Jean-Marie
Sansterre, "Jean VII (701-707): Ideologic pontificale et realisme poli
tique," in Rayonnement grec: Hommages a Charles Delvoye, ed. Lydie Had
ermann-Misguich and Georges Raepsaet (Brussels: Editions de
l'Universite de Bruxelles, 1982), 377-88.
69. Grabar, L'iconoclasme byzantine, 67-74; James Breckenridge, The Numis
matic Iconography of Justinian II (New York: American Numismatic Soci
ety, 1959), 66-77; and Robin Cormack, Writing in Gold (London:
George Philip, 1985), 96-106. The more recent literature on the
Umayyads is more nuanced in seeing a multiplicity of influences on
the Arab coinage (not least in relation to the conquest of Jerusalem),
but preserves the sense of an iconographic and partly polemical dia
logue with the Christians: see N. Jamil, "Caliph and Qutb: Poetry as a
Source for Interpreting the Transformation of the Byzantine Cross on
Steps on Umayyad Coinage," in Bayt al-Maqdis: Jerusalem and Early Is
lam, ed. Jeremy Johns, Oxford Studies in Islamic Art, vol. 9, pt. 2 (Ox
ford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 11-58, esp. 45-55; Julian Raby,
"In Vitro Veritas. Glass Pilgrim Vessels from Seventh-Century Jerusa
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ICONOCLASM AS DISCOURSE: FROM ANTIQUITY TO BYZANTIUM 3gj
lem," in ibid., 111-90, esp. 119-24, 147-48, 182; Luke Treadwell,
"Mihrab and 'Anaza or 'Sacrum and Spear'?: A Reconsideration of an
Early Marwanid Silver Drachm," Muqarnas 22 (2005): 1-28, esp. 17,
19-21; and Robert Hoyland, "Writing the Biography of the Prophet
Muhammad," History Compass 5 (2007): 581-607, esp. 593—96. Gener
ally on Islam and iconoclasm in this period, see Leslie Barnard, The
Graeco-Roman and Oriental Background of the Iconoclastic Controversy (Lei
den: E.J. Brill, 1973), 10-33; and Oleg Grabar, "Islam and Icono
clasm," in Bryer and Herrin, Iconoclasm, 45-52.
70. In an Iraqi variant, a type that appropriated the Christian orans ico
nography was also produced under 'Abd al-Malik's half brother, Bishr
ibn Marwan, in the same period. See Luke Treadwell, "The 'Orans'
Drachms of Bishr ibn Marwan and the Figural Coinage of the Early
Marwanids," in Johns, Bayt al-Maqdis, 223-70.
71. I am grateful to Finbarr Barry Flood for pointing this out to me.
72. On Umar II, see Nikita Elisseeff, La description de Damas d'Ibn Asakir
(Damascus: Institut Fran^ais de Damas, 1959), 66 (section 44 of Ibn
Asakir's text). I am most grateful to Finbarr Barry Flood for tipping
me off on this topic and giving me the reference. On Yazid II's edict,
see, for example, Aleksandre Vasiliev, "The Iconoclastic Edict of the
Caliph Yazid II, AD 721," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 9, no. 10 (1956): 23
47; A. Grabar, L'iconoclasme byzantine, 105-9; G. R. D. King, "Islam,
Iconoclasm, and the Declaration of Doctrine," Bulletin of the School of
Oriental and African Studies 48 (1985): 267-77; Sidney Griffith, "Im
ages, Islam and Christian Icons: A Moment in the Christian/Muslim
Encounter in Early Islamic Times," in La Syrie de Byzance & VIslam Vlle
Vllle sidcles, ed. Pierre Canivet and Jean-Paul Rey-Coquais (Damascus:
Institut Fran^ais de Damas, 1992), 121-38; Robert Schick, The Chris
tian Communities of Palestine from Byzantine to Islamic Rule (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995), 180-219, for a full archaeological
and contextual discussion, 215-17 on the edict; Garth Fowden, "Late
Antique Art in Syria and Its Umayyad Evolutions," Journal of Roman
Archaeology 17 (2004): 282-304, esp. 294, 300-301; Glen Bowersock,
Mosaics as History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006),
91—111; and M. Guidetto, "L'editto di Yazid II: Immagini e identita
religiosa nel Bilad al-Sham dell' VIII secolo," in LYIII secolo: Un secolo
inquieto; Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi, Cividale del Friuli 4-7
dicembre 2008, ed. Valentino Pace (Friuli: Comune di Cividale di
Friuli, 2010), 69-79. On the specific issue of (Christian) iconoclasm
at the church of St. Stephen in Umm-al-Rasas, see, for example, Su
sanna Ognibene, Umm-al-Rasas: La chiesa di Santo Stefano ed il "problema
iconofobico" (Rome: Bretschneider, 2002), esp. 97-153.
