Iconophages: a history of ingesting images by Jérémie KoeringCall Number: N7428 .K6413
Publication Date: 2024
Eating and drinking images may seem like an anomalous notion but, since antiquity, in the European and Mediterranean worlds, people have swallowed down frescoes, icons, engravings, eucharistic hosts stamped with images, heraldic wafers, marzipan figures, and other sculpted dishes. Either specifically made for human consumption or diverted from their original purpose to be ingested, these figured artifacts have been not only gazed upon but also incorporated--taken into the body--as solids or liquids. Jérémie Koering examines this unexplored facet of the history of images through an interdisciplinary approach that ranges across art history, cultural and material history, anthropology, philosophy, and the history of the body and the senses. He analyzes the human investment, in terms of culture and imagination, at stake in this paradoxical way of experiencing images.