Determined by its biblical origins, the birth of specifically Christian
visual culture had to be given through overcoming the inevitable resistance
of early church towards images. In order to find its stable place on late
antique cultural scene, early byzantine art, thus, had to rely on support of
religious and cultural patterns remote of magisterial artistic trends. Among
those, contemporary theory recognizes as especially important: 1) cult of
relics and 2) sealing practices. Crossing the possibility of theoretical
definition of unique semiotic model standing behind those two cultural-
religious practices with the fact that after iconoclasm byzantine art will be
systematically distanced from both of them, this research attempts to explore
the relation between iconophile theory and byzantine artistic production from
a yet unexplored interpretative position. Hypothesis that category of
indexical sign, as it is proposed by contemporary semiotics (based on
Peircean legacy), can be used for extraction of this unique semiotic model is
used here as a specific methodological tool for re-approach to both - 1) the
pre-iconoclastic need for accentuating the indexical aspects of iconic images
and 2) the mystery of post-iconoclastic radical distancing towards such a
semiotic need. On the basis of such an integrated approach it is possible not
only to search for more precise explanation of co-relations between artistic
practices and contemporaneous (iconophile) theory, but to explain curious
historical delay in application of this theoretic knowledge in artistic and
liturgical realms, together with a late outburst of iconoclastic behaviour
provoked by this very delay. Namely, one of the most prominent incarnations
of pre-iconoclastic need for ?indexicalisation? of iconic medium, the
mysterious Mandylion from Edessa, had very curious role in historical
development of post-iconoclastic plastic arts in Byzantium. This specific
object was miraculously and undividedly uniting both key indexical aspects of
pre-iconoclastic cognitive settings in one icon - causally connected with the
archetypehimself. However, exactly this kind of synthetic, relic-seal-image
status turned out to be the specific semiotic stumbling stone in the process
of application of iconophile theory in liturgical arts. This is why in XI
century byzantine church decided to refrain Mandylion from public life for
good and lock it in court chapel, under the protection of the emperor
himself. As one of the most curious theological decisions of medieval
Christianity, this extraordinary semiotic conversion was, actually, the final
step in application of the most advanced achievements of the late iconophile
theory, which was, at the same time, the first step in development of
artistic system relaxed from the pressure of need for legalistic, causal
validation of pictorial language.
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