The Bonds of Divine Kenosis: Reinterpreting some Peculiarities of the Post-Iconoclastic Iconography of the Virgin and Christ

The importance of the iconography of the Virgin and Christ for Byzantine art and culture can hardly be overemphasized. Curiously, however, there is one striking detail from the core of this iconography that still awaits a sufficient theoretical explanation. Namely, while the Heavenly Child is recognizably depicted in the medieval pictorial interpretation of chiton and himation of Late Antiquity, this iconographic formula was very often enriched by a specific addition – a third garment that virtually never appears when Christ was depicted as a grown man. Usually, this particular piece of cloth is wrapped around the Child’s chest and shoulders, occasionally just around the chest, over the chiton and under the himation (if the second was depicted). Contemporary theory has put forward some quite different interpretations of this iconographic phenomenon, but – as the following research will show – we are still far from a comprehensive and consistent interpretation of its meaning(s). Assuming that the cloth wrapped around the heart of the Christ Child in one of the most popular iconographic formulas of Byzantine art really deserves an in-depth investigation, the following study will attempt to unravel this iconographic mystery from the beginnings of its introduction into Byzantine art, and explain its semantic subtleties as a dynamic fusion of different layers of meaning that gradually overlapped in the course of its synchronic and diachronic embedding in the structures of Byzantine imagery.

Byzantine icons of the Virgin and Christ usually depict a child with a prematurely adult physiognomy, garbed in the same type of raiment found in iconic portraits of him as a grown man. While the colors of this raiment vary considerably, its form is quite stable: as a rule the Heavenly Child is garbed in the standard Byzantine pictorial interpretation of the chiton and himation of Late Antiquity.^[1] Exceptions to this rule are infrequent, apart from one specific detail. Very often, the infant Christ is wrapped in a third item of clothing, which virtually never appears when he is depicted as a grown man. This garment is particularly prominent and visible in icons of the Virgin of Tenderness type, where the Son of God usually removes the himation from his torso, leaving it partly in mother’s arms, to reveal that over his chiton is wound a third piece of fabric, which technically means one different in form and color (fig. 1).^[2] Most typically, this garment is wound around the Infant’s chest and shoulders (figs. 1, 3–5, 14–17), resembling something like the safety harness or life jacket of our contemporary visual surroundings. Although at first glance it shows a similarity with the clavi—and possibly some painters/viewers did not draw a clear distinction between the two (fig. 16)—the difference is far more obvious than the similarity. Unlike the decorative strips known as clavi, attached to the typical (Byzantine pictorial interpretation of) Roman tunic from the shoulders to the feet, the mysterious third garment is always tightly wound around Christ’s chest and never extends below the chest.^[3] When it occurs in Middle-Byzantine art, this piece of cloth is typically white, whereas later it is usually red or blue, and very often it is decorated using chrysography.^[4] Occasionally, it covers not the shoulders, but only the chest (fig. 2); in such cases, the clavi might also be depicted on the Infant’s tunic, while the difference between these decorative strips and the third garment might be emphasized using different colors.^[5]

The following research aims to explore the historical origins of this specific pictorial motif and to interpret its formative semantic layers in all the relevant synchronic and diachronic contexts. As the first chapter will lay out, contemporary theory has put forward numerous and sometimes quite divergent interpretations of this iconographic phenomenon, but nonetheless we are left with a mass of substantial questions, which remain unresolved from various standpoints. In my opinion, the garment that swaddled the very heart of the Infant Christ, within one of the most popular—I would say emblematic—iconographic formulae of Byzantine art, deserves a great deal of scrutiny, as it needs to be explained in a truly comprehensive manner. In order to do so, we should initially refrain from the habit of identifying this piece of cloth by its red or blue color, the way we see it in numerous late Byzantine icons (fig. 1–2, 16), and remind ourselves that the earliest examples of the motif, be they in monumental or in miniature art, typically display a narrow white band decorated with simple ornaments and wrapped around the infant Christ’s chest and shoulders in a number of bands (figs. 4–7, 14–15). While the later change of color is not insignificant in this domain, the following research will be primarily focused on interpretation of the subject at the period of its very historical emergence, in its original white. As would be the case with any other artistic development, an understanding of the original semantic base to which later pictorial innovations are added seems to be an essential and irreplaceable hermeneutic step, which must be carried out if a comprehensive interpretation of the subject is to be our final goal.^[6]

The Mystery of the Third Garment

The earliest of the representative monumental examples, which provides a stable context for the opening of this discussion, would certainly be the apsidal fresco from the Church of St Sophia in Ohrid (fig. 3). This monumental portrait of the Theotokos displays the third garment in the form of a thin white band decorated with simple linear ornaments and wrapped in several bands around the chest and shoulders of the Heavenly Child, on top of his solemn golden raiment (fig. 4).^[7] The presence of this iconographic invention in such a prominent context could hardly pass unnoticed by contemporary scholarship. It was first identified, in research from the last quarter of the twentieth century, as an orarion, otherwise worn by deacons during the liturgy. Put forward by Ann Wharton Epstein [1980], this interpretation, based primarily on the form of the band depicted in Ohrid Cathedral, suggested that Christ is playing the role of deacon in this image.^[8] Expanding on this hypothesis, Vojislav Đurić [1981] added that Christ’s priestly ministry was occasionally emphasized in Byzantine art by means of iconographic allusions to three different levels of ecclesiastical hierarchy: deacons, priests, and bishops. Accordingly, he concluded that depictions of Christ as deacon or priest appeared almost simultaneously in the eleventh century.^[9]

But those initial interpretations lacked evidence at both the liturgical and the iconographical level. Although it is quite similar to an orarion at the first glance, the band is wrapped around Christ in such a way that it would never have been seen in pictorial depictions of the Byzantine liturgy.^[10] Furthermore, it is quite impossible to discover a consistent theological reason for depicting Christ, the Head of the Church, as a member of the lowest rank of the Byzantine priestly hierarchy in the most important position of the church program. Moreover, how are we to explain the fact that depictions of Christ as a bishop appeared almost three centuries after the supposed appearance of his representation in the two lowest priestly ranks? Thus, Christopher Walter [1982] discarded the comparison with the orarion, instead named the pictorial device a ‘stole’, and, reverting to previous interpretations at a more general level, concluded that it ‘refers discreetly to his [Christ’s] priesthood’.^[11] As we shall see by the end of this paper, the word ‘discreetly’ is the key intuition to be remembered at this point. On the other hand, if a symbolic device discreetly referred to a thing, then it is quite plausible to suppose that there are one or more things to which it might refer more openly.

Expanding on the above findings, Alexey Lidov [1986] carefully examined the artistic and literary evidence and moved his interpretation in a new direction, basing it on more solid evidence. The only premise that he was not ready to abandon was the expectation that the answer to the question would emerge primarily in the realms of liturgical evidence. Such an expectation was quite reasonable: after all, it is very hard to rid oneself of the impression that the narrow white band with black cross-like marks does not belong to the aesthetics of standardized Hellenistic costume typically found in portraits of Christ and the Apostles, but perfectly conforms to the aesthetics of Byzantine liturgical vestments. Lidov identified a confirmation of this kind of assumption in a short late-Byzantine liturgical commentary, On the Holy Temple and Its Consecration, written by St Symeon of Thessalonica in the fifteenth century.^[12] There he discovered a reference to the syndon, the liturgical vestment worn by the bishop over his regular liturgical vesture during the rite of church consecration and which was girdled with three belts ‘in honor of the Holy Trinity’.^[13] This discovery finally provided credible literary evidence of the existence of the liturgical vestment wound around the body of a bishop in a manner similar to the mysterious third garment depicted on the figure of the infant Christ in the Ohrid cathedral apse. To be more precise, the author proposes that the infant Christ’s golden ornament should be recognized as the same ‘sindon [σινδόνα]’ that, according to the ancient liturgical treatise, was draped from the ‘shoulders’ down ‘to the feet’, with belts wound on top of it at three different parts of bishop’s body—1) on ‘the neck’, 2) ‘under armpits around the chest’, and 3) on ‘the loins’—depicted as narrow white bands with ornamental decoration.^[14] Lidov acknowledges that what we see in the apse of Ohrid Cathedral does not completely match this complicated investiture based on Trinitarian associations, but overcomes the problem by concluding in a rather generalized way: ‘If we try to imagine the practical embodiment of what is suggested by the text, then the interpretation of the garments from the Saint Sophia of Ohrid wall painting is shown to be the most plausible’.^[15] Consequently, the author further concludes, ‘Both, Symeon of Thessalonica and the author of the Ohrid Saint Sophia iconographic program had in mind the same garment, used solely in the rite of consecrating a church, which would be performed by no lower than priestly rank of bishop’.^[16]

Unlike Epstein, Đurić or Walter, therefore, Lidov seemed to be in a position to provide a historically documented theological interpretation for his bold conclusion: ‘The Christ Emmanuel in the conch of Saint Sophia in Ohrid was depicted as a bishop consecrating a church’.^[17] Although author did not base his interpretation solely on the arguments here adduced, but in addition supported it with solid secondary evidence, the actual historic and hermeneutic context gives rise to a series of substantial yet unanswered questions. The least of the problems are [1] the aforementioned lack of any formal likeness between the literary description and the pictorial evidence, and [2] the question of the historical distance between the image and the text. The first problem might be explained to be a result of the hermeneutic widening of the borders of artistic freedom in representation of literary or liturgical sources. In other words, artists might have allowed themselves a little more freedom in the process of representing a liturgical device that they had probably never seen in real life. While such an interpretative method would seem at least unreliable in the cognitive context, it is not possible to solve the second problem through such a methodological workaround. It would be quite plausible to expect at least some sort of account of the liturgical syndon and its belts in the ecclesiastical literature prior to the fifteenth century if we wish to apply this sort of knowledge to research into eleventh century art. Lidov tries to solve this problem in a footnote to the quotation from St Symeon through the hypothesis that ‘using the fifteenth-century text to interpret images from the eleventh century shows itself to be methodologically valid, because Symeon of Thessalonica describes the ancient ritual, which with the greatest likelihood [s ogromnoĭ veroi͡atnosʹi͡u] existed in the Byzantine Church during the eleventh century’.^[18] Although this kind of conclusion was extremely hazardous,^[19] proof of its validity was actually to come to (scholarly) light a quarter of a century later.

Among various mediaeval texts of the same kind, the description of the rite of church consecration from an eleventh-century (AD 1027) Constantinopolitan Euchologion manuscript has been researched, translated, and presented to a wider scholarly community in a doctoral dissertation [defended in 2012, by Vitalijs Permjakovs] dealing with this very rite in the Byzantine ecclesiastical context.^[20] As this source, written just a few decades before the Ohrid Cathedral frescos were painted, informs us, a vestment called the syndon really did appear to be an element of the rite of church consecration at that time. Among the items necessary for the consecration, ‘two linen cloths (σαβανὰ), which are white linens (συνδόνας)’, are listed in the text.^[21] After ‘all lay people are sent out’ and ‘the doors of the temple are firmly shut from all sides’, ‘the bishop is vested in all episcopal garments’, while the aforementioned linen cloths are put on after all the initial preparations are complete: ‘But upon [the bishop] who is going to celebrate the consecration, they lay a linen garment [σαβανόν] over the sacred vestments, which stretches from his chest to his feet, but at the back it is held from both sides under his armpits and tied together, in the middle being fastened by a belt. And upon each of his arms they place the cloths, tied with belts’.^[22] While St Symeon’s detailed description, with its nine belts—three for body, on the neck, chest, and loins, and three for each arm—raised serious problems for Lidov’s interpretation,^[23] this simplified account seems more compatible with it. If one supposes that creators of the eleventh-century Ohrid fresco program might have had access to such a simple description of the rite of church consecration, with belts girdled under the armpits and on both arms, which is very close to the shoulders, then such literary/liturgical evidence might justify the formal aspects of Lidov’s hypothesis. Nevertheless, the true problem of the hypothesis does not lie concealed in its formal aspects.

Having said that, we may finally turn to the essential problems of Lidov’s hypothesis. Examples similar to that found in the apse of Ohrid Cathedral, which are accessible today, show that the white band could have been wound around the infant Christ in quite different ways. The number of bands is easy to count and is not very stable (cf. figs. 4–8, 14–17, 34). Furthermore, variants without bands around the shoulders (but only around the chest) are not only a peculiarity of Georgian monumental art, as Lidov suggested,^[24] but also can be found in probably the earliest monumental representation of the motif, the fresco of the Hodegitria in the south-west chapel of the Hosios Loukas monastic catholicon in Fokida,^[25] and in numerous different representations of the Theotokos and Christ found in the Balkans up to the fifteenth century (fig. 2).^[26] This makes two highly diverse modes of winding the bands [a) chest and shoulders, and b) chest only], with several sub-modes, which can be differentiated by the various numbers of fabric bands that are wound. On the other hand, even with only a cursory look at artistic representations of bands with a definite liturgical role—such as the omophorion, epitrachelion, and orarion—it may be seen that the manner of binding is extremely significant, and almost invariable throughout the millennial history of Byzantine art.^[27] From such a viewpoint, [3] the extreme variability of the modes for winding the white band around the infant Christ makes it simply incompatible with typical Byzantine liturgical vestments. If we attempt to solve the problem by suggesting that a device designed for church consecration was not used as often as other liturgical bands, meaning its form was probably not very stable even in its original ritual context, then this raises a final set of problems, which appear to be crucial at this point.

Why would the motif of the ‘bishop consecrating a church’ be so important as to place at the very centre of the highly sophisticated and theologically charged fresco program of the cathedral church of an important Byzantine archbishopric? As is well known, the author of this program was a figure of great theological knowledge, whose role in this artistic endeavor was widely acknowledged at the time.^[28] Therefore, if he decided to allude to the rite of church consecration at the focal point of this ensemble, he could not avoid having to answer (to himself, at least) a few simple but important questions. [4] Would it even be possible for a Byzantine viewer other than the bishop himself to recognize elements of a rite so seldom performed and which he/she would never actually see? For not only the quoted text from the eleventh-century Constantinopolitan Euchologion, as we have seen, but also the text by St Symeon emphasize that lay people are not allowed to take part in the consecration rite.^[29] St Symeon, moreover, as is to be expected of a meticulous mystagogical writer of his reputation, expands on the subject and provides a detailed explanation Why Laics Are Excluded from Church Consecrations.^[30] In addition to this, it seems quite reasonable to suppose that, given low social mobility in the medieval context, even an ordinary parish priest might take part in such a rite only once or twice in his lifetime, if he was lucky. Ultimately, then, who were the addressees of the supposed iconographic allusion to church consecration? No matter how rigidly clerical mediaeval society might have been, the liturgy and its art did not cease to be a ‘common act’ of Byzantine piety, so it is hard to suppose that the (arch)bishop, and few of his fellow priests, would have chosen such an important and conspicuous position in a cathedral church solely for their own private communication.

This brings us to the final, congruent, and equally important problem of the fact that consecration is basically an introductory rite, providing a proper space for the Eucharistic mysteries, which are themselves in fact the true raison d’être for the emergence of any church building, together with the art pertaining to this kind of space.^[31] While the rites of those mysteries consequently entered the iconographic programs of ecclesiastical wall painting only gradually, a process that began at exactly the same time and place as that which we are researching,^[32] the motif of church consecration never actually existed as such in Byzantine art.^[33] However, [5] it would be quite plausible to find at least some kind of artistic interest in the subject, if we expect what should be expected in a Byzantine cultural context: any possibility of its actual recognition and communicative application. Moreover, the very fact that this kind of iconography did not develop in itself proves that wider recognition was important for creators of Byzantine art: the need to develop the iconography of church consecration did not exist for the obvious reason that no one save the priests could have ever recognized it. Which means that priests, despite their privileged position in the ecclesiastical and wider social setting, actually had no need to communicate their exclusive priestly experiences in ecclesiastical art. Or, to put it positive terms: this kind of art was still aimed at the larger part of the community that occupied the nave of the church, and such a direction for communication needs to be taken into account if we are to understand its messages and innovations. From such a perspective, on the other hand, it may finally be argued that neither the liturgical context nor the pictorial system could provide sufficient reason for artistic representation of church consecration. Thus, problems [4] and [5] bring to bear the congruent and most essential reasons to suggest that Lidov’s interpretation may be taken into account only at a highly generalized associative level, without excluding other possible associations and with far greater reason to explore the existence of more explicit semantic levels within the pictorial motif we are looking at.

In addition to the fact that a number of researchers accepted Lidov’s hypothesis,^[34] several of them put forward an alternative interpretation for the mystery of the third garment, albeit more often than not approaching it in far less detail and one-sidedly, as often happens when an iconographic detail forms a secondary aspect of wider research and needs to be harmonized with its major strands. Thus, for example, Chrysanthe Baltoyianni [1992] interprets the third garment of the infant Christ in late Byzantine icons of the Theotokos by comparing it with the sash depicted on the chest of the young King David in narrative biblical scenes from Byzantine miniature painting.^[35] Subsequently, Branislav Todić [1994] returned to elements of Lidov’s interpretation in order to explain the presence of the third garment motif in the domain of the so-called Anapeson iconography. While skeptical about the high-priestly aspects of this interpretation, on the one hand, and recognizing the trinitarian associations of the third garment device, on the other, Todić does not yet relinquish the possibility that the text of St Symeon of Thessalonica, with its evocation of a funerary sindon, might be helpful in this semantic domain.^[36] A little later, Rebecca W. Corrie [1996] touched upon the congruent presence of the third garment motif in the western iconography of the thirteenth century, and proposed that it could be understood as a pictorial reinterpretation of the clavi, cross-referenced with elements of contemporaneous children’s clothing.^[37] Finally, the research undertaken by Athanassios Semoglou [2006] connects the infant Christ’s third garment in the conch of Ohrid Cathedral with famous relics and ‘image reliquaries’ from the Church of the Virgin in Blachernai, and consequently suggests that it ‘resembles in form the bandages of the deceased or the swaddling clothes of newborns’, as such motifs appear in a ‘series of middle-Byzantine images.’^[38]

While I shall touch upon some of the arguments in these studies below, since they took important steps toward a new comprehensive approach to the subject, it is important here to note that all these surveys, as well as Lidov’s, are confronted with numerous insoluble problems. Most of these problems are quite thoroughly and quite persuasively brought to the surface—making it pointless to repeat them here—in the recent study undertaken by Miodrag Marković [published in 2021].^[39] Since this is, after Lidov’s, the most detailed and rigorous survey on the subject, it is no surprise that it dedicates much space to the analysis and refutation of the arguments put forward by the Russian scholar (as the present study also does). However, since his thorough analysis of ancient texts and subsequent comparison of their descriptions of liturgical vestments with the forms of third garment exposed the inconsistency of Lidov’s argument quite precisely and successfully, Marković felt no need to explore Lidov’s argumentation further.^[40] Thus, he embarked upon his own interpretation without taking into account the problems posed by the wider liturgical context, which I have here found to be the most essential [problems 4 and 5]. This is probably why Marković, despite rejecting all of Lidov’s findings, actually accepts his most general argument and does not abandon the idea that the explanation is to be found chiefly on the priestly side of the semantic spectrum. Moreover, he pushes this kind of argument even further, suggesting that the third garment of the infant Christ is ‘the girdle (Hebrew: abnet) proscribed by Jewish canonical scriptures as an element of the vestments worn by all priests when serving in the Temple or Tent of the Congregation’.^[41] The author bases his argument, far more persuasively than did Lidov, in the general ‘Christian doctrine of Christ as a priest “in the order of Melchizedek”’.^[42] But, in the end, this interpretation also comes up against problems, which are more sophisticated but no less significant than those Lidov faced. Namely, why the girdle? When Marković starts using the Hebrew word abnet in his text rather than girdle, it sounds quite important and substantial, and when he adds information on this subject from the medieval Hebrew sources it begins to look even more persuasive.^[43] But the truth is that educated Byzantines had their own primary source of knowledge about the Old Testament, the authoritative and, as fathers of the Church believed, divinely inspired Greek translation that was the Septuagint.^[44] It is therefore not very reasonable to expect Byzantine intellectuals to have discussed such issues with the rabbis of their time when they had their own, hyper-reliable source of information, contained in no less than the Bible transferred from Jewish to Greek culture through a translation recognized by undisputed authority and tradition of use. Even if we try with considerable effort to imagine such an interreligious dialogue in the Middle Ages, it seems out of the question to imagine any Byzantine theologian trying to apply knowledge gathered in such a way within the most popular cultural domain, when he could simply have made use of knowledge obtained from the Bible itself.

