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Chapter Seven Animated Bodies and Icons Depicting the relation between a saint and his icon required as subtle a touch as depicting the saintly body itself. This chapter begins a discussion of the role that hagiographical word-pictures played in ‘‘showing,’’ as it were, the ephemeral-but-tangible materialization of a saint in an icon. Like relics, icons were an important part of the material turn in late ancient Christianity, a perspectival shift that fostered reverence for those objects that gave palpable reality to religious ideas like saintly intercession. Also like relics, icons raised the problem of the overinvestment of matter with meaning, particularly to the extent that their status as painted portraits was thought to present, and not merely to represent, saintly presence and power. Icons were just as much ‘‘things,’’ in Bill Brown’s sense of the term in his ‘‘thing theory,’’ as relics: they were objects whose surplus value made them magnets of attraction, and their force was sensuous (material) and metaphysical (theological) at once.1 My argument in this chapter and the next is that certain anecdotes about icons in late ancient hagiographies betray an awareness of the delicacy involved in dealing with the spiritual objects that were icons. Of particular interest are anecdotes whose narrative oddities provoke uncertainty about how, exactly, an icon harbors saintly presence. The way in which these brief narratives are crafted curbs the tendency toward idolatry that was endemic to this form of Christian expression in its early stages. This taming of the idolatrous impulse was achieved by dissipating the material opacity of the icon without betraying its substance as mediator of the holy, thus rendering icons as objects that are neither wholly material nor wholly spiritual—or perhaps better said, as objects that are both at once without, however, equating them. Like the phenomenon of relics, the phenomenon of icons was both the sign and the carrier of a complicated relation between materiality and spirituality. In the two centuries prior to the outbreak of iconoclasm, anecdotes about icons began to appear in hagiographies. One such anecdote, contained in the seventh-century collection of the miracles of Saints Cosmas and Damian, tells the story of a woman who had been healed of various physical afflictions at the saints’ shrine on the Golden Horn just outside 132 Chapter Seven Constantinople. Upon her return home, the woman painted images of the saints ‘‘on all the walls of her house, being, as she was, insatiable in her desire to see them.’’ One night, the text continues, while alone in her house, the woman came down with an acute stomachache. ‘‘Perceiving herself to be in danger, she crawled out of bed and, upon reaching the place where these most wise saints were depicted on the wall, she stood up leaning on her faith as upon a stick and scraped off some plaster with her fingernails. She put the plaster into water and, after drinking the mixture, she was immediately cured of her pains by the visitation [πιφοτησις] of the Saints.’’2 What is one to make of such a story? At the very least, and on the surface, this seems to be a portrayal of iconophilia run amok, as the woman indulges herself in decorative overkill for the sake of piety. But not only does she plaster her house with images of these saints, she eats their portraits, treating the material substance of the pictures as though it carried the curative presence of Cosmas and Damian themselves. Has this woman passed beyond simple iconophilia to outright idolatry by equating the stuff of a painted image with divine power? From the perspective of an eighth- or ninth-century iconoclastic reader, this story would certainly seem to flirt with idolatry, understood as investing the material world with too much extrahuman meaning and power. In this chapter, I want to view the flirtation positively as a narrative technique for negotiating the delicate dynamic of saintly presence and absence in images. Consider, first, how the woman is depicted: situated on the knife edge of desire, she yearns for presence. Her longing to see the saints is described as ‘‘insatiable’’ ("κρεστος). What her desirous gaze sees, however, is not the saints themselves, but their artistic representation . Nonetheless, the saints are somehow present, since the stuff of their portrayal heals. Insofar as images, like iconic portraits, do not sheerly present but represent, they draw on the power of longing to overcome absence; the dead saints come alive not only in memory but also...

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