The Performative Icon

The medieval icon was experienced not simply through sight, as in visual studies and museums today, but also through touch, sound, smell, and taste. Nor was it static: the icon became animated in its interaction with the faithful. Its rich, highly reflective materials and surface textures, combined with its setting—flickering candles and oil lamps, sounds of music and prayer, the fragrance of incense, and the approach and breath of the faithful—saturated the material and sensorial to excess. It led to a vision that transcended this materiality and gave access to the intangible: a taste of the divine.