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Chapter Nine Incongruous Bodies The icons that figure in the hagiographical anecdotes discussed in the previous two chapters were in the main objects that could be hung on walls. But this form of icon does not exhaust the late ancient conception of icons: as Averil Cameron has pointed out, though ‘‘we tend to think of icons typically as portable images painted on wood, it is important to realize that it was neither the material nor its portability that made a picture into an icon.’’1 She continues: ‘‘It is rather the subject and treatment of the picture that qualifies it for the term ‘icon,’’’ as evidenced by the fact that ‘‘several of the images that would attract the hostility of the Iconoclasts in fact took the form of fixed decoration in churches, in mosaic or fresco.’’2 One such fixed decoration, a mosaic portrait of Saint Agnes, will ultimately provide the focus of this chapter’s analysis of an artistic style that re-materialized the once-living body of a saint in a concrete image so fashioned as to ‘‘show’’ the holiness of a special human being. As noted in an earlier chapter, because they were dead and so literally gone, martyrs were situated at the farthest reaches of sensory apprehension where memory turns to imagination.3 For the artist, crafting an image of a martyr in mosaic tiles was thus not only a material but also an imaginative practice, especially since martyrs such as Agnes had, as saints, become vehicles of intercession between the earthly and heavenly realms and so had been touched by transcendence. How one might use a material substance such as glass tesserae in order to represent a saintly body that could both disclose and mediate the power of an invisible spiritual world is the issue explored in what follows. Icons and Agency Attributing to icons the ability to disclose and mediate spiritual power suggests that icons have agency. As objects that, following Brown’s ‘‘thing theory,’’ have become things, loci of surplus value, icons have not only ‘‘force’’ as sensuous and metaphysical presences, but they also effect a change in the relation between object and human subject.4 An Incongruous Bodies 165 icon is not an ordinary picture, and to behold one, especially as a suppliant , is to undergo a change in one’s ‘‘natural’’ perception of art. In his book What Do Pictures Want? literary and art critic W. J. T. Mitchell has trenchantly stated the obvious about the issue of iconic agency: ‘‘Iconophilia and iconophobia only make sense to people who think images are alive.’’5 As he goes on to observe, ‘‘[images] are phantasmatic, immaterial entities that, when incarnated in the world, seem to possess agency, aura, a ‘mind of their own.’’’6 In early Byzantine hagiography, the idea that images possess agency, aura, and a mind of their own functions well as a theoretical conceptualization of their concrete treatment of icons, expressing what hagiographers themselves did not explicitly say. For rather than theorizing about the nature of artistic representations of the saints, as did later iconophiles such as John of Damascus, hagiographers instead wrote anecdotes that showed icons in action—or perhaps better, in interaction with their venerators. We have already seen, for example, the seventh-century Life of Saint Theodore of Sykeon, which is punctuated by stories that narrate the boons granted to Saint Theodore by icons. To mention just a few: as a child, Theodore was cured of bubonic plague by drops of dew dripping from an icon of Christ, and another icon of Christ, giving him in effect a honeyed tongue, granted the boy the grace of a better memory for learning the psalter by heart; as an adult, bubbling myrrh from an icon of the Virgin Mary soothed an affliction of his eyes.7 Of course the most remarkable example of iconic agency in this vita is the anecdote in which the painted image of Saints Cosmas and Damian comes alive, as it were, with the saints’ healing presence.8 As Robin Cormack has observed, Saint Theodore ‘‘owes his life to the concern of a supernatural being in the form of an image’’; indeed, the saint’s recovery is ‘‘to be attributed to the agency of God as icon.’’9 When ‘‘incarnated,’’ as it were, in the matter of their icons, the saints—not to mention Christ and his mother—did in fact possess agency according to the hagiographical imagination. I have already referred to the ‘‘image...

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