Breaking the Image, Celebrating the Word: Byzantine Iconoclasm and the Tendency to Abstraction

Abstract

Byzantine iconoclasm (725-843) was quite a paradoxical historical incident, which has defied so far all attempts for explanation and interpretation. The imperially endorsed break with a long standing and revered visual tradition and the abrupt abandoning of the representational visuality that had dominated the Greco-Roman world in favour of a non-representational and aniconic pictorial abstraction was an unexpected and somehow anomalous paradigm shift. Indeed the transition from an iconoplastic visual regime to a logomorphic lexical symbolism, by substituting images with words, has been one of the most puzzling questions in the history of art, representational thinking and indeed social culture. The fact that such a change was attempted without a preceding structural shift in the world-view of the period, with the introduction of a new religion for example, further complicates the question. All Mediterranean cultures had been anthropomorphic in their long established representational codes; divine hierophanies or indeed theophanies were symbolically represented through objects, human forms and imaginative constructs, through iconographic signs which themselves indicated the presence of the deity or of a sacred entity. The image represented the immanent presence of the depicted form – indeed in the common practice, it was the form itself.