Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium

A history of how Byzantine writers understood seeing, touching, and imagining. Surveying classical, late antique, and medieval theories of vision, the book argues that the tactile language Byzantines used for sight described the mind’s grasp of what the senses delivered, and shows what that theory of perception meant for the making and viewing of images, and for the image as a site of desire for the Divine.

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.