Besides, in the LXX translation, we find that the abnet is simply the belt [ζώνην], which, as Marković rightly notes, was not a garment exclusive to the High Priest, but was also worn by the sons of Aaron [Exodus 28:40] and all other later Jewish priests. Nevertheless, if we move back a few verses in the biblical text, we find the entire description of the High Priest’s raiment consists of: ‘the chest piece (περιστήθιον) and the shoulder-strap (ἐπωμίδα) and the full-length robe (ποδήρη) and tasseled tunic (χιτῶνα κοσυμβωτὸν) and turban (κίδαριν) and sash (ζώνην)’ [Exodus 28:4]. Of these, the shoulder-strap, the LXX term for the ephod, would easily have been recognized by any Byzantine or other reader as the most important, since it was not only worn exclusively by the High Priest, but the stones with the engraved names of the twelve tribes were attached to it, so that Aaron (and his successors) ‘shall bear the names of the sons of Israel before the Lord on his two shoulders, a remembrance for them’ [Exodus 28:12]. In addition, ‘an oracle of judgements’, with the additional twelve stones engraved by the names of sons of Israel, is joined to the shoulder-strap [28:15–26], so that High Priest (Aaron) ‘shall bear the judgments of the sons of Israel on his chest before the Lord always’ [28:26].^[45] On the other hand, we can see that a sash/belt is the final element of this list, equally belonging the list of vestments of the lower ranks of Old Testament priesthood. After all, Byzantine priests themselves, of both the higher and the lower ranks, had their own belts, referred to by the same word. While this part of their vestments is mentioned in St Symeon of Thessalonica’s detailed liturgical commentary,^[46] St Germanus’ famous tractate from the eighth century omits it, while its later interpolation on the monastic schema, added by the ninth century, informs us that even the simple monastic habit was furnished with a leather belt (ζώνη δερματίνη).^[47] We are therefore faced once more with the same sort of question as the one we discussed within the Christ-as-deacon hypothesis: [1] why place an element of priestly garb, which was secondary in the biblical as well as the Byzantine priestly context, on Christ as depicted in the centre of an important Byzantine cathedral? If it is well known that He is the ultimate High Priest of the Christian Church, then it is hard to imagine that emphasis of his priestly status could have missed this fact. In short, why would one try to represent Christ’s priestly status with the least significant among all the available Old Testament priestly vestments? One might here object that in mediaeval times no one knew what the ancient high-priestly vestments actually looked like, so the best the Byzantines could do was to look at the Jewish priests of the day. But this simply is not the way things functioned in Byzantine art. The well-known example of monumental inscriptions on the garments of representations of Old Testament priestly figures in Palaeologan art illustrates the way things did work. Since in monumental art stones inscribed with the names of the twelve tribes would hardly be visible to spectators, artists simply ignored the presence of the stones from the biblical text and inscribed the monumental letters directly on the white garments of High Priests.^[48] Of course, this truly brilliant and inspiring artistic interpretation had almost nothing to do with what Jewish medieval liturgical vestments actually looked like. It was based solely on the biblical text and was, moreover, quite loose in its visual interpretation. Thus, [2] if the Bible itself was not only sufficient but also used in quite an arbitrary way, why would anyone need to visit a Jewish quarter in search of obscure details from an alien liturgical practice?^[49]

After all, we must here note that the priestly girdle/belt was depicted on the figures of Jewish (High) Priests in Byzantine art only seldom. When Marković himself points out, ‘the abnet is also sometimes visible in the depictions of Old Testament priests in Byzantine art, but the way it is tied is not usually clear because the figures wear cloaks’, he in fact means that he found only one example of the belt depicted in a single Byzantine manuscript illumination.^[50] I might add that rather more credible examples of this kind can be identified in the figure of Zechariah depicted as part of the Presentation of the Virgin to the Temple composition from Lagoudera,^[51] and in the portraits of four Old Testament High Priests in the altar of the Dečani catholicon,^[52] but as far as I can ascertain, the ‘list’ of examples of the ‘abnet’ in church frescos ends here. Given that on the other hand, figures of Jewish High priests are frequently depicted in Byzantine art,^[53] it is clear that the image of ancient biblical high-priestly figures in the minds of the authors and consumers of this art simply did not include the image of the girdle. Finally, the artistic system itself raises the question: [3] why would any observer connect such an item with the Old Testament priesthood if it did not belong to Old Testament priests as Byzantine art itself depicted them?

This brings us to the nub of the issue, with which Lidov’s pioneering interpretation closes. Namely, while the Bible itself provides, as we have seen, very weak inspiration for the symbolic elevation of the priestly belt motif, the question of potential popular reception of such an inspiration comes up against truly insurmountable hermeneutic obstacles. Thus, even if we accept the unrealistic hypothesis that Christ was adorned with the simplest priestly belt from the Old Testament tradition, who would be the addressee of such a message? Although probably every Byzantine Christian knew that Christ is ‘a priest forever According to the order of Melchizedek’, based on the vast liturgical use/influence of the Psalter [110:4] and the Epistle to the Hebrews [5:6],^[54] this still does not mean that they had the opportunity to read and analyze every Old Testament priestly writing the way we can today. In other words, what did function as the source of Old-Testament biblical knowledge for the average (illiterate) Byzantine was liturgical readings from the Psalter and lectionary manuscripts with selections of Old Testament readings for the annual liturgical cycle. Recognized as the Prophetologion in contemporary theory, this manuscript tradition achieved a stable form by the ninth century and remained consistent until the sixteenth century. Without including the Psalter, this compilation contained no more than fifteen percent of the Old Testament text, which the Byzantine Church deemed essential for its flock.^[55] It is therefore no wonder that meticulous descriptions of (high-) priestly vesture did not find any place in this abridged Bible for the masses.^[56] Consequently, there is no reason to believe that such literary images could have found their way into the popular imagination. On the other hand, the opportunity of reading the Old Testament as we read it today was the sole privilege of a small group of Byzantine high intellectuals, those of ‘mandarin quality’, as Cyril Mango used to describe them, and perhaps a privilege of some of the most educated/curious priests.^[57] Thus, acceptance of Marković’s ‘abnet hypothesis’ once again leads us to the conclusion that, [4] even if such a priestly message existed, probably no more than a handful of people in Ohrid could possibly have received it. Once again, we come up against the rather implausible possibility that the central point of the important fresco program was used primarily for the private theological meditations of one or a handful of priests. I am not saying that this kind of scenario is absolutely irrelevant to the present discussion, nor do I wish to dismiss every argument put forward by professor Marković, but at this point it seems quite obvious that there are still important pieces of the puzzle missing as we endeavor to obtain a coherent image of the subject under discussion. In other words, all of the problems we have looked at so far suggest that the motif of the third garment is still far from having been comprehensively explained and that what is needed is to open up new interpretive perspectives in order to reach such an explanation.

After all, there is no reason to set aside the simple fact that Christ was already represented as the priest communicating the Eucharist, just beneath the fresco in question, in the equally famous and thoroughly researched Communion of the Apostles scene in Ohrid Cathedral.^[58] If we therefore take into account the fact that all the priestly hypotheses have come up against inextricable problems and set against this the background of the fact that overt, conspicuous representation of mature Christ as High Priest was present beneath the apsidal image at stake, then perhaps we should simply try thinking about the image without any priestly associations in mind. For a start I would therefore suggest a simple but essential methodological turn toward the hypothesis that we are dealing with a multilayered symbolic device, which simply cannot be approached from a single, exclusive interpretive position. If we approach it in this way, then the story of the third garment will surely become far more complicated and more meaningful, which need not be unexpected, since we are, after all, examining the pictorial device wrapped around the heart of God’s Son and depicted at the focal point of an entire pictorial system. Finally, if we approach it this way, and we are attentive to every single one of its possible semantic layers, then even its priestly aspects will slowly begin to reveal themselves behind the bonds of discreteness, and present its Divine wearer as the most unusual High Priest the world (of images) has ever seen.^[59]

Before embarking on such a quest, it is important to note that giving a break to the expectation that the solution is primarily to be found through research into liturgical formulae is not entirely implausible, if we are genuinely to pay full attention to the artistic and liturgical context under research. In fact, the introduction of liturgical subjects into the repertoire of ecclesiastical murals was quite a novel programmatic concept at the time when Ohrid Cathedral was painted. The very fact that literal illustrations of the liturgy began to enter monumental art at the time of what Christopher Walter called the eleventh-century watershed^[60] reminds us that the relationship of ritual to art cannot be understood as a kind of simplified master-slave transfer. To put it in its simplest manner: art had its own logic long before the overt penetration of liturgical iconography even began. At the time such a programmatic watershed appeared, the Church actually began (re)searching for models of a stronger and more obvious, i.e., mimetic, interchange between art and ritual, but there is no reason to suppose that direct expression of various theological concepts through pictorial media ceased to be interesting to artists and commissioners. It therefore seems quite legitimate to explore the idea that the strange white band found its way onto Christ’s chest as an expression of some important theological concept, perhaps even without any direct liturgical association. Of course, such a concept does not have to be understood as anti-liturgical. My discussion of this will, moreover, try to demonstrate that it had a strong pro-liturgical orientation, although we will need not only one but multiple kinds of methodological reconsideration in order to be able to trace such an orientation. The idea is that liturgical layers of meaning do not always have to be articulated through explicit illustrations of ritual, but rather, sometimes even more efficiently, through illustration of theological ideas and historical events. After all, the contemporary researcher has to be aware that the mediaeval mind was not as thoroughly structured as ours, and that specialized disciplines and university cathedrae had not yet become separate: as the images themselves will here show us, in this specific gnoseological ambience, biblical, doctrinal, or liturgical motifs could quite spontaneously intermingle and leap from one context to another, without any need for their semantic origins to be explicated. Finally, if we reconsider from such a perspective the arguments put forward in Lidov’s pioneering research, then one important interpretive possibility begins to emerge as soon as we leave eleventh-century Ohrid. Moreover, from this novel perspective, his discovery of the syndon motif might actually provide a specific keyword to open up an as yet virtually unexplored set of pictorial and literary parallels, which could become essential in solving the mystery of the third garment.

When Birth Means Death…

We might start by reading the above-quoted text of St Symeon from the standpoint of professor Todić, who seems to be the first authoritative scholarly figure to express overt skepticism towards the exclusively priestly interpretation of the infant Christ’s third garment. In addition, he emphasizes the fact that word syndon is not only the name of a liturgical device, but also a word denoting both the device itself and ‘a shroud in which Christ was buried’.^[61] After all, the Archbishop of Thessalonica himself says that the ‘white syndon’ used during the church consecration rite is actually ‘the image/symbol of Christ’s burial syndon’.^[62] This reminds us of the notable fact that word syndon was the Greek term for the burial clothes (shroud) from New Testament onwards.^[63] Hence, let us try to forget the liturgical context and Ohrid Cathedral for a short space and enter the more abundant field of twelfth-century pictorial evidence with the image of Christ’s burial (with syndon) in mind. The most important and the most significant of the examples from this period would certainly be the fresco icon of the Virgin from Lagoudera, Cyprus, the so-called Theotokos Arakiotissa. This polysemic painterly masterpiece has captured the attention of numerous contemporary scholars, and consequently it has been examined from various points of view.^[64] Its most obvious and most important semantic charge is identifiable in the fact that it is the first known Byzantine icon of the Virgin of the Passion type, unquestionably distinguished as such by instruments of the Passion borne by the flanking angels (fig. 5, 31).^[65] In addition, observation at the macroscopic iconographic level shows that the portrait of the infant Christ in this exquisite twelfth-century work of art was again supplied with a narrow white band, almost identical to the one in the Ohrid Cathedral altar conch (cf. fig. 5, 72).^[66] Is it now to a certain extent possible to avoid distanced and complicated interpretations which tend to 1) recognize the motif of church consecration even outside the altar itself,^[67] or tend to 2) imagine Byzantine artists or priests as participants in an improbable mediaeval interreligious dialogue on liturgical matters, and try to connect the third garment of the infant Christ to the central subject of the famous Araku fresco? Or, to put it more simply: should we not try to explore the existence of a meaningful iconographic connection between the instruments of the Passion borne by the angels and a white band wound around Christ’s chest? If such an interpretive possibility exists, then the wielding of Occam’s razor would be quite plausible at this point.

In the programmatic context of the church at Araku, we merely have to look across the nave in order to cut the Gordian knot and confront the bulk of straightforward, although still unexplored, interpretive possibilities. As is widely accepted in contemporary theory, the Arakiotissa fresco icon belongs to the spatially refracted scene of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple.^[68] Across the earliest Virgin of the Passion, the spectator can therefore see St Symeon, holding the infant Christ wrapped in the same third garment, while St John the Baptist stands behind them with a scroll inscribed with the message accentuating the sacrificial aspect of the image (fig. 6): ‘Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!’ [John 1:29].^[69] Even without such an additional textual reference, however, the sacrificial aspect of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple imagery would have been easily recognizable to any (Byzantine) spectator, since the scene was always a reminder of St Symeon’s prophecy that the ‘sword will pierce through’ the soul of the Divine child’s mother [Luke 2:35], which was fulfilled by the instruments of Christ’s Passion.^[70] However, combining the image of Christ as sacrificial Lamb with the instruments of the Passion within this iconographic context places an extremely strong hermeneutic accent on Christ’s passion, sacrifice, and death, which strongly suggests that his third garment, twice depicted inside spatially dispersed Lagoudera Presentation, can hardly escape such a semantic coloring.

At this point it is important to stress that the earliest appearance of our mysterious iconographic device actually belongs neither to monumental art, nor to the iconography of Virgin with Christ portraits, but can be found in miniature painting, in the depiction of the Circumcision of Christ from the famous Menologion of Basil II, painted in the late-tenth century (fig. 7).^[71] The sacrificial accent must have been even more recognizable in this image than within the complementary iconography of the Presentation: the divine infant is approached by the priest with the knife, as it was part of the rite of the circumcision, itself recognizable, from a biblical and a patristic perspective, as the first (sacrificial) spilling of Christ’s blood.^[72] However, since the iconography of the Circumcision never became popular in Byzantine art,^[73] far more important for our research is the fact that the third garment was quite often represented on the infant Christ within the iconography of the Presentation in the Temple, which was widely disseminated and therefore was a constant reminder to the Church, personified by his Mother, of the ‘sword’ of the Divine Son’s Passion and death. While the frequent presence of the third garment in this specific iconographic domain would require a separate study of its own, for now let it suffice to say that the iconography of the Presentation, through its inevitable narrative reference to the basic connection between Mother and Child, ineluctably influenced, and was influenced by, the iconography of the Virgin with Christ. In addition, the basic narrative connection of the iconography of the Presentation with the ritual imagery of the church altar, and the corresponding programmatic connection of this iconography with the altar space, as found in Lagoudera itself and in several other churches of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, added a strong ritual-sacrificial accent to the presence of the Holy Child in images of Presentation.^[74] This might be why at some point the color of the third garment changed from white to red. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries we find examples of the Presentation in the Temple with Christ wrapped in a white third garment (cod. Dionysiou 587m., fol. 146r; Lagoudera; Palatine Chapel of Palermo),^[75] but in the twelfth century, examples of this clothing device colored in red are also introduced (Nerezi; Monreale; Amaasgou).^[76] Among these, the late-twelfth- or early-thirteenth-century Presentation composition in Church of the Panagia Amasgou (Cyprus) provides one very specific and very important argument for the following discussion.^[77] Namely, simple observation and field research simultaneously demonstrate that the scarlet of the third garment in this image is not only the same color as the altar table beneath the infant Christ, but that the color is quite deliberately differentiated from the purple of the Virgin’s maphorion and other reddish garments in the composition.^[78] Furthermore, only these two surfaces are decorated with the same, unusual ornament, consisting of double stripes and circles, which additionally and unquestionably distinguishes and closely interconnects the iconographic elements painted in such an exclusive way (fig. 8). On the other hand, it is well known that the Byzantine altar table is always covered with what is called the eiliton (εἰληετὸν), which, already in the famous mystagogical treatise of St Germanos, ‘signifies the winding sheet (σινδόνα) in which the body of Christ was wrapped when it was taken down from the cross and placed in the tomb’.^[79] The hypothesis that the bold semantic connection achieved in the aforementioned Amasgou pictorial parallel was recognizable in the wider cognitive space of Byzantine pictorial language will be supported by masterful examples from no less than Nerezi, Sopoćani, and Protaton. Though deprived of ornamental formal support, there can be no doubt that iconography of the Presentation found in those churches operates with a highly similar syntactic embedding of the coloristic distinction on the red side of the spectrum: while the maphorion of the Virgin is a dark, purplish red, the third garment of Christ and the altar cloth are simultaneously differentiated within the composition by a considerably lighter tone of red, obviously deliberately introduced in order to connect those two distinct surfaces (fig. 9–11).^[80] Although these intricate iconographic parallels are still not sufficient to identify the third garment as the funerary syndon itself, they seem to be quite decisive in lending a strong funerary/sacrificial semantic aspect to our mysterious iconographic device.

