Iconophages

Jérémie Koering’s “Iconophages” studies the “underappreciated tradition of biting, licking, chewing and swallowing images and objects.” Credit...Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
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In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, sometimes the best way to appreciate a picture was not with the eyes, but with the mouth. In this scrumptious work of art history, Jérémie Koering reveals an underappreciated tradition of biting, licking, chewing and swallowing images and objects — sometimes explicitly edible, such as marzipan wafers embossed with the insignia of aristocratic families, and others a lot harder to digest, like icons of saints that bear teeth marks on their frames centuries on. Whether in statues of the lactating Virgin or prints of believers sucking Christ’s blood, Europeans often treated “ingestion as a route towards a relation with the divine,” though the mystical incorporations have endured to our secular age. Today you can upload a JPG to BaskinRobbins.com and order an “edible picture cake,” with vanilla frosting, when your beloved graduates.