73. For example, O. Grabar, "Islam and Iconoclasm," 46.
74. See Ekonomou, Byzantine Rome.
75. I use the word "economy" deliberately; it is the key patristic and Byz
antine term for the divine dispensation, and not least God's manage
ment of the created world, including man's relations with God and
the relations of human beings with each other. See especially Mond
zain, Image, Icon, Economy, 18-66, for a semantic discussion of the
concept in Greek and Byzantine culture, and 69-170 on the "iconic
economy."
76. This is the main topic of Noble, Images, Iconoclasm and the Carolingians,
who has transformed the level of discussion on the Carolingian as
pects of the problem.
77. Strikingly, Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclastic Era, offer
almost no discussion of theology as such, in a monumental volume of
more than nine hundred pages.
78. This is a vast topic. See, for example, Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian
Tradition, vol. 2, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1974), 37-90; Joan M. Hussey, The Orthodox Church
in the Byzantine Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 9-29;
and Henry Chadwick, East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 50-70.
79. Geov ouSevl eoiKevai' 4>r|crLv '8ioTT€p auTov oi»8eis eK^iaGeiv cikovos
SuvaTai'
80. For example, Paul Alexander, "An Ascetic Sect of Iconoclasts in Sev
enth Century Armenia," in Late Classical and Mediaeval Studies in Honor
of Albert Mathias Friend, Jr., ed. Kurt Weitzmann (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1955), 151-60.
81. For a brief but comprehensive resume with bibliography, see Noble,
Images, Iconoclasm and the Carolingians, 20-26, including texts known
only from the iconophile excerpts of the Second Council of Nicaea of
787.
82. For text and discussion, see Paul Alexander, "Hypatius of Ephesus: A
Note on Image Worship in the Sixth Century," Harvard Theological Re
view 45 (1952): 178-84; also Gunter Lange, Bild und Wort: Die kateche
tische Funktion des Bildes in der griechischen Theologie des sechsten bis
neunten Jahrhunderts (Wurzburg: Echter Verlag, 1969), 44-60; Stephen
Gero, "Hypatius of Ephesus on the Cult of Images," in Christianity,
Judaism and Other Greco-Roman Cults: Studies for Morton Smith, ed. Jacob
Neusner (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1975), 208-16; and Hans Georg Thum
mel, Die Fruhgeschichte der ostkirchlichen Bildlehre: Texte und Untersuchun
gen zur Zeit vor dem Bilderstreit (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1992), 103-6.
83. For the text, see Vincent Deroche, "L'Apologie contre les Juifs de Leon
tios de Neapolis," Travaux et Mtmoires 12 (1994): 45-104; with Nor
man Baynes, "The Icons before Iconoclasm," in Baynes, Byzantine
Studies, 226-39, esp. 97-98; Lange, Bild und Wort, 621-76; Thummel,
Die Fruhgeschichte der ostkirchlichen Bildlehre, 127-36, 233-36; and Bar
ber, Figure and Likeness, 17-24.
84. See Sirapie Der Nersessian, "Une apologie des images du septieme
siecle," in Etudes Byzantines et Armeniennes (Louvain: Orientaliste,
1973), vol. 1, 379-403, esp. 379-88, for a French translation. Discus
sions include idem, "Image Worship in Armenia and Its Opponents,"
in ibid., 405-15; and Thomas Mathews, "Vrt'anes K'ert'ogh and the
Early Theology of Images," Revue des Etudes Armtniennes 31 (2008-9):
101-26.
85. For Speck's repeated assaults on Leontius and the defense of the text
by Deroche, see the list in Barber, Figure and Likeness, 146 n. 12; for
dating and reattributing the Armenian defense, see P. Schmidt, "Gab
es einen armenischen Ikonoklasmus? Rekonstruktion eines Doku
ments der Kaukasisch-Armenischen Theologiegeschichte," in Das
Frankfurter Konzil von 794, ed. Rainer Berndt, pt. 2 (Mainz: Selbstver
lag der Gesellschaft fur Mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte, 1997),
947-64.