Finally, from this standpoint it is no surprise to find that the third garment is regularly present, often together with the instruments of the Passion, within late Byzantine iconographic formula representing reclining Christ-Emmanuel, the so-called Anapesson, or Unsleeping Eye in the Slavic recension (fig. 12). As is widely accepted in theory, this iconography was based on the recognizable literary image of the Lion of Judah from the Book of Genesis [49:9; cf. also in Numbers 24:9], which in the New Testament was already allegorically attached to Christ [‘Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has prevailed to open the scroll and to loose its seven seals’; Revelation 5:5], and which later became metaphorically identical with the widely accepted mediaeval image of the king of the animals, based on the extremely popular late antique heritage of the so-called Phisiologus.^[81] Thus, after claiming that ‘our Savior’ is ‘the spiritual lion of the tribe of Judah’, this ancient treatise on nature (theologically re-framed during Late Antiquity) taught Christians throughout (mediaeval) Europe that the lion ‘although he has fallen asleep, his eyes keep watch for him’, directly comparing this image with Christ, who ‘physically slept on the cross, but his divine nature always keeps watch in the right hand of the Father’.^[82] In a similar manner, Physiologus says that the lion’s whelp is born dead, waiting in this condition until its father ‘arrives on the third day and, breathing into its face on the third day, he awakens it’; which claim is followed by the theological interpretation: ‘Thus did the almighty Father of all awaken from the dead on the third day the firstborn of every creature’.^[83] Since the Byzantines tended to attribute the theological redaction of the Physiologus to no less a figure than St Basil the Great, and since they were very fond of connecting the imagery of the sleeping lion of Judah with Christ’s death in theology and in liturgical poetry, the conflation of such motifs with congruent knowledge of nature is not a surprising outcome, neither in theory nor in art.^[84] If we further agree that the aforementioned literary images molded the iconography of the Anapeson, then it is clear that, despite its profound theological optimism, this kind of image actually represents what happens before the Resurrection: ‘The reclining pose of the young Emmanuel anapeson, who is asleep and at the same time awake, anticipates and symbolizes Christ’s sleep of death in the tomb’.^[85] Taking this into account, we can finally name the two parallel threads that connect all the paintings discussed in this and the previous two paragraphs: 1) at the formal level they are connected by the presence of the infant Christ’s third garment, while 2) at the semantic level they are connected by the overt association with Christ’s death (the Passion and His sacrifice). Bearing this in mind, we can now turn back to the earliest representation of the Virgin of the Passion and boldly suggest that the third garment found in its iconography must have been semantically connected with Christ’s Passion and death.

Although such a diachronic cross-iconographic argument is still far from sufficient to conclude the story of the third garment, it boldly opens up the question of its relation to Christ’s death. Therefore, let us now try to explore this question in its wider and deeper historical contexts. In order properly to embark on such an investigation, one simple question needs to be asked: apart from the iconography of the Presentation, what kind of hermeneutic benefit could the winding of funerary clothes around the chest of the newborn Christ in the image of Him in His mother’s arms possibly convey to the ancient spectator or the contemporary interpreter? The answer to this question begins to reveal itself as soon as we look at the post-iconoclastic development of the iconography of the Virgin and Christ. As is and was well known, He was never represented as a typical newborn child, and she was never represented as a typical mother. Not only were His birth and His Passion/death recognized as deeply interconnected from the perspective of the Divine salvific plan, but at some point, the Byzantines realized that Mother’s position was also an important hermeneutic key to an understanding of this fundamental theological connection. To be more precise, the Mother’s role in the Passion of Christ was never unfamiliar to the Christian piety/culture,^[86] but after Byzantine iconoclasm, she comes into sharper theological focus as a special emphatic witness of the reality of His humanity. Given that the reality of Divine Incarnation was the key argument for the development of post-iconoclastic artistic production,^[87] there was a good reason to emphasize it in post-iconoclastic art, and representing the full reality of Christ’s Passion and death turned out to be one of the most efficient and most popular ways to achieve this goal.^[88] And inasmuch as the birth and death of the Messiah were two indivisibly linked events of the Divine plan for the salvation of humankind, the Virgin’s role as theological and emphatic witness needed to be widened to encompass both these events. Therefore, she naturally remained the key figure for conveying the reality of Christ’s Birth, but she also became the ‘key witness’—and I would say that here empathy was the gnoseological key—of His fully human Passion, Death, and Burial.^[89] Through its subsequent broad emphasis on the role of the Mother of God in liturgical art, particularly through iconography connected to the liturgy of Passion Week, the Byzantines were to produce, as Maguire and Belting have plainly demonstrated, innovative multimedia means of expression that harmonized the liturgy and the visual arts in a fashion whose semiotics were highly advanced.^[90]

The Mother’s Lament, through which Christians of every possible social level could engage in theological meditation about the dialectics of Christ’s birth and death, was one of the inventions that led to a breakthrough in the understanding of relations between Byzantine liturgy and art. Combining traditional and innovative rhetorical devices to contrast the care that mother gave to the dead body of her son with the care she gave him after his birth, this sort of hymnography became important for Byzantine piety after iconoclasm and commenced its intensive liturgical life in the eleventh century, whence it was easily able to inspire the artistic developments of twelfth century.^[91] ‘I cannot bear, my child, to hold you without breath, whom I nursed as a child when you leaped in my arms… I will wind you in a winding cloth [syndon/σινδόνι], my son, instead of in swaddling clothes, I will place you in a dark tomb, my light, instead of in a crib’.^[92] These are just some of the verses that conveyed in an expressive, poetical way the theological concept that recognized the deep interconnection between the birth (initial kenosis) and death (final kenosis) of Christ. Moreover, the recognizable metaphoric denominator of this concept was obviously the syndon [σινδόνι] of Christ. At the moment of the Son of Man’s death, the ‘winding cloth’ (syndon) was a reminder of his birth, with his mother and the Church lamenting together. Once this associative link was established at the most popular liturgical level, its potential use in the opposite associative direction was obviously near at hand. This is why the attachment of the instruments of the Passion to the representation of the Theotokos occurs in twelfth-century monumental art, and this is why, at the same time, the placement of the funerary clothing device on the chest of holy infant cradled in her arms seems quite reasonable from the perspective of the wider ecclesiastical currents of the period under discussion.

Given that the aforementioned hymn is considerably older than the twelfth-century frescoes under discussion and that the lament of the Virgin began to enter Byzantine hymnography long before its official liturgical appearance, by the eleventh century, within the typikon of the Good Friday service,^[93] it is clear that by the eleventh century the motif of the burial syndon would have been recognized as a symbolic tool of theological inspiration possessing the highest semantic potential for art. In addition, the fact that, even much earlier than this, liturgical reading from Paul’s epistles, for example,^[94] was capable of inspiring kenotic theological mediations can help us finally to put forward a broad but solid interpretative framework for further research: the third garment depicted on the Christ’s chest and shoulders does not directly refer to liturgical ritual(s), but was presented as a theological (symbolic) reminder of the kenosis, whereby the incarnation and death of the heavenly Logos could be understood as deeply interconnected. Translated into pictorial language, this means: the (third) garment wound around the body of Christ in the scene conveying the doctrine of His Incarnation is the same as that which will be wound around His body after the Crucifixion. Before we begin to examine this interpretive possibility in detail, it is important to underline the fact that the aforementioned dialectic was not the exclusive theological property of the Byzantine elite, but rather, as we have seen, it belonged to the highly popular, highly expressive, and liturgically regularly performed domain of Byzantine hymnography. It is, moreover, important here to emphasize that this kind of theological concept could easily have been adopted at the widest cultural level long before the hymnography of the Lament was popularized, since it had very ancient, biblical foundations. Theological images connecting the initial (incarnational) and the final (sacrificial) kenosis of the Son of God were deeply rooted in the New Testament foundations of the Christian faith, and can be found in Paul’s description of Christ as one who is ‘equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation [ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσε], taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross’ [Philippians 2:6–8].^[95] It is therefore hard to dismiss the possibility that, from such a standpoint, kenotic theology might have led to the formation of a horizon of Christian imagery long before it even began to materialize in the visual arts.

In order to expand on the interpretive possibilities outlined above, I suggest that we set aside the liturgical context for the time being and look at the syndon as the clothes used in Christ’s burial. It is important to note that this piece of cloth was present in the life of the Byzantines only via biblical literary evidence.^[96] It was also kept as a relic in Constantinople, as a physical reminder of the reality of Christ’s death to its citizens and pilgrims from all over the Christian world.^[97] From this standpoint, the syndon was more than one among many literary images: it was the primary evidence of the reality of the Savior’s full humanity and of the profundity of the Divine kenosis. On the other hand, the self-emptying and humbling of the Son of God, as we have already noted, was not connected only to the events of Good Friday. Since this part of the theological story is of particular importance to further research, let me emphasize once more that the Divine kenosis commenced at the very moment of His birth as a human, mortal being. Although not developed with the same polemical meticulousness that was reserved for other, later theological motifs, the idea that the original kenosis, or Incarnation, and the final kenosis, or Passion and Death, of the Son of God were actually indivisible aspects of the Gospel message was deeply and universally interiorized and in genuine harmony with the biblical roots of the Christian worldview.^[98] It begins, as we have seen, with the famous Christological hymn from Philippians, and, as we shall see, was present in the patristic literature and liturgy long before it is supposed to have entered to the domain of visual culture.

With all this in mind, let me suggest that the only way to push forward the present research is to suppose that the mysterious third garment of the infant Christ had something to do with precisely the historical funerary syndon of Christ. In order to examine the potential of such a hermeneutic proposal, we ought, for starters, to return to twelfth-century Cyprus and analyze one very specific representation of the third garment of the infant Christ, which was not examined by either of the most comprehensive studies on the subject, those of Lydov and Marković. Home to several different layers of fresco decoration, dating from the eleventh to the seventeenth century, the church of St Nicholas tis Stegis, Kakopetria, is one of the few monuments in the world that bears witness to the aesthetic and iconographic habits of early-eleventh-century fresco painting.^[99] Among the few pieces preserved from those times, it is possible to identify a part of the Embalmment of Christ scene.^[100] Today we can see the lower part of the composition, with the partly visible figures of Christ and St John, and a clearly visible monumental piece of fabric beneath the body of Christ (fig. 13). There can be no doubt that we are here dealing with a funerary syndon, laid beneath the dead body prior to being wound in funeral sheets, probably one of the earliest representations of its kind in Byzantine monumental art.^[101] Richly decorated with black ornaments, the monumental white piece of cloth is definitely a highly prominent and conspicuous part of the composition, informing us that its semantic potential was clearly recognized in the narrative art of the times. Similar compositions also existed in eleventh-century book illuminations (fig. 66).^[102] However, the reason why this church is important to our story is the artistic event that took place therein almost an entire century later. The fresco of the Mother of God inscribed Hodegetria (fig. 14) is not directly connected with the eleventh-century frescoes in the nave of the church since it was painted when narthex was added at the beginning of twelfth century. Not unlike the Virgin of Arakiotissa, this fresco-icon was given a prominent place in this twelfth-century program, on the north-east central pillar in front of the portal that gives onto the nave.^[103] Rather like the first Virgin of the Passion fresco-icon, the torso of the Heavenly Child is wound in white bands that are even more conspicuous than those at Lagoudera due to their width and intricate ornamentation. From a solely formal standpoint, this example of the third garment is therefore closest to the forms of Byzantine priestly vestments, but the radical, one might even say ironic, positioning of the image in the narthex of the church subverts its potential for interpretation from a eucharistic perspective. From such a standpoint it is notable that this representation of the third garment, given the width of the bands and the conspicuousness of its ornamentation, very precisely conforms to the same device traceable in the remnants of the Virgin and Christ composition in the south apse of the Cappadocian Çanli Kilise (fig. 15).^[104] Since this eleventh-century fresco is heavily damaged, with only parts of the figures of Christ and the Virgin visible, it is no wonder that the two surviving pieces of the broad, white, boldly decorated band that draped over the Infant’s shoulders have without great reluctance been identified as an element of liturgical vesture by contemporary scholars.^[105] But when we place this image alongside the Hodegetria fresco-icon from Kakopetria, it is hard to resist the impression that we are seeing exactly the same type of Christ’s third garment in both frescoes (cf. fig. 14 and 15). Since the Cappadocian example is the only available eleventh-century parallel to the apsidal fresco from Ohrid Cathedral—almost synchronous with it and seemingly echoing the trends in the Byzantine Capital^[106]— the Kakopetria fresco-icon of the Hodegetria indirectly comes within the purview of this study and has the potential to become an important link in the interpretation of our basic subject. If we now return to the eleventh century frescoes from the church of St Nicholas tis Stegis, we find that the sharply contrasting black ornaments on the white bands wound around the Infant in the Hodegitria fresco are very similar to the ornaments depicted on the white syndon in the eleventh-century Embalmment composition (cf. figs. 13 and 14). In my opinion, it is not very realistic to suppose that the twelfth-century painter made this ornamental transcription unintentionally. It seems more likely that he was trying to make an exact painterly transcript of the image of the eleventh-century syndon by applying the same ornaments in the new iconographic context and trying to establish a semantic connection between the two devices marked by those ornaments. It is possible to support this interpretation with the example of the Presentation scene examined above, which was later painted in the neighboring Cypriote Church of Panagia Amasgou (fig. 8), with its overt and conspicuous ornamental connection between Christ’s third garment and the eiliton, the altar-table cloth identifiable as one of the clearest liturgical images of the burial syndon.^[107]

In order to avoid the pitfalls of overinterpretation, however, I suggest that the two historically distant but ornamentally linked frescos from Kakopetria do at least inform us that 1) the monumental art of the eleventh-century used the motif of the unwound syndon in narrative Passion compositions, and 2) the ornaments depicted on the Kakopetria funerary syndon reappear within the same ensemble a century later, on white bands wound around the infant Christ’s torso. Thus, at the very least, the scrupulous researcher ought to be prompted to ask the question of how the two obviously quite differently proportioned garments might be related. But the difference poses a significant obstacle in itself: if the two garments are formally different enough, what might be the meaningful connection between them other than a variation in ornamentation from different periods? In other words, if the third garment could hardly be visualized as the burial syndon itself, how is it possible to suppose a meaningful semantic connection between those two? And this finally brings us to one of the key problems of the present study, of a kind that cannot be solved by methodological detours but requires thorough research into the entire pictorial and cultural context in order to become conceivable. The following series of examples will demonstrate step by step that the proposed semantic link between the two different sorts of garment was in fact wholly in agreement with the dominant strands of Byzantine visual thought, although it was not a link of a simple kind and more than one piece of cloth should come within our purview in order to explain it.

In twelfth-century Byzantine art the imagery of the Passion underwent significant developments,^[108] producing a vast number of examples that might help us uncover the historical logic of the attachment of a funerary semantic charge to the figure of the infant Christ. As we have seen, the first known icon of the Virgin of the Passion, in which the instruments of the Passion threaten the heavenly Infant, was designed in those times. What seemed to be only a suggestion in eleventh-century art now became more obvious: being clothed in human nature and threatened by death are congruent from the perspective of the Son of God’s presence in the world. The inscription that follows later interpretations of the Virgin of the Passion iconography on portable icons were specifically to explain this: ‘and Christ, clothed in mortal flesh, seeing the signs of death, was afraid (fig. 16)’.^[109] It is obviously not by chance that such icons are as a rule furnished with the third garment. But since this iconographic type was to be thoroughly developed only during the final centuries of Byzantine art and afterwards, the peculiar changes in the color of the third garment that followed upon these developments must remain outside the purview of this research, although it should be noted that the shift of color toward red may plausibly be explained as the invention of the twelfth-century iconography of the Presentation in the Temple, which itself was grounded in the sacrificial interpretation of the that biblical event.^[110] In addition, the unusual early thirteenth-century Italian private devotional triptych by Berlinghiero Berlinghieri, depicting the Virgin and Child surrounded by figures of Christ and saints, represented as direct references to the Passion and martyrdom, is furnished with a white third garment very similar to that depicted in our key eleventh- and twelfth-century Byzantine examples (fig. 17).^[111] However, at this point in our research, we need to focus our attention on Byzantine art of twelfth century, since the Arakiotissa fresco-icon, as has been shown above, obviously confirms what was suggested through the pictorial cross-references over two generations found in the Kakopetria frescoes: a key to understanding the third garment of the infant Christ seems to lie in the development of the Passion imagery. In fact, there is abundant evidence from the twelfth century narrative iconography to demonstrate that winding bands around the body was meant precisely to represent the symbolic connections between the imagery of birth and death, which actually functioned within a far wider semantic space than that studied hitherto.

In the frescoes painted at the beginning of this century in the church of the Panagia Phorbiotissa, Asinou (Cyprus), The Soul of the Theotokos, in the Koimesis fresco, and the figure of Lazarus at the moment of his Resurrection are depicted in identical clothes (figs. 18–19).^[112] There can be no doubt about the painter’s intention to make a precise iconic, and therefore semantic, link between the two body-coverings, since the figures are not simply wound in white bands but also their heads are covered with the additional elaborately ornamented garment, probably with reference to the contemporary funerary practices of the local upper classes.^[113] What makes the connection between these two events, in a form of rhetorical inversion, is both death and life after death. The baby’s swaddling clothes and the funerary clothes of the corpse were obviously, as far as the Byzantine painter/spectator was concerned, deeply interconnected at the iconic and symbolic levels. Although it seems that the Koimesis fresco is not the ideal place to establish standards for baby clothing in Byzantine iconography, since the infant in Christ’s hands is actually the representation of the soul of His mother,^[114] the twelfth century provides sufficient examples to show that the idea rested on a far broader basis than that covered by the iconography of one or two feasts. Our next example comes from the second half of the century and is part of the series of festal icons that make up the masterful Tetraptych with Dodekaorton now kept in the Sinai (St Catherine’s) Monastery.^[115] The funerary clothes in the Resurrection of Lazarus are very similar to those depicted at Asinou, but far more importantly they are identical to the clothes of the infant Christ depicted in the Nativity icon of the same tetraptych (figs. 20–21). The soul of the Theotokos in the Koimesis icon does, of course, have the same clothes (fig. 22), with a slight difference of the introduction of ornamented decoration on the head covering. From such a standpoint, it would seem that babies and corpses depicted in Gospel narratives in Byzantine art had something very important in common. The simple religious intuition suggests that we are dealing with birth as the inception of mortality, and, at the other dialectic pole, death as the inception of the new life. However, is it possible to place such an intuition on a firmer historical footing? In order to find additional historical support, we do not yet need to leave the twelfth century, since the contemporaneous development of the Passion imagery provides a perfect starting point for further analysis of our subject.

