Performative Colors in Late Antique Eikones

In the study of visual art, issues of performativity have been signaled, broadly, by explorations of the performative dimension of meaning-making, where the experiences of viewers are understood as complex interactions with works of art that are affective and transformative. [1] The vast range of inquiry included in the “performative turn” (and the related “affective turn,” and “experiential turn”) has been effectively applied to the study of Byzantine images and the construction of Byzantine holy spaces in order to analyze crucial matters of performative theory involving materiality and affect, embodiment, enactment, staging, and ritual. [2] Interest has focused on the various multisensory experiences of sacred environments, their visual, spatial, lighting, auditory, and olfactory effects, and the “spectacular representation” [3] of the spiritual in the material world within those spaces. It has also explored issues of ritual and how the faithful performed behaviors that co-created holy spaces and images and thus facilitated—or “activated”—dynamic encounters with the sacred. These encounters, in turn, shaped behaviors and perceptions, so that we understand these exchanges as contextually discursive within the culture that created them.

Icons of the middle and late Byzantine periods have naturally factored into these explorations of performativity, being particularly elucidating for icon scholars trying to explain conceptual aspects of icons and what they were perceived to do, or be capable of doing, by contemporaries. [4] Because of their perceived potentiality to act (to move, bleed, exude oil, produce and reproduce themselves), to intervene, to mediate, to perform miracles, and so on, icons were flexible and subjective. Moreover, as material images of spiritual beings, icons were divinely condescended meeting places assigned to negotiate the mysterious overlap of the perceptible and immaterial. As was ultimately explicated in various ways over centuries of icon defense, icons were a paradox comparable to the Incarnation of God, being both what is visible and what is not; they described what cannot be described, fixed the eternal into a temporal plane, brought heaven to earth. [5] Thus, using performativity to understand these issues allows us to acknowledges the icon as an object that was perceived to operate across both earthly and spiritual dimensions, permitting believers imaginary associations with otherwise invisible subjects. Performativity admits the agency of the icon in this discursive framework and describes its performative space as an object that does not reductively represent its subject, but through its activity, constructs its own identity. [6] It further suggests that viewers of icons, within their many and various contexts, not only experienced icons as affective, but participated in creating sacred encounters though rituals and behaviors.

Late antique eikones were also performative. I use the term eikones following the contemporary sources of the late fourth century to indicate painted portraits on panels of holy exemplars, often referred to rhetorically, rather than adhering to the developed understanding of icons that we assign to the holy images of ritual and veneration that emerged in later centuries. [7] In the period under scrutiny here, an eikon signaled to the faithful that they could experience seeing with their eyes or envisioning in their mind’s eye a holy person, and through imaginative associations about the meaning of painted portraiture and its capacity to convey virtuous character with color, experience the portrait as a spiritual encounter. An eikon was a material or metaphorical painted portrait; in both contexts, it served as an objectification of a holy exemplar that reiterated the belief in the commingling of material and otherworldly, acknowledged human senses as capable of perceiving holiness, and became its own generative and evocative source. [8] Like the performative utterance, these painted eikones from late antiquity brought into being, into the present reality, what they portrayed—in other words, they performed their identities as eikones in dialogue with believers. Encompassed within a system of belief specifically about the ability of painted colors to portray the truth of one’s spiritual character, eikones became sites of potential signification and co-produced meaning with viewers and audiences, which ultimately affected the perception of holy portraits in Byzantine Christianity.

According to J. L. Austin, performative utterances have to be agreed upon, adhered to, and culturally appropriate in order to be accepted as words that alter reality; the performativity of an eikon’s paint, then, needs to be inscribed within its cultural context. Looking at notions about paint and its use in portraits in order to understand its philosophical and rhetorical associations in antiquity, the perception of color as related to truth and inner character in late Greco-Roman society, and how this was transformed in late antique Christian sources related to “imagined” eikones, we will see how the color of painted eikones was perceived as spiritually mimetic. The performativity of painted (and the act of painting) portraits in descriptions of holy people, and specifically the application of colors to the depicted form, produced the portrait’s effect, which transformed it from an incomplete or rough, physical resemblance into a true likeness. Though the sources used here refer to conceptual issues about eikones, I maintain that material counterparts existed even though they are rarely attested and we have no surviving examples. Nevertheless, these early sources reveal the importance of painted portraits in shaping perceptions of later Byzantine icons.

