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birkbeck, university of london, uk

icon/image
robert maniura

Material Religion Volume 7 Icon/Image

Robert Maniura Issue 1 Robert Maniura

Robert Maniura is Senior Lecturer in the History
of Art at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the
author of Pilgrimage to Images in the Fifteenth
Century: The Origins of the Cult of Our Lady of
Cze˛ stochowa (Boydell & Brewer, 2004) and co-
editor of Presence: The Inherence of the Prototype
within Images and Other Objects (Ashgate, 2006).
Icons and images are troublesome things: they are
notoriously difficult to pin down. The very terminology
is vexing.1 The two terms have their roots in the Greek
and Latin languages, respectively, and as such are
embedded in European culture in general and in the
cultures of Christianity in particular. They are contested
terms even within this heritage, but outside of it the issues
of reference and applicability become even more fraught.
In practice the two terms are often used interchangeably
in the context of religion to refer to depictions of sacred
figures or stories. The discipline of art history understands
the term icon in a narrower technical sense as a panel
painting—a painting on wood—of a holy figure or figures
from the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition. This
somewhat minimalist definition provides a useful starting
point because it highlights materiality as part of the issue:
an icon so defined is emphatically a thing made out of
wood and paint.
A significant number of icons in this art historical sense
show a single holy figure full face, confronting the viewer
and meeting his or her gaze. This characteristic gives
rise to the adjective “iconic” to describe a wider range of
pictures that share this feature. A more widespread current
use of “iconic,” though, draws on another feature of the
Eastern icon—its focal cultural role and high status—to
refer to culturally salient people, things, and concepts:
sportspeople, musicians, commercial products, and
brands, among other things, can all be “iconic” in this
sense. This leads away from material religion, but that the
icon should have given its name to this notion of cultural
centrality is significant: icons are important. It is worth
remarking that in contemporary popular culture “icon”
is used almost interchangeably with “idol,” a term that
implies an excessive degree of devotion. As noted below,
Material Religion volume 7, issue 1, pp. 50–57
DOI: 10.2752/175183411X12968355481971
 this uncomfortable pairing, and implied conflation, has a
very long history.
In art history, a major part of the study of icons and
images has been “iconography,” that is the study and
interpretation of the subject matter of a picture. Pictures
are taken to communicate meanings in systems of signs
somewhat akin to language. The philosopher C. S.
Peirce, drawing on one sense of the original Greek eikon
as “likeness,” adopted the term icon to label a sign that
resembles what it stands for. The issue of likeness has
been taken to be central to the understanding of the image
in general. The broadly semiotic approach treats images
largely as disembodied and idea-like, true to some of the
meanings of the original Greek and Latin terms: images
can be mental phenomena as well as material objects.
This conceptual register of the iconic is in tension with the

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materiality of the icon as object, and it is precisely when
these two registers are seen to have become blurred that

Icon/Image
icons have become most troublesome.
The “iconic” images noted above are particularly
problematic in this respect. Icons of individual holy
human figures or gods-made-men are taken in certain
respects to “look like” what they depict. There has been
a lingering concern that the degree of likeness can be too
close for comfort. Is the icon a mere sign or something
more? What is the relationship between the icon and
its prototype? The issue becomes urgent when we
move away from the icon in isolation and consider its
involvement in patterns of human behavior. The full-face
address of the “iconic” type confronts the viewer with a
vivid evocation of another person with whom the viewer
is invited to interact. Historically that interaction has gone
beyond contemplation. Icons are not just looked at and
prayed before. They can be touched, manipulated, carried
around, or otherwise impelled into movement and involved
in more or less elaborate rituals, rituals which may also
“look like” social interactions with other human actors. The
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traditional kissing of the icon in Orthodox Christianity is a

52 simple but powerful example.
A kiss is appropriate to a person. But why kiss an
object? To treat the icon as if it were a person has long
been viewed with suspicion in a religious context. Is to
do so not to turn the icon into a “fetish,” to attribute to
it qualities and powers which it does not posses? Does
the devotee who kisses the icon not offer their worship
to the brute matter of the picture rather than god or the
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saint? The icon allegedly becomes an idol and the devotee

guilty of idolatry, in the Judeo-Christian tradition the
ultimate sin of worshipping the wrong god. A widespread
response to such perceived or alleged “abuse” of images
 is iconoclasm, the breaking or defacing of images.
Iconoclasm asserts the materiality of the image and
dismisses it as a fit focus for worship. Ironically, as Martin
Luther noted, this response also acknowledges the very
force and centrality of the image that the iconoclast wishes
to deny.
It is, though, arguably this very ambivalence of the
image, its manifest status as an artifact alongside its
unsettlingly vivid evocation of a sacred “presence,” which
is crucial to its role in religious practice. It is important
that the blurring of the material and conceptual registers
is not the preserve of “simple people” as theologians
and spiritual professionals have sometimes implied. The
wholehearted exploitation of the materiality of the image
is sometimes quite explicit in “official” contexts. Take the
example of a surprisingly little-known image at the very
heart of the Latin Christian tradition.
Figure 1 shows the image of Christ from the so-called
Sancta Sanctorum—the Holy of Holies—of the Lateran
Palace in Rome.2 This was the private chapel, dedicated

FIG 1
Icon of Christ from the Sancta Sanctorum,
Lateran Palace, Rome. Photo: antmoose,
Flickr

53
 to St. Lawrence, in what during the Middle Ages was the
main residence of the Pope, next to the church of St. John
Lateran. The chapel is one of the few surviving fragments
of the medieval palace, and the icon remains on its altar.
It is a curious sight. The bulk of the main panel is
covered by an ornate gilded silver revetment with an
inscription stating that it was donated by Pope Innocent III
(1198–1216). Above the revetment rises a strange doll-
like face surrounded by a gilded nimbus. This face is
painted on a piece of canvas and is the result of a repair
ordered by Pope John X (914–28). The wing panels with
embossed silver figures of saints date from the fifteenth
century. This image emerges into documentary history
in the eighth century when it was called an image not
made by human hands. Later medieval tradition held that
it had been begun by St. Luke and finished miraculously

