With this monograph, Vladimir Ivanovici brings together analyses of sacred art, cult practices, and the visuality of divinity in the ancient world to describe various ways the visual culture of Greco-Roman religion and statue worship were applied to the living bodies of superlative humans who were understood to be embodiments and reflections of the divine. While his aim is to describe a history of thought that influenced late antique Christians’ associations between images and the appearances of living Christians, the study necessarily begins with antique discourse about the potential of human beings to transcend their nature and become god-like. The conceptualization of this human achievement relied on the expressions of divinity at hand: the statues and cult spaces that constructed the visual and material components of worshipping the gods, and other sensible phenomena that were characteristic of divine entities. Human bodies were perceived and described in relation to images of deities to indicate their relationship to the divine, which encouraged iconic modes of (self) presentation that drew from the established visual language of cult images. Using textual sources and examples in visual art, Ivanovici explains how the statues of gods influenced viewers’ apprehension god-like humans (in Christianity, Christ-like humans), and how the architecture, material trappings, and rituals of statue worship informed the performative dimensions of these identities and their representation.

Chapter 1 begins with Greek sources attesting to the belief that the inner character of a person was visible in the external body. Roman interpretation of physiognomy instituted the idea that one could cultivate character through modifying one’s outer appearance (with garments and cosmetics) and comportment, imitating the rarified beauty and behaviors that evoked comparisons to the gods. Outward beauty and decorum, as well as other cultural influences, such as philosophical teachings about imitating the divine through virtuous living, led to the perception that godhood could be divinely bestowed upon or achieved by individuals. Over the course of the first few centuries C.E., belief in the potential indwelling of divinity and in human divinization unfolded in different ways; but, as the author argues, in all of these cases, images (icons) of the gods—especially statues—must be considered visual touchstones that provided the means to express these beliefs. In this way, images that helped sharpen the identities of humans resulted in creating humans whose bodies assumed iconic identities.

In the special case of emperors, the subject of the second chapter, iconicity—that is, the body-as-image—meant presenting themselves as living gods with all the corresponding architecture, imagery, and cult ritual. They adopted the guise of statues when they processed in public. They often aligned their identities with ruler gods, such as Jupiter, Sol, and Christ, which had implications for the appearances and representations of the emperors. They occupied temple-like spaces and framed themselves with temple-like architecture, as gods should. For Christian emperors who were not considered living gods but divinely invested by God, the significance of sacred architecture did not diminish. Indeed, the imperial palace became more definitive as an abode for his sacred body, which was presented and portrayed with costume and props that drew attention to the iconic office of the emperor rather than the individual.

Chapters 3–6 feature discussions about specifically Christian expressions of human iconicity. Ivanovici describes several categories of people whose bodies were perceived as iconic: martyrs and confessors, the newly baptized, ascetics and monks, bishops, and stylites. Each of these is discussed contextually, iconsidering wider notions of the sensible divine at the time. Pauline texts about being restored to God’s likeness, about the apostle’s own mirroring of the icon of God (Christ), and carrying Christ within him, merged with non-Christian ideas about divinization to form new interpretations of iconicity. Early Christian martyrs displayed Christ-like suffering, which took on a performative quality at their death as their bodies were filled with divine presence, becoming images of transcendence so that others could perceive God in them. The living bodies of confessors, who were understood as representatives of Christ, were treated as if holy, the faithful desiring haptic contact with them as if they were sacredly charged. Ivanovici suggests that living bodies believed to contain divine power may have precipitated the cult of relics that took greater hold in the fourth century.

Temples and statues provided early Christians with metaphors that conceptualized their religion, which they initially applied to human bodies to differentiate from paganism’s hollow worship of inanimate material. Christians understood themselves as temples housing the divine. According to the author, the body as a spatial and material “temple” nuances the scholarly position that early Christians shunned constructing actual temples for their directed worship. However, conferring iconic status to all Christians, despite preaching that they had been restored to the image of God through baptism, threatened a hierarchical system that recognized that some people, such as saints, holy men, and church leaders, achieved greater similarity to God, conforming more to the His likeness than other Christians. Qualifying exceptional humans as Christ-like through iconicity occurred in several ways. For example stylite ascetics appeared like statues on honorific columns. Meanwhile, bishops established their identities as representatives of God on earth, applying to ecclesiastical settings the kinds of visual presentations exploited by emperors, with purposeful architecture and imagery that aligned their identities with Christ’s representation in those spaces.

This is a work of meticulous research of primary and secondary sources; every footnote displays ample citations for the author’s arguments and the bibliography is vast. Ivanovici states his intent to provide a broad overview of the subject. It is indeed important to see a longer trajectory and to recognize how visual art affects a culture’s perception as people go about making sense of their world and each other. With this and other studies exploring similar ideas about religious embodiment, we begin to see ‘iconicity’ as a conceptual framework that operates in various ways to construct identities and appearances that are informed by images, but do not necessarily directly mimic them. As this study indicates, iconicity provides a way to describe an imaginative process in which abstract notions are made comprehensible not just in relation to images, but because there are images.