Preached in the last decade of the fourth century, John Chrysostom’s sermon on 1 Cor 4:16, the verse, “Therefore I urge you to imitate me,” compared St. Paul’s soul to a panel portrait, his conversion in Christ to the act of repainting this panel portrait imitating the icon of Christ, and Paul’s deeds thereafter to the display of his new self-portrait:

The extended metaphor that Chrysostom uses here makes Paul into an artist whose exemplary spiritual “self-portrait” was achieved only once he had been given the correct colors. [10] The sermon, which also entails a lengthy verbal “portrait” of Paul starting at his feet and working through Paul’s body (though these body parts are given as virtuous deeds to characterize them instead of physical features), [11] is wonderfully meta-discursive as a performance: Paul, through the imagined performance of (re)painting an old and unfinished panel, [12] creates the new reality of his Christ-like image, while Chrysostom performs his own spiritual portrait of Paul for his listeners by recounting the deeds of Paul as if “painting” a full-body portrait and metaphorically setting it out for everyone to see (i.e. “observable to the senses and the mind”). The point of the sermon was already laid out for his audience, as Chrysostom had begun by proposing that the listeners follow Paul’s dictate to imitate him and undergo a similar “repainting” of self. [13]

However sophisticated the rhetoric, Chrysostom was only elaborating upon a much older encomiastic trope that used the painted portrait as a metaphor for the soul. [14] Reference to portrait painting as the means of revealing the soul is evidenced in the late second-century Eikones (Portraits) by Lucian. [15] Lucian was a highly educated writer and orator who wrote in Greek, and the encomium was probably composed in Antioch, likely in 163 CE. In the work, which is in praise of Panthea, the mistress of Emperor Lucius Verus, Lucian presents a verbal portrait of her by embedding it in a story presented as a dialogue. The male protagonist, Lykinos, has seen from afar the most beautiful woman he has ever beheld. He attempts to describe her to a friend, Polystratos, yet finds himself lacking adequate words. Thus, he sets about trying to sculpt verbally an image of her with recourse to the master sculptors and their creations of statues of deities, using the most famous sculptures of the Greek world to cobble together an image of perfect beauty. Panthea, it is assumed, rejected his comparison of her to divinities, since Lucian follows up in a second text, Hyper tôn eikonôn (Defense of the Portraits), in response. In it, he explains that he did not, in fact, compare her to the gods, but to their sculpted likenesses; for, he avows, the gods are beyond human imitation and do not reveal themselves to human sight. In the text, Lucian makes clear that the most beautiful of manmade images represent the pinnacle of human ability to visualize the gods, and thereby defends his comparison of her to such works.

But there is more to this story. Since this is a portrait of a human Lucian is “sculpting,” it should be noted that he admits it is not adequate to describe her physical form while omitting her inner beauty. In section twelve of Eikones, Lucian’s protagonist admits that he cannot portray the soul of Panthea, and so his friend, who, as it turns out, had the acquaintance of Panthea, takes up the task of adding her inner portrait. Lykinos calls on Polystratos to take over the portrait, “and paint me the portrait of her soul (και τινα εἰκόνα γραψάμενος τῆς ψυχῆς ἐπίδειξον), so that I may be no more her half-admirer.” This metaphorical paint is the description of her virtues. In order to construct a character portrait of Panthea, Lucian looks to wise humans of the past as well as accomplished painters, not unlike the amalgam of sculptural comparisons used to describe her physical appearance, though the focus is on her inner qualities rather than her body. He ends the account with Polystratos saying, “Let us combine our portraits (εἰκόνας), your statues of the body and my images of the soul” (ἥν τε σὺ ἀνέπλασας τὴν τοῦ σώματος καὶ ἃς ἐγὼ τῆς ψυχῆς ἐγραψάμην) (sect. 23).

The work provides important insight into the perceived ability of a painted portrait, rich in colors and in modeling (sect. 16), to create the spiritual, or inner dimension of a likeness. This is not the color applied to sculpture, used to enhance the gracefulness of her form, which also plays a large part in fashioning of her physical portrait (sects. 7–9). [16] Rather, this second portrait is painted on panel, as it is revealed at last when the interlocutor, Polystratos, recommends the written portrait above all, “insomuch as it is not made of wood and wax and colors (μὴ ξύλου καὶ κηροῦ καὶ χρωμάτων) but portrayed with inspirations from the Muses.”