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by divine intervention. The age of the original painting is
uncertain. It may date back to about 600 CE, but little is left

Icon/Image
of it. Recent conservation revealed that the walnut panel
beneath all these later additions resembles nothing so
much as a piece of driftwood. It seems to have originally
displayed a full-length figure of Christ enthroned. Judging
by the long history of repair, it must already have been
badly degraded by the tenth century.
The ruinous condition of the panel is understandable in
the light of its use. The very first eighth-century reference
has the image carried in procession, and by the ninth
century it was already recorded in an annual nocturnal
procession from the Lateran to the church of Santa Maria
Maggiore on the eve of the feast of the Assumption of the
Virgin Mary. There the image of Christ “met” an equally
ancient image of the Virgin Mary housed in the church
and the two pictures were made to bow to one another.
Details of the current state of the Sancta Sanctorum
icon relate to further details of the ritual. A pair of small
silver doors, near the base of the main panel, covers the
area of the original image’s feet. A twelfth-century text
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notes that when the procession reached the church of

54 Santa Maria Nova, now Santa Francesca Romana, in the
forum, the doors were opened and the feet of the image
were washed. In the thirteenth century the Pope opened
the same doors in order to kiss the feet during Mass on
Easter Sunday.
The Assumptiontide procession was no effusion of a
dubiously orthodox “popular piety” but a focal civic ritual
with direct papal involvement. The processions finally
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came to an end only in the pontificate of Pius V (1566–

72). Today, this icon is more a relic of Roman Catholic
tradition than an active focus of devotional life, though
it is, from time to time, still involved in papal ceremonial.
 But throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance it was
treated in certain respects like the embodiment of Christ
himself.
A Christian from the Reformed tradition might dismiss
this history as a confirming instance of “popish idolatry,”
but to acknowledge this ideological conflict is also to
recognize the persistent centrality of the image as an
issue in Christian culture. Whether affirmed or denied as
valid foci of worship, images are difficult to get away from.
One can remove the issue from a potentially sectarian
Christian context by observing that the treatment of the
Santa Sanctorum icon closely parallels the ritual treatment
of images in other religions. The bathing of the feet of (the
image of) Christ resembles, for example, the ritual bathing
of the Śiva-linga in the traditions of Śaiva Hinduism.1
The image is treated in both cases “as if” it were the
god himself. Significantly, the Hindu tradition shares with
Christianity a marked ambivalence about the status of
images in its theoretical writings while fully engaging with
the materiality of images in practice. The charge that to
treat images in this way is in error is historically important
but needs to be recognized as a polemical allegation.
The challenge is to acknowledge that such a response is,
rather, quite understandable. The tantalizing ambiguity of
the relationship between the depiction and the depicted
is arguably an important part of how images “work” and
what sustains their central role in the first place. Images
provide such a good focus for devotion precisely because
they are so enduringly provocative.
The example of the Śiva-linga takes us back,
though, to the issue of definitions. In Hindu cults, Śiva
is visualized in various anthropomorphic forms, but the
linga, the most important visual manifestation of the god,
is a smooth cylindrical shaft. In a fundamental sense
this image is unlike the god. But so are the other visual
manifestations, which cannot be taken to present him
adequately. The same idea is present in Christian theology:
god is uncircumscribable. In the end, the same is true
of all images: there are limits to likeness. The Sancta
55
Sanctorum image in its present state serves as a rare
example of the role of the unlike in the European tradition.
The original painting may well once have offered a vivid
evocation of the enthroned Christ. A number of early
Marian panels survive in Rome with a good deal more of
their original paint, and they reveal just how striking early
Christian painting could be. But the Sancta Sanctorum
icon, as it has appeared since the high Middle Ages,
looks like . . . nothing on earth. This icon as likeness of the
incarnate god was erased, at least in part, by its own ritual
manipulation. The object remained as the focus of ritual
 but the most “like” element of this complex was the ritual
itself, which mimed exchange with the divine.
The Sancta Sanctorum image of Christ is an extreme
but by no means isolated example. Such images have,
until recently, found only a tenuous place in the study
of the Western Christian tradition in the discipline—art
history—which most privileges visual material because
they fail to engage with the aesthetic criteria which have
conventionally driven the process of selection. Moreover
art history has tended to concentrate on the conceptual
register of the religious images it has studied in generating
largely symbolic interpretations. Their materiality has
been recognized in terms of their production and not
their reception. This disciplinary bias has arguably
compromised the wider study of religion by obscuring an
important aspect of the role of images in religious practice.

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The emphasis is, however, beginning to shift and the
growing recognition of the importance of the physical, as

Icon/Image
well as conceptual, engagement of “viewers” with images
promises to enrich the study of material religion.

notes and references

1
For a discussion of what Davis, Richard H. 2006. Presence
constitutes an image, see Mitchell and Translucence: Appar’s Guide
(1986). to Devotional Receptivity. In
Presence: The Inherence of the
2
For the early icons of Rome, see
Prototype within Images and
Belting (1994).
Other Objects, ed. Robert Maniura
3
For images of Śiva, see Davis and Rupert Shepherd. Aldershot:
(2006). Ashgate, 87–104.
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56 Belting, Hans. 1994. Likeness and

Presence: A History of the Image
before the Era of Art. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, esp.
63–73.
Mitchell, W. J. T. 1986. Iconology:
Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, esp.
7–46.
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