On Edible Images: Artefacts and the Constitution of Community

Research Seminar

Date: Sep 11, 2018
Time: 01:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Jérémie Koering
Location: Villino Stroganoff, Via Gregoriana 22, 00187 Rom
Host: Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte
Contact: paulinyi@biblhertz.it

On Edible Images: Artefacts and the Constitution of Community

There was a time - but is it just over? - when some images were not just looked at, but eaten. Produced to be swallowed, they were consumed by the mouth rather than the eyes. This presentation will focus on this particular way of experiencing images, by examining the consumption of the edible artefacts (body paintings, eucharist, waffles, edible sculptures, figurative cakes) over the longue durée, and by highlighting the anthropological and cultural stakes that inform this specific practice.

As part of a logic of participation, the ingestion of the image makes it possible for the person who experiences it to enter a community or contribute to maintaining its cohesion. This presentation, which will take us from ancient Egypt to contemporary Europe through Byzantium, Renaissance Italy and the medieval West, will be an opportunity to observe that the sharing of the image, far from having been a simple theoretical and theological program, has taken forms both unexpected and concrete in our history.

Research Seminar organized by David Zagoury

Jérémie Koering is an art historian at the CNRS and Deputy Director of the Centre André Chastel. His fields of study are Italian Renaissance Art, epistemology of art history, and anthropology of images. Currently, he is writing two books: one on edible images (Des images que l’on mange, Actes Sud, 2018), the other on Schapiro’s drawings (Meyer Schapiro en dessinant).