Images of ordinary humans in the presence of holy figures, the former typically shown offering a pious gift—a book or a church—to the latter, remain endlessly fascinating to students of Byzantine art. Such images, conventionally classified as “donor portraits,” provide the scholar with a point of access to historical individuals and their world; they put a human face on a visual culture all too often maligned for its presumed emphasis on the generic and the abstract at the expense of the personal. Rico Franses's eloquent and handsomely produced book is an ambitious attempt to rethink the Byzantine imagery of religious donation and patronage. The book makes no claim to a comprehensive coverage of the material. The focus, instead, is on methodology and issues of interpretation. Moving away from the interpretive frameworks of biography and social history, two approaches that continue to dominate the scholarship on the subject, Franses is primarily concerned with conceptually grounding the donor image and its distinct mode of operation. Donor portraits, he argues, should be considered within three interconnected fields: the afterlife, gift exchange, and the interaction between human and divine. The argument is complex, and the all-too-brief summary that follows cannot possibly do justice to its subtlety.

The practice of religious donation in Byzantium was a response to acute anxieties concerning one's fate after death. Yet the pious gift was a peculiar redemptive device, one that could not be easily reconciled with the notions of sin, punishment, and divine mercy that shaped the Byzantine conceptions of the afterlife. The purpose of the gift was not to wash sin away but to establish contact and facilitate exchange with the divine. Franses challenges much of the scholarship on sacred giving that discusses the phenomenon in terms of reciprocity and mutual obligation, or alternatively, as a form of purchase. He insists that the exchange between devout donors, on the one hand, and God and his saints, on the other, cannot be reduced to protocols governing human interactions. Bringing together two figures of radically different status, sacred giving is inscribed in a relationship of power; it makes manifest one's submission to a holy potentate. Within this framework, the gift is but a due expression of the giver's respect for the recipient. Since respect is not “an item of exchange or purchase, gifts can be given, potentates can respond with favors, and yet to neither party does it appear as though they are engaging in exchange or purchase” (178–179). The power structure of religion thus negates the interested and transactional nature of sacred giving. Donor portraits played an active part in this mechanism of exchange that was not really an exchange by stressing the donor's subservience and humility before a holy other. In fact, the true subject of these images is not so much the act of donation, but rather the donor's desire for a personal contact with the recipient. This is why Franses proposes that “donor portraits” are better described as “contact portraits.” The nature of these visualizations of what is plainly impossible—an encounter between a mortal and a holy figure—is far from clear. Franses rejects those interpretations that read donor/contact portraits as either symbolic or literal, arguing that the image itself has the potential to generate belief in the possibility and, indeed, reality of such an encounter. The portrait is thus best understood as a site of religious transformation. Having entered, as it were, the pictorial space, the donor is called on “to transmute the image into truth” (222).

The greatest strength of Franses's account is his sophisticated and intricate unpacking of the various conundrums that confront the scholar attempting to make sense of the seemingly unproblematic images of donation in Byzantine art. He has approached his task armed with insights borrowed from other areas of inquiry beyond art history, most notably social anthropology and literary theory. The thoughtful considerations of such diverse topics as intentionality, representation, symbolism, and social exchange are bound to provoke further reflection, and not only among Byzantinists.

The book, however, is not without problems. The most severe concern the author's unexamined assumptions. Franses takes it for granted that all mortals depicted, without a gift in hand, in prayer next to a holy figure are donors. He refers to such images as “non-donation donor portraits.” However, without direct evidence—for example, in the form of a dedicatory inscription—we can never be certain whether the portrayed supplicant was responsible for the creation of the work or whether the work has been executed for the supplicant's spiritual benefit at the behest of somebody else. Besides, in Byzantine art the dead could share the same iconography with the living—witness the portrait of Constantine, the brother of the commissioner and donor in the so-called Leo Bible (figure 4.1). How many of Franses's “non-donation donor portraits” may actually be depictions of the deceased? These different possibilities and scenarios are surely significant and must be taken into account when discussing the various valences of “contact portraits.” Franses is also mistaken in assuming that sacred giving was solely and exclusively a matter of preoccupation with the afterlife. Other more specific, earth-bound concerns were also at play. Consider, for instance, the practice of votive offering. Ex-votos—gifts made in fulfillment of a vow—acknowledge and respond to manifestations of divine favor that have transpired in this life. Incidentally, the category of the ex-voto also challenges Franses's resolute denial of any transactional element in sacred giving. By its very nature, a votive gift is the result of a straightforward quid pro quo exchange, an exchange whose terms are, moreover, stipulated by the votary. One gets the impression that some of these inaccuracies and omissions could have been avoided, had the author engaged with the primary sources in a more sustained and systematic fashion. It is rather surprising that relevant Byzantine texts, including inscriptions, monastic foundation documents, and wills and acts of donation, among others, do not play a more prominent role in his account. These texts are of critical importance; they provide us not only with a period-specific language of religious patronage, but also with a set of concepts and discourses that framed and animated the phenomenon of pious generosity in Byzantium. Any attempt to come to an understanding of Byzantine donors and their images should give due consideration to this precious body of evidence. Franses has written an intelligent and provocative book, but its readers would do well to approach it with caution.