Lucian is playing on the theme. In describing the character of Panthea as if a painted portrait, vaunting the practice and giving validity to the painted portrait, indeed, objectifying the living Panthea as a portrait, he ultimately avers its limited ability to capture her qualities, which are articulated extensively in his encomium and self-evidently require his masterful skill to craft. The comparison—and often competition—between the written/oratory and visual arts had been in place for centuries, stemming from the close relationship between the use of vivid description in rhetoric and writing, and the resulting imaginations (phantasia) of listeners and readers. In antiquity, an accomplished writer and orator was judged by his ability to create, or “paint,” images for his readers or audience; handbooks on rhetoric and writings on epistemology discuss the importance of using vivid imagery in speech (enargeia), of describing so well that audiences or readers were able to imagine the subject in such detail as to feel like they were “seeing” it firsthand, and so we often find painting used as a metaphor for rhetorical enargeia; and later, enargeia was used to describe paintings that seem to come alive. [17]

The conceptual entanglement of visual art, the written or spoken word, and the imaginations of an audience, was effective. Literary descriptions and visual representations were sometimes avowed compatible as epistemological tools (as the art of ekphrasis demonstrates) and sometimes set in opposition. Primary sources indicate how painted portraits were frequently used as foils in describing the ways it may be possible to “see” a person’s inner qualities, or soul, when compared to the person’s written words or witnessed deeds. For example, after Marcus Antonius Primus (d. 81 CE), retired statesman and general, sent Martial a portrait of himself, Martial composed this epigram: “This picture which I honor (colitur) with violets and roses, do you ask whose face it recalls, Caedicianus? Such was Marcus Antonius Primus in the prime of his life; in this [image] the old man sees his younger self. Would that art could have painted his character and his soul! [my emphasis] There would be no painting more beautiful in the world” (10.32). [18] Another extant epigram in which it seems the portrait is of a certain Alexander, tells us the portrayed is better known by his words than his image: “I who painted the form would fain have painted also the character, but the limits of my art checked my eagerness. Call me eloquent Alexander, my friend” (The Greek Anthology no. 687). [19] In the fourth century, Basil of Caesarea took up the trope that compares the words expressed by a person and a painted portrait, albeit a hypothetical image. In his letter to Jovinus, and using the language of portrait painting (charakter), Basil wrote, “I saw your soul in your letter (Εἶδον σου τὴν ψυχὴν ἐν τοῖς γράμμασι). For truly no painter can grasp so accurately the characteristics of the body (χαρακτῆρα σώματος) as words can portray the secrets of the soul. For when I read your letter, its words adequately delineated to us the soundness of your character …” (Letter CLXIII). [20] Additionally, in his homiletic portrait of Paul, though he uses the metaphor of painting an icon to describe Paul’s soul, Chrysostom nevertheless proclaims Paul’s letters to be superior for comprehending his soul. [21]

This by no means excludes actual painted portraits from our larger picture. The desire to have, and the practice of keeping, portraits of esteemed friends and family suggest that painted portraits were equally valued for their ability to make the characters of the people depicted visible and knowable, [22] a function of portraiture that did not seem to have necessitated strict adherence to physical likeness. Pliny, when discussing ancient authors’ portraits in people’s libraries, where individual traits were visualized even though nobody knew what they really looked like, writes, “… every imaginary likenesses are modelled and a sense of loss gives birth to countenances that have not been handed down to us, as occurs in the case of Homer” (Natural History 35.9), [23] indicating that portraits were often assigned to esteemed men of the past based on physiognomies that were deemed appropriate to express their virtues and dignity, in other words, based on the visualization of their character. [24] “Portraits” did not always represent their subjects objectively for consideration by posterity, even if identified specifically or identifiable because of an accepted appearance. Rather they presented images of character to viewers, who constructed imaginary and meaningful connections with them.

