REVIEWS 705

no reference either to the debates about the issue in studies of late

antiquity. The same problem applies to the discussion of Christ's
supposed effeminacy and androgyny. In the absence of any real
contextual evidence, as it stands, the reading seems to fit the preoc-
uppations of the late twentieth century rather than those of early
Christianity. This leads finally to the question of the methodology
involved in the study which is in fact classical. It looks for artistic
parallels in order to understand a given image. There is no treat-
ment of the relation of the art to the Christian literary tradition,
particularly the Scripture, and highly influential texts such as the

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Vita Constantini and the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius, which
underpinned the imperial theory, are not considered.
Nevertheless, despite one's desire to argue with almost every-
thing, it must be acknowledged that the book does immense ser-
vice in presenting with such learning the creativity of early
Christian art and in emphasizing its great role in forming the
collective imagination of Europe.
SISTER CHARLES MURRAY

Likeness and Presence. A History of the Image before the Era

of Art. By HANS BELTING. Translated by Edmund
Jephcott. Pp. xxiv + 651. 12 colour and 295 black and
white illustrations. University of Chicago Press, 1994.
ISBN 0 2 2 6 0 4 2 1 4 6 . $65.
I N this magisterial work, the art historian, Hans Belting, well
known not only for his work on Byzantine art but also for his
studies of late Medieval Western art, puts forward and defends a
fundamentally new approach to our understanding of the history
of what we have come to call art. Art, in the modern sense, is a
product of the Renaissance, which introduced the notion of the
creativity of the artist, and with it the notion of a work of art as
something to be appreciated in aesthetic terms. Before that,
according to Belting, art was somewhat different: artists produced
images that enabled those who beheld them to enter into the pres-
ence of what was depictedChrist, the Mother of God, one of
the saints, or an event from the liturgical year, participation in
which was enhanced through contemplation and veneration of its
image, and expressed through miracles and answers to prayer.
What Belting aims to do in this book is, principally, to write a
history of the image before the era of artas his sub-title makes
clearbut also to show how the Renaissance does represent a real
706 REVIEWS
caesura: so he explores both sides of this divide, and shows how
the new conception of art rendered the older view no longer ten-
able. There are also a number of axes grinding away, one of which
concerns 'theologians', and in particular the attempt of Orthodox,
principally Russian, theologians in this century to present a theolo-
gical case for the 'icon' as the only real religious art form: we shall
come back to this later.
The first two chapters clear the ground, sketching out Belting's
thesis, drawing attention to the discoveries in Sinai and Rome that
now make the history of the icon possible, and attacking the mis-

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conceptions of the 'theologians' (a much more thorough criticism
of the modern 'Russian' theological defence of the icon can be
found in Alain Besancon's L'Image interdite: une histoire intel-
lectuelle de I'iconoclasme (Paris, 1994), esp. pp. 180-200). Then
follow several chapters on the veneration of icons in the period
before iconoclasm: the growth of the cult of the Mother of God,
traditions about icons 'not made by human hand' (acheiropoietoi)
or icons of the Mother of God believed to be painted by the
Evangelist, St Luke, the influence of late antique funerary por-
traits on Christian icons, and the connection between the Imperial
cult and icon-veneration. Belting then discusses iconoclasm and
the new role of the icon after the triumph of Orthodoxy in the
ninth century: this includes the patterns of interior church decora-
tion that emerge from the ninth century onwards, including the
iconostasis, as well as the place of icons in public processions,
pilgrimages and so on. In this period Belting is keen to see an
attempt by 'theologians' to tame the icon, reducing them to a
single level by incorporating them into a theologically-controlled
pattern of church decoration and marginalizing superstitious prac-
tices. I am not sure how convincing this is: even today, the ordered
ranks of icons in an Orthodox church do not preclude devotion
to individual icons. Belting then devotes attention to developments
in icon painting in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the way
in which rhetorical canons determine the ways in which icons
'speak' and lead to different ways of depicting the crucifixion, and
new ways of representing the maternal care of the Mother of God
for those who turn to her and her intimate relation to her Son, as
well as icons that incorporate a narrative structureboth the
sequence of events celebrated at one of the great feasts such as
Christmas, and the events of the life of a saint. Belting then turns
to the impact of Byzantine icons on the West, especially after the
sack of Constantinople in 1204. This story he tells with a number
of original twists. First, he views as simplistic the contrast norm-
ally drawn between the rigid adherence to timeless types, typical
 REVIEWS 707
of the East, and the freedom found in the West: he points out that
the West also tried to follow traditional norms, sometimes in a
more constrained way than we can find in the East, but more
significantly, what initially impressed the Western artists about
the imported icons was precisely the 'living painting' of these
icons, with its rhetorical structurenot the 'norm' but rather the
'freedom' of Byzantine painting. Belting also discusses the differ-
ent ways in which iconographic ideals were incorporated in the
West, and makes much of the difference imposed by the different
ways of celebrating the liturgy: whether behind an iconostasis, or,

