IF WE SUPPRESS too much abstract analysis in art history, then relational being and thinking can keep subjecthood in play for things long left for dead. They force understanding away from Cartesian absolutes of mind and body, subject and object, and open art history to experientialized historical human and nonhuman subjects—to full relations among all those subjects, as flesh of our own flesh, to borrow from the title of Kaja Silverman’s book, which invokes Adam’s words in Genesis to argue for similarity, rather than difference, as placing everything in relation.

This chapter uses an icon and a box to venture beyond an art history of objects and to advocate for the subjecthood and agency for all Byzantine things. It attempts to demonstrate the materiality of a late Byzantine icon. It argues for sensitivity to the temporal rhythms and material experience that things reveal, and it offers possible strategies for showing in exhibition, where many of us encounter things from the past, how materialities can manifest themselves to us so long after the objects were made and first made active.

Stephen’s Materiality

There is a small, late Byzantine icon of St. Stephen in the Menil Collection (Figure 3). The icon’s mereness might betray its active agency, but attendance to its sensual surfeit reveals its relational energy. Holding a swinging censer in one hand and a paten, the small plate that holds the Eucharist bread, and a gold box in his covered left, the figure of Stephen performs his transitive acts that span the inside and outside of the picture. The porousness of the picture plane is one thing, but more radically, with transitive senses, Stephen enacts the relational, transformative agency of his presence.