We may take as an unlikely comparison to Lucian’s Eikones a story from the apocryphal Acts of John, which also dates from the second century. [25] The text is important because it is an early reference to a practice of painting and venerating portraits of spiritual mentors by Christians. In the passage, a man by the name of Lykomedes has commissioned in secret a painting of John, who has recently performed a miracle for Lykomedes and his wife, that he keeps in his bedroom on an altar, adorning it with garlands and lighting lamps in front of it. John discovers the portrait one day and accuses Lykomedes of worshipping a pagan god like a pagan, for John does not recognize his own likeness, never having seen himself. Lykomedes defends himself, proving the likeness to John, yet John is still displeased. He tells Lykomedes that he would rather Lykomedes become a “good painter,” and, using the colors John has received from God and now gives to Lykomedes, indeed, the colors that God used to paint all of us and Jesus (ἔχεις χρώματα ἄ σοι δίδωσι δἰ ἐμοῦ ὁ ἑαυτῶ πάντας ἡμᾶς ζωγρφῶν ᾽Ιησοῦς), Lykomedes should paint his own spiritual portrait using Christian virtues: “And the colors (τα χρώματα) I bid the paint with are these: faith in God, knowledge, godly fear, friendship, communion, meekness, kindness, brotherly love, purity, simplicity, tranquility, fearlessness … and the whole band of colors that paint the likeness of your soul (ὄλος ό τῶν χρωμάτων χορὸς ό εἰκονογραφῶν σου τὴν ψυχήν) … and in a word, when the whole company and mingling of such colors (χρωμάτων) has come together into thy soul, it shall present it to our Lord Jesus Christ undaunted, whole, and firm of shape.”

The importance of color (and, by association, the colored paint in a portrait) as a physiognomic indicator of virtue both in the physical perception of a person and in rhetorical description developed in the first-century BCE Roman world and gained momentum in the first century CE. [26] As early as the second century we see in the Acts of John that Christians, too, compared the rainbow-like colors God provided for painting portraits with the virtues of the soul, a metaphor that continues through late antiquity. [27] In Chrysostom’s epideictic sermon on Paul, the vivid imagery he uses “to paint” the portrait of Paul also qualifies the paint Paul used to make his spiritual self-portrait as τὰ ἄνθη, best translated as “bright/true tints,” given by God. [28] By placing emphasis on the process of adding bright colors to a portrait as the means by which Paul achieved his “icon” (εἰκόνα), Chrysostom is referring to a much larger perception of the potential meanings of the colors of painted portraiture. In the same sermon on 1 Cor. 13:4, for example, John Chrysostom speaks of Paul’s words about love: “Of necessity he next makes an outline of its matchless beauty, adoring its image with the parts of virtue as with a sort of colors.”

In yet another extended metaphor about portrait painting and perfecting the soul, one that predates Chrysostom’s sermon by about ten years, Gregory of Nyssa wrote to the monk, Olympios:

Here, Gregory describes a scene of the Christian portrait painter who uses clean colors to realize fully the self-portrait, an essay in virtue modeled on Paul, as they endeavor to be made into “an image of an image.” By contrast, impure, “dirty colors” belong to evil characters with misformed faces (ᾶμορφον προσωπεὶον). It was a perception of color as either dirty or pure, bad or good, that had an established history in the Roman world, where color had ontological value that made truth visible. [30] Cicero, for example, compared the color of the sooty masks of Piso’s ancestors to Piso’s own dark complexion, insulting the ancestor portraits and Piso as morally corrupt (Against Piso I). [31]

Christians of late antiquity used the painting of portraits of saints on tablets, verbally and performatively “set out” in front of Christians to imagine and to copy in their own hearts, as a metaphor for the spiritual state of the soul. They described the use of clean and bright colors to paint their eikones that reflected the traditional belief that color in portrait painting corresponded to demonstrative virtuous qualities. Such associations suggest that the objectification of the saints as eikones through literary portraits describing their virtue by evoking the materiality of portraiture and the act of painting, was a powerful manifestation of the Christian belief that the Incarnation provided validity to the potential sacredness of material in the earthly realm, to flesh, and, ultimately, to the representation of the flesh. [32]

Related to this problem is the deeper question concerning why late antique Christian and Byzantine icons as material objects of veneration were perceived as accurate “portraits,” as an eleison of physical and spiritual character, a requirement that at least conceptually belonged to the realm of traditional painted portraiture on panels for reasons related to what has already been proposed. This is not to say that portraits of holy persons in other media were not available or acceptable as eikones, as we have examples in wall paintings, gold glass, mosaics, etc., portraying holy persons which have survived from the fourth century and about which the functions are debated. The icon’s meaning as a painted panel portrait becomes clearer when we examine some of the ancient perceptions of portraiture that evidently still held sway in late antique Christianity.