Research into the series of rhetorical oppositions carefully encapsulated throughout the fresco ensemble of the Church of St George in Kurbinovo, pointed out by Henry Maguire in his seminal study from the 1980s, has shown that the motifs of the Nativity of Christ and of His Death/Mourning were interconnected within this compact liturgical/pictorial space.^[116] Concomitantly, as we have seen, through the lens of the Lament of the Theotokos, sung at the highly popular Good Friday vespers, every Byzantine citizen could take part in a theological meditation in which death and birth constantly changed roles through a dialectic of rhetorical, emotional, and existential oppositions. Expanding on Maguire’s research, I shall argue that the intentional symmetry of the Nativity and Burial of Christ scenes at Kurbinovo is actually the culminating point of a specific dialectic that delicately oscillates throughout the church’s entire second (narrative) programmatic zone. More importantly, the narrator of this sophisticated theological story, almost invisible at the first glance, will be the white bands/sheets wound interchangeably around the bodies of both the dead and the newborn. The key interpretive formula for this unusual sort of theological/pictorial narrative will be the flower-like ornamental pattern used to decorate the white bandages. Against the background of our previous research, the specific sub-iconographical nature of this story suggests that it should unfold from the west side of the north wall, moving east as it follows the representations of events connected with Christ’s death. At the beginning of this sequence, the spectator therefore encounters the Crucifixion, where the funerary clothes do not yet play an iconographical role.^[117] Nevertheless, in the next scene as we move east, we encounter the Deposition from the Cross, where the white funerary syndon decorated with a flower-like pattern appears, held in hands of Joseph from Arimathea below the body of Christ (figs. 23–24).^[118] Moving further east, the spectator comes to the programmatically and iconographically convergent Lament/Entombment scene, where the syndon with its flower-like pattern is carefully laid beneath the dead body of Christ (fig. 25).^[119] It is quite interesting to note that in both of these scenes, only the Mother is allowed to touch the dead body of her Son and St John is allowed to kiss His hand, while the other hands touch only the syndon. After the burial, we come to the first of the (Post)Resurrection scenes, in which an angel shows the burial clothes with the same flower-like pattern to the myrrh-bearing women, and which is now, of course, wound around empty space, thereby informing us of the absence of the body that has been released from the chains of death (fig. 26).^[120] In the next scene, the Anastasis (Descent to Hell), which is already part of the altar space, the funerary garments are not necessary, since such raiment obviously belongs to the world of mortality, to which Christ, after Holy Saturday, no longer belongs.

Along with the Passion-Resurrection narrative, the story of the humanity of the Son of God has its other side, which correspondingly unfolds on the south side of the nave at Kurbinovo. Thus, once the eyes of spectator have followed the narrative across the north wall and, having traced the sequence from west to east, entered the altar space, with its monumental portrait of the Theotokos and the Annunciation/Visitation scenes,^[121] the Gospel narrative of the nave program begins anew with the Birth of Christ on the east side of the south wall. The moment when Christ is bodily clothed in human nature is here represented in quite a conventional iconographic manner (fig. 27).^[122] This moment is, again quite conventionally, marked by the white swaddling bands of the infant Christ. Nevertheless, those bands are also decorated with a flower-like pattern. Can we now say that the swaddling clothes of the Son of Man and His burial garments on the two sides of the church are the same? Or, although a deep connection obviously exists, is it possible that they are not precisely the same clothes, since the flower pattern on those of the south side are slightly different from that depicted on the north side of the nave (cf. figs. 24–26 with figs. 27–29)? To answer such a question, we need only follow the sequence further west. The next composition on the south wall is the Presentation in the Temple, a figure which—although heavily damaged—again reveals beneath the Heavenly Child, in the hands of the ancient priest/prophet,^[123] the white band with the appropriate flower-like pattern (fig. 28).^[124] Is this finally the syndon? The floral design is not the only evidence pointing to an affirmative answer to this question. As we have already seen, the sacrificial aspect of the imagery of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple was widespread in Byzantine art, so the syndon would be expected to be found here from more than one point of view.^[125] But in order to achieve a precise and contextually unshakable answer to the question, two steps further need to be taken. The next composition, showing the naked Christ during his baptism, does not help us to continue the interpretive sequence constructed so far, but at the end of the same wall, conclusive proof is very clearly visible. The resurrected Lazarus (fig. 29) is depicted wound in white bands with a floral pattern, exactly the same pattern as that which ornaments Christ’s white raiment in the Nativity scene.^[126] Finally, we are able to say that slight variations in the depiction of the ornamentation obviously does not detract from the overall interpretation: white winding clothes with a floral pattern follow Christ throughout his life, evincing his mortal nature at the moment of his birth and even at—or precisely because of—the moment when he overcomes the bondage of mortality.

This narrative sequence concludes on the west wall, where the soul of the Virgin Mary is depicted at the moment of her Assumption in the same clothes of mortality, once again decorated with the same recognizable floral pattern (fig. 30).^[127] Furthermore, since the intermingling of the birth and death imagery is an intrinsic theological key to an understanding of this iconographic formula, then we might say that the lifting of the swaddling/funerary clothes in question up to the heavens is an authentic pictorial use of this key, in order to visually interpret an apocryphal image that meaningfully recapitulates the Gospel cycle by placing the final seal of faith in the personal resurrection of every single human being.^[128] The ascension of those expressive signs of mortality to the heavens therefore tells us that the Virgin’s mortal nature, symbolizing the mortality of every other human, cannot be saved on its own, but only in the presence of her immortal heavenly Son. Although compatible with mediaeval theology, such a construct cannot be applied to the visual material presented above without a degree of caution. But what is obvious and crucially important to this study is the fact that swaddling clothes of birth and winding sheets of death are one and the same element of the visual story depicted at the end of twelfth century. Thanks to its delicacy and its semantic precision, such a narrative lays a bridge to take our discussion to the next level, raising a fresh series of questions.

. . . While Death Means Birth

Taking into account everything said thus far, analysis of the examples from Kurbinovo has gradually revealed another side to our semantic coin, which seems to suggest that the subject of the present discussion might be quite meaningfully approached from a completely different direction. As already noted above, the syndon as the burial cloth of Christ did not exist only in the world of literary, liturgical, or artistic images. It was kept in Constantinople as a relic of the highest importance and is found mentioned in literary sources from at least the tenth century onward.^[129] Earlier still, however, in the eighth century, literary sources bear witness to the presence of the swaddling bands of the infant Christ, named ta spargana [τα σπάργανα], in the capital of the Christian empire.^[130] Both were definitely present together and were marked by separate inscriptions—σινδων and σπαργανα—in the famous imperial reliquary from the tenth century, now recognized as the Limburg Staurothek.^[131] Since it is therefore quite possible that the spargana were a focus of Byzantine relic culture even before the syndon, a simple question, already partly suggested by the aforementioned pioneering research carried out by Semoglou, needs to be asked. Namely, what happens if we try to read the Kurbinovo narrative from the perspective of the infant Christ and propose that all the aforementioned white bands with a floral pattern should point our interpretative apparatus toward the imagery of swaddling the newborn? The potential hermeneutic benefits of such an approach are not to be dismissed so easily because this kind of metaphor is grounded very deeply in human culture, long before the specifically Byzantine rhetoric of contradictions was established: genuine religious experiences and teachings from every period of human history tell us that death is simply birth into a new life. The idea is probably as old as the human condition itself, and this is why the semantic parallel between swaddling bands and funerary winding bands can be identified in Egyptian hieroglyphs, for example, grounded in the fact that the elaborate ancient Egyptian rites involving winding bands/sheets (fig. 59) were entirely based on the idea of death as birth into a new life.^[132]

While this sort of symbolic entity is hardly familiar to contemporary observers, a very short and simple historically grounded phenomenological analysis is required in order to explain their universally identifiable semantic interdependence in the ancient cultural setting. Tight swaddling of the baby, as practiced in Antiquity, kept the newborn body completely immobile, ensuring, as believed in those days, its formation according to required standards.^[133] Consequently, swaddling was an expression of the complete powerlessness of the undeveloped human being, whose body was not its own possession, but controlled by somebody else. In the Roman cultural context, the powerlessness of the baby was particularly strongly expressed through the legal principle of patria potestas, which assumed that only once recognized by the father was a newborn child to be perceived as human being, otherwise it might even be exposed without incurring punishment.^[134] Though less brutal than this, the practice of tight-swaddling, maintained up to the end of Middle Ages and even beyond, was an equally expressive social signifier of the same kind of human powerlessness.^[135] At the very beginning of life, therefore, the human body was in the possession of parents, who exercised the conventions of the wider community, while symmetrically the birth into the new life inevitably meant that the body falls under the possession of death.^[136] Both phases of the ultimate powerlessness were therefore symmetrically marked by the universally recognizable image of the wound body. Exactly the same kind of body, circumscribed by the same genuine symmetry of powerlessness, was the locus of Christ’s incarnation and consequently a vehicle of his kenosis. And, if we remember the prominence given to the clothing metaphor in late antique and Byzantine theological culture, then the swaddling clothes of the Heavenly Child become a powerful metaphor of his incarnational kenosis, which inevitably leads up to the ultimate kenosis of his death and winding sheets.^[137] This is obviously why St John Chrysostom’s recapitulation of the famous Christological hymn from the Philippians includes the swaddling clothes in the list of key images conveying the authentic kenotic theology:

He who by nature was in the bosom of the Father deigned to take the form of a servant, to submit himself to all other bodily conditions, to have a woman for mother, to be born of a virgin, to be carried in the womb for nine months, to be wrapped in swaddling clothes [σπάργανα δέξασθαι], to be thought the son of Joseph, Mary’s husband, to grow up gradually, to be circumcised, to offer sacrifice, to suffer hunger and thirst and weariness, finally to meet his death, and not simply death but that death thought most shameful—I mean crucifixion.^[138]

Seemingly recognized as a highly expressive metaphoric tool for Christian theology, this kind of imagery was also to be employed by St Ephraim of Syria in an even more condensed context and more expressive manner: ‘All these changes did the Merciful One make, stripping off (glory) and putting on (a body); for He had devised a way to re-clothe Adam in that glory which Adam had stripped off. He was wrapped with swaddling clothes, corresponding to Adam’s leaves, He put on clothes instead of Adam’s skins; He was baptized for Adam’s sin, he was embalmed for Adam’s death…’^[139]

These texts plainly tell us that at its deepest patristic roots, Byzantine theology was ready to explore the symbolic potential of reduction of the semantic distance between the image of Christ’s swaddling clothes and the image of His death—which was itself already inseparably (metonymically) connected with the image of winding sheets. Probably the most radical affirmation of this theological tendency is nonetheless to be found in the writings of St Gregory the Theologian, which describe Christ in following manner: ‘He was wrapped in swaddling bands, but at the Resurrection he unloosed the swaddling bands of the grave [Ἐσπαργανώθη μὲν, ἀλλ’ ἀποσπαργανοῦται τὰ τῆς ταφῆς ἀνιστάμενος]’.^[140] Here we can see that the very word swaddling could be used interchangeably as a basis for construing the terminological designators for 1) the clothes of newborn or 2) the funerary clothes in the same sentence. I shall provide a detailed analysis of this inspiring passage and its inventive terminology below, but for the time being it is important to note that the image of swaddling obviously became, at least as effectively as the image of funerary-binding, the highly expressive signifier of the emptying out of Christ’s Divine power, which symbolically comprised his birth and death into an image of one indivisible kenotic/salvific project.^[141] It is therefore no surprise to find that in a very popular sermon of the late-seventh or eighth century, Andrew of Crete employed both metaphorical tools in such a way as to incorporate those deeply rooted cultural formulae within an innovative context, through comparison of the otherwise incomparable events of the Nativity of Christ and the Raising of Lazarus. ‘Just look how related and how congruent are these events… There we have Christ wrapped up in his swaddling clothes [ἐσπαργανωμένος], here we have Lazarus received in his winding cloth [κειρίαις ἐνειλημμένος]. There is the crib; here is the tomb…’^[142] Consequently, we may positively conclude that the swaddling clothes / winding sheets parallel was not an invention of twelfth-century artists, but a deeply rooted and universally recognizable trope of Byzantine religious culture. It could function up to the point of the total semantic symmetry, whence the infant-wrapping and the burial-clothes perspectives were easily interchangeable, in order to be employed to meet the current rhetorical requirement.^[143] Finally, it was recognizable at a highly popular level, as can be seen from the aforementioned eleventh-century liturgical innovations to be found in the hymnography of the Virgin’s Lament: ‘I will wind you in a winding cloth [σινδόνι], my son, instead of in swaddling clothes [σπαργάνων], I will place you in a dark tomb, my light, instead of in a crib’.^[144] While the question of which of the two perspectives held symbolic primacy now seems rather superfluous, their semantic symmetry emerges as a deeply grounded and recognizable theological formula that cannot be ignored in the following research.

With these newly acquired theological tools, we can finally return to the artistic world of the twelfth century and place our findings from Kurbinovo in a wider gnoseological context. Namely, it now seems quite obvious why the bands wrapping the newborn Christ in the Nativity composition are so consistently similar to those that are unwrapped from the figure of the buried and now risen Lazarus (fig. 29), or to those left behind by Christ in the empty tomb (fig. 26). However, while we traced the floral ornamental pattern that so consistently connected all the swaddling and funerary clothes in this ensemble, there was no need to analyze the fact that in some of images under research this ornamental pattern was enhanced by the discreet addition of a specific double-stripe decoration (fig. 25, 28). If we now combine our newly acquired theological tools with a sharper focus of our visual analytic apparatus when we look at this particular ornamental addition, striking and highly meaningful visual parallels will start to emerge. From the outset, we should note that, within the Kurbinovo swaddling clothes / grave clothes visual narrative, double stripes are most conspicuously and most systematically depicted on the white winding clothes in the Resurrection of Lazarus composition (fig. 29, 32), within the iconographic formula that in itself provides the most detailed and expressive account on the actual funerary techniques depicted by Byzantine artists. In combination with the floral forms, on the other hand, the addition of the double-stripe ornament makes the winding bands of Lazarus extremely similar to the bands swaddled around the figure of the infant Christ in the apse of Ohrid Cathedral and, more importantly, to the same set of bands found in the Virgin of Passion fresco/icon from Lagoudera, painted almost at the same time as the Raising of Lazarus from Kurbinovo (cf. figs. 31 and 32). Against the backdrop of the aforementioned theological and broader cultural ambience, it is ultimately impossible to suppose that such a similarity could occur by chance or that it could have passed unnoticed by spectators of the earliest image of Virgin with Christ surrounded by the instruments of the Passion. Of course, if one does not compare the delicate metropolitan style of Lagoudera with the wild expressionism of Kurbinovo, we might observe that this is not the only adequate parallel in the context. A very similar depiction of The Raising of Lazarus, with the unwinding of white bands decorated with the same double-stripe and floral ornament, can be found in the basilica of the Old Metropolis in Veria, painted only a few decades after the Lagoudera masterpiece (fig. 33).^[145] While numerous late-Byzantine examples of this composition, whose bands are decorated solely with the double-stripe pattern (cf. fig. 33 with fig. 52 and 56), can now be recognized as a direct syntactic distillate of the same pictorial tradition, it is still important that we remain within the period of rich ornamentation for a little longer and draw our conclusions from the current phase of the discussion. If we therefore make a purposeful synchronic break and look carefully at these images from the late-twelfth and early-thirteenth centuries, it finally becomes very easy to explain why and how the third garment appears on the Infant as found in the first Virgin of Passion icon: it emerges as no less than a sign of his (future) Passion and Death, recognizable to any Byzantine spectator from the narrative representations of the Death and Burial.

Before expanding this comparative discussion and moving it towards congruent examples from the narrative imagery of following centuries, I would like to take one short look back and use arguments laid out thus far in order to (re)consider a number of specific contextual oddities in the eleventh-century Ohrid example of the infant Christ’s third garment. Namely, this device is depicted not only in the image of the Theotokos and Christ in the altar conch, but also in the same kind of image depicted on north pillar in the naos of the same church, in the lowest register of fresco ensemble (fig. 34). While the faces of Christ and the Virgin are damaged, the lower part of this composition is well preserved, and not only displays the same third garment as the one in the altar apse, but also, unlike the altar composition, represents the Infant Christ dressed in short tunic, with His knees and legs completely uncovered.^[146] In this respect, the north-pillar image of the Virgin and Child displays an iconographic formula almost identical to that of the Virgin Arakiotissa fresco-icon. Now, if we take into account the interpretation put forward by Chrysanthe Baltoyianni, which recognizes the iconographic formula of the Infant’s bared legs, which is typical of Virgin of the Passion iconography, as a sign of his future Passion/Sacrifice, then the fresco-icon of the north pillar of Ohrid Cathedral might be a hitherto undetected early precursor of the more explicit and well-established Virgin of the Passion formula from Lagoudera.^[147] Although I do not find Baltoyianni’s arguments on this subject very convincing, I do agree—and will try to argue additionally in favor of this interpretation—that the uncovered legs and short tunic are evocative of Christ’s sacrifice, albeit in rather different way.^[148] Namely, with the exception of Christ, the children depicted in Byzantine art are as a rule clothed only in short, usually white, tunics (fig. 35). Unlike the Holy Child, other infants are almost never depicted in a himation, which was the Graeco-Roman status symbol of free adult citizens and was obviously still recognizable as such in the Byzantine pictorial language.^[149] To be more precise, the garments of adults and children were systematically differentiated in Byzantine art: children might be dressed in the clothes of adults only if it was necessary to signal their high social rank, while adults might be dressed in short tunics, like children, only if a low or slave’s rank needed to be represented.^[150] On the other hand, it is well known that children in Antiquity were heavily subject to the authority of the father, whether by law, as in Rome, or traditionally and patriarchally, as everywhere else. At the time when the Christian world was emerging, ‘a child was on a par with a slave, and only after reaching maturity was he/she a free person’, and consequently, even in Bible, ‘the term “child/children” could also be used as a serious insult’.^[151] Although such attitudes slowly shifted during the Christian Middle Ages, Byzantium never stopped being a patriarchal society, built at the crossroads of the Roman Patria Potestas and Old Testament social habits.^[152] In such a context, the above-mentioned maintenance of the practice of tightly swaddling babies, both in art and in reality, may be viewed as a vivid expression of the unchanged social custom of subordinating the child to the power of adults/parents. One of the most expressive and, from the perspective of the period under discussion, surely one of the most influential images of these cultural circumstances is implied in the memorable words of Christ: ‘whoever humbles [ταπεινώσει] himself as this little child [παιδίον τοῦτο] is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven’ [Matthew 18:4]. Namely, this famous biblical text, which is the most detailed of its synoptic counterparts, introduces a highly expressive peculiarity: the presence of the term humbling. For the Greek Bible reader, term ταπεινώσει, here used by writer of the first Gospel, does not refer to any mild form of humbling, as might be suggested by how the term humble is usually defined in English dictionaries.^[153] The word evokes raw images of humbling and debasement, such as the image of the Suffering Servant of Jehovah, from the Book of Isaiah [53:8], or the Crucified Christ, from the Epistle to Philippians, who: ‘humbled [ἐταπείνωσεν] Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross’ [2:8]. Finally, the icons inscribed Akra Tapeinōsēs [άκρα ταπείνωσης] by Byzantine painters represented the Dead Christ in the Grave, and their title is usually rendered as the Utmost Humiliation.^[154] Thus, whether from the Bible or from their own cultural surroundings, Byzantine artists and spectators knew that being a child was not an exercise of ultimate freedom and overprotection as it may be considered today, but more likely an experience of powerlessness and lack of freedom. If in the Christian empire ‘the main emphasis was placed on religious education’ of children, this was based on sources that ‘give prominence to obedience towards parents’, so that in turn, as is the case in all patriarchal societies, ‘within the family, parents represented authority’ and ‘had the power to set the rules that must be followed by children’, together with freedom to ‘use corporal punishment alongside other disciplinary methods’.^[155]

In short, the fact that child was still a socially undeveloped human being, different from developed adults, was incomparably more relevant then than it is today. And the relevance of this difference was precisely expressed in the arts, through specific differentiation between styles of clothing. If we take into account how humble the image of child actually was within the Byzantine/Biblical worldview, it will be easy to explain the iconographic innovation that depicts the infant Christ with bare legs. In other words, if instead of focusing on the bare legs themselves we note that such an innovation means that Christ is represented in a short tunic, then there can be no doubt that the Holy Child, instead of being clad in the garments of a mature philosopher, is now dressed in the clothes reserved for any other powerless child of the Roman/Byzantine world. Compared to the glorious raiment of the adult, previously used without exception in portraiture of the infant Christ, the introduction of a child’s tunic into the iconography obviously signified in quite a bold manner the basic powerlessness of a newborn human being, which was itself is a sign of the original kenotic humbling of the Son of God. Correspondingly, the clothes of God’s original incarnational kenosis, when He decided to humble himself as a little child [Matthew 18:4], could be symbolically connected to the clothes of the God who ‘humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross’ [Philippians 2:8]. And this is ultimately why the short tunic matches so well the third garment of the infant Christ in both of the frescoes discussed above, from Ohrid and Lagoudera, and why it supports the hypothesis that the key to an understanding of these mysterious winding bands lies in the kenosis of the Son of God.

