Gender Fluidity in Byzantine Painting: Heroic Nudity and Female Holiness in the Menologion of Basil II

In Byzantine Art, images of partially or fully bare figures have been the subject of numerous studies investigating forms, materials, and contexts, both in secular and religious spheres. The classical legacy is evident in the forms of the body. It is expressed through heroic nudity of warriors and deities, sensual bodies of Nereids, representations of Aphrodite, personifications exhibiting shoulders, breasts, and buttocks, even through the actions performed by plump irreverent cherubs.

Despite controversy and accusations of blasphemy, nudity was also permitted in the religious sphere, when it was functional in the transmission of doctrinal concepts. The bodies of Adam and Eve, Abraham and Jesus are interpreted as depictions of the glorified body that preceded original sin or the body purified after baptism. Appreciated or disdainfully rejected, the body image is characterized by polysemy. The display of nudity in Byzantine works carries complex messages that need to be decoded, as they express various meanings depending on the works and contexts.

The Menologion of Basil II is an extraordinary corpus for studying the visual strategies used by painters to construct the image of saints. The manuscript displays 430 illuminations by eight different artists. The 24,8% of the miniatures show images of female martyred saints. As attested by hagiographical traditions, they reject their fate as brides and mothers imposed by society, choosing a life of chastity and prayer, following a perfect imitatio Christi. Their courage is manifested not only through the lack of fear facing of torture and death, but also through the external appearance of their body. Sometimes the female form is enhanced, highlighting female curves. Sometimes the body is completely transformed: the manly courage demonstrated by these saints is manifested through their masculine appearance. The heroic nudity of these women is a heavenly asexual nudity: the images supplement the bloody details that are missing in the Greek text, amplifying the uplifting effect of these virtuous manly women.

Co-organizer and panelist

Discontinuity between Text and Image in the Menologion of Basil II: How (Mis)communication Can Illuminate Aspects of Production

On its own, the illumination for the deaconess Poplia (or Publia) in the Menologion of Basil II includes an ambiguous scene. A woman appears to be speaking before an emperor who sits pensively as he listens to her. Both are originally portrayed with halos (Vat. gr. 1613, 100). A later hand, however, has covered the emperor’s golden halo with gray paint, and the accompanying text makes the reason for this correction clear. The emperor is none other than Julian the Apostate, and the saint is in the middle of insulting him, some of which is even reported verbatim. Such disharmony between text and image is not unique within this manuscript, and it can take many different forms. Herod I, for example, also possesses a palimpsestic halo as he oversees the gruesome slaughter of infants in Bethlehem (281). Euphrosyne and her father Paphnutius are both depicted twice, once in a complete entry from September and again in a duplicate entry from February that has title and illumination but is missing its narrative text, perhaps after the scribe has realized their mistake (67 & 402). Furthermore, the three artists responsible for depicting the martyrdoms at Sinai and Rhaithou have accurately recorded specific details found in the hagiographic source texts, but the scribe has failed to mention them in his abbreviated versions of the events (315–18). Although the coordination between text and image in the Menologion is generally intricate and harmonious, these relatively frequent moments of discontinuity between the visual and the verbal require further exploration.

In this paper, I refine our understanding of the relationship between the texts and the images in the Menologion, and I argue that interdisciplinary dialogue is essential for advancing our knowledge of this multimedia luxury object. I begin with an overview of the manuscript’s format, the nature of the texts, and the imbricated relationship between text and image. Then I turn to some representative examples of the discontinuity described above, and I discuss the most plausible models for interpreting them. Here I pay special attention to the incomplete entries that populate the second half of the manuscript, and I show how they provide critical evidence for reconstructing aspects of the manuscript’s production and the (mis)communication within its team of makers. Through this analysis, I build upon the traditional view of how each entry was produced—the linear progression of painted illumination, written title, painted initial capital, and written main text—by shifting our perspective so that we can better see this dynamic process in three dimensions. I conclude with a discussion of what is gained when we see the Menologion from this new viewpoint, and I reiterate how my holistic reading provides new paths forward in the collaborative study of this important manuscript.

Idols and Icons in the Menologion of Basil II

Several classicizing figural statues – many clearly idols – appear in the illustrations of MS Vatican graecus 1613. Posed in languid contrapposto or straining in acts of nude athleticism, nearly all of these statues seem blithely unaware of the manuscript’s overriding interest in martyrdom and Christian virtue. Smaller than the living forms that surround them, they have a carefully delineated musculature, and they stand in poses familiar from earlier Greco-Roman sculpture.