In ancient Greece, and later in Rome, portraiture was distinct from the images of the gods not just in function, but in the understanding of what could and could not be represented. Ancient portraits set up for the public to view—whether as statues or paintings, whether intended to be mimetic, or, as is more often the case, generally representative according to the ideals of physiognomy—were created, presented, and perceived as images of exemplary models who were to be emulated. Portraits were for citizens, in the words of Deborah Tarn Steiner, to “regulate not just their bodily appearance but their conduct, ēthos.” [33] In order for the portrait to work in this context, there had to be something affective in the images themselves, an outward display in bearing and countenance modeling character that was related to inner goodness, as form and character had long been connected. [34] The statues and images of gods, by contrast, are habitually described in antique sources as human-manufactured objects that appeal to man’s desire to see the gods, but are not portraits of the gods, [35] an idea that has already been noted above in Lucian’s defense of his description of Panthea. Artists who created beautiful representations of deities were famous, praised when they attained such heights in their images as to inspire awe, and produced images that invoked viewers’ reverence of the gods and properly exalted these channels through which a god may decide to make his or her presence known. [36] The extent to which anyone believed the deity was located in the sculpture is a matter of conjecture and is also variable. Most everyone, however, would have agreed that deities could use their images to demonstrate their presence to worshippers. [37]

Unsurprisingly, there were those in ancient Greece who averred portraiture was incapable of modeling ethos, or character, or else fell far short in its capacity to relate the deeds and virtues of a person, which are better described with words. [38] To provide one example of the latter opinion, in the fourth-century BCE, Isocrates, delivering his encomium to the deceased Evagoras, asserts that, “although portrait images of bodies (σωμάτων εἰκόνας) are fine memorials, those images of deeds and thoughts which one might observe only in well-crafted discourse are worth much more”; and further, while no one can make their bodies look like statues and paintings, they can “imitate the character of their fellow men and their thoughts and purposes … that are embodied in the spoken word.” [39] We see, then, an ancient writer who, like Chrysostom centuries later, reminds his audience to place the greater value on the words of the portrayed and the written account of his achievements, in this case, the account that Isocrates himself offers. [40]

The idea of looking to the portraits of exemplars as models finds parallels in non-Christian sources in late antiquity, as well. In the Life of Pythagoras, the Neoplatonist Iamblicus, describes the sage’s understanding that men may want to look upon him and see in him images and examples because they are unable to comprehend the archetype of things. [41] And further, the Neoplatonist, Proclus, validates how looking at portraits of exemplars affects viewers and reminds them to be virtuous: “… just as many, on beholding the images of divine men, are accustomed, from the very view, to be fearful of perpetrating anything base.” [42] The performative affect is made clear in this text; the portraits are understood as potentially reality-shaping if they alter the actions of viewers. Similarly, Gregory of Nazianzus offers a parallel example, recounting how the portrait of a student of Xenocrates, a certain reformed hedonist named Polemon, changed the heart and ways of a prostitute when she saw it displayed over the door of a young man she was to visit. [43]