It is very important to add here that the proposed interpretation of the meaning of the Ohrid Cathedral short tunic worn by Christ, although it demonstrates its author’s ingeniousness, does not suggest that the message conveyed is aimed solely at an intellectually informed audience. Even the least educated observers, who were in the majority, would have noticed that the infant Christ was not dressed in the typical way, but wore an ordinary small child’s tunic, such as that depicted in the scene of Abraham’s Sacrifice in the same church, for example (fig. 35).^[156] Moreover, given that the scene represents the sacrifice of the young Isaac, dressed in a child’s short tunic, the kenotic/sacrificial semantic content of Christ’s short tunic becomes all the more emphatic and easier to recognize in the programmatic/iconographic context. Likewise, it would not have required an intellectual spectator to recognize the similarity of the infant Christ’s short tunic in the Arakiotissa fresco-icon and that of the tunics worn by other children in contemporary Byzantine images, or the similarity of His third garment with the winding bands of the risen Lazarus in contemporary narrative iconography (cf. fig. 31–33), or to connect all this with the instruments of the Passion adjacent to the Holy Child. Thus, the abovementioned examples from Kurbinovo and Veria, together with numerous others that will be examined below, demonstrate that any Byzantine spectator who had seen more than one church in his or her life would easily have been able to recognize the semantic connection between the third garment of the infant Christ (from Lagoudera) and other representations of swaddling/winding clothes in narrative iconography, not through sophisticated theoretical channels of transmission, but by mere unlettered observation of the images themselves.

The evidence presented hitherto has substantiated the hypothesis that kenotic theology had plentiful reasons and pictorial means to influence the iconography of the Virgin and Christ, and the evidence from late-Byzantine art can now be used to reinforce this finding by demonstrating that examples from twelfth-century narrative iconography are not the final expression of a birth/death theological symmetry in the domain of the visual arts, but rather the initial one. The solidity and persuasiveness of the specific typological relationship between swaddling clothes and winding sheets is, as we shall see, even enhanced and enriched over the course of the radical stylistic changes that came about in the final phases of the development of Byzantine art. Momentarily setting aside the highly divergent examples from the turbulent period of the thirteenth century, I would now like to explore this hypothesis against the background of rich and stylistically convergent evidence from the Palaeologan epoch of Byzantine culture. Is it, however, permissible to suppose that the plethora of purely white bands depicted on the figures of babies and dead bodies throughout the highly elaborate narrative fresco programs of Palaeologan churches confirms the existence of a birth/death swaddling symmetry in the eyes of late-Byzantine artists and spectators? Namely, the foremost Palaeologan artists were not enamored with the idea that swaddling and funerary clothes should be ornamented with any kind of folk-art patterns and usually painted the bands in plain white. This kind of pictorial interpretation of our subject appears as early as the instance at Sopoćani, while later it can be found at Protaton, the Constantinopolitan Chora, the Holy Apostles of Thessalonica, St Nikolaos Orphanos, Studenica, Staro Nagoričino, Gračanica, and St Niketas near Skopje.^[157] (figs. 36–42) Other than by recourse to notions of taste and style, it is hard to decipher the meanings behind such a decision. Perhaps the artists, or their educated patrons, merely wished to revert to the biblical text, or to demonstrate their learning in this domain, by basing the representation on the word white linen [βύσσου], which occurs frequently in the Bible in various apposite sacral contexts.^[158] Whatever the reason(s) behind this choice, some of the artists were fortunately not apt to abandon the practice of ornamental decoration of swaddling and funerary clothes. In such cases, which will be of great significance to our research, changes also occur in the area of ornamental form, however. In order to understand these changes and to be able to apply them in the discussion below, I shall attempt to sketch out the late-Byzantine formal development of this particular kind of ornamental decoration against the backdrop of the wider synchronic and diachronic contexts.

It is not easy to discern whether the funerary/swaddling ornamentation used by Comnenian artists derived from a putative Jewish or from a Byzantine ethnological legacy. Be that as it may, such a distinction is not of essential importance to the discussion at hand. What is essential is to show that materials with decorative (floral and double-striped) patterns were used within the symbolic structure of Comnenian art as a signifier of the specific cultural and ethnological setting of biblical events. The images themselves can directly confirm this hypothesis, since we can find the floral pattern not only on the burial syndon of the resurrected Lazarus, but also on the head covering of one of the figures in the Entry into Jerusalem composition from the church of St Panteleimon, Nerezi, for example (fig. 43, 44).^[159] Further confirmation comes from late-twelfth-century Kurbinovo in the iconographical structure of the Resurrection of Lazarus composition, where the winding sheets/bands of the risen Lazarus and the head coverings of the witnesses show the same ornamentation, based on a floral pattern combined with double stripes (fig. 29).^[160] Head coverings of this kind were quite often depicted in post-iconoclastic art and were used as a supposedly Jewish or, less specifically, oriental ethnological reference, obviously reminiscent of the Talmudic tefillin, as a sign of devoutness, in numerous iconographic contexts.^[161] Finally, we can quite often find very similar decoration in historically correspondent representations of the Mandylion (fig. 45), which was narratively defined as a cloth for wiping the face.^[162] Knowing that such a towel was also named the soudarion (σουδάριον), the word the Evangelists used in their description of the burial and resurrection to denote the towel that covered Christ’s head,^[163] it becomes obvious that decoration common to this group of cloths with an important part in the history of salvation symbolically connected them at the historical (ethnographic) and symbolic (sacral) levels within the previously discussed developmental phase of the Byzantine representational system (cf. figs. 23–30 and figs. 43–46). This might also be why all the cloths that obtained their sacral aura through historical contact with Christ’s body—His winding sheets, His swaddling clothes, and His face-cloth—were altogether deprived of their traditional ornamentation through the stylistic reforms of the Palaeologan epoch (figs. 36–42). However, on the subject of the birth-death symbolic symmetry, such a stylistic change poses a specific hermeneutical problem: white bands/cloths are simply white bands/cloths, and the iconic relation of similarity necessarily connecting all the white bands/cloths in the world is hardly sufficient to convey any kind of obvious artistic or theological intention behind the way in which those bands/cloths were placed within the wider iconographic/programmatic structures of late Byzantine art. At this point, help arrives in the form of the abovementioned group of more conservative artists from different phases of the Palaeologan renascence, who decided not to erase the ornamentation from the winding strips presented in their paintings, but to adapt those decorative forms to new stylistic trends. Luckily, this formal transformation of the old ornamentation toward an innovative pictorial re-interpretation thereof was precise and expressive enough to show that the semantic symmetry of swaddling and winding clothes was not an occasional invention of any particular epoch of Byzantine art, but a long-standing pictorial concept deeply embedded in the structures of Byzantine artistic thought and, at the same time, thoroughly linked to fundamental existential and religious experiences.

As we already have noticed in some of the examples previously discussed, the interpretation of decorative (ethnographic) marks on clothing devices from the art of Macedonian and Comnenian periods was not based solely on floral patterns. Moreover, neither dots nor flowers (usually consisting of dots), nor even crosses, were the most consistent element of the decorative patterns under discussion. The most stable elements of this ornamental matrix are actually the dark (black or red) double stripes. Besides dots and peculiar X-like elements, we can thus find the double-stripe motif in the mysterious third garment of the infant Christ from the Ohrid Cathedral conch (fig. 4), and in its contemporary counterpart from the southern apse of the Cappadocian Çanli Kilise (fig. 15). A similar set of motifs, with the addition of small crosses, are present on the third garment found in the Hodegetria icon from Kakopetria, painted at the beginning of the twelfth century (fig. 14), while the same garment from the Arakiotissa fresco-icon is decorated solely with double stripes and small dot-like crosses (fig. 5, 72).^[164] On the other hand, the same combination of motifs, which are very similar in their rhythmic distribution, appears on the head coverings of oriental monks at Nerezi and Lagoudera (fig. 47–48).^[165] Finally, as noted above, the previously examined floral pattern, in combination with the double-stripe motif, is also simultaneously present on the funerary garments and Jewish head coverings in the Kurbinovo narrative scenes (cf. fig. 23–26, 29).^[166]

Although the double stripes are obviously the most persistent motif in the decoration of (pseudo-)Jewish fabrics in Middle Byzantine art, the above examples suggest that they also seem to be the least conspicuous element of such decoration. Given their formal simplicity, the double stripes often resemble some kind of additional frame for more elaborate decorative forms, rather like an ornamentation of the ornament (cf. figs. 4–8, 13–15, 31–34, 47–48). Nevertheless, late Byzantine artists decided to turn precisely toward this kind of formal simplicity in the iconographic domain under discussion. As far as I can tell, the earliest steps toward this kind of ‘ornamental abstraction’ can be found as early as in twelfth-century monumental art. In the famous Nerezi Entry into Jerusalem scene, we find a dynamic artistic interplay of two Jewish head coverings, decorated only with the floral pattern, and a third head covering decorated only with the double-stripe pattern (fig. 44). Almost contemporaneously, the turbans of St Kosmas of Majuma and John of Damascus at Bačkovo are marked only by the simple double-stripe ornament.^[167] Later, in Mirož, we find separate figures of various representatives of the Jewish community with head coverings whose decoration is based only on thick and conspicuous, dark double stripes (fig. 49).^[168] In the same century we also find a rare example of double-striped decoration without any kind of addition in the syndon belonging to the Lamentation at the Tomb at the Hagioi Anargyroi church, Kastoria.^[169] Thus, though not quite typical of the century, the idea of simplifying distinctively oriental/Jewish/sacral ornamentation was already current.

At the very beginning of the thirteenth century, we still find decoration completely compatible with the traditions of the previous epoch in the Studenica catholicon, for example: double stripes and dots/crosses on the turbans of oriental monks and the floral pattern on the head covering of the soldier Longinus, in the famous Crucifixion scene.^[170] An even more elaborate iteration of twelfth-century traditions, combining stripes with floral forms, can be found in above-mentioned Raising of Lazarus in the Old Metropolis, Veria (fig. 33), and in the Entombment of Christ from the same church, painted immediately after Studenica. By the middle of the century, in Boyana church, outside Sofia, floral patterns were still present on Jewish head coverings found in the Twelve-Year-Old Christ Teaching in the Temple, while the head coverings of St John Damascene and the soldier Longinus in the Crucifixion scene are decorated with only double stripes.^[171] Finally, toward the end of the thirteenth century, at Sopoćani, we find monks’ turbans, as well as the infant’s swaddling clothes in the Birth of Christ and Dormition scenes, that are plain white, heralding the Palaeologan trend toward the exclusion of ornaments from white clothing devices that are imbued with symbolic/sacral and ethnographic/historical references.^[172] Therefore, between 1) rich (pseudo-)oriental ornamentation and 2) total exclusion of decoration from white-linen clothing devices, there rests the idea of ornamental simplification, which was achieved by extracting the simplest and the most recognizable element from the earlier traditions: the double-stripe ornament. Emerging in the twelfth century, this idea was to remain a valid artistic choice up to the very dawn of Byzantine artistic development. In thirteenth century art, such a choice was more openly explored in the wider semantic space of monumental decorative programs. In the church of St Nicholas, Prilep, for example, funerary garments are decorated with a conspicuous double-stripe pattern, freed of any additional ornamentation (fig. 50), while the head coverings of the Jews present within the Passion compositions are decorated with the same stripes, in some cases enriched by the addition of inconspicuous dots, which were released from their traditional floral rhythmic grouping (fig. 51).^[173] Similarly, at the Church of Panagia Olympiotissa, Elasson, whose murals were painted on the cusp of the fourteenth century, a plain double-stripe ornament can be found on the head-coverings of the Jews in the Entry into Jerusalem scene and on winding sheets of the resurrected Lazarus, while the monumental syndon depicted beneath Christ in the Threnos scene is decorated with rather atypical triple stripes, followed by the inconspicuous addition of the by then old-fashioned floral motifs.^[174] In any event, however, the stripes gradually became thicker and more conspicuous, while the dots/flowers tended to become less noticeable, to the point where they completely vanished by Palaeologan times. In the Virgin Peribleptos church, Ohrid, painted at the very end of the thirteenth century, only the double stripes and white bands can be found in the relevant iconographic fields,^[175] while during the fourteenth century artists were to stick to the twofold but very precisely defined choice of either no ornamentation at all, which was the more frequent, or double-stripe ornamentation, which was less frequent, but is far more important to the present discussion.^[176] It is by now quite obvious that the double stripes were not a radical innovation but a gradually developed re-interpretation of earlier pictorial formulae. On the other hand, late Byzantine art was to add one more innovative pictorial detail to this domain: simplification of form was to be accompanied by an enrichment of color.

Monochrome double-stripe decoration was present in the following centuries, but this was not the most popular coloring for decorating depictions of white linen. The monochrome formula can be found in the Resurrection of Lazarus at the Peribleptos Church, Ohrid (fig. 52), and in the same scene at the Church of the Resurrected Christ, Veria, where funerary strips are decorated with double stripes that are deep red in color,^[177] while in same composition at the Hagios Athanasios Tou Mouzaki Church, Kastoria, the monochrome decoration was rendered in black.^[178] However, more frequently we find a rhythmic interplay of red and black stripes in the double-stripe decoration found in relevant imagery from this period.^[179] Such a pattern can be found, for example, in the compositions Resurrection of Lazarus, Threnos and Myrrh-bearing Women at the Tomb, at the Church of St Nicholas, Prilep (fig. 50);^[180] Myrrh-bearing Women at the Tomb at the Church of Panagia Olympiotissa, Elasson;^[181] Threnos, Myrrh-bearing Women at the Tomb, and Dormition, in the catholicon of Vatopaidi Monastery (fig. 53);^[182] Resurrection of Lazarus and Myrrh-bearing Women at the Tomb, at the Church of the Holy Virgin, Peć.^[183] Finally, the most precise application of the double-stripe and two-colour decoration can be found in the frescos of the Dečani monastic catholicon, where it was used as a symbolic device to render the birth-death theological dialectic with incomparable expressive precision. This rendering will require a more detailed survey in the pages that follow, since it might finally allow us to reach a hermeneutic position similar to the one we explored when discussing Kurbinovo: specific ornamentation is here used simultaneously to distinguish the particular group of garments from the entire visual field of the spectator and, consequently, to define the strong semantic connections between them.

For the very beginning, the Dečani masters enhanced the ornamental pattern through the use of a distinctive and striking red-blue color combination, which made the white garments decorated in this way wholly stand out, not only among all the other garments but more significantly, among all the other painted surfaces within the ensemble (fig. 54–57). While the Kurbinovo masters, despite admirable discipline in their visual interpretation of the swaddling/winding clothes dialectic, allowed themselves an amount of formal vagueness in their rendering of the ornaments employed to express this dialectic, the ornamentation developed by the painters of Dečani attained an unprecedented formal discipline, making it recognizable as almost an abstract and purely conventional sign. From such a viewpoint, we can easily and unambiguously extract the Dečani swaddling and funerary clothes from the mimetic level of the image and read them as if we were dealing with the characters of an inscription, which convey a theological message by strictly conventional means. Of course, the content of this message could not differ very much from the one at Kurbinovo, but the improvement of the formal vehicle for its transmission speaks eloquently of the unchanged actuality of this content in the domain of Byzantine visual culture. Finally, the way in which the Dečani masters organize the rendering of the swaddling/grave clothes dialectic in the rich and delicate program of the masterpiece they painted demonstrates a new level of theological subtlety, achieved through centuries of artistic meditation on the birth/death paradox.

Within the highly complex Christological cycle that unfolds in the broad space beneath the dome of a monastic catholicon,^[184] these meditations were to be orchestrated and achieve a resonance such as was nowhere else achieved in the history of this art. In the lunette of the north wall beneath the dome, we are first confronted with a monumental Nativity composition in its most elaborate iconographic form.^[185] The Mother of God is not represented in the usual recumbent pose, but rather she twists her body in order to hold her Son with both her hands, as if she trying to protect him (fig. 54). What we therefore see is a narratively re-contextualized image of the Mother presenting her Child, not to the spectator in front of the icon, as is naturally the case in portraits of the Virgin and Christ, but to the three Magi positioned across from her within the pictorial space. The Child is of course swaddled in white garments decorated with red-blue double stripes. Beneath this part of the composition, a bathing scene is included and rendered iconographically in an unusually delicate manner (fig. 55). A woman holds Christ partly swaddled in golden clothes,^[186] while another, who pours water into the bath, holds a long white band distinguished by its red-blue double-stripe decoration. Since the women holding Christ is testing the temperature of the water with her free hand, it is obvious that the golden raiment is about to be removed and after the bath it will be replaced with white raiment decorated with the double-stripe. The precise message this kind of color orchestration conveyed is hard to decipher fully, but the white, ornamented bands are obviously juxtaposed with the golden raiment of glory, repeating the juxtaposition that we can see in the altar conch of the Ohrid Cathedral or the famous Lagoudera Virgin of Passion. In other words, in both of these images, which are crucial to the present research, the infant Christ is wound in white decorated bands above his golden garments. Since the white decorated bands are therefore covers for the glory of the gold, it seems obvious, even if we analyze the Dečani Nativity outside its programmatic context, that their purpose is to designate something other than Christ’s risen, heavenly status. When we enter the programmatic context, however, it will become obvious what role the red-blue decoration plays. Directly beneath the Nativity composition, the Resurrection of Lazarus is represented, with the resurrected Lazarus wound in exactly the same kind of white garments with double-stripe/colored decoration (fig. 56).^[187] In the Myrrh-bearing Women at the Tomb depicted on the north-east pillar beneath the dome,^[188] the empty cocoon formed by white funeral clothes is, yet again, decorated with the same pattern (fig. 57). Finally, even the Raising of the Widow’s Son depicted in lower register of the north-west pillar^[189] is represented with the resurrected figure similarly wound in white bands decorated with colored double stripes (fig. 60). Therefore, depicted with the same unique decoration, which is not used anywhere within the pictorial program, the clothes of the newborn Christ and his winding clothes, along with the winding clothes of the two other resurrected characters from the Gospels, develop the birth-death dialectic in an incomparably explicit, precise, and expressive manner. In other words, the swaddling clothes and grave clothes are absolutely one and the same and interchangeable within the worldview of the late-Byzantine artists and spectators. Birth means death while death means birth was the obvious and conspicuously symmetrical message of the artistic representations in question.