There is an inconsistent relationship between the manuscripts’ texts and its images of idols. Some but not all of the statues appear in illustrations of Lives that mention idolatry. However, they do not appear often enough or in a consistent enough manner to symbolize paganism at large, and they certainly do not illustrate all of the many Lives that reference idols. In other words, they are not simple markers of pagan worship or society, but a more subtle meditation on the differences between past and present cultures and especially on the differences between Christian and pagan understandings of bodies and representation.

There is a pronounced contrast between the body language of the pagan idols and of the figures that surround them. Although most of the Lives are set centuries before the manuscript was produced, the paintings are not especially classicizing, and the many images of saints, tormentors, and onlookers do not assume overtly archaized poses. Rather, they use a visual vocabulary of body language that is extremely familiar from other middle Byzantine sacred artworks. In comparison, the pagan statues, which are rendered not in flesh tones but in gold or grisaille, stand out like ghosts from an ancient past. They closely mirror the poses of statues as famous and profusely copied as the Doryphoros and the Capitoline Jupiter, suggesting that their middle Byzantine artists were well-aware of the specific conventions of classical sculpture.

This paper will investigate the strange apparition of classical body language in Vat. gr. 1613. I will argue that the specialized vocabulary of ancient posture and gesture was not simply one component of a classicizing mode of painting that became popular in elite circles after iconoclasm. Rather, the manuscript’s images of idols demonstrate that Byzantine artists were consciously aware of the cultural and temporal specificity of body language. They used posture and gesture as a malleable symbol that could complicate the distance between the present and the past and between artworks and living people. By framing the idols in opposition to the other figures, the manuscript presents them as anti-icons. They are not simply a historicizing remnant of the empire’s ancient past, but an example of art that, for all its figural fluidity, lacks the force and agency of life.
 

Co-organizer and chair

Blood and Empathy: The Military Affect of the Menologion of Basil II

Across the illuminations of the Menologion of Basil II, the reader is confronted with repeated depictions of sadistically gory scenes of torture and martyrdom. Blood drips from open wounds, bright and fresh at the source, yet dark and coagulating on the ground. Body parts that have been beaten, broken, pierced, or ripped from the body are depicted in their resting places with an arrestingly macabre care. Even heads roll across the ground, revolving on the orbs of their saintly halos, and eyes meet the gaze of the viewer right before the executioner’s sword strikes. Such details produce a distinct relationship between the manuscript’s users and the creators’ intentions at eliciting certain affective responses. These images encourage a deep empathetic relationship with those broken and martyred bodies and a rageful scorn against the perpetrators of such actions, translating into military retribution and violence. 

While these images have often been understood in isolation, contoured by scholars’ generic understanding of the lives and stories of the saints depicted, the production of a critical edition and translation of the manuscript’s text reframes how we understand the images and the responses elicited by both authors and artists. Furthermore, it allows us to question where the impetus of the manuscript’s gore and violence lies: in the words of the authors, the imagination of the illuminators, or both. Through this newfound understanding, along with the traditional study of the Menologion’s individual illuminators, we are able to extend our understanding of the critical decisions made across word and image to better parse out how these images, unique in their brutality and violence, speak to broader processes of decision making between authors, scribes, and artists. The Menologion, as a single manuscript and in its own exceptionalism, may not be able to answer all these questions for all of Byzantine art, but it can provide our best documented case for critically studying these interrelationships. 

In this paper, these largescale questions about manuscript illumination in the Middle Byzantine period are pursued through a series of concrete queries regarding the construction of the images of martyrdom and torture seen across the manuscript. Particular attention will be placed on the emotional affect of the manuscript’s text and images, how empathetic responses are contoured by the manuscript, and how martyrs and their persecutors are variably depicted. Informed by the growing literature in Premodern Critical Race Studies, the paper pays close attention to the use of racializing tropes to depict figures understood to be grouped as other to the Christian martyrs. In particular, the paper traces how variable and complex modes of race-making are used across the manuscript, differing across various individual cases and stories. In this capacity, this paper demonstrates the crucial importance that the Menologion of Basil II offers for current investigations of “race before race” in the premodern world, suggesting what both art history and Byzantine Studies (both shamefully underrepresented fields in this area of study) have to contribute to the history of race-making.  