However, there is an important difference in one of the common metaphors used to describe pagan divinization that, though found to a certain extent in late antique Christian sources, does not have the same resonance for Christians as the painted eikones; and it is in this discrepancy that we may find another reason behind the promotion of paintings, at least in rhetoric, as opposed to other media for portraiture of holy exemplars. Sources describe pagan holy men as urging followers to resemble statues as a way to describe the process of becoming divinized. [44] Plotinus in his Enneads, for example, says that in order to become virtuous it is necessary to make oneself into a statue, carving away everything extraneous and polishing the stone, “until you shine forth the godlike splendor of virtue.” [45] Indeed, perfected men are said to be like statues, not the colored panel portraits of the Christian saints. Proclus, discussing the Platonist succession, states: “Plotinus … Amelius and Porphyry … those who were the disciples, and are for us at the same level of perfection as statues … It was from these men that he who, after the gods, was our guide in all that is beautiful and good …” (Platonic Theology I, 1, 5–7). [46] In this contemporary, Neoplatonic paradigm, the ascension of humans into the visual language reserved for divinity is the greatest achievement of perfected virtue in humans. Sculpture rather than painting completes such a comparison in this scenario. Nevertheless, the existence of painted philosophers’ portraits, as attested in texts, but also alluded to in extant two-dimensional portraits in other media, indicates the importance of the dialectic of the mutual gaze to the late antique viewer. Both the painted panel and its associated portrait mode signaled for viewers a kind of intimate knowledge of form and character, the kind that could be contemplated and emulated in one’s own life, and perhaps provided a glimpse into the spiritual dimension of the portrayed. In the context described above, the painted portrait functioned as such for both pagans and Christians; but, I would argue, in the visuality of Christianity in late antiquity, portrait painting and its associated characteristics—the mutual gaze and the perceived physical and spiritual mimesis revealed by color—gained even greater significance.

In the fourth and fifth centuries, Church Fathers not only wrote about “metaphorical” saintly icons as models of virtue, they also both exhorted painters to bring life to their images of the martyrs with colors and composed ekphraseis of existing paintings of martyrdom that reference the use of colors. In a homily perhaps spuriously attributed to Basil of Caesarea, for example, the orator urged painters to depict the tortures suffered by the saint: “Up I charge you, famous painters of the martyrs’ struggles … use all your skills and all your colors in his honor” (Homily 17, “On Barlaam”). [47]

Surviving panegyrical sermons include ekphraseis of images found on the walls of martyria and painted on panel. These described what viewers could clearly see for themselves, yet were passionately orated by Christian leaders who sought to bring the images vividly to the present, to provoke visual imagination and emotional empathy, so that viewers felt they were experiencing the events firsthand. [48] The combined visual and aural perception, as well as other various environmental sensations, heightened the performances of the sermons, the performativity of the imagery, and the imaginations of the audiences. Again, the painters’ colors are emphasized. For example, Gregory of Nyssa’s sermon on St. Theodore the Recruit, delivered in the martyrium at Euchaïta likely sometime in the 370s, describes the painted images of the martyr to be seen there and notably remarks upon the role of color: “The painter colored the blooms of his art, having depicted on an image the martyr’s brave deeds … having fashioned all these things for us by his use of colors as if in a book that uttered speech … For even though it remains silent, painting can speak on the wall …” [49] Gregory’s language is evocative; he suggests that the colors can utter themselves, as if comparable to the impossible feat of a book that can speak the words written on its pages. His sermon further suggests the performativity of the colors of a painting creating itself for viewers in the moments they perceive the subject depicted. Moreover, the comparison between visual painting and words is once again evoked as means of acquiring knowledge; yet here the written word as a marker of character or deeds does not prevail, but painting stands as its equal. [50]

Indeed, the power of vivid imagery to engage listeners and viewers was not to be shunned, but instead embraced. As mentioned previously, vividness—enargeia—had an ancient tradition related to the performativity of verbal, visual, or imaginary imagery in ways so evocative that it could make events and persons that are not present before the eyes become sensually perceptible, as if present. The term enargeia as it filtered through the Greek philosophers was primarily used to indicate the vividness of images created in the mind when used epistemologically, ideally to reach true knowledge. [51] Plato mentions enargeia as a characteristic of painting, and specifically with the adding of colors to a sketch, though he is relying on application of colors as a metaphor for the knowledge fleshed out in discourse. An unfinished picture, he says, “seems to have a good enough outline, but not yet to have received the vividness (enargeia) that comes from pigments and the blending of colors.” [52] In rhetorical handbooks of later centuries, a link between persuasive oratory and painting provided orators with the means to create pictures for their audiences so as to have the same immediacy and affective impact as vision; thus, the frequent recourse both to descriptions of events and people as images and to ekphrasis. [53] Combined with the imaginative processes of the listeners, the rhetorical eikones of late antique Christian leaders, like Lucian’s Eikones, were undoubtedly described in the belief that vivid images conjured in the mind’s eye led to greater spiritual knowledge. As Basil states, “And in some ways it is reasonable that we compare ourselves to painters.” [54]

In Gregory’s encomium, once again, color is given a formative role to play in making images come alive as if living and moving, and in revealing truth. The potentiality of an eikon to be revelatory is amplified in rhetorical enargeia evoking the significance of pure color as a visual indicator of the spiritual reality of a holy person, as is its discursive and performative content through the imaginative present-ness. However, there remains a gap between considering how the rhetorical use of eikones in order to bring to life the “images” of exemplars, and how color functions in the performativity of an actual painted icon.

