Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium

Studies the interrelation of sight, touch, and the imagination in ancient and medieval Greek theories of perception and cognition.

Roland Betancourt (Author)

9781108424745, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 April 2018

416 pages, 3 tables
23.5 x 16 x 2.6 cm, 0.73 kg

'This is a very learned and important book, with significant ramifications for thinking about sight and touch, aesthetics, the cultural history of vision, the historiography of Byzantine art and continuity/shift between the classical world and Byzantium. Betancourt shows better than all previous scholarship how theories of vision/touch grow out of their classical intellectual archaeology.' Jas' Elsner, Humphrey Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art, Corpus Christi College, Oxford

Considering the interrelations between sight, touch, and imagination, this book surveys classical, late antique, and medieval theories of vision to elaborate on how various spheres of the Byzantine world categorized and comprehended sensation and perception. Revisiting scholarly assumptions about the tactility of sight in the Byzantine world, it demonstrates how the haptic language associated with vision referred to the cognitive actions of the viewer as they grasped sensory data in the mind in order to comprehend and produce working imaginations of objects for thought and memory. At stake is how the affordances and limitations of the senses came to delineate and cultivate the manner in which art and rhetoric was understood as mediating the realities they wished to convey. This would similarly come to contour how Byzantine religious culture could also go about accessing the sacred, the image serving as a site of desire for the mediated representation of the Divine.

Acknowledgements
Note to the reader
Introduction: can't touch this
Part I. How Sight Is Not Touch: 1. The medium of sight
2. The problem of tactility
3. The commonalities of the senses
Part II. Photios and the Unfolding of Perception: Introduction
4. Has the mind seen?: the language of effluxes
5. Has it grasped?: apprehending the object
6. Has it visualized?, I: the grasp of the imagination
7. Has it visualized?, II: the problem of fantasy
8. Then it has effortlessly …: judgment and assent
Conclusion
Part III. Mediation, Veneration, Remediation: 9. Medium and mediation
10. Tactility and veneration
11. Synaesthesia and remediation
Conclusion: tempted to touch
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Medieval history [HBLC1], Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1], History of art: Byzantine & Medieval art c 500 CE to c 1400 [ACK]