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  3. Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium
  • Cited by 9
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    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      25 May 2018
      12 April 2018
      ISBN:
      9781108344067
      9781108424745
      9781108440899
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108344067
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.73kg, 416 Pages
      Dimensions:
      (229 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.602kg, 418 Pages
      • Subjects:
      Area Studies, European History 1000-1450, History, European Studies
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    Subjects:
    Area Studies, European History 1000-1450, History, European Studies
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    Book description

    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.

    Reviews

    '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 allprevious 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

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    Contents

    Contents
    • Introduction: Can’t Touch This
      pp 1-26
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