Saints for Supper
Alexander Bevilacqua, 26 December 2024
Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images
by Jérémie Koering, translated by Nicholas Huckle.
Princeton, 480 pp., £30, October 2024,978 1 890951 27 6 Show More
by Jérémie Koering, translated by Nicholas Huckle.
Princeton, 480 pp., £30, October 2024,
“... of Constantinople – that she was ‘healed by the image’ – is, he admits, misleading. As the anonymous Byzantine Greek writer who recorded the incident is at pains to specify, the woman was not made whole by the frescoed wall, but by the saints whom the painting represented. The woman herself, the writer insists, understood that God was working on her ... ”