86. See Lawrence Duggan, "Was Art Really the Book of the Illiterate?"
Word and Image 5 (1989): 227-51; Celia Chazelle, "Pictures, Books and
the Illiterate: Pope Gregory I's Letters to Serenus of Marseilles," Word
and Image 6 (1990): 138-53; and Noble, Images, Iconoclasm and the Car
olingians, 42-43.
87. See especially Barber, Figure and Likeness, 40-54, on the importance of
Canon 82; and Noble, Images, Iconoclasm and the Carolingians, 26-27.
For Canon 82 as a response to the theological disputes of the seventh
century, see Cameron, "The Language of Images," 38-39.
88. See George Nedungatt and Michael Featherstone, eds., The Council in
Trullo Revisited (Rome: Pontificio Istituto Orientale, 1995), 155, 162
64, 180-81.
89. See Cyril Mango, The Brazen House: A Study of the Vestibule of the Impe
rial Palace of Constantinople (Copenhagen: Kommission hos Munks
gaard, 1959), 113, 170-74.
90. See A. Grabar, Uiconoclasme byzantine, 130-42; Mango, The Brazen
House, 108-48; Anatole Frolow, "Le Christ de la Chalce," Byzantion 33
(1963): 107-20; and Stephen Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm during the
Reign of Leo III (Louvain, 1973), 95, 212-17.
91. The key discussion is Marie-France Auzepy, "La destruction de l'icone
du Christ de la Chalce par Leon III: Propagande ou realite?" Byzan
tion 60 (1990): 445-92, which reviews the documentary evidence in
detail; also Leslie Brubaker, "The Chalke Gate, the Construction of
the Past and the Trier Ivory," Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 23
(1999): 258-85; and Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclas
tic Era, 128-35. The strongest independent evidence for the existence
of the Chalke Christ before Leo III and therefore for his demolition
of it is the reference in the Liber pontificalis, in relation to the pontifi
cate of Zacharias (r. 741-52), to the erection of a portico and tower
at the Lateran with "a figure of the Savior before the doors [figuram
Salvatoris ante fores]"; see Louis Duchesne, ed., Liber pontificalis, vol. 1
(Paris: E. de Boccard, 1955), 432. This looks very like an iconophile
riposte to Leo's act of iconoclasm—"a silent rebuke of Constantino
ple's religious position." See the discussion of John Haldon and Brian
Ward-Perkins, "Evidence from Rome for the Image of Christ at the
Chalke Gate," Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 23 (1999): 286-96,
esp. 288, 295. Despite what is now the prevailing view, some still ac
cept the Chalke Christ and its demolition, for example, Bissera V.
Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual and the Senses in Byzantium
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 63.
92. On Irene's "restoration" of the image, see Mango, The Brazen House,
121-22.
93. On Leo V's iconoclasm of the Chalke Christ, see ibid., 122.
94. The iconoclasts' image of a cross at the Chalke Gate is attested by a
group of poems, one of which appears to have been its inscription.
However, it is not clear whether the epigrams relate to a cross set up
by Leo III and Constantine before the Second Council of Nicaea or
one set up by Leo V after he removed Irene's icon of Christ. See
ibid., 118-19, 122; and Gero, "Hypatius of Ephesus," 113-26.
95. Mango, The Brazen House, 125-32.
96. On Leo III and iconoclasm in general, see Brubaker and Haldon, By
zantium in the Iconoclast Era, 69-155.
97. On the Ecloga, see Ludwig Burgmann, Ecloga: Das Gesetzbuch Leons III
und Konstantinos' V (Frankfurt: Lowenklau-Gesellschaft, 1983); with
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392 art bulletin September 2012 volume xciv number 3
Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era: The Sources, 286
91.
98. Pace the claims of Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm, 97-103; Brubaker, "On
the Margins," 109-11, reviews the evidence trenchantly. Generic and
hyperbolic references aside, we have only five acts of destruction de
scribed with any specificity in the texts and one more attested ar
chaeologically. This evidence touches on only Constantinople and its
immediate environs (Nicaea). See also Brubaker and Haldon, Byzan
tium in the Iconoclast Era, 199-212.
99. On acheiropoieta, see Dobschutz, Christusbilder; Eva Kuryluk, Veronica
and Her Cloth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 28-33; Belting, Likeness and
Presence, 47-77; Herbert Kessler and Gerhard Wolf, eds., The Holy Face
and the Paradox of Representation (Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale,
1998), esp. the essays by Hans Belting, Averil Cameron, J. Trilling,
and Wolf; and Gerhard Wolf, Schleier und Spiegel: Traditionen des Chris
tusbildes und die Bildkonzepte der Renaissance (Munich: Fink, 2002), 16
33.
