The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium by Bissera V. Pentcheva (review)

Abstract

The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium. By Bissera V. Pentcheva. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2014. Pp. xvi, 327. $89.95 clothbound, ISBN 978-0-271-03584-0; $44.95 paperback, ISBN 978-0-271-03583-3.)In recent years, art historians have found that many more icons have survived from the Byzantine period than was previously thought. Correspondingly, attention has shifted away from the study of manuscripts, once the dominant area of interest, and away from mosaics and wallpaintings, for a period seen as the major achievement of the culture. Instead, the icon has become the center of scholarly attention. This conceptual shift began in the United States with the experience of Kurt Weitzmann of Princeton University, who participated in a series of visits to the monastery of St. Catherine at Sinai in Egypt in 1958, 1960, 1963, and 1965. He intended to study the manuscripts in the library (and their importance is such that a program of digitization is now in progress) but was shell-shocked (intellectually, that is) to come across some 2000 icons in the monastery, the majority never discussed in print. He realized that this remote monastery had somehow acquired many high-quality painted icons dating from the sixth century onward. His priority was to catalog and describe these icons. Before his death in 1993, he had published what he saw as a number of the major pieces. His method of work was traditional, aiming to date the works, determine their place of production and the character of the artist, and interpret their iconography. This kind of work is of primar)' interest to the art historian rather than the theologian or church historian, although manner of researchers have looked at the newly found icons, like the now wellknown sixth-century encaustic painting of Christ.Bissera Pentcheva in The Sensual Icon is one of a number of recent scholars who are going beyond the cataloguing stage of publishing new icons and attempting to ask broader questions. Beautifully produced, the book brings together a wealth of material, although it is essentially a restatement of her recent articles. Obviously in the present state of work, with many more unstudied icons emerging into the field and a number of exhibitions of Byzantine and Russian art being presented, both cataloguing and interpretation are necessary and complementary activities. The main question in looking at this book is to ask who can benefit from its methodology, and herein are difficulties. The fundamental problem is that the whole book depends on a false premise, summed up on page 15: all the existing translations have started from the point of view that eikon means 'painting. …