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as eventually happened in the West, in front of an altarpiece. This
section is fascinating, but seemed to me a bit rushed, in that
Belting does not consider the changes in sacramental devotion that
accompanied the growth of the altarpiece, in particular the way
in which devotion came to be focused on the consecrated host, in
a manner which was already beginning to preempt the icon of its
function of effecting a presence. And then came the end of the
'image' and the beginning of the era of art. For Belting this is due
to the Renaissance, and perhaps especially the invention of print-
ing and the prominence that it gave to word over against image.
The iconoclasm of the Protestant Reformers is result not cause:
'what they rejected in the name of religion had long since lost the
old substance of unmediated pictorial revelation' (p. 16). The
Counter-Reformation gave contemporary art 'the task of provid-
ing the effective presentation of the old image': Belting discusses
this acutely and briefly, but sees it as an attempt doomed to failure.
This is the story told by the book, supported by immense learn-
ing and many fresh insights: it will undoubtedly become funda-
mental for our understanding of medieval art. It is not, however,
all equally compelling. First of all, Belting tends to take the record
of what has survived as too directly veridical of what happened:
but much has been lost or destroyed, and for the early period,
especially, we have to confess that we do not really know that
much. Belting assumes an initial rejection by Christians of any
form of religious art, and cites in support the well-known canon
of the 'general' Council of Elvira (p. 145): but it was a local
Spanish council, and at best informs us about attitudes in the
extreme West of the Empire (and is presumably evidence that
there were paintings in churches, else why forbid them?). The
truth is that we are very unclear about early Christian religious
art, and that when we do have evidence of widespread veneration
of imagesby the end of the sixth centuryit is presented as a
long-established practice. Also, Belting uses the term 'icon' to
mean a panel painting, and takes as axiomatic that three-
708 REVIEWS
dimensional images were long regarded by Christians as idolat-
rous. This, it seems to me, is simply to take later (much later)
Orthodox usage (and anti-Catholic polemic) and project it back
into the historical record. In our sources from the first millennium,
eikon means image of any kind and certainly includes mosaic and
carved ivory, as well as panel paintings; and if there is little evid-
ence for three-dimensional Christian icons (the Empress
Theodora's 'dolls'!), when Leontius of Neapolis calls images the
things Solomon had made 'in carving and sculpture' to place in
the Temple, he was clearly envisaging three-dimensional objects.

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Belting's usage seems to be an anachronism projected on to a
fragmentary historical record. An example of another kind of ana-
chronism is Belting's animus against 'theologians'. Belting's 'theo-
logians' are represented as controlling and limiting the power of
the image by their theories: even the iconodules are presented as
close to iconoclasm. Even of modern Orthodox theologians that
seems to me a strange thing to say: one modern Orthodox theolo-
gian has justified 'paper' icons by pointing out that some of these,
in North America, are miracle-working, 'weeping' icons. But in
the Byzantine period, St Theodore of Stoudios is presumably one
of Belting's 'theologians': it does not seem to me that he restricts
the icon in any way, he is even enthusiastic for practices, such as
having icons as god-parents, that (quite properly, I would have
thought) have dropped out of use. (Incidentally, Leontius' defence
of Christian icons, cited earlier, contradicts one of Belting's fre-
quent assertions, that the theological defence of icons was simply
a reaction to iconoclasm: Leontius, in the sixth century, was
responding to Jewish criticisms of Christian practice.)
Even Belting's principal theoryabout the divide between
'image' and art at the time of the Renaissanceseems to gain in
conviction from the unevenness of the historical record. Belting
seems to argue that, with the dawn of the modern period, the
production of art depicting fictional themesfor Classical mytho-
logy, for instancepermanently compromised the older 'image':
'the new themes, which had no reality of their own in a literal
sense, now affected the way images in general were seen. If what
is depicted was based on fiction, the older themes (images of saints
and portraits), which were taken literally, could not remain free
of ambiguity' (p. 472). The force of this argument is made greater
in Belting's presentation by his completely ignoring secular
Byzantine art: much less of this has survived than Byzantine reli-
gious artmainly because religious institutions survived the fall
of Constantinople whereas secular institutions did notbut there
is no doubt that there was a continuous tradition in Byzantium of
 REVIEWS 709
art deploying secular (and mythological) themes. This objection
does not, of course, dispose of Belting's theory, but it does make
the issue more complex.
This is a work of massive synthesis. It is particularly important
in the way Belting insists that the 'image' was a locus of the power
of sanctity, and is essentially to be approached in these terms.
This suggests new ways of approach, not just to art history and
cultural history, but even to a theological understanding of icons:
Belting must not be surprised if theologians find in his arguments
much to support the theology of the icon, and are even tempted

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to extend their notion of the icon beyond its hitherto culturally-
determined limits.
ANDREW LOUTH

Authority and the Sacred. Aspects of the Christianisation of

the Roman World. By PETER BROWN. Pp. xiii + 91.
Cambridge University Press, 1995. ISBN O 521 49557 1 and
499046. Hardback 27.95/534.95; paper 9.95/512.95.
MORE than thirty years ago, in his seminal paper on aspects of
the christianisation of the Roman aristocracy (1961), Peter Brown
bade us to turn aside from the legislation of the fourth century
emperors and consider, instead, the culture, the marriages, and
life-styles of aristocratic families. Like other fine historians, Brown
has remained preoccupied by the same set of problems, and has
continued to push hisand ourunderstanding of them forward
step by step in a number of studies. The three chapters of this
book (the Tanner Lectures for 1993) move this advance several
stages ahead. They are based on the author's 'growing suspicion'
that 'accounts of the Christianisation of the Roman world are at
their most misleading when they speak of that process as if it were
a single block, capable of a single comprehensive description ..."
The first lecture, 'Christianisation: narratives and processes',
concerns the narratives which pagans and Christians alike pro-
duced to represent the process of 'Christianisation'. In our
attempts to understand this process we modern historians have to
a large extent been the heirs of the (mainly Latin) Christian writers
of the generation of Augustine who created the representation of
Christian success as 'a slow, heroic struggle on earth against the
unyielding, protean weight of an unconverted ancient world'.
Brown draws our attention to the ambiguous and shifting balance
of the religious situation with which both pagans and Christians