100. See Louth, St John Damascene, 3—8, for details. The case that at least in
part John was writing against iconophobic attitudes among local Pales
tinian Christians living under the caliphate has been made by Sidney
Griffith, "John of Damascus and the Church of Syria in the Umayyad
Era: The Intellectual and Cultural Milieu of Orthodox Christians in
the World of Islam," Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies 11 (2008): 1—32.
101. See Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era: The Sources,
248; and Louth, St John Damascene, 208. Paul Speck, Artabasdos, der
rechtglaubige Vorkampfer des gottlichen Lehren (Bonn: Habelt, 1981), 179
243, characteristically goes for a different view and places the three
orations after the Ecumenical Council of 754. Note that no one has
doubted that the order in which we refer to them (from 1 to 3) re
flects the actual order of writing.
102. For the text, see Bonifatius Kotter, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damas
kos, vol. 3, Contra imaginum calumniatores orationes tres (Berlin: de
Gruyter, 1975). I use (with adaptations) the translations of David An
derson, in On the Divine Images by Saint John of Damascus (Westwood,
N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1980); and Andrew Louth, in Three
Treatises on the Divine Images, by Saint John of Damascus (Westwood,
N.Y.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2003). For discussion, see Chris
tophe von Schonborn, L'icone de Christ (Fribourg: Editions Universi
taires, 1976), 191-200; Hans Georg Thummel, Bilderlehre und Bilderstreit:
Arbeiten zur Auseinandersetzung uber die Ikone und ihre Begrundung vor
nehmlich im 8. und 9. Jahrhundert (Wurzburg: Augustinianus Verlag,
1991), 55-63; Parry, Depicting the Word; Louth, St John Damascene, 193
222; Barber, Figure and Likeness, 70-77; and Pentcheva, The Sensual
Icon, 66-71.
103. Note that the term proskynesis is applicable to both forms of venera
tion, whereas latreia is for God alone. See Thummel, Bilderlehre und
Bilderstreit, 101-14; Parry, Depicting the Word, 166-70; and Louth, St
John Damascene, 214—25.
104. For the development of John's theology of matter among the later
iconophile theologians, see Kenneth Parry, "Theodore Studites and
the Patriarch Nicephorus on Image-Making as a Christian Imperative,"
Byzantion 59 (1989): 164-83, esp. 169-71.
105. See Henry, "What Was the Iconoclastic Controversy About?" 25-26,
who rightly sees that John moved the debate from questions of idola
try to "whether any material aids were permissible in worship"; also
Marie-France Auzepy, "L'iconodoulie: Defense de l'image ou de la
devotion a l'image?" in Boespflug and Lossky, Nicee II, 157-66.
106. Thomas Noble, "John Damascene and the History of the Iconoclastic
Controversy," in Religion, Culture and Society in the Early Middle Ages, ed.
Noble and John Contreni (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publica
tions, 1987), 95-116, esp. 101-7; and Noble, Images, Iconoclasm and the
Carolingians, 91-93.
107. On the image of Christ, see, for example, Martin Buchsel, "Das Chris
tusportrat am Scheideweg des Ikonoklastenstreits im 8. und 9. Jahr
hunderts," Marburger Jahrbuch fur Kunstwissenschaft 25 (1998): 7-52;
and idem, Die Entstehung des Christusportrats (Mainz: Philipp von Za
bern, 2003). On the importance of inscriptions in relation to images
of Christ, see Karen Boston, "The Power of Inscriptions and the Trou
ble with Texts," in Eastmond and Tames, Icon and Word, 35-57, esp.
37-46.
108. See Parry, Depicting the Word, 168.
109. I think this view is excessively inflected by Protestant assumptions, and
as a historical explanation it is simplistically monocausal. But see, for
example, Martin, A History of the Iconoclastic Controversy, 112-24.
110. See, for example, David Gwynn, "From Iconoclasm to Arianism: The
Construction of Christian Tradition in the Iconoclast Controversy,"
Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 47 (2007): 225-51.
