The Icon’s Gold: A Medium of Light, Air, and Space

Abstract

Considering the prominence of gold ground in Byzantine icons, this article puts into dialogue recent investigations on the phenomenology of icons with classical, late antique, and Byzantine conceptions of space and gold. Through its play with ambient light, gold operates in the same manner as the medium of sight, understood by Aristotle to be a diaphanous substance that surrounds a visible object and, when activated by light, transmits colors from the object to the viewer. By considering the manner in which contemporaneous thinkers understood the materiality and composition of gold and air, this article argues that the icon’s gold embodies the very air that surrounds the bodies of the figures represented, rather than being a mere symbol for an eternal heavenly realm. The aim here is to use this argument to consider how we can think of medium in an expanded field as not merely the physical substrate or materiality of an artwork, but rather as that imperceptible action of representation that mediates between the image as a mere potentiality of form in the artist’s repertoire and the image as an actualized reality in a material.

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