In such a precise and elaborate interpretation of the birth-death symmetry, there is only one curious exception: in the Entombment of Christ composition, depicted on the abovementioned south-west pillar, Christ is wound in plain white funeral clothes without any ornamentation.^[190] If this composition were positioned in any other, separate space inside the Dečani catholicon, one might think that the painters did not need to repeat the same ornament or simply forgot to paint it, but such an interpretation simply does not work in this context. In the elaborate Post-Resurrection cycle depicted in the altar vault, in two scenes not very visible from the nave, white funerary clothes are represented in the usual iconographic context,^[191] but without the red and blue (or any other) decoration. We will probably never know why the Dečani masters decided to make such a distinction between the same iconographic formulae that are represented in the nave and in the altar. Perhaps the images were painted by different masters or during different phases in work on this vast project, with a difference in attitude perhaps arising from such synchronic or diachronic distinctions.^[192] Perhaps they simply wanted to use such a distinctive ornamental formula exclusively in the most prominent space of the entire iconographic program.^[193] Whatever the true reason for this differentiation, it is obvious that the pictorial surface areas under the dome were treated as an integral space, chosen for exposition of the birth/death (swaddling/winding) dialectic using the double-stripe and dual-color ornament. It simply cannot be imagined that the inventors of such an elaborate system for representing such a delicate concept could employ it on every instance of swaddling or funerary clothes in the most prominent space of the church decoration and then neglect to employ it in no less than the Entombment of Christ without having a very strong reason to do so.^[194] In order to fathom the logic that might lie beneath such a peculiar pictorial decision, it will be necessary to take our discussion of the birth-death symmetry to the next interpretive level.

Taking the Bonds of – Beyond the Birth-Death Symmetry

Now that the pictorial evidence has shown us that reflection on the swaddling clothes / winding clothes symmetry was a highly important and stable aspect of Byzantine narrative imagery, which tended to influence even the Virgin and Christ iconography, we can ask the most delicate question of this survey: why? Although the discussion in previous chapters has partly answered this question, in the following it will be shown that we are still far from any comprehensive elucidation of the problem. First of all, let us return to the Nativity composition from Dečani and take a careful look at the Virgin Mary, delicately holding her precious Son wound in the clothes of his future burial. Or, to put it more precisely, the infant Christ is wrapped in a raiment which, as has been demonstrated, immediately evoked the image of his future burial. But is it not rather too morbid, even for the so-called Dark Ages, to force the mother, in the very moment after she has given birth, to see her baby dressed in the grave clothes, to force her to think about his death? Despite the proven importance of the birth-death symmetry within the artistic discourse under discussion, and within the wider ecclesiastical context, was there not even in the least any room for the joys of life? Were the Byzantines so morbid or is an important stone in the interpretative edifice constructed so far still missing? The answer to the second question is that not just any stone, but the cornerstone itself is missing. The entire life-death dialectic hitherto presented would have been unspeakably morbid were it not for its relation to the Resurrection narrative. As the Apostle Paul reminded the Byzantines and Christians of all times: ‘if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty’ [1 Corinthians 15:14]. Thus, if we wish to close the hermeneutic circle and genuinely decipher the meaning of the processes of semantic production focused on in this study, the introduction of a Resurrectional perspective is unavoidable.

Only from such a perspective, after all, does everything connected to the death of Christ derive its ultimate meaning, while His winding sheet does not remain a mere symbol of death, but becomes a symbol of the victory over the death, a symbol of the death of death. It was, of course, the same old and universally recognizable symbol of the birth into the new life, but in this context the new birth was not merely the spontaneous passage to another form of life, which in one way or another is reserved for every mortal being: it was Christ’s historical, miraculous, and ultimately personal, human, and bodily Resurrection from the dead, which promised the possibility of personal resurrection to all other human beings, with their bodies and individualities. Moreover, in such a context, his funeral clothes evolved, from the Gospel accounts to Byzantine theology and hymnography, into the first categorical material proof of the historic event itself. Let us first take a look at this notion from the perspective of the undisputable authority of the writings of St John Chrysostom, which were acknowledged not only in the Byzantine but also in the wider Christian cultural context.

Accordingly, when she [Mary Magdalen] had come and said these things, the Apostles on hearing them hurried with great eagerness to the tomb and saw the linen cloths [ὀθόνια] lying there, a circumstance which was a sign that the Resurrection had taken place. For, if some persons had changed the location of the body, they would not have stripped the body in doing this. . . . But why in the world were the linen cloths [ὀθόνια] lying there in one spot and the handkerchief [σουδάριον] folded up in another? That you might realize that it was not the work of men in haste or agitation to put the cloths in one place and the handkerchief in another, and to fold the latter. Because of this fact the Apostles believed in the Resurrection.^[195]

In addition, we may here already note that at least one of the funeral cloths mentioned in the Gospel accounts, the syndon, had long been present in the capital of the eastern Christian world as a relic, an object itself of veneration that preserved the freshness of physical contact with the resurrected body.^[196] Let us therefore now try to look at the funerary clothes we have hitherto analyzed from the perspective of the role they played in textual and pictorial Resurrection narratives. First of all, this will help us achieve additional terminological and art-historical accuracy, while later it will enable a more thorough discussion of the fundamental theological ‘logics’ upon which rests the mysterious swaddling clothes (birth) and winding sheets (death) symmetry that pervaded the visual arts.

Derivates of the word sparganon [σπάργανον; τὰ σπάργανα in the plural] occur in the New Testament only twice [Luke 2:7, 2:12], as a terms used for swaddling (clothes), with an originative semantic potential connected to sweating and (secondary) metaphorical potentials connected to infancy.^[197] Its semantic inclination towards the funerary metaphoric domain was, as already noted in the example from the writings of St Gregory, obviously the result of its use in Christian literary culture.^[198] On the other hand, the basic terminological denotations for the actual funeral clothes (of Christ) occur far more frequently within the Gospel narrative. Moreover, from the initial, and essential, moment of their emergence in Christian history/culture, i.e., in the New Testament context, there was more than one variety of funeral clothes and more than one term to denote them. Furthermore, simple comparison of the pictorial evidence demonstrates that for the Byzantine painter/observer, there was more than one kind of burial clothes, so the use of a single term such as syndon, for example, would have been insufficient; therefore the theoretical apparatus constructed so far requires a fundamental terminological adjustment. But is it actually possible to harmonize evidence from the domains of 1) the biblical text and 2) archaeology with evidence from the field of 3) visual art? While archaeological evidence from Byzantine times cannot help us to decipher precisely to what extent painters reflected the burial customs of their own times, it also does not, as we shall see, essentially confront the evidence on show in the field of visual art.^[199] In addition, a degree of symbolic conservativism, focused on preservation of what was meant to be the image of ancient customs, has to be expected in this field, since paintings depicted highly important events from a faraway historic place.^[200] Taking all this into account, it now seems that the best we can do in order to understand how Byzantine artists interpreted such themes is to compare the literary and pictorial evidence and then, at a secondary hermeneutic level, to place this comparison against the backdrop of the narrower archaeological evidence concerning Byzantine mortuary practices.

The key literary evidence here is, of course, the New Testament itself. The Gospel account on the Resurrection of Lazarus informs us of the existence of two funeral cloths: the keirias [κειρίαις], usually translated in this context as winding bands,^[201] and the sudarion [σουδαρίῳ], usually translated as towel, in this particular case a towel used as mortuary head covering.^[202] In the accounts of the Death and Resurrection of Christ, the word syndon, by now familiar to the reader of this study, was used with high degree of frequency, although its terminological counterpart(s) was (were) not avoided. While the synoptic Gospels say that Joseph buried Jesus after wrapping him in a syndon [σινδών; Mark 15:46; Matthew 27:59; Luke 23:53], John uses the term othonia [ὀθονίοις] in this context [John 19:40]. On the other hand, the discovery of the empty tomb by the myrrh-bearing women and apostles is followed by the discovery of two burial cloths named othonia and sudarion [ὀϑόνια and σουδάριον; John 20:5–7] or only by the othonia [ὀϑόνια; Luke 24:12], a word that is plural. The textual evidence of the Scriptures does not allow for a positive answer to the relationship between σινδών and ὀϑόνια, but it does seem, despite the singular/plural incongruence, that terms were used synonymously.^[203] It is also possible that the synonymous use of these two terms alluded to the funerary customs of New Testament times, assuming the presence of two sorts of fabrics for winding around the body, a single sheet, seemingly the syndon, and bandages, referred to in the plural, possibly the othonia.^[204] Whatever the historical truth may have been, the Biblical evidence shows that σινδών and ὀϑόνια were, if not totally synonymous, then deeply interconnected within the funerary practices detectable from the biblical text itself.

At this point in our study, however, more important by far is the fact that literary descriptions of the key New Testament burials (and resurrections) employ at least four terms for funerary cloths, which suggested to the Byzantine reader the existence of at least two actual coverings, one for head and one for the body, but which could also very probably suggest the existence of three sorts of cloth: one for the head (towel) and two for the body (shroud and bands). On the other hand, winding the dead body in large sheets of cloth, the so-called shrouding, and its additional binding with a more or less elaborate set of narrow bands were part of funerary practices from the times of the Egyptian mummies to the Byzantine Middle Ages^[205] (cf. figs. 58–59 and 43, 52–53, 60–62). Whether influenced by the spread of New Testament terms or by actual ethnographic funerary customs or by both of these and even a third factor, the pictorial evidence demonstrates that funerary garments were not typically depicted as a single entity in Byzantine art. A large shroud might be represented at the moment of the Deposition or Lamentation (figs. 13, 25, 46, 53), but the final grave clothes consisted of this cloth and the narrow bands that obviously held the body, like a mummy, in a rigid, conventional position (cf. figs. 32–33, 36–37, 43, 60–62). This list of fabrics can be brought to a close with the head-covering towel, which although not always, is more often than not discernable as a distinct item (figs. 18, 21, 26, 36, 50, 57). The existence of shrouding and banding funerary customs in a less elaborate form can be also identified in archaeological evidence from the Byzantine period, and therefore it might now be assumed that the image of ancient funerary customs in Byzantine art did not radically diverge from actual practices recognizable by contemporary spectators.^[206] On the other hand, artistic representations obviously developed their own intrinsic pictorial and semantic logic, which had to function within the highly sophisticated artistic language and theologically structured narrative represented by this language.

If we return to the pictorial evidence, it should be noted that previously examined ornamental decoration was not something that distinguished the large cloth and the narrow bands from each other, although some Byzantine painters, such as the masters of Kastoria Hagios Stephanos, Asinou, and Nerezi, obviously employed decoration for this purpose, in an attempt, it would seem, to demonstrate some kind of special knowledge of the subject (cf. figs. 18, 43, and figs. 58–59).^[207] Nevertheless, the painters were most often not so accurate when it came to the distribution of the decoration: it often freely fluctuated from the wide piece of cloth to the thin bands, without any need to make a precise visual differentiation between them (cf. figs. 26–30, 50, 52). Perhaps this inconsistency was in itself why some of the most distinguished Palaeologan painters discarded such decoration and kept only the plain white of the three accurately distinguished funerary cloths: the head covering, the large cloth wound around the body, and the narrow strips used for the final bandaging (figs. 36–42). On the other hand, the precisely defined set of decorations that some Palaeologan artists, such as the Dečani masters, left for our analysis may assist an understanding of the relationship of Byzantine painters and spectators to the literary/terminological and ethnographic/pictorial material that has been here presented. As we saw in previous chapter, the symbolic focus of the entire swaddling/winding (birth/death) dialectic can be recognized in the motif of body-binding. Both cloths, the large shroud and the tight bands, serve this purpose, but that which is most visible in an actual composition will be marked by ornamental decoration in order to maintain symbolic focus on the subject. In the Deposition or Lamentation, the decoration will be applied to the large cloth, whether we call it the syndon, othonia, shroud, or some other term (fig. 53), while in every other instance it will be concentrated on the white bands. Moreover, since in representations of the tightly wound body the difference between the bands and the shroud beneath them is barely perceptible, in the final impression the bands often seem to dominate visually, as if nothing but the bands were visible (cf. figs. 26–27, 36–42, 50, 52, 56–57). This optical impression was obviously so effective that some painters ultimately left no room to discern the shroud and represented only the bands wound around the body (figs. 21, 26, 40). Consequently, both the Comnenian and the Palaeologan masters, who made use of the floral and/or double-stripe ornament, often did so as if there were no distinction between the two kinds of funeral clothes (fig. 26–30, 52). Nevertheless, careful observation shows that some Comnenian painters made a careful distinction between the two (fig. 18, 43), while some late-Byzantine painters not only rendered the distinction (figs. 36–38, 41) but also took care to apply the double-stripe ornament solely to the narrow bands (figs. 56–57, 60–62), or to apply—even more meticulously, I would say—red double stripes to the shroud and black double stripes to the bands (fig. 50). Whether or not this level of representational precision was achieved, the overall aspect of the material presented shows that the most expressive sign for immediate visual recognition of the wound/swaddled body was the narrow white bands, employed for its tight binding. It seems that the stylistic development itself provides support for this conclusion, since the strong optical effect of the stylistic switch to a simple double-stripe decoration can be recognized in its interference with the rhythm of the bands themselves, which consequently makes differentiation of the shroud even harder and results in the bands being even more visually dominant.

All these aspects of the subject under discussion seem to be in keeping with the suggestion that its basic visual logic is in perfect accord with both its symbolic and its phenomenological background: since the shroud could not be tightly wound by itself, the chief and sole function of the bands was to assure the absolute immobility of the body, which was consequently the immediate sign of its ultimate powerlessness. Thus, thanks to the fact that not only were they more conspicuous, but also served a practical purpose, the bands themselves became the ultimate symbol of death and, viewed in a symmetrical semantic mirror, a symbol of the helplessness of the newborn child, experienced by every human and by the Divine Logos incarnate in a human body. This is why for those artists who were highly accurate in this domain, such as the Dečani masters, there was no question that only the narrow white bands should be rendered with the distinctive dual-color, double-stripe decoration, which attained its highest semantic development and syntactic elaboration within this ensemble (figs. 54–57, 60–62).^[208]

Thus becoming the visually and semantically most expressive witness of Christ’s Resurrection in the Myrrh-bearers/Apostles at the Tomb compositions, the bands themselves were to become the focal point of the death/birth symmetry, in the way that Byzantine art wished to represent it. Or, to put it more precisely, what can be seen as a typical funerary cloth—one that will be abandoned and become recognizable as the key witness to the Resurrection of Christ—in the Byzantine images are actually the tight bands wrapped around the forms of the body. Therefore, what ultimately remains in the spectator’s eyes after looking at the late-Byzantine representation of the empty tomb is not the image of shroud, but the image of bands that are wound around the form of body (figs. 26, 36, 50, 57). From such a symbolic and visual position, the white bands and their decoration could quite meaningfully and easily have entered the iconography of the Theotokos and Christ. Now it is much easier to understand why, as the evidence from the previous chapters has already suggested, only a part of the funerary decoration was used as reminder of Christ’s death/kenosis in images representing Him as an infant in the arms of the Theotokos. Whether we use the word syndon, or othonia, or kieria, which now seems most plausible, to designate the funerary semantic aspects of the third garment of the infant Christ is here of no great concern, since the technical accuracy in the description of the funerary process obviously was not crucial, either for the Gospel writers or their Byzantine pictorial re-interpreters. What is more important is to note that this pictorial device is construed as a specific formal abstraction of the funerary/swaddling iconography, based on the motif that was the expressive key to the symbolism of the bound body in Byzantine art. And what is ultimately of the greatest importance is to understand how this unusual pictorial abstraction, which added to the kenotic perspective of the image of the newborn Christ, was nested within the multilayered range of meanings of the pictorial system under discussion. In order to answer this important question, the missing cornerstone must now be added to the interpretative construct that has worked out in the previous chapters, in order that we might finally begin to examine our earlier conclusions from the perspective of Christ’s Resurrection.

After taking into account all the above ways in which the life/death symmetry pervaded Byzantine culture, it is not surprising to find that at the most popular interpretational level of biblical Resurrection theology—in the famous Easter Vigil, recognizable to every Byzantine and every present-day Orthodox Christian alike—terms such as spargana and syndon do play quite significant and deeply interconnected rôles. At one point in the text, which can be attributed to Roman the Melodist, the spargana is compared with the syndon, in a traditional hymnographic manner, when Christ is said to be ‘one who is now wrapped, not in swaddling clothes (σπαργάνοις), but in linen (σινδόνι)’.^[209] At another point in the text, however, in an older hymn named Ypakoe (Tone 4), which was part of the Vigil and later became part of the Paschal Liturgy, the term spargana is used to denote the burial clothes themselves, in the construction ἐντάφια σπάργανα: the grave swaddling-bands.^[210] Although this peculiar terminological construct, together with all the evidence presented so far, finally and unquestionably demonstrates that for a Byzantine painter and spectator, and indeed for any Byzantine believer, the images of funeral and swaddling were semantically almost completely overlapping, I shall attempt to argue that absolute symbolic symmetry cannot be postulated here without a degree of theological caution. What disrupted the genuine existential/religious symmetry of death and birth will already have been noticed within the Kurbinovo fresco ensemble. If we approach the antithesis analyzed by Maguire through the lens of the present research, it becomes apparent that the fresco of the Nativity on the south wall is juxtaposed with not one but two frescoes on the symmetrical section of the north wall: the Burial and the Myrrh-bearing Women at the Tomb of Christ.^[211] The authors of this program obviously wanted to juxtapose the Birth not only with Death, but also with the Resurrection of Christ, which subverted the genuine simplicity of the birth/death symmetry. What breaks the symmetry is, of course, the image of Resurrection. As we have seen, in all three scenes swaddling or winding clothes play a prominent role, but the manner in which they are used in the last image actually makes the ‘asymmetrical’ theological point of the entire Gospel/pictorial narrative. In the Myrrh-bearing Women at the Tomb composition, the funeral clothes cannot simply be juxtaposed semantically with swaddling clothes, because there is no body to be bound and prepared for the new phase of the life/death cycle. This is exactly what late Byzantine artists were trying to emphasize by depicting the funeral clothes as an empty shell in the form of a human body (figs. 26, 36, 50, 57). The bands are wound around an empty space, as a trace of the body that has been freed from the winding clothes. Resurrection can be understood as a birth into a new life, but more than this, it is the event that breaks the chains of the life/death symmetry. And the grave clothes became the most distinctive symbol of what Christ’s presence among humans actually changed: the bonds of human mortality itself.