Devotional Durations: Liturgical Processions and Timescapes in the Menologion of Basil II

Among the 430 commemorations represented in the Menologion of Basil II, a small corpus of 7 processions interrupts the saintly figures honored in the calendar to depict scenes of liturgical action. One such image for the commemoration of Saint Clement (pg. 204) stages the tomb of the saint against an approaching liturgical procession. As seen across the collected entries, the image offers additional information beyond the textual entry, revealing how once a year on 25 November, the saint’s feast day, the sea would recede and allow the citizens of Cherson to approach Clement’s tomb. In reference to a familiar miracle, a small boy, who was presumed to have drowned the previous year, grabs onto the tomb at right having survived through the saint’s power. In this way, the participants carrying censors, candles, and a bejeweled cross honor the saint’s numinous presence and ensure miracles continue at the site. Through its ability to evoke the memory of the 1 st century saint in liturgical language contemporary with the manuscript, the page’s textual and pictorial components play with the various scales of time bound together within Basil’s menologion more broadly: pages designate the date of each feast, emperors associated with each saint’s martyrdom offer historical place markers for many of the entries, and the initial commemoration is reserved for the 15-year Indiction cycle.

These scenes of performance provide the opportunity to consider the unique timescape of the menologion, drawing on hagiographic narratives, liturgical experience, and urban settings. Scholars have considered the temporal dimension of liturgical performances and the ability to unsettle or reshape the present through ritual action (Baldovin, 1993; Krueger, 2015). Others have grappled with the function and agency of illustrated rituals, situated between realistic and aspirational expressions of power (Nelson & Sullivan, 2024). But how do these representations of liturgical processions, interacting with the urban setting and sacred past, contribute to Basil’s luxury calendar manuscript? In what ways can these calendar images reinscribe historical and spiritual connections between saints, events, and the empire?

This paper reexamines representations of urban liturgical performances in the menologion in line with the manuscript’s unique temporal calibration, and I argue that these scenes must be considered in dialogue with the broader program. I begin by introducing the corpus, the nature of their depicted processions, and their varied relationships to the texts. I then turn to instances where the procession itself is not described in the text but serves as the subject of the illustration. Within this section, I consider not only the symbolic nature of performance, but also how processions create time through their engagement with the historic and sacred past. Throughout I build on Byzantine conceptions of liturgical time—variously considered as a collapsing and an expansion of time—to situate these representations of recurring performances within the manuscript’s repository of sacred lives and images. Ultimately, I conclude with a discussion of how attitudes toward liturgical time intersect with broader temporal understandings, including chronological and imperial, to emphasize how these processional scenes interlace different temporal scales in the manuscript.
 

Performative Reenactment in the Martyrdoms of the Menologion of Basil II (Vat.gr. 1613)

In the depiction of the martyrdom of Babylas, the Patriarch of Antioch, in the Menologion of Basil II (Vat.gr. 1613), the hieromartyr stands bent forward, wearing humble vestments, looking straight ahead, unmoved by his imminent death. The unnamed executioner, in contrast, wears brightly colored garments—garish in comparison—and stands behind Babylas, raising his sword into the air. The executioner’s cloak flies out dramatically to his left, mirroring the upward thrust of his sword. His elaborately costumed body is tense in this singular instant before he brings down the sword with all his force. The juxtaposition between the two figures’ movement and stillness and between their ornate and humble costumes dramatizes the scene, with each figure carefully playing out his role as the audience anticipates a climatic action that is only realized through the reading and speaking of the text: “and the soldiers apprehended and slaughtered them” (καὶ λαβόντες αὐτοὺς οἱ στρατιῶται, ἀπέσφαξαν). The vocalization of this sentence from the vita completes the action the image begins, some 800 years later in Constantinople.

Throughout the manuscript, most martyrdoms take place in generic landscapes, with little details of the specific circumstances of the life or death of the saint, as described in their vitae. Instead, the illuminations work to condense and order a vast temporal and geographic range into a contiguous visual landscape, creating a universalizing landscape through which actions, actors, and audience are prioritized. I argue that the interaction between text and image perpetuated by the viewer of the manuscript, generates a performative relationship between the manuscript and its intended audience, Emperor Basil II. He not only becomes a witness, but an active participant in the reenactment of the saints’ lives and deaths. Through the act of reading the saints’ vitae he completes their martyrdoms.

