Judging by the number of books published in the last ten years or so with “frame” or “framing” in their title, to say nothing of those that include the terms “border,” “boundary,” or “margin,” the direction of scholarship is migrating toward the edges of the artwork. However, a fair number of these books are not about frames in the art-historical sense of the term at all. Leaving aside those clearly marginal to this review, such as house frames and the many histories of picture frames (often with their celebrated masterpieces blanked out), a vast number of studies use “framing” in a more figurative sense. With titles such as Framing Monsters, Framing the Middle Ages, Framing Blackness, these books are less interested in directing their readers’s attention to issues of marginality (although Framing Blackness might do just that), as much as seeking an arresting title that marks the topic for our attention.

However, alongside this largely figurative use of the term, and further excluding the many titles that engage with Erving Goffman’s classic study of cognitive and institutional frames, Frame Analysis (New York: Harper, 1974), other investigations, many from the fields of Medieval and Byzantine studies, employ the concept of frame and framing in ways more relevant to the history of art. Michael Camille’s Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), which focuses on the borders, both literal and conceptual, of pre-modern visual culture, immediately comes to mind. Likewise Charles Barber’s Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) evokes frames and framing through its use of “limits” to question the role of visual imagery in the period of Iconoclasm. Importantly for the present discussion, these studies suggest that, while it is possible to study the material frame in isolation, and equally possible to employ “framing” in a purely figurative manner, it is more rewarding to explore the relation between the material border and the artwork on the one hand and the frame as institutional, ideological, or perceptual border on the other.

It is into this growing field of studies focusing on the frame that Glenn Peers introduces issues of parergonality into the relationship between the viewer and the representation of divinity in Byzantine visual culture. He is well qualified to do so. In recent years Peers has been among those who have integrated a theory of frames and framing into their teaching, writing, and research. In his introduction, “The Great Age of the Frame,” Peers argues for the mediating role of the frame in Byzantine art. The principal forms of Medieval and Byzantine visual culture—the manuscripts, mosaics, and icons—open up the image to a liminal interpretation, thereby creating a place where “multiple interpretations were provided . . . where the reality of an image was declared” (7). In this sense the frame was not simply a background to a mosaic or a surround for an icon but “central to the communicative processes of Byzantine works of art” (7). Summing up both the aim of the book and his commitment to a study of marginalia, Peers declares: “The theme of this book is the frame, but more specifically the way in which the frame presents a clear and convenient way to phrase questions about how Byzantine viewers first made apprehensible and then internalized divine presence” (7).

Frequent references to “the viewer” and “viewers” in his text raise another important strand of Peers’s analysis—the role of the beholder in the construction of meaning. For Peers, it is not enough merely to focus on the frame. The examples of parergonality that constitute the subject matter of his analysis are but instances of rhetorical framing; paramount is the need to keep in mind the object of this framing—the connection of the viewer with the divine. Thus Peers looks “not at what conventionally constitutes the frame, but an overlooked area quietly asserting itself between the so-called heart of representation and a viewer” (7)—in other words, the discursive, inside/outside, supplemental spaces of the artwork’s margins: “the area between Byzantine viewers and the center of pictorial space was heavily burdened and traveled, for this zone was where the union with God was to be found” (11). All this leads Peers to consider the frame not as a material presence, or even boundary, but as the space where union with the divine becomes possible: “The real theme of the book then becomes the assimilation of the viewer with her or his divine counterpart, the body of Christ and/or the saints and the martyrs who are with him” (11).

As Peers is at pains to point out, these remarks render a purely material or essentialist analysis of the frame untenable. Rather, in a somewhat deconstructionist move, he states his aim as an attempt to understand “that which frames the frame.” This counter-intuitive gesture, first put forward by Jacques Derrida in his essay “The Parergon” (in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 37–82), denies the frame its Kantian role as marker of limits or ornament in favor of its function as what Louis Marin has called “an indispensable parergon, a constitutive supplement” (Louis Marin, “The Frame of Representation and Some of Its Figures,” in Paul Duro, ed., The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork, New York: Cambridge, 1996, 82). In place, then, of an uncomplicated understanding of liminality, Peers seeks to examine the physical edges of the artwork as a space that is itself under contestation—by texts, by viewers, by discourse, and not least by “the necessarily postmodernist view from which this book is written” (11). It is this plurality of frames, some which surround the image and some which discursively frame the frame, that positions us at the matrix of a scopic regime and defines the conditions under which we experience the artwork as unproblematically present.

With this groundwork in place Peers develops a series of readings of pectoral crosses, of the depiction of the blood of Christ in the Chludov Psalter, of “architectural” frames in liturgical miniatures, of a fourteenth-century icon of Saint George, and of the Mandylion, thought to preserve traces of Christ’s face. In each chapter Peers demonstrates the depth of his commitment to the frame as a signifier of meaning, understood as a material, conceptual, and ideological presence. Thus in his first chapter (on pectoral crosses), Peers restates the book’s theme—the union of the viewer with the divine—to explore the migration of the Crucifixion from the framed-off space of the discreet depiction to that of the pectoral cross, where a more contiguous relationship with the bearer allows for greater intimacy with the meaning of Christ’s sublime sacrifice: “The viewer . . . can achieve union with God by mimicking the outer frame and the bodies within that frame . . . [establishing] a conceptual continuum traveling from inside to outside, and in the other direction as well, and across this continuum Christians sought contact with God” (34). In this sense the frame, thanks to its cruciform shape, both surrounds and completes the image, articulating a shift from containing device to mirroring of the image, “framing” bodies, dissolving the space between our bodies and the divine (134).

Likewise in his chapter on the vita icon of Saint George in the Byzantine and Christian Museum in Athens, Peers develops a subtle understanding of the relationship between image and frame. The central sculpted figure of Saint George appeals to Christ on behalf of a kneeling donor, while small painted scenes of the saint’s martyrdom (the vita) surround the central representation. In line with his thesis, Peers sees this parergonal arrangement, which illustrates episodes from the seven years of torture and three deaths endured by the saint, as the means by which the beholder is able to gain access to the sacred: “The periphery, the vita scenes, also acts in concord with the center to create a narrative of damaged and reconstituted bodies as a demonstration of the advocate’s presence before the supplicant and viewer” (10). Thus the relationship between the narrative border and the central icon depends on a series of visual and conceptual oppositions that direct our attention, establishing a connection between the figure of the saint, the donor, and God within the visual field, and the space of the beholder beyond the frame.

This brief discussion of just two of the book’s examples demonstrates that the “framing” of the subtitle is anything but tokenistic. Peers has taken his study of the frame in Byzantine art seriously, both in drawing attention to its largely overlooked material borders, and also in developing a methodology of the liminal that recognizes the work of the frame to be fundamental to the construction of meaning. By paying attention to the indivisibility of the material and conceptual border, Peers has demonstrated that an adequate understanding of the frame must be grounded in a close reading of specific historical examples; at the same time, his attention to theory has shown the potential for the frame’s relevance beyond the borders of Byzantine visual culture. And by enlisting this methodological groundwork in the cause of explicating the union between the viewer and God, Peers has liberated the frame from any imputation to marginality. Scholars of Medieval and Byzantine art everywhere have reason to applaud his efforts.