111. For the horos of Hiereia, contained in and refuted by the acts of the
Seventh Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 787 (is it correctly, fully, or
fairly reported there?), see Herman Hennephof, Textus byzantinos ad
Iconomachiam pertinentes (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1969), 61-78; Stephen
Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm during the Reign of Constantine V (Louvain:
Corpussco, 1977), 68-94, which conveniently has the Greek text as
well as an English translation; and Torsten Krannich, Christophe
Schubert, and Claudia Sode, eds., Die Ikonoklastische Synode von Hiereia
754 (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002). Discussions include Milton
Anastos, "The Ethical Theory of Images Formulated by the Iconoclasts
in 754 and 815," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 8 (1954): 153-60; idem, "The
Argument for Iconoclasm as Presented by the Iconoclastic Council of
754," in Weitzmann, Late Classical and Mediaeval Studies, 177-88; Gero,
Byzantine Iconoclasm during the Reign of Constantine V, 68-110; Noble,
Images, Iconoclasm and the Carolingians, 94-99; and Brubaker and Hal
don, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, 189-97.
112. At 213A the horos has Lucifer lead man into "worshiping the creature rather
than the Creator [irapd tov KTiaavTa iTpoaKUveiv UTro0ejievos]," some
thing direcdy associated with idolatry at 22 ID. This is a reversal of John
of Damascus's Oratio 1.4, "I do not adore the creation rather than the
Creator [ov TTpoaicuvu) Tfi KTiaei Trapa tov KTiaavTa]Idolatry on both
these lines is implicitly worship of creation.
113. The text is in Hennephof, Textus byzantinos, 52-57 with discussions by,
for example, Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm during the Reign of Constantine
V, 37-52; and Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era,
179-82. For the influence of the Peuseis on the horos of Hiereia, see
Gero, 41-43, 96; Hans Georg Thummel, Die Konzilien zur Bilderfrage im
8. und 9. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Schoningh, 2005), 65-68; and No
ble, Images, Iconoclasm and the Carolingians, 94-95.
114. On the Christology of the horos, see Schonborn, L'icdne de Christ, 170
78; Krannich et al., Die Ikonoklastische Synode, 12-15, and on its rela
tions with John of Damascus, 26-27; and Giakalis, Images of the Divine,
93-101.
115. On circumscription and uncircumscribability, see Parry, Depicting the
Word, 97-113.
116. As implied by the commentary on this passage in the acts of the Sec
ond Council of Nicaea (256C), which has a touch of self-righteous
bluster about how this is "rhetorical" and a false declaration.
117. On the Eucharist in iconoclast thought, see Stephen Gero, "The Eu
charistic Doctrine of the Byzantine Iconoclasts and Its Sources," Byzan
tinische Zeitschrift 68 (1975): 4-22; and Parry, Depicting the Word, 178
90.
118. The worries of the iconoclast Council of St. Sophia in 815 about the
images of saints, and the attempt there (so far as we can trust our ex
iguous sources, themselves excerpts from Patriarch Nicephorus's refu
tation of this council's deliberations) to justify the rejection of icons
of holy personages, perhaps hint that the Council of 815 saw Hiereia
as having somewhat fudged this issue. See (rather obscurely) Paul J.
Alexander, The Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople (Oxford: Claren
don Press, 1958), 44-45.
119. The evidence of iconoclasm conducted on images of the Virgin and
Child—notably, the apse mosaic at the Church of the Koimesis at Ni
caea—indicates that the image of the Christ Child was no less signifi
cant than that of the mature Jesus. See, for example, Charles Barber,
"The Koimesis Church, Nicaea: The Limits of Representation on the
Eve of Iconoclasm," Jahrbuch der Osterreichischen Byzantinistik 41 (1991):
43-60; and idem, "Theotokos and Logos: The Interpretation and Re
interpretation of the Sanctuary Program of the Koimesis Church, Ni
caea," in Images of the Mother of God, ed. Maria Vassilaki (Aldershot,
U.K.: Ashgate, 2005), 51-59. Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium in the
Iconoclast Era, 206, rightly point out that the Virgin and Child is not
the only possible option for what the iconoclast image of a cross re
placed in this church.
120. I find the translation offered by Sahas, Icon and Logos, 149-50, rather
garbled, so I have supplemented it with the versions of Philip Schaff,
Christian Classics Ethereal Library, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff
/npnf214.xvi.x.html; and Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm, 87.
121. Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm, 107, reads this as meaning that there was
plenty of iconoclastic activity, which this ruling attempts to limit, but
that is by no means the only or most obvious interpretation.
122. See Parry, Depicting the Word, 193-95.
123. On the ecumenical status of the Second Council of Nicaea, see Marie
France Auzepy, L'hagiographie et Viconoclasme byzantin (Aldershot, U.K.:
Ashgate, 1999), 211-28; and Thummel, Die Konzilien zur Bilderfrage,
194-95; generally on Nicaea II, see Thummel, 87-213; and Brubaker
and Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclastic Era, 260-76.
