Sacred Shock

Framing Visual Experience in Byzantium Glenn Peers

Publish Date: 1/4/2005
Dimensions: 7 x 10
Page Count: 208 pages

Illustrations:

Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-271-02470-7

Hardcover Edition: $51.95Add to Cart

“Sacred Shock is a significant and scholarly contribution that will both invigorate and stir controversy within its primary field, and be read and understood by those beyond.” —John Osborne, University of Victoria

“This is a book which has the potential to change our understanding of Byzantine art and how it worked.” —Charles Barber, University of Notre Dame

“Sacred Shock is a fine book, and one that will stimulate us to rethink the way we look at Byzantine Art.” —Lesley Jessop, RACAR

“Sacred Shock is impeccably well documented and up-to-date in its references.” —Henry Maguire, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies

"So a miracle leaves its frame, and one epiphanic detail Illuminates an entire epoch" —Derek Walcott, from Tiepolo’s Hound

Art did not exist in Byzantium. As Glenn Peers explains in Sacred Shock, there were, instead, a variety of devotional objects—pectoral crosses, church mosaics, icons, and illuminated manuscripts—regarded as infused with divine presence and used in religious practices. What concerns Peers in this provocative book is the means by which the relationship between the divine and the human was made manifest through crafted, material objects.

According to Peers, the devotional objects of Byzantium should be understood as having a detail or place that plays a large part in “framing” their meaning for viewers. After an insightful discussion of pectoral crosses, Peers examines a series of case studies, which includes the depiction of the blood of Christ in the Chludov Psalter, a fourteenth-century icon of St. George, and the Mandylion, a famous relic thought to preserve the traces of Christ’s face.

Sacred Shock combines fine scholarship with close analysis of Byzantine devotional objects and discussion of issues of broad importance to the study of visual experience. It is significant as both an exploration of art-historical methodology and a contribution to our understanding of the medieval world.

Glenn Peers is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Subtle Bodies: Representing Angels in Byzantium (2001).

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction: The Great Age of the Frame

1. The Crucifixion Contained and Containing

2. The Bloody Page in the Chludov Psalter

3. Gregory of Nazianzus as Twelfth-Century Paradigm

4. Saint George and His Iconic Bodies

5. Silver Cladding and the Assimilation of Bodies and Faces

Epilogue: The Body Framing

Abbreviations

Notes