Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium

Considering the interrelations between sight, touch, and imagination,
this book surveys classical, late antique, and medieval theories
of vision to elaborate on how various spheres of the Byzantine world
categorized and comprehended sensation and perception. Revisiting
scholarly assumptions about the tactility of sight in the Byzantine
world, it demonstrates how the haptic language associated with vision
referred to the cognitive actions of the viewer as they grasped sensory
data in the mind in order to comprehend and produce working
imaginations of objects for thought and memory. At stake is how
the affordances and limitations of the senses came to delineate and
cultivate the manner in which art and rhetoric were understood as
mediating the realities they wished to convey. This would similarly
come to contour how Byzantine religious culture could also go about
accessing the sacred, the image serving as a site of desire for the
mediated representation of the divine.