In fact, a more direct experience of the performativity of the colors used to paint an icon is indicated a little later, in the well-known, sixth-century verse written by Agathias Scholastikos describing an icon of Archangel Michael:

The verse reveals the prevailing theories the early Byzantines inherited from antiquity concerning vision and how form is perceived through color. [56] It also speaks to the paradox of representation, of giving form to a formless entity—an angel—as the means to visualize a transcendent being otherwise elusive to human perception. The fundamental problem that is proposed by the portrayal of a holy being that is not of the physical realm, whether angel or saint, is resolved nonetheless through a material representation; the material is then understood as having “efficacious potentialities,” perhaps made possible through the viewer’s participation, or the “ritual action required to enliven their performativity.” [57] While the only human activity mentioned here is the viewer’s prayer, we may surmise from the text that this contemplation of the image involves the viewer’s intense engagement with the subject and thus the attention to the image amounted to a kind of ritual, perhaps involving more codified behaviors that are left undescribed. However, with no artist mentioned, it is as if the colored wax itself has become the active, performative agent. It has shaped itself into an acceptable material form of an immaterial body that serves as focus of veneration, [58] and color, perhaps unsurprisingly, serves as the mediator between the viewer and the transcendent being. One wonders if the earlier rhetoric on the role of color in eikones provided a foundation for the interpretation of the archangel’s icon evidenced here.

It may be that we can locate the source for the rapid ascent of the icon that is observable by at least the sixth or seventh century in the relationship between perception and the painted portrait precedented already in the late fourth-century texts. Patricia Cox Miller, referring to the holy bodies of saints, discusses the Christian belief system that upheld the notion that material—flesh, bones, contact relics, loca sancta—can be sites of spirituality. This belief amounts to nothing less than affirming of the role of the senses in the perception of holiness, which in turn shaped human behavior. [59] Similarly, descriptions of real or imagined paintings provided the human sense of vision with an authority to perceive not just physically, but also spiritually.

Though we have no surviving portrait paintings on panel of saints from this period, there are abundant “portrait” images of Paul (and other holy persons) that survive in other media (as well as texts referring to portraits), ones that already give him his identifiable features of black pointed beard and black hair receding from his broad and wizened forehead. Additionally, the second-century Acts of Paul and Thecla provided a physical description of Paul that was understood as authoritative. Chrysostom’s evocation of Paul’s eikon may only set the stage for his much lengthier sermon of Paul’s virtues and deeds; yet by beginning his sermon with the material components of a portrait and the colors that complete it, he gives his audience the immediacy of an image brought to mind, whether completely imagined, or, more likely, formed according to existing images of Paul with which they were familiar. With Chrysostom’s—and many others’—use of tropes regarding color as indicative of virtue, and of painted portraiture as particularly insightful into the character of the person depicted, I would suggest we have already in place the acknowledgement of the epistemological use of eikones and the importance of vision in the perception and understanding of holy persons. The performativity of color in eikones lies in the listeners/readers experience of them through oral and written descriptions, which reinforced how color as a potentially revelatory medium participated in the fashioning of spiritually mimetic portraits, and in how viewers then learned to look at, approach, and understand actual painted portraits of holy persons, seeing them as coming-into-being, vividly in the present, through painted colors. Viewers could then imagine themselves as potentially transformed through being present to the creation of the colored (virtuous) portrait, perceiving the color of an icon to be affective as well as having the capacity to convey prayers. Color, it would seem, carried truth that reached across dimensions, a quality that would be ascribed to form in later defenses of icons. One wonders if the rise of the archieropoieta in the later sixth century, so often described as unpainted (suggesting an icon painted itself according to God’s will), [60] was partly framed by these associations.