124. See Schonborn, L'icdne de Christ, 144-48; Gervais Dumeige, "L'image
du Christ, Verbe de Dieu," Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum 20 (1988):
258-67; Auzepy, L'hagiographie et Viconoclasme, 242-56; and Noble, Im
ages, Iconoclasm and the Carolingians, 105-8.
125. Vittoro Fazzo, "II concilio di Nicea nella storia Cristiana ed I raporti
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ICONOCLASM AS DISCOURSE: FROM ANTIQUITY TO BYZANTIUM 393
fra Roma e Bizanzio," in Cultura e societd, nelVItalia medievale: Studi per
Paolo Brezzi (Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1988),
345-60, esp. 347-57; and Noble, Images, Iconoclasm and the Carolin
ians, 101.
126. At length on the horos of 787 in relation to images, see Johannes Up
hus, Der Horos des Zweiten Konzils von Nikaa 787 (Paderborn: Schon
ingh, 2004), 202-337.
127. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova, vol. 13, 377DE.
128. The problem is philological. Does horizomen (we ordain) plus the in
finitive carry the sense of permission (icons may be set up) or the
sense of obligation (icons should be set up)? Among recent versions,
Sahas, Icon and Logos, 179 (used by Noble, Images, Iconoclasm and the
Carolingians, 101-2) is permissive, while Alexander, The Patriarch Nice
phorus, 21; Schonborn, L'icdne de Christ, 143; and Joseph Munitiz (in
Belting, Likeness and Presence, 506) are prescriptive, as is the recent
unpublished version by Thomas Mathews, which I use here with his
permission (I am persuaded by his argument on the issue, which is
still unpublished, and I am most grateful for his discussion of the
topic with me). The Greek and Latin versions (with a French transla
tion) are conveniently available in Marie-France Auzepy, " 'Horos' du
concile Nicee II," in Boespflug and Lossky, Nicee II, 32-35; her French
version oddly makes the infinitive an indicative, representing a cur
rent state of affairs with no emphasis on either permission or obliga
tion. For recent discussion, see Uphus, Der Horos des Zweiten Konzils,
202-3.
129. See Martin, A History of the Iconoclastic Controversy, 160-70; and Bru
baker and Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, 366-452.
130. On the Council of 815, see Paul Alexander, "The Iconoclastic Council
of St Sophia (815) and Its Definition (Horos)," Dumbarton Oaks Papers
7 (1953): 35-66; with the counterarguments of Anastos, "The Ethical
Theory of Images"; and further discussion in Alexander, The Patriarch
Nicephorus, 137-40; also Thummel, Die Konzilien zur Bilderfrage, 230
45; Noble, Images, Iconoclasm and the Carolingians, 245-50; and Bru
baker and Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclastic Era, 372-76. The most
recent text is Jeffrey Featherstone, Nicephori patriarchae constantinopoli
tani refutatio et eversio definitionis synodalis anni 815 (Turnhout: Brepols,
1997), 337-47.
131. Fragment 9, in Alexander, "The Iconoclastic Council of St Sophia," 59
(also in Featherstone, Nicephori patriarchae constantinopolitani, 337, as
no. 342), trans. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 169.
132. Fragments 14, 16, in Alexander, "The Iconoclastic Council of St So
phia," 59-60 (Featherstone, Nicephori patriarchae constantinopolitani,
338, as no. 664), trans. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 169.
133. Fragment 15 in Alexander, "The Iconoclastic Council of St Sophia,"
60 (Featherstone, Nicephori patriarchae constantinopolitani, 338, as nos.
694, 702), trans. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 169, with adap
tations.
134. Fragment 16 in Alexander, "The Iconoclastic Council of St Sophia,"
60 (Featherstone, Nicephori patriarchae constantinopolitani, 338, as no.
71s).
135. For the letter, see Monumenta germaniae historica, Leges, sec. 3, Concilia,
vol. 2, pt. 2, Concilia aeri Karolini (Hanover: Hahn, 1908), 475-80,
trans. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 157-58. Interestingly, this
version of iconoclasm—the moving, not the breaking, of images—had
been suggested to Nicephorus by Leo V in 814 but rejected by the
patriarch. See Martin, A History of the Iconoclastic Controversy, 165; and
Alexander, The Patriarch Nicephorus, 128.
136. Interestingly, Theodore of Studion, Epistola 1.17, approves of precisely
this last use of images as godparents; see Mango, The Art of the Byzan
tine Empire, 174.
