When a picture is good enough to eat

This review of Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images by Jérémie Koering (translated from French by Nicholas Huckle) appears in the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

A memory from childhood: I am perhaps six, and allowed to pick anything I want at a local bakery. I am lured away from the doughnuts, buns and cakes by an object that only a child could desire. In lurid green and purple, it is a baked portrait of the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtle Donatello. I love the Turtles, perhaps as much as I love anything else in the universe; it is imperative that I have it. I am tactfully advised against my choice, on the grounds that it is made of meringue, and I hate meringue. Nevertheless, I insist. Later, under the yellow light of the kitchen lamp, I stare at it in an emotional state I can recall as vividly as anything in my whole childhood. On the one hand, I am desperate to eat it: its whole point is to be a treat. On the other, there is absolutely no question of eating it: my reverence for the icon and my disgust for the material are in firm agreement. It cannot pass my lips.

To follow Jérémie Koering’s terminology, I paused on the threshold of iconophagy: the act of eating an image. Under the form of confectionery effigy, it is not so very aberrant – we still eat, as Koering notes, ‘figured’ foods today, particularly as children – but it is nevertheless a practice that, he maintains, has become ‘in large part foreign to us’. The physical consumption of ‘icons, frescoes, sculptures, devotional engravings’, of which there is a storied history in Europe and the Mediterranean world, has now disappeared in ‘the long process of rationalization that forms our heritage’. The aim of Iconophages is to reclaim and explain such acts both as a means of contributing to a history of images outside the ‘already traced lines of a triumphant art history’.

For minds of a certain tilt, Iconophages will seem likely to be great fun. It starts promisingly with series of stills from the movie Red Dragon (2002), showing Ralph Fiennes’s serial killer Francis Dolarhyde compulsively devouring the William Blake watercolour The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun (c. 1803–05). Bug-eyed with the desire to have and become the image, Fiennes’s expression is extraordinary. We may be ‘in the fictional register of cinematographic fable’, as Koering puts it, but the scene shows how modernity has turned ‘iconophagy into an exemplary transgressive act’. Museums do not let you touch pictures, let alone eat them. Koering is keen to point out, however, that this is not ‘an aberrant form of consumption’, but of a particular kind of ‘conjunction […] that transforms the very nature of […] representation’ itself.

Iconophages sets out ‘to cover, as much as possible, the entirety of the phenomenon’ in a narrative that is, as Koering puts it, a history with ‘no beginning and no end […] synchronic and polyrhythmic’. Though an early modernist by training, Koering has admirable range. Divided into three broad sections, Iconophages runs from Egyptian healing statues, through early Christian debates on the roles of icons, up to early modern social practices and through to Hogarth, with a little Piero Manzoni, John Cage and other moderns thrown in for seasoning. All the analyses are framed by Koering’s division of iconophagy into two broad categories: ‘constituting’ and ‘instituting’ – respectively, acts designed to heal or protect the eater, and acts, like the sharing of marked foods, designed to delineate the eater as belonging to a community.

The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothes with the Sun (Rev. 12: 1–4) (c.1803–05), William Blake. Brooklyn Museum, New York

Much here is intrinsically interesting, particularly those ephemeral objects and their associated practices that are apt to vanish from dominant histories. Among these are the Schluckbildchen (‘tiny images for swallowing’) once popular in Catholic Germany: printed sheets of saints and miracles that, perhaps having been primed by contact with a relic or shrine, could be swallowed as medicine. The same region was home to healing earthenware Schabmadonnen (‘Madonnas for scratching and scraping’), the dust from which could be mixed with water and drunk. Other objects that Koering discovers – waffle moulds and wafer presses – are simply beautiful.

And yet Iconophages drags somewhat. The reader’s ability to enjoy it will come down to their degree of patience. To borrow his own term, Koering’s prose is very much of the ‘instituting’ variety: designed to delineate his belonging to a specific academic clan as much as conveying any content. If you can greet a sentence like ‘it is the eaten-image, always as a sequential syntagm, that is the operator through which a physical, psychological, and social transformation takes place’ with both comprehension and good cheer, read on. If not, get out while you can. Even to this reader, an avowed fan of French theory, it began to strike me as more habitually orotund than technically perspicacious.

The Mass of Saint Gregory (c. 1490), attr. Diego de la Cruz. Philadelphia Museum of Art

Taste aside, this has consequences. During a section on debates about iconodulism (the veneration of icons), Koering produces a snippet from the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, which promoted prostration before ‘icons of the carnal economy of Christ’. It does not stand out particularly in the general gumbo, but makes little to no sense, and turns on a poor translation of the Greek oikonomia in the article used by Koering for the reference – which in context means ‘the incarnation’. Similarly, we are informed that one 13th-century theologian advised that scripture should be (metaphorically) devoured, ‘and transmitted within us through a taste […] both very fervent and sapid’. While I’m grateful to be introduced to the word sapid (strongly pleasant tasting), the actual reading – three pages away from the reference given – is ‘rapid’ (rapidum). Translator Nicholas Huckle and the proofreaders do generally valiant work here, but I felt for them when I saw Koering’s unglossed ‘mystères des décans’ (ten-degree divisions of the zodiac) become ‘mysteries of the deacons’. I too was beginning to lose my own fine grasp of detail by this point. In prose less reflexively dense, such things would be easier to spot and rectify. Iconophages is definitely not a rapid read; whether or not you find it sapid will be up to you.

Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images by Jérémie Koering is published by Zone Books.

From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.