ABSTRACT
We tend to associate the word “icon” with a portrait of a holy figure on woodpanel, painted with tempera or encaustic (wax-based medium).1 This brief essay will challenge this established notion and argue for the diversity of meanings of eikon in Byzantium and for the site-specific character of icons.2 In our modern understanding of the history of eikon we have sought its origins in the Egyptian painting tradition of panels of the gods or of portraits of the deceased drawn on wood boards or cloth and colored with tempera or encaustic. The evidence for this practice emerges in the Hellenistic period but continues throughout the late Roman imperial times.3 Similarly, we have looked for answers for the origins of icons in the rise of the cult of saints and pilgrimage in Palestine.4 Earthen or lead tokens from the Holy Land and Syria with the imprinted portrait of the saint (Figure 21.1), or an image of the architecture or of the hallowed event that took
place at the site, gave the faithful a continual return to the sacred source of power.5
