Between Statues and Icons: Iconic Persons from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages

This book argues that Romans credited certain living persons with the capacity to function as cult statues, that is, as images and vessels of the divine. After addressing the cultural context that produced the idea that humans can become images of the divine, the text shows how emperors, bishops, and others imitated the aesthetic, immobility, and material setting of statuary to establish themselves as iconic and how their role as mediators with the divine was eventually transferred to new categories of material objects, such as relics and icons. The figure of the iconic person thus is shown to have bridged the cult statues of Antiquity with the new mechanisms of interaction with the divine that Christians used for the following millennium. By integrating living persons in the art historical analysis of the spaces and advocating for the need to consider the animation of artefacts together with the reification of bodies, this study marks an important development in the study of the past. Table of Contents Abbreviations Figures Acknowledgments Introduction Methodological Considerations Status Quaestionis Chapter 1: Setting the Stage 1.1 Body Language in Early Imperial Society 1.2 Sieging Olympus: Humankind Claims Immortality 1.3 Knowing the Gods: From Cult Statues to Iconic Persons 1.4 Conclusions Chapter 2: Emperors 2.1 Negotiating Divinity in Rome 2.2 Constructing Iconicity 2.3 From Image of Jupiter to Image of Christ 2.4 Conclusions Chapter 3: Martyrs 3.1 Paul’s Concept of Iconic Living 3.2 Performing Christ in the Arena 3.3 God’s Living Temples 3.4 Preserving the Martyrs’ Iconicity: Relics 3.5 Preserving the Martyrs’ Iconicity: People 3.6 Conclusions Chapter 4: Initiates 4.1 Visions, Ascensions, and Transformations in Late Antique Initiations 4.2 New Bishops for a New Church 4.3 Making Golden Statues of Christ 4.4 Beyond Baptism 4.5 Conclusions Chapter 5: Bishops 5.1 From Martyr-bishops to Teacher-bishops 5.2 Rome’s Aristocratic Bishops 5.3 Emperor Justinian’s Living Mirrors 5.4 Beyond the Living Bishop 5.5 Conclusions Chapter 6: Stylites 6.1 Living vs. Animated Statues 6.2 Multiplying the Stylite’s Body: Eulogia, Relics, Columns 6.3 Preserving the Iconic Body: Icons 6.4 Conclusions Chapter 7: Conclusion Bibliography Index of Ancient Names Index of Places