Ultimately, the Lamentation liturgy of Great Friday, so popular among the Byzantines, with all its expressive iconographic outcome, so inspiring to contemporary scholarly research, is meaningless, and would also have been then, unless we take into account the reverse perspective of the Easter liturgical celebration that follows, with its specific hymnological (re)contextualization of the swaddling/winding clothes imagery.^[212] Or, to attempt to put it in a more vivid and poetic way, release from the grave clothes was the real reason for all the narrative and hymns that followed. Moreover, from the perspective of the dialectical kenotic theology, which continuously—as the basic cognitive framework for the pictorial developments under discussion—(re)connects Christ’s birth and death, release from the powerlessness of the grave also meant release from the powerlessness of swaddling clothes, or simply the release of humanity from the chains of the death/life symmetry. Subsequently, funeral/swaddling clothes as a pictorial motif was made the sign of this symmetry only in order that it might be made a sign of its defeat! Thus, only when the deserted Christ’s grave swaddling-bands [ἐντάφια σπάργανα] emerged in Byzantine art—and this was the case in almost every elaborate middle- and late-Byzantine monumental program—was the real point of the artistic history hitherto under discussion finally uttered.

In theological (poetic/metaphorical) realms, moreover, the potential of the idea was explored very early on, probably even before it entered the liturgical life. In the poetical conclusion of his theological oration On the Son, which has been recognized as ‘one of the most beautiful passages in early Christian literature’,^[213] St Gregory the Theologian demonstrates that the roots of the poetical/dialectical oppositions later employed in metaphrastic lament hymns are rooted very deeply in Christian culture and, more specifically, demonstrates that these oppositions cannot be properly interpreted without the recognition of their profound relationship to the theology of the Resurrection. In the nineteenth chapter of the Oration, between the rhythmical series of dialectic oppositions describing the miraculous earthly birth of the Son of God, the author introduces, quite unexpectedly at the first glance, the following funerary motifs: ‘He was wrapped in swaddling bands [Ἐσπαργανώθη], but at the Resurrection he unloosed the swaddling bands [ἀποσπαργανοῦται] of the grave’.^[214] This mention of the Resurrection and grave seems unexpected, because Gregory was to speak in detail about Death and the Resurrection at the end of twentieth chapter, after presenting the entire earthly life of Christ through the aforementioned poetic series of antithetic formulae.^[215] What allows the peculiar hermeneutic interpolation found in this sentence is, of course, the traditional and universally recognizable symmetry of birth and swaddling clothes, on the one hand, and death and the winding sheets on the other. The image of birth recalls the image of death virtually regardless of the context, demonstrating how deeply this kind of cognitive symmetry was inscribed within the Christian cultural horizon. But the beauty of Gregory’s theological expression, in the context we are concerned with here, resides not only in the way in which his poetical language encompasses this basic religious experience, but also in the way in which he converts this well-known trope of all religious cultures and attunes its meaning to the novelty of the message he wishes to convey. Thus, purpose of his inclusion of funerary terminology in the wrong context was to emphasize the birth/death (swaddling/winding) dialectic, but this was not the final aim of the statement: such a poetic experiment was introduced only for the sake of a more important and more interesting terminological/theological innovation, without parallel in Christian literature. What seems to have caused trouble for translators of the sentence in question is not the term in-swaddling (Ἐσπαργανώθη), which would have been recognizable to Christian authors from their New Testament readings (ἐσπαργάνωσεν, ἐσπαργανωμένον),^[216] but Gregory’s neologism ἀποσπαργανοῦται, which Lampe translates take-off-wrappings.^[217] Besides this lexicon, all the other sources available to me suggest that in the entire corpus of ancient Greek literature this term is used only once, in the quoted sentence. Thus, Gregory obviously invented an oxymoronic term in order to express a phenomenon which ordinary language had not required prior to the writing of this poetic theological contemplation. The human activity that the introduction of the prefix ἀπο—used to emphasize spatial or temporal distancing ‘away from’^[218]—in front of the word swaddling suggested was simply not physically possible: both types of body susceptible to swaddling/binding—babies and corpses—have no power to take off their swaddling/wrappings. As has been pointed out more than once, the essence of the action of swaddling/binding is in that it cannot be undone by the body subject to the action. Of course, this experiential fact is exactly why Gregory coins this ingenious oxymoron: he wants to find a word to express the utmost miracle of Christian faith, which radically transcends physical laws and ordinary human experience. Thus, his use of the term spargana for the tight symbolic interconnecting of Christ’s birth and death obviously plays on a recognizable, symmetrical religious dialectic, but the true aim of such a play on words is to confront this very dialectic and re-fashion the traditional symmetrical terminology from the miraculous perspective of the Resurrection. It might be said that the great poet-theologian from Cappadocia constructed the expressive image of the eternal cycle of birth-death only in order to break it. Tragic human experience shows that being wrapped in the swaddling clothes of birth inevitably leads to being wrapped in the swaddling bands of death, and that the joys of birth are always metaphysically overshadowed by the tragedy of death, but Christ’s miraculous, unseen removal of the swaddling clothes of death brought to an end this tragic existential dialectic of the human race. Through a poetic rendering of Christ’s ability to take off the swaddling bands of death, Gregory therefore attempts to convey the ultimate miracle, which has captured the attention of every generation of Christians in every area of the culture they have made.

After all, perhaps it is not sheer coincidence that the most expressive pictorial illustration of the poetical/theological construct in question can be found in Cappadocia, Gregory’s birthland, in the composition depicting the Myrrh-bearing Women at the Tomb found in the so-called Dark Church, Göreme, where the angel guides the eyes of the myrrh-bearing women towards the darkness of the grave, containing a white head-covering (soudarion) and one thin white band carefully arranged in a spiral form (fig. 63).^[219] This funeral wrapping is not an empty cocoon showing the absence of the human body once swaddled in it, as it was usually to be depicted in later Byzantine art, but a strip of cloth that could be so carefully arranged only by the person who had cast it off, by Him who had the power to un-swaddle Himself. From such a viewpoint, the arrangement of funeral clothes that characterizes almost every Myrrh-bearing Women at the Tomb composition from the early and middle Byzantine periods (up to the time of the Comnenian dynasty), with winding sheets arranged more or less spontaneously within the darkness of the tomb (figs. 64–66), suggests that He who was wrapped in them has not simply vanished, leaving behind his funerary clothes in the form they took while they encased His dead body, as later artistic interpretations tended to do. On the contrary, the earlier iconography obviously tended to represent the proofs of the Resurrection as deliberately arranged signs left behind by Him who had the power to un-swaddle life from the bonds of death.

On the other hand, later Byzantine painters found their own way to indicate that the grave clothes were not left without meaningful order in the darkness of the tomb. Almost without exception, they took care to depict separately 1) the empty cocoon of the body bandages and 2) the head covering in the darkness of the grave (figs. 26, 36, 50, 57), which was obviously their specific iconographic response to the Resurrection account in the Gospel of St John, analyzed by St John Chrysostom in his previously quoted passage.^[220] Namely, after the beloved disciple looked inside the grave and ‘saw the linen cloths lying’ but ‘yet he did not go in’, Simon Peter ‘went into the tomb; and he saw the linen cloths lying there, and the handkerchief that had been around His head, not lying with the linen cloths, but folded together in a place by itself’. [John 20:5–7].^[221] The basic message of this account was, of course, the source of inspiration for the previously examined theological/terminological invention of the great Cappadocian father. He who had the ability to un-swaddle Himself, to perform the ἀποσπαργανοῦται, as St Gregory would say, did not simply depart the grave but, as Byzantine art seemingly tends to inform us in different ways, left behind carefully arranged signs of His miraculous act. The same idea was obviously the basis for St John Chrysostom’s explanation of why the grave clothes were a key material witness to the Resurrection: ‘it was not the work of men in haste or agitation to put the cloths in one place and the handkerchief in another, and to fold the latter’.^[222] In the same direction, Theodore of Mopsuestia was to develop his interpretation of the same Gospel narrative, even going a little further by arguing that Jesus Himself ‘placed them [the linen clothes] in an orderly arrangement, leaving in one place only the shroud that had been on his head and that he had received first, and in another place the rest of the linen wrappings’, arguing in addition that in fact ‘He laid the linen cloths in their proper places and left them as signs of his resurrection, which he had predicted many times also before his passion’.^[223] Together with the theological interpretation thus put forward, the mysterious event of the un-swaddling also acquired a specific narrative extension.

Since in the Byzantine context the quoted texts did not belong to the realm of popular literature, it is now time to return to the fact that long before the famous lamentation hymns acquired a place in lay piety, the metaphoric potential of the motif of the ‘wrapped body’ were popularized in the liturgical context through the hymnography of Easter worship. In addition, it is also a good time to recall that all the metaphors of the lamentation remain virtually meaningless without taking into account this far more ancient liturgical and theological basis. Moreover, what the ancient theologians wrote about the Resurrection came to be public poetic property precisely through liturgical poetry and its ritual actualization. In the beginning, therefore, the sufferings and hopes of humanity wrapped in the bonds of the birth/death symmetry were very clearly expressed at the deepest archaeological level of the Easter Vigil hymnography.

To the Sun who was before the sun and yet had set in a tomb, myrrh-bearing maidens hastened towards dawn, seeking him as the day, and they cried to one another: ‘Friends, come, let us anoint with spices the life-bearing yet buried body, the flesh which raises fallen Adam and now lies in the grave. Come, let us hurry, like the magi let us adore and let us offer sweet spices as gifts to the One who is now wrapped, not in swaddling clothes (σπαργάνοις), but in a shroud (σινδόνι). Let us weep and let us cry, ‘Be roused, Master, who grant resurrection to the fallen.’^[224]

The metaphorical comparison of the myrrh-bearing maidens to the three Magi naturally belonged to the hymnographic opus of St Romanos the Melodist and, more specifically, to his famous Kontakion On the Nativity of Christ,^[225] but it could not function in this context if the birth-swaddling/death-winding symmetry was not already part of the recognized symbolic corpus of Byzantine culture. Though Romanos the Melodist does provide an elaborate answer to the cries and lamentations of fallen humanity, represented by the weeping myrrh-bearing maidens, in the following sections of his kontakion On the Resurrection of Christ, the answer is already partly contained in the verses in question, which were exclusively incorporated into the Easter Vigil hymnography: the same as all the participants in this service, the maidens are, from the reverse perspective I might say, already partly aware that the ‘buried body’ which ‘lies in the grave’ was actually the same as the ‘flesh which raises fallen Adam’. But a far more precise answer to the needs of the fallen, lost in the darkness of the ruthless birth/death dialectic, is given in the famous ancient Ypakoe sung before the third ode of the Paschal Canon, and which later became part of the Paschal Liturgy itself, today sung after the Introit at the Little Entrance.^[226]

Playing precisely on the birth-swaddling/death-winding symmetry and, moreover, breaking the bonds of the primordial spell that inspired the use of the term spargana for burial clothes, the hymn provides an answer to the cries and lamentations of ‘the fallen’ with incomparable clearness, as it belongs to the voice of the heavenly messenger seated by the tomb of Christ. ‘Why seek ye among the dead, as though He were mortal man, Him Who abideth in everlasting light? Behold the grave-clothes [τὰ ἐντάφια σπάργανα]. Go quickly and proclaim to the world that the Lord is risen, and hath put death to death. For He is the Son of God, Who saveth the race of man’.^[227] Though it is not possible to discern whether the text of this Ypakoe was created before or after the Kontakion of Romanos the Melodist, the intrinsic metaphorical dialogue between the two texts is obviously deeply grounded in the earliest strata of Easter liturgical poetry, since both hymns belong to hymnographic material prior to the famous Paschal Canon of St John Damascene, written in the eighth century.^[228] In the same way as St Gregory’s Oration On the Son, the text of Ypakoe uses the swaddling terminology instead of terms more appropriate to the funerary context in order to accentuate the birth/death symmetry in the most radical way, but this emphasis is required only in order to draw a poetical contrast that will enhance the ultimate theological point: the emphasized piece of cloth stands as witness to and as a sign of the event that breaks the spell of the symmetry, the event that has ‘put death to death’. The universally recognizable sign of the life/death symmetry, which is left behind by Him who was able to take off the wrappings and which lies abandoned in the tomb, voided of its basic function, becomes a new kind of sign: the sign of the end of the symmetry and the ultimate victory of the ‘Son of God, Who saveth the race of man’. Therefore, if these peculiar swaddling/funerary bands were obviously imagined to be a symbol signifying the breaking of the chains of the birth/death symmetry long before their popularization within the post-iconoclastic, continuing expansion of Passion iconography even began, it now seems quite reasonable to proceed to examine all the other bandages we have looked at so far from what we might call a reverse, resurrectional, or eschatological perspective.^[229]

The Third Garment Re-swaddled:
On Christ’s Priesthood from the Reverse Perspective

A re-examination of the artistic domain through this specific, inescapable but unexplored theological frame of reference should finally provide the essential hermeneutic tools for the conclusion to this research. For a start, illumination of our subject from the resurrectional perspective opens up the possibility of interpreting some of the particular ways in which swaddling clothes and funerary bands have been (re)present(ed), in narrative compositions and portraits, which could not have been explained otherwise. In other words, it now seems quite possible to solve the semantic mystery encrypted within the symbolic structure of the most precise elaboration of the newborn-swaddling/funerary-winding dialectics that can be found among the narrative programs of Byzantine churches. To be more precise, the painters of Dečani, as previously noticed but not yet elucidated, made quite a peculiar iconographic exception in their elaborate system for representing swaddling and funerary bands. In the exclusive space under the dome, a distinctive red and blue double-striped decoration was applied to every composition with swaddling or winding bands, except the Entombment of Christ. If we now look at this peculiar structural exception from the perspective of its relationship to Resurrection imagery, then it will become obvious that all the other funerary garments particularized by this decoration in the space beneath the dome were actually witnesses to a resurrection: the Resurrection of Christ, and the Resurrection of Lazarus or the Resurrection of Widow’s Son. The grave cloth wound around the body of Christ at the moment of the Entombment was actually the only one that belonged to the dead body.^[230] To put it poetically, this image represented the moment when the hope that death could be defeated by death was at its lowest imaginable level, at least from the perspective of the Christian approach to the history of salvation. Or, in the simplest and most poetical manner: it was the moment when all human hopes died along with the dying Lord. Unless it was a mistake, which does not seem likely in such a context, the omission of the dual-colored, double-striped decoration from the funerary clothes in this image, against the backdrop of its systematic, simultaneous presence in representations of resurrected bodies, now makes sense only if the decoration itself was a sign of the Resurrection in the present context. Of course, the historical succession of events was not structured in a historiographic manner, but primarily in order to enhance the theological message. The event of the Entombment was simply the moment when the hopes of humanity were at the greatest possible distance, not temporal but metaphysical, from the Resurrection, and therefore the omission of the red and blue decoration from the grave clothes in this composition apparently came from an intention to enhance the symbolic connection of the decoration with the theology of Resurrection.

Starting with the Dečani imagery, application of the ‘Resurrectional perspective’ can now at last enable us to take the crucial interpretive steps in the domain of the iconography of the Nativity/Incarnation, which will lead us to the central subject of this study. In other words, it now becomes clear that what wrapped the newborn Christ in the Nativity composition in the Dečani catholicon were not simply swaddling or grave clothes, but rather, perhaps more than anything else, the clothes that witnessed his future Resurrection. It is obvious that not only were the authors of these images conscious of the importance of this final and crucial layer of meaning infusing the core of the swaddling/winding clothes dialectic, but also, they had the need and the means to emphasize it at the iconographical and programmatic level. The first step in achieving this emphasis was the formal abstraction of decoration which, as has previously been explained, transformed the swaddling and winding clothes into a highly conventional sign, rather like a banner, if we can put it so poetically. The next step was exclusion of the blue and red decoration from the Entombment composition, resulting in the establishment of a contextual connection between this decoration and the theology of the Resurrection, which turned the swaddling and grave clothes marked by this pictorial formula into a kind of banner of Resurrection. Together with the image of Christ’s birth, the mysterious, exclusively ornamented swaddling/winding bands belonged only to the images of the Resurrection: of Christ, of Lazarus, of the widow’s son. To be more precise, these specially marked funeral bands were either cast off by Christ or wound around those humans raised from the dead by Christ, and in both cases were deprived of their primary function and transformed into expressive signs of the ultimate miracle of Christian civilization. Finally, therefore, the application of this pictorial motive to the Nativity composition was not simply an expression of the birth-death dialectic. The newborn Christ was swaddled in bands that were, at the same time, a symbol (banner) of his Birth, his Death and, most importantly, his Resurrection. This finally brings us into perfect agreement with the theological and liturgical findings of the previous chapter: again and again, the birth/death dialectic was enhanced only in order to be explained and overcome by the Resurrection of Christ. All three layers of meaning were important and irreplaceable, but only the last of them had the asymmetrical privilege of being the reason for the entire story to be told.

Is it possible now, in the light of all of these new findings, to return to the bands depicted on Christ Emmanuel in the altar of the famous Ohrid Cathedral, or to the equally famous fresco-icon of the Arakiotissa Virgin? More specifically, is it possible to apply the Resurrectional perspective to the particular images that are crucial for this study, as it was possible to do so to the narrative representation of the Nativity from Dečani? In order to enter this conclusive hermeneutic circle properly, it is necessary to return to the pre-iconoclastic past and recall that the patristic theology and liturgical poetry explored in previous chapter were not the only cognitive spaces where the grave swaddling-bands could have been comprehended as a banner of Resurrection. Byzantine art itself also raised this kind of banner long before iconoclasm and, therefore, long before the subsequent focus of Byzantine piety on the Passion/Death imagery began. More from the Resurrection of Lazarus iconography than from the iconography of Christ’s own Resurrection (the Myrrh-bearing Women at The Tomb), the funerary winding bands were a highly recognizable sign of the Resurrection for Christians of the pre-iconoclastic period. Furthermore, early Christian/Byzantine iconography was not interested in representing Christ in a funerary context, while early representations of Christ’s Resurrection were focused on the motif of the empty tomb itself, without bothering to represent the grave clothes inside it (fig. 68).^[231] On the other hand, the image of the resurrected Lazarus was always based on the burial techniques that place the winding clothes at the forefront of the visual narrative (figs. 67, 70). The extreme popularity of this iconography in early Christian art^[232] therefore inescapably defined the position of the image of the (grave) swaddling-bands in the imaginaire of early Byzantine culture: they could belong the iconography of either the Resurrection of Lazarus or the Nativity of Christ (fig. 69). Now, there is no need to discuss the fact that the Resurrection of Lazarus was indivisibly interconnected with the Resurrection of Christ, at a biblical, theological, liturgical, representational or any other conceivable semantic level.^[233] Perhaps the most expressive image of this connection can be found in some of the earliest explicit representations of Christ’s own Resurrection, based on the iconography of the Women at The Tomb of Christ,^[234] depicted on two Roman ivories from the first half of the fifth century, now kept in London and Milan (fig. 68).^[235] While the inner space of the tomb is yet not visible here, its broken, half-opened and very conspicuous doors are decorated with the specific image-within-an-image motif depicting the Resurrection of Lazarus scene. One way or another, therefore, the pre-iconoclastic image of the funerary winding sheet could not avoid being explicitly and closely connected to the image of the Resurrection.