In this paper, I explore the tangle of historicity and theatricality, of ephemerality and permanence, at the core of the martyrdom scenes in the Menologion of Basil II. I argue that the images and texts together create an environment of theatrical reenactment in which the emperor can order and embody the holiness of the depicted saints. I employ Rebecca Schneider’s theory of reenactment, that is, “embodied inquiry into temporal repetition, temporal recurrence” in order to understand a past event as “part of a continuous present.” The compressed spatial perspective and atemporality of the setting of the illuminations, combined with the (re)performance of vivid actions through the reading of the vitae, creates an imperial devotional environment deeply rooted in ideas of performance and paideia. In reading the saints’ vitae and contemplating the images, the emperor embraces the taxis (τάξις, ‘harmonious order’) embodied in the calm, assured posture of the martyrs, and rejects the ataxia (ἀταξία, ‘disorder’) of the executioner’s wild movement. The actions of the martyrs model proper behavior for the emperor – not to literally submit to a martyr’s fate, but to always embody the empire’s harmonious order.
 

Co-organizer and chair

Session organizer and panelist

Songs in the Key of Time: Non-Human Music in Early Byzantine Christianity

The Byzantine Christian liturgy resounds with the voices of human singers. Cantors and choirs, psalmody and hymns mark sacred time through song. The Bible includes songs of Moses (Exodus 15:1-18) , Jonah (2:2-10), Anna (1 Kings 2:1-10), and Mary (Luke 1:46 – 55), while epistles include verses from early Christian hymns (e.g., Galatians 3:26-28). In early Byzantine Jerusalem (4th-8th c. CE) many biblical odes (canticles) became part of the daily services and expanded further in kanons. By the sixth-century in Constantinople and even earlier in Syria, congregations sang along with songs retelling biblical stories from the perspective of Eve, Abraham, Mary, Jonah, and apostles.  Congregations joined in songs featuring figures from the sacred past. 

Amid these liturgical songscapes, non-human voices also figured into these songs. This paper explores the role of non-human characters in Byzantine liturgical songs. In addition to  angels and other heavenly beings, rocks, trees, seas, and animals, served as cosmic witnesses. I shall focus on examples from early Byzantine evidence appearing in psalms, liturgical instructions, sung sermons expanding on biblical stories (known as kontakia), biblical odes sung during the daily office, and the kanons that elaborated on them. I shall discuss works by Proclus of Constantinople (ca. 390-446), Romanos the Melodist (fl. 555), and translations of lost Greek liturgical books which originated in Jerusalem: the Armenian Lectionary and the Georgian Chantbook. 

Examples of non-human voices appear in psalms and were elaborated in liturgical songs. Their significance can be better grasped by drawing on recent theories of new materialism (J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter [2010]) provide a valuable theoretical lens on why Byzantine songs included non-human, material communication. I shall also draw on recent work on animals in the poetic imagination (M. Payne, The Animal Part [2010]; P. LeVen, Music and Metamorphosis in Graeco-Roman Thought [2022]). How animals created song and humans learned to sing from animals guides my analysis of how and why early Byzantine Christians imagined a responsive and agentive world with its own capacity to sing along with human singers. 

The Charms of Horus in Byzantine Egypt: Incantations to Bind, to Seduce, to Heal

This paper will explore a series of incantations to the god Horus and his mother Isis still sung and inscribed in sixth- through tenth-century Egypt (and preserved in Coptic ritual manuals). While distinctly rooted in ancient Egyptian traditions of Isis-Horus historiolae (rather than early Byzantine inventions -- archaisms), the incantations continued to be preserved for their familiarity and ritual efficacy.

The historiola, from the Latin for “little story,” is a scholarly term for a type of abbreviated reference to a myth (or mythic characters) that bears in some way on a human health or social crisis and, in performance with healing gestures and substances, is meant to facilitate healing, binding, or some other resolution. As ritual speech – as performative utterance – the historiola works by drawing the power in the myth into the unresolved crisis-situation in this world and in that way ritually resolving the real crisis situation by the authority of the myth. In this way, while the historiola represents a virtuoso improvisation on the stories of mythic heroes, the human crisis itself becomes an opportunity for patients and audiences to experience myth, to encounter myth, and to imagine mythic characters in their lives.  

Historiolae are the most common forms of Christian charms, with countless improvisations on gospel and hagiographical legend across Latin, Greek, Anglo-Saxon, Slavonic, and other traditions of oral healing from late antiquity through the early modern period and beyond. Ritual experts improvised with characters of myth or legend to create narratives relevant to one or another ailment or crisis, sometimes with deference to a traditional myth and sometimes with considerable freedom.