137. See Robert Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours East and West (Collegeville,
Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1986), 276; idem, The Byzantine Rite: A Short
History (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1992), 52-54; Thomas
Pott, La reforme liturgique byzantine: Etude du phenomene de revolution non
spontanee de la liturgie byzantine (Rome: Edizioni Liturgiche, 2000),
110-13; and Alexander Rentel, "Byzantine and Slavic Orthodoxy," in
The Oxford History of Christian Worship, ed. Geoffrey Wainwright and
Karen Westerfield Tucker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006),
254-306, esp. 262-63.
138. Since one of the principal liturgical poets of Mar Saba was John of
Damascus (see Louth, St John Damascene, 252-82) and the major litur
gical reformer was Theodore of Studion, it is striking that liturgical
transformation and the defense of icons went together so closely.
139. See Anna Kartsonis, Anastasis: The Making of an Image (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1986), 126-86; Jas Eisner, "Image and
Iconoclasm in Byzantium," Art History 11 (1988): 471-91, esp. 475-77,
482-85; Gilbert Dagron, D'ecrire et peindre: Essai sur le portrait iconique
(Paris: Gallimard, 2007), esp. 31-63, for iconoclasm, the iconophilic
response, and their effects; Charles Barber, Contesting the Logic of Paint
ing: Art and Understanding in Eleventh-Century Byzantium (Leiden: Brill,
2007), for conceptual attitudes to images in the wake of iconoclasm.
140. Freedberg, The Power of Images, 415, but following suggestions already
in John of Damascus 2.61, 66; with Parry, Depicting the Word, 25. On
image and prototype in general, see ibid., 22-33.
141. Of course, this did not prevent post-eventum iconophile apologists from
attacking the iconoclasts precisely as attempting to damage the proto
type (see Parry, Depicting the Word, 33, on Nicephorus)—as in the fa
mous images preserved in the ninth-century marginal Psalters. See
Kathleen Corrigan, Visual Polemics in the Ninth-Century Byzantine Psalters
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). But this is polemic:
no Byzantine iconoclast would have claimed to be attacking Christ.
142. Osborne, "The Repudiation of Representation," 68-70; and Parry,
Depicting the Word, 70-80.
143. Basil, On the Holy Spirit 18.45.
144. Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, 782-87 also con
clude that Byzantine iconoclasm was about representation. However,
their concern is not with a conceptual issue in the theory of images
but with what they characterize as "social" representation ("how we
display, present or project ourselves, to ourselves and others," 783)
and "cultural" representation ("how authors and artisans present
themselves, or, usually, others, to an audience. This type of represen
tation is governed by what is usually called genre," 783). They argue
that theology is "largely beside the point" (783) and that it "followed
along and either codified changes in social practice or attempted to
limit them" (784). They claim further that theologians "justified or
codified existing realities" (784). As is obvious from my argument, I
think this excessively emphasizes realism as a historical extrapolation
from rhetorical and philosophically inclined sources (which is an act
of faith on the part of the historian), and I also think that art histori
cally, it underplays the long conceptual tradition on the nature of the
image's relation to the "presence" of its prototype, which the debates
in the period of iconoclasm effectively resolved. But their social and
cultural point in general is certainly valid, even if we may worry that it
is too functionalist, and we may want to add that theological thinking
also created new realities as well as justifying and codifying existing
ones.
145. The principal modern theorist of this theme in Gr
Jean-Pierre Vernant, Figures, idoles, masques (Paris: J
40; and idem, Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays
ton University Press, 1991), 151-63 (esp. 152-53), 16
standing discussion of Richard Neer, "Jean-Pierre V
History of the Image," Arethusa 43 (2010): 181-96; a
Philip Hardie, Ovid's Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge:
sity Press, 2002), 90-91, 191-93. Note that scholars
have been much more hesitant to ascribe assumptio
ence even to archaic Greek images than have, for ex
of ancient Egypt; see Jan Assmann, The Search for God
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 40-47
do not 'dwell' on earth .. . they 'install' themselves i
(43) or "the statue is not the image of the deity's bo
itself' (46, in italics in the original). For some discu
ence in relation to Greek religious images, see Wald
"L'image incomplete ou mutilee," Revue des Etudes An
(1930): 321-32, esp. 324, 326, and on iconoclasm, 3
Gladigow, "Prasenz der Bilder-Prasenz der Gotter: K
Bilder der Gotter in der griechischen Religion," Visi
(1985-86): 114-33; and Tanja Scheer, Die Gottheit un
suchungen zur Funktion griechischer Kultbilder in Religio
nich: Beck, 2000), 44-129.
