Already by the late thirteenth century, the laudes ceremony had become a weekly feature of civic life on the island, performed each Tuesday in the capital city of Candia in a ritual that symbolized interfaith relations on the island. It was folded into the veneration of icons and encounters with the miraculous, became a site for resolving personal disputes, and was referenced and represented deep within the rugged interior of the island in the decorative programs of rural chapels. Each of these configurations, explored in Chapter 2, reveals a different facet of a political imagination that gave music the power to represent the state in all its members, local and far-flung, visible and invisible, human and divine. Studying the performance of laudes in all its variety gives us glimpses into the chaotic reality out of which Venice’s project of empire was forged in the early years. Both Latin and Greek populations on the island adopted the laudes as a space to negotiate and contest colonial identity. Far from expressing unanimous agreement, the laudes had, by the fourteenth century, become a spectacular arena of dispute on the island.

This chapter surveys art history, patristic theology, and modern Orthodox theology to identify a starting point that can address the mediating function of the icon. However, each of these approaches is also marked by limitations that ultimately leave them unable to sufficiently address two questions that are essential to this inquiry: (a) What is a painted image, and how does it mediate the truth of what it shows by its specific, finite capacities and aesthetic devices? (b) What would it mean for God to “show himself,” or what kind of “visibility” would God have? I make a case that phenomenology will be a powerful tool to address both questions.

Sign systems help to create descriptive and depictive representations. Descriptive representations operate on symbols. They are based on conceptual analyses identifying objects or events as well as attributes and interrelations. Attributes and relations are ascribed by predications to entities according to syntactic rules resulting in so-called propositions (“idea units”). These propositions can be integrated into coherent semantic networks. Propositional representations are considered as mental structures which can be externalized in the form of spoken or written texts. Despite their informational incompleteness, descriptions have high representational power. Depictive representations are based on inherent commonalities between a representing object and the represented subject matter. The inherent commonalities can be based on similarity or analogy. These representations are complete with regard to a certain class of information. Due to their completeness and consistency and because information can be read off directly, depictive representations have high computational efficiency.

Chapter 19, “Pilgrimage to Constantinople,” examines the emergence of Constantinople as a sacred center of Christian pilgrimage. It outlines the city’s attractions and considers the motives that drove people to visit.

The earliest preserved painted icons in the Adriatic date from the thirteenth century.In fact, apart from Rome, the entire Latin West seems to have embraced icons simultaneously overnight as soon as they started coming in great numbers from Byzantium following the capture of Constantinople by the crusaders in 1204. This chapter argues that the Adriatic was particularly responsive to these painted icons because it had already embraced Byzantine relief icons in the eleventh century. The examination includes both the material and written evidence for the existence of icons in the eleventh-century Adriatic, such as the extant marble Hodegetria icon from Trani and the recorded commission of a gilt silver icon for Siponto Cathedral in 1069. When it comes to Dalmatia, this investigation looks into a donation document recording five icons, one of which was made of silver, in a church built and furnished by a Croatian dignitary in the 1040s. The analysis demonstrates that by the thirteenth century, the Adriatic was conditioned by relief icons to embrace easily portable painted icons reaching its shores after the fall of Constantinople and that this area as a whole experienced a strong prestige bias towards Byzantine artefacts.

This chapter likewise draws on ancient visual and material culture in order to examine the worship of divine cult statues in Mesopotamia, the anti-idol polemics in the Bible, and the power of images and ritual activities in the construction of religious beliefs. In particular, the ancient Mesopotamian “washing of the mouth” ritual is studied within a cognitive framework. The discussion highlights both the intuitive and non-intuitive (i.e., costly) aspects of the belief in divine cult statues, and proceeds to examine both the cognitive process and cultural mechanisms that contribute to the belief that an inanimate statue is or becomes the deity. In doing so, the chapter adds a nuanced layer to the nature of belief and also problematizes certain scholarly views about belief in cult statues in ancient Mesopotamia and Israel.

Detailed examination of two building projects associated with Pope John VII (705–7); his funerary chapel in Old Saint Peter’s and the redecoration of the church of Santa Maria Antiqua. Prime attention is given to the cultural background of the decorations and the media employed.