LES ICONOPHAGES
Une histoire de l’ingestion des images
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ICONOVORES
A history of the ingestion of images Jérémie Koering
14 × 22.5 cm 340 pages 100 black & white and color illustrations softback april 2021 retail price: 32 €
Jérémie Koering is a lecturer in art history of the modern period at Fribourg University. His work looks at Renaissance art in its anthropological, political (Le Prince en représentation, Actes Sud, 2013), and poetic dimensions (Caravage, juste un détail, inha, 2018, with Stephen J. Campbell, Andrea Mantega, Making Art History, Wiley, 2014). He is also interested in the epistemology of art history and the cinematographical imagination (Imaginer le cinéma, Actes Sud, forthcoming). He is also editor of Actes Sud’s “Les Apparences” collection.
“Eating images” might seem like a strange idea but since Antiquity people have constantly consumed frescoes, icons, sculptures, engravings, etched emblems, imprinted holy bread, embossed heraldry, marzipan models or sculpted food.
T
he examples are endless: a Host bearing the image of Christ and the apostles, a gingerbread Virgin Mary suckling her newborn, a statue of the Madonna with a pipe fitted inside her breast that “miraculously” dispenses milk
“Les Apparences” collection awards • 2014, Jérémie Koering, Le Prince en représentation, François-Victor Noury Prize, Institut de France, art history category. • 2016, Francesca Alberti, La Peinture facétieuse, Monseigneur Marcel Prize silver medal, Académie française. • 2020, Florian Métral, Figurer la création du monde, Monseigneur Marcel Prize, Académie française.
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to worshippers, or even all the paintings and engravings depicting men, women and children hungrily ingesting sweet and sacred images. The original purpose of such figurative artifacts was transfigured. Due to their constitutive matter, they were made to be consumed, but above all, they were intended to be looked at first. How might we explain this? Why take a sacred image and turn it into something to be handled and destroyed? Why not just leave it out of harm’s way to be worshipped? What therapeutic, religious, symbolic or social functions might be attributed to such entities? What is the mind imagining when it combines religious iconography and food? When the palate encounters such visual configurations, what are their effects? Have images always been used in this way, everywhere around the world? To answer these questions, Jérémie K oering traces the history of iconovorousness from Antiquity to the present day bringing together the histories of medicine, religions, literature and meaning.