What is so tantalizing about the Coptic materials I address is that they involve historiolae about the ancient Egyptian gods Isis and Horus, but in ritual formularies and charms long post-dating any temples or formal ritual traditions of these gods’ devotion in Egypt. This paper focuses on seven instances from the Byzantine period (and more will probably emerge from libraries in coming years). Their salient feature is their sung dramatization of these (once major) Egyptian gods Isis and Horus as familiar, living characters. My larger interest lies in the meaning of these charms for redescribing the religion of Byzantine Egypt and the diversity of Byzantine Christianity. 

Chair

Worship Among the Flames: The Babylonian Furnace in the Constantinopolitan Liturgy

The foremost Byzantine poet, Romanos the Melodist, crafted a world through his hymns that invited his congregation into biblical stories and brought the ancient figures into the streets. Full of dynamic characters and entertaining dialogues, his sixth-century poetry helped his congregation reimagine their own world in light of the scriptural narrative. One particular hymn, On the Three Children, retells the story of Daniel 3 and traces the faithfulness of three youth as the Babylonian king constructs an idol, requires them to worship it, throws them into a furnace for their disobedience, and witnesses their worship among the flames. In it, Romanos showcases his storytelling skills, incorporates liturgical elements, and points to his own context. 

The performance of liturgical poetry, such as the Melodist’s hymns, can create further meaning for both the Byzantine audience and the modern interpreter. This paper will explore the performative context of On the Three Children, illustrating how Romanos utilized certain aspects of the hymn to communicate doctrinal instruction to his audience through sensory experience. Drawing on the recent work of Georgia Frank and Laura Lieber, it will investigate how the hymn’s nocturnal setting and refrain help to bring the Melodist’s words to life in the midst of his audience. Romanos sang his hymns for night vigils, ensuring the need for lighting devices to illuminate himself and his congregation. A brief discussion of early Byzantine lamps used in churches will demonstrate their effect on the sensory experience and imagination of the congregation as they heard the story of the youth. While the fiery lamps flicker around them, they also participated in the singing of the refrain, a prayer central to the hymn. The congregation voiced the youth’s prayer from Babylon, and it became their own in Constantinople. Through this hymn and its performance, Romanos invited his audience to imagine themselves within the furnace and to realize that their own Constantinopolitan worship sat within a furnace as well.

Apocrypha and Anthems: The Hymnography for the Dormition in Late Ancient Jerusalem

The well-known Armenian and Georgian Lectionaries of Jerusalem open up the world of the Holy City's early liturgies in a spectacular way that is truly unique within late ancient Christianity. They specify not only the appointed readings for dozens of annual liturgical feasts, but they also provide the specific locations for their celebration in Jerusalem and its immediate environs. Yet, while these two documents are unequaled for what they reveal about the evolving feasts of the Palestinian church in late antiquity, their terse accounts of these annual commemorations offer little sense of how these celebrations came to life in the context of early Christian worship.

Thankfully, however, there is yet another important early liturgical source that can provide such a perspective, the ancient Chantbook of the Jerusalem church, a work that survives only in Old Georgian where it bears the title Iadgari (Tropologion in Greek). This remarkable collection of texts reveals for the first time the hymns that were sung in the churches of Jerusalem during the sixth, the fifth, and even the fourth century. The largest part of this collection consists of hymns appointed for the various annual liturgical feasts as they were observed in Jerusalem on the eve of the Islamic conquest, the date given by most scholars to this unrivalled collection of ancient Christian theological poetry.

One of the richest collections of festal hymnography in this Chantbook is for the feast of the Virgin’s Dormition on 15 August, Jerusalem’s, and one of Christianity’s, oldest liturgical commemoration of the mother of Jesus. Perhaps as a sign of its importance in ancient Jerusalem’s calendar, the Chantbook preserves three separate, complete hymnographic cycles for this feast. No other feast in the Chantbook has such multiple versions of festal hymnography, not even the feast of the Cross, the dedication feast of the Holy Sepulcher whence this collection appears to derive. In this paper we will compare these three different sets of hymns for the Dormition with an aim to understanding both their differences and perhaps also why there appears to have been some need for more than one version.

Of particular note is the fact that these three sets of hymns show different levels of reference to the ancient narrative traditions of the end of the Virgin’s life, the so-called Dormition and Assumption apocrypha. One set refers to them only rarely, another quite often, and the third is in between. Could it be that these different services reflect an evolving interest in including apocryphal material in worship services, particularly in cases such as this one where there is really hardly any connection with the canonical scriptures? Accordingly, we will take this opportunity to explore the shifting boundaries between apocryphal and liturgical traditions at the end of antiquity, two “genres” that, as scholars of both has long recognized, frequently have significant overlap.