For the New York Times, Jason Fargo names Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images by Jérémie Koering a Best Art Book of 2024. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to see the full list. Fargo’s comment on the book appears below:

“In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, sometimes the best way to appreciate a picture was not with eyes, but with the mouth. In this scrumptious work of art history, Jérémie Koering reveals an under appreciated tradition of biting, licking, chewing and swallowing images and objects–sometimes explicitly edible, such as marzipan wakers 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 Baskin-Robbins.com and order an ‘edible picture cake,’ with vanilla frosting, when your beloved graduates.”