146. Vernant, Mortals and Immortals, 152, 164-85; Neer
nant," 183-85; and Jas Eisner, "Reflections on the '
in Art: From Changes in Viewing to the Transforma
ity," in Rethinking Revolutions through Ancient Greece,
and Robin Osborne (Cambridge: Cambridge Univers
68-95, esp. 77-86 on the effect of this for viewing.
147. For visual theology in Greek art, see, for example
The History Written on the Classical Greek Body (Camb
University Press, 2011), 185-215 (on "godsbodies"); M
Aniconism in Greek Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford Univer
coming), chap. 6; and idem, "The Absent Figure of
Aniconic Monuments on Greek Vases," in Epiphany:
Divine in the Ancient World, ed. Verity Piatt and Geo
(forthcoming).
148. On Plato, see, for example, Vernant, Mortals and Immortals, 164-85;
Christopher Janaway, Images of Excellence: Plato's Critique of Art (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 110-26, 170-73; Burnyeat, "Culture
and Society in Plato's Republic," 292-305; and Halliwell, The Aesthetics
of Mimesis, 124-47.
149. There is a very rich literature on this set of issues now. One might
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394 art bulletin September 2012 volume xciv number 3
begin with the work of Michael Squire, for example, "Making Myron's
Cow Moo? Ecphrastic Epigram and the Poetics of Simulation," Ameri
can Journal of Philology 131 (2010): 589-634; and idem, The Iliad in a
Nutshell: Visualizing Epic on the Tabulae Iliacae (Oxford: Oxford Univer
sity Press, 2011), 303-70.
150. Many ramifications of this theme are powerfully discussed in Verity
Piatt, "Making an Impression: Replication and the Ontology of the
Graeco-Roman Seal Stone," Art History 29 (2006): 233-57; and idem,
Facing the Gods, 170-332.
151. There is a major literature on this theme. See, for example, John
Phillips, The Reformation of Images (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1973); Carl Christensen, Art and the Reformation in Germany (Ath
ens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1979), 23-35; Carlos Eire, War
against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cam
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Margaret Aston, England's
Iconcolasts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 62-219; Freed
berg, The Power of Images, 378-428; Feld, Die Ikonoklasmus des Westens,
118-92; Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Icono
clasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg and Basel (Cambridge: Cam
bridge University Press, 1994); Norbert Schnitzler, Ikonoklasmus—
Bildersturm: Theologischer Bilderstreit und ikonoklastisches Handeln wahrend
des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Fink, 1976); Koerner, The Refor
mation of the Image, 83-136; and Tara Hamling, Decorating the "Godly"
Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2010), 38-65.
152. By contrast with Protestant theory and practice, the Catholic apologia
for images has been distinctly less discussed. See, for example,
Giuseppe Scavizzi, Arte e architettura sacra: Cronache e documenti sul
controversia tra riformatori e cattolici (1500—1550) (Reggio: Cam del
bro, 1982), 236-63; Paolo Prodi, Ricerca sulla teorica delle arti figurat
nela Riforma Cattolica (Bologna: I Nuovi Alpi Editoriale, 1984); Fel
Die Ikonoklasmus des Western, 193—215; and, at length, Christian He
Katholische Bildertheologie im Zeitalter von Gegenreformation und Barock
(Berlin: Gebriider Mann Verlag, 1997). On the Counter-Reformat
and the cult of Mary, see Brigit Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in
Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 20
148-282. For a superb case study of (Roman Catholic) wonder-wo
ing images in Genoa and its environs from the Renaissance to m
nity, see Jane Garnett and Gerald Rosser, Spectacular Miracles: Tran
forming Images in Italy 1500-2000 (forthcoming) (I am most gratefu
to the authors for affording me the chance to read this book in
uscript) .
153. See especially Michael Squire, Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Art His
tory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 15-89; specifi
cally on the reformed image, see Koerner, The Reformation of the Image.
154. For an acute discussion of how the post-Lutheran Reformation and
the Protestant tradition of art history dismantled the equality of image
and Scripture (of art and word) that was established by the icono
phile tradition in response to Byzantine iconoclasm, see Squire, Image
and Text, 15-89.
155. The issues are well summarized by Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium
in the Iconoclastic Era, 777-79.
156. See the remarks of C. Wickham, "Conclusions" in Lymberopoulou,
Images of the Byzantine World, 231-39, esp. 238-39.
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