“The Image Is Not God”
Politics, Theology, and the Materiality of Images in San Marco, Venice
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21322281 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Antony Eastmond (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 64 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 103-125 |
| Publication date | 2025-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Gesta (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-920X • E-ISSN: 2169-3099 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/736586 |
| OpenAlex | W4415597308 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 16 |
An inscription above a twelfth-century mosaic image of Christ in the church of San Marco in Venice states: “Indeed God is as the image teaches, but the image itself is not God. Here you see [the image], but you worship in spirit what you perceive in it.” The mosaic was made at a moment of great anxiety about the status of images across the Christian world. A small group of images in both Rome and Constantinople were increasingly singled out as particularly holy. The line between the holiness of the images and that of the objects on which they were painted became blurred, eliding their material form and their spiritual efficacy. The mosaic in Venice must be understood against this background. It shows how the city sought to negotiate its position between East and West both theologically and politically. The mosaic is part of a larger set of images in San Marco that argued for a different, more limited, role for the image, and this must be understood alongside the city’s promotion of relics as the prime means of interaction with the divine. The influx of Byzantine art and icons into Venice after 1204 overwhelmed this earlier position on images. While the early mosaics of San Marco are often seen as a subset of Byzantine art, this article argues that they are fundamentally different in function and meaning and should not form part of the same art-historical narrative
Byzantine architecture · Materiality (auditing) · Meaning (existential) · Mosaic · Witness · Worship · Byzantine Studies and History · Historical and Religious Studies of Rome · Visual Culture and Art Theory
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |