'This is a very learned and important book, with significant ramifications for thinking about sight and touch, aesthetics, the cultural history of vision, the historiography of Byzantine art and continuity/shift between the classical world and Byzantium. Betancourt shows better than all previous scholarship how theories of vision/touch grow out of their classical intellectual archaeology.' Jas' Elsner, Humphrey Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Acknowledgements; Note to the reader; Introduction: can't touch this; Part I. How Sight Is Not Touch: 1. The medium of sight; 2. The problem of tactility; 3. The commonalities of the senses; Part II. Photios and the Unfolding of Perception: Introduction; 4. Has the mind seen?: the language of effluxes; 5. Has it grasped?: apprehending the object; 6. Has it visualized?, I: the grasp of the imagination; 7. Has it visualized?, II: the problem of fantasy; 8. Then it has effortlessly …: judgment and assent; Conclusion; Part III. Mediation, Veneration, Remediation: 9. Medium and mediation; 10. Tactility and veneration; 11. Synaesthesia and remediation; Conclusion: tempted to touch; Bibliography; Index.