Icons as "movable" objects : the case of the Panagia Amirou icon

An icon known as Panagia Amirou is still used and venerated at the monastery of Panagia Amirou, near the Cypriot village of Apsiou. The icon consists of two panels inserted one into the other and thus belongs to the rare category of so-called "composite icons." This essay analyses this unusual form giving special attention to the inset icon, which, the study concludes, should be dated to the second half of the fourteenth century and, hence, is much older than the embedding panel, which dates to the sixteenth century. By pointing to details that reveal the previous use of the inner panel and by referring to different notions of movability, the icon emerges as an active object that was meant to be touched, moved, opened, and otherwise interacted with.