Given that the iconography representing Christ’s actual death was not highly developed prior to iconoclasm,^[236] the presence of funerary bands could not therefore become the sign of death itself, but rather, based on their exclusive iconographic position in those times, an unmistakable sign of Resurrection in early Christian/Byzantine art. However, if we look at the wider context, since a formally identical set of bands was present almost without exception in the iconography of both the Birth of Christ and the Resurrection of Lazarus (fig. 67–70), this means that the use of such a pictorial symbol did not genuinely connect Birth and Death, but rather Birth and Resurrection iconography in early Byzantine art. This finally means that 1) the image of funerary bands must have entered the post-iconoclastic artistic renewal loaded with a symbolic charge that speaks principally of the Resurrection, and consequently, 2) the original image of (infant) swaddling bands was symbolically closer to the resurrectional than the funerary end of the iconographical spectrum of meaning.^[237] Whether this kind of ancient semantic charge could actually have existed in the minds of early post-iconoclastic painters and spectators is less important than the fact that their view of earlier art simply could not provide any other mode of interpretation for our funerary pictorial motif. In other words, the post-iconoclastic development had at its disposal this kind of pictorial/symbolic device only as a highly recognizable banner of Resurrection, before starting to employ it as an element of the Passion narrative. With such a perspective in mind, the Middle-Byzantine application of this symbolic device in images depicting the Virgin and Child no longer seem either morbid or unexpected. From such a perspective, moreover, the winding/swaddling bands become the real symbolical/theological golden thread, stretching diachronically from the earliest to the latest Christian artistic endeavors.

With this kind of Resurrectional perspective in mind, the clusters of examples examined so far can finally find their intrinsic theological grounding and be seen to be genuinely interconnected. Thus, in images of the Theotokos and Christ, the Heavenly Child obviously wraps around his body only a part of the swaddling/grave clothes: the narrow bands that are visually and symbolically the boldest element of the motif of the bound body in narrative imagery. Furthermore, as He who has the power to un-swaddle Himself, Christ does not put on this semantically charged piece of fabric in the same fashion in which it was employed in its genuine, practical context, that of swaddling a baby or wrapping a dead body, but quite the opposite: He does so in such a way that it cannot restrict His bodily movements. And this elevates the forms of the third garment to become a sign of Christ’s eschatological freedom from the bonds of death. As might be expected, one of the subtlest pictorial expressions of such a logic—let us here call it the inverse semantic perspective—can be found in the masterful Lagoudera fresco ensemble. If we try to place the Arakiotissa Virgin of the Passion in its wider programmatic context, and if we turn our view from this image toward the Nativity scene depicted on the vault of the nave, we can see Divine infant swaddled in a single white band, which takes a peculiar spiral shape, attached to His body in quite an unrealistic way, more as an insignia than a practical device meant to bind His body (fig. 71). It is as if this specific insignia were simply waiting to be rearranged and added to the figure of the Infant in the famous Virgin of the Passion fresco-icon in the lower register (fig. 72). Were one to object that the band from the Nativity scene is not decorated with the ornament consisting of double stripes and crosses, which are found on the band of the Arakiotissa Virgin, then I would say that this is probably due to how high up the fresco is in the vault, where the decoration on the narrow band was not necessary since the spectator would have been able to discern it only with difficulty. While some Byzantine painters would probably not have taken into account the distance of the spectator in such a context, the sophisticated masters of the Lagoudera ensemble were surely capable of this. Finally, the change of artistic attitude in the transition from the higher to the lower registers of ensemble might also be taken into account, since, from the perspective of overall iconographic and programmatic context, we are dealing with a quite inconspicuous ornamental addition, which was applied in a still unconventional and unexplored iconographic domain. After all, we might surely think of this particular ornamental innovation as an additional semantic association with the Passion/Death, given that in this case the traditional double-stripe decoration is not followed, as would usually be the case, with dots and/or floral patterns, but by crosses. It is as if, just after His mother un-swaddles Him from the insignia (band) of his kenotic, self-emptying Birth (Incarnation), He puts on the same kind of insignia (band), now marked by crosses, as a sign of his ultimate self-sacrificial kenosis—the outstanding insignia that speaks of His Passion and sacrifice, but which also, far more than this, reminds us of His power to un-swaddle himself from the bandages of death. This interpretative approach is all the more obviously supported by the aforementioned manner in which this particular image of re-swaddling was formally executed: the bands wrapped around the chest and shoulders are worn as an insignia that cannot inhibit the wearer’s freedom of bodily movement, emphatically reminding the spectator that the child is He who cannot be enclosed within the circle of the swaddling/grave clothes symmetry, nor be subject to the bonds of death. Thus, the body bandages that were universally recognizable as the ultimate sign of human powerlessness, are here boldly refashioned by Christ himself, by theology, and, finally, by the visual arts into a sign of his theanthropic power to un-swaddle himself, and therefore into an insignia of His power to liberate humanity from the bondage of the birth/death symmetry. Taking into account the fact that the ornament based on the symbol of the cross is added to this exceptional image of re-swaddling, we may begin to think even more clearly about the third garment of Christ found in the Arakiotissa fresco-icon as a specific insignia of status, one that is not haphazardly recognized as a priestly raiment as it has been by generations of scholars. One might say, in a poetic manner apposite to the cultural sphere under examination, that in the mysterious third garment we can identify the priestly stole of the self-scarifying high priest, which designates the key elements of His incomparable priestly ministry: His divine Incarnation, His sacrificial/redemptive Death, and His salvific Resurrection. Thus, having been formally and semantically distilled from the iconography of the Nativity, Passion, and Resurrection and reformulated within the iconography of the Virgin and Child, the mysterious third garment of Christ became an incomparably meaningful symbolic device, which at the same time conveyed the doctrines of his Birth, Death, and, as the final theological goal of the both, the Resurrection from death. Or, to put it in a more iconographically descriptive way, the ornamented white bands, swaddled around the infant Christ in images of the Theotokos, are the same as those wrapped around Him in narrative images depicting 1) his Birth and 2) his Death, but most importantly, the same as those that are represented as 3) having been un-swaddled and left behind by Him in the tomb, as a sign of His victorious Resurrection. Finally, the asymmetrical semantic unity of these three layers of meaning within a single symbol is what actually makes it so special and opens up the inverse/eschatological/miraculous perspective within those images that are marked by it: the first two aspects, belonging to the human nature, become meaningful only in the presence of the third, miraculous, and supernatural aspect.

If, finally, we carefully reconsider all the semantic aspects that have been touched upon thus far, the mysterious third garment examined in this study will move into focus for us as the Byzantine rhetoric of paradoxes and antinomies begins to unfold its creative capacities in situ.^[238] Let us begin by unpacking the extraordinary semantic package found in the apse of Ohrid Cathedral, whence the present study set out. Are the decorated white bands wrapped around the infant Christ in the image that dominates the altar space appropriate swaddling clothes? Yes, they are: they are the spargana, the regular swaddling clothes of the ancient world. Do the white bands speak solely of the joys of the newborn infant, safely nestling in his mother’s lap? No, they do not: those are also funerary bands (kieria or othonia), the most conspicuous element of the regular grave clothes of the ancient world. Why both at the same time? Because the birth and death of Christ are two phases of the same kenosis that was undertaken by the Son of God. The glory of the Heavenly Lord, seated with His Mother on the throne at the summit of the apsidal conch,^[239] is kenotically marked by the clearest twofold sign of His humanity, His birth/swaddling and His funerary/winding bands. He is a baby in swaddling clothes and at the same time the sacrificial lamb, the High Priest who is going to mount the Cross, to die, and to be wound in funerary bands ‘for the life of the world’ [John 6:51].^[240] Is this therefore finally the traditional, universally recognizable image of the birth/death symmetry? Yes, it is, but it was represented only in order to declare that the Divine child was He who defeated this dialectic. His third garment was the representation of the unique historical item that was the material witness to his death, but also, far more than that, the witness to His victory over the death. This, after all, is why he does not wear it as if he were in thrall to the bonds of the birth/death swaddling symmetry, but as the inverse, victorious insignia of His power to un-swaddle Himself from this bondage. And, finally, why does this specific symbol/insignia so intensively interfere with the visual semantics of priestly raiment? Because it must. By acting as swaddling and funerary bandage for the Son of God, it is spontaneously able also to become His priestly stole, since He is a priest, but no ordinary one. It is the stole that simultaneously represents the likeness and the difference between Christ and all other priests relevant to the Byzantines, be they Jewish or Christian. After all, for every generation of Christians it was well known that the fact of Christ’s being ‘a priest forever According to the order of Melchizedek’ [Psalm 110:4; Hebrews 5:6] actually meant that ‘in the likeness of Melchizedek, there arises another priest, who has come, not according to the law of a fleshly commandment, but according to the power of an endless life’ [Hebrews 7:15–16]; the one ‘who does not need daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifices, first for His own sins and then for the people’s, for this He did once for all when He offered up Himself’ [Hebrews 7:27].^[241] Though it partly resembles the different kinds of priestly stoles known to Byzantine spectators, the third garment of the infant Christ is also a unique symbolic device, which, by its iconographic associations with the narrative imagery of the Byzantine pictorial system, distinguishes the ultimate, divine, self-sacrificing High Priest of the New Testament Church, as the threefold signifier of His Divine Incarnation, His self-sacrificial Death, and His glorious Resurrection.

While such a poetic-theological priestly interpretation would probably appear quite appropriate from the standpoint of a hypothetical Byzantine reader, from the contemporary scholarly standpoint it still seems rather too generic and speculative. To be more precise, the vague aesthetic resemblance to Byzantine priestly garments is not yet sufficient to allow us to speak of the third garment as a priestly stole, except insofar as it is not continuous with other priestly traditions. On the other hand, the manner in which it is wound around the body, along with the solid persistence of the pictorial formula, does suggest that some kind of ritualistic thinking/imagery was behind it. And this finally brings us to the question of the form of the third garment. It is easy to understand why this iconographical innovation covered only a small part of the figure of Christ: as has been pointed out, its primary purpose was to depict not the body wrapped in bands, but the bands that had been unwound from the body and refashioned into a sign of its liberation, its restoration to life and movement. This intrinsically theological interpretation might also find support in the wider iconographic and cultural framework: any radical and conspicuous iconographic innovation of such importance, particularly if it occurred at the summit of the altar program, would hardly have been universally welcomed in Byzantium.^[242] There is a significant example that demonstrates how such conservativism could go and why any experimentation with the garments depicted in traditional portraits of Christ and the Virgin had to be so subtle and gradual as to be virtually inconspicuous in the context. Namely, despite the fact that the image of Christ as High Priest was intrinsic to the Byzantine liturgy, and even despite the fact that monumental images of the Communion of the Apostles represented Christ in a eucharistic priestly role from the eleventh century onwards, it took almost the entire post-iconoclastic development of Byzantine art to change His regular ancient raiment and instead garb Him in the vestments of a bishop within this iconographic formula, by the beginning of fourteenth century.^[243] While such depictive conservativism does explain the modest size of the third garment, it does not yet explain the origins of its forms and their specific, pictorially unstable, but historically persistent repetition up to the twilight of Byzantine culture and even beyond. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that Byzantine painters would have invented the form(s) of this garment out of nothing in order to create a generic likeness with existing ecclesiastical vestments, while at the same time persistently maintaining a formal differentiation from them. While in the first chapter we were able to observe that the third garment differed from the standard Byzantine liturgical vestments in its forms and the stability of their application, we were also able to see that, on the other hand, this difference was not great enough to prevent some of the most reputable researchers of Byzantine art from postulating a liturgical origin for the pictorial motif. Particularly when it comes to the most prominent chest-and-shoulders type of the motif, it is hard to resist the impression that it is wound in this fashion not only to demonstrate the liberation from the body bandages, but also with an additional, positive intention to evoke ritual modes of clothing, which deliberately differ from practical everyday clothing customs. In addition, prolonged exposure to Byzantine art teaches us that the artists engaged in its execution would always rather choose to rely on some kind of tradition or source than to employ their own creativity to invent motifs and forms out of nothing. But if all of this suggests that the forms of the third garment could hardly have arisen out of nothing, while, on the other hand, the way it was wound cannot be identified in any Byzantine liturgical ritual, then where ultimately did these forms come from? Was there a cognitive space within which they arose, or should our curiosity continue to satisfy itself with the image of their purely artistic invention out of nothing?

One very intricate and important piece of literary evidence can help us answer such questions. It is a particular ancient account, found among Hebrew sources and used to support the ‘abnet hypothesis’ developed by Miodrag Marković, which, in my opinion, could not reveal its full potential within the strictly priestly reading suggested by this author. Namely, while it was not easy to imagine a Byzantine patron, theologian, or artist researching the Jewish liturgical practices of his times, it is quite easy to imagine him reading Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities, which was a historical source highly valued by the Byzantines.^[244] And within this text we find a literary description of the item that truly resembles the third garment of the infant Christ, in a way unmatched by any other literary image mentioned up to now. Against the backdrop of a constant Byzantine interest in Old Testament history and a specific increase of this interest in the eleventh-century,^[245] the description in question should now be quoted at length:^[246]

This robe [a linen robe, chethon] is a tunic descending to the ankles, enveloping the body and with long sleeves tightly laced round the arms; they [priests] gird it at the breast, winding to a little above the armpits the sash [ζώνην], which is of a breadth of about four fingers and has an open texture giving it the appearance of a serpent’s skin. Therein are interwoven flowers of diverse hues, of crimson and purple, blue and fine linen, but the warp is purely of fine linen. Wound a first time at the breast, after passing round it once again, it is tied and then hangs at length, sweeping to the ankles, that is so long as the priest has no task in hand, for so its beauty is displayed to the beholders’ advantage; but when it behoves him to attend to the sacrifices and perform his ministry, in order that the movements of the sash may not impede his actions, he throws it back over his left shoulder. Moses gave it the name of abaneth, but we have learnt from the Babylonians to call it hemian, for so is it designated among them.^[247]

Here, we can finally recognize the literary source that genuinely could have been used by at least some among Byzantines involved in the creation of church iconographic programs and, in addition, it could not be formally closer to the mysterious pictorial device of the third garment. Although even this literary description is not identical with the pictorial device, we are now so close to a recognition of its forms and even decoration that it becomes quite plausible to let the mediaeval artistic or theological imagination account for the existing discrepancies. For example, the only major variation, to do with the covering of both shoulders rather than just one, might have been motivated by the need to represent the difference between New Testament and Old Testament priesthood, through a comparison with Christian high-priestly vestments, which always cover both shoulders. Nevertheless, even if such a variation was merely a mistake in the not always simple or transparent transmission of information from the literary to the pictorial domain, all the research assembled here does strongly suggest that nothing but this particular text could be the earliest literary source for (the specific forms of) our pictorial phenomenon. But does this proposal push us back to the abnet hypothesis and throw into question all the conclusions drawn in this study? Not really, in my opinion. It will actually help us understand the way in which the priestly semantic layer was actually incorporated into this highly meaningful and semantically multilayered pictorial device. Namely, the questions that could not be answered during discussion of the abnet hypothesis can be answered only with the help of the arguments and conclusions presented thereafter. First comes the question of priestly rank: why would anyone choose the abnet, when it was a secondary item of clothing, which did not even belong solely to the Jewish High Priest? Moreover, in his detailed description of the priestly vestments, Josephus himself says that over the tunic girdled by abnet the High Priest puts on another ‘tunic of blue material’ which likewise ‘reaches to the feet’, and then over this second tunic he puts on the unique high-priestly vestment called the ‘ephod [ἐφώδην]’, which ‘is buckled on to the shoulders by two sardonyxes’, on which are ‘graven the names of the sons of Jacob’.^[248] Now, if the abnet is not only a secondary vestment, belonging to all the priestly ranks, but also on the High Priest it is not visible at all, as he is covered in the blue tunic reaching to his feet, we must here answer a highly significant question: what could have inspired a hypothetical Byzantine reader of Josephus to suggest that precisely this garment should be added to the figure of the New Testament’s ultimate High Priest? Or to put it in more emphatic terms: why the subsidiary priestly belt but not an ephod, which, as already noted in first chapter, is the truly crucial and unique high-priestly vestment of the Old Testament? In my opinion, there is only one way to answer to this question, one that can be delineated solely by relying on the findings of this study.

We can start to unravel this mystery from within the quoted text itself: ‘when it behoves him to attend to the sacrifices [θυσίας] and perform his ministry [διακονεῖν]’, the priest throws the sash ‘back over his left shoulder’.^[249] Although it was the key aspect of the Old Testament priestly ministry, the term sacrifice (θυσία) is mentioned only here within Josephus’ description of the high-priestly vestments.^[250] Moreover, in this description, the priest makes the technical gesture which is preparatory to his sacrificial duties: throwing the sash over the shoulder. The term shoulder and the gesture are, in my opinion, key to the Byzantine iconographic reading of Josephus’ text. Christ is depicted as a high priest preparing Himself for His sacrificial ministry. Of course, such a textual particularity could provide inspiration in this context only because Byzantine readers of Josephus knew very well that Christ was not the kind of priest who performed a typical priestly ministry, but the High Priest who ‘once for all… offered up Himself’ [Hebrews 7:27] as the sacrifice, ‘for the life of the world’ [John 6:51]. Since He is ultimately the self-sacrificing High Priest, who is simultaneously both priest and sacrifice, the throwing of the sash over His shoulder was a sign of His preparation for this specific ministry and for the offering of this specific sacrifice. In other words, Christ’s own preparation for the priestly ministry means nothing other than the preparation for His own sacrificial death, which is itself in the very focus of the entire liturgical life of the Church. From such a perspective it is easy to understand how the sacrificial/preparatory gesture in question could have become far more inspiring and important to Byzantine readers/interpreters of the ancient historical treatise than the entire hierarchy of priestly vestments and priestly ranks described therein. And this, ultimately, is the only way to explain why this particular detail, although quite insignificant at first glance, was drawn from the text and then represented in a radically different syntactic context.

Only through such a self-sacrificial reading can we finally assign the priestly semantic aspect of the third garment to its proper place. Only thus will we be able to recognize it, furthermore, as the priestly stole of Him who, although a ‘King of glory’ and ‘master of the things of heaven and earth’, out of ‘ineffable and boundless love for mankind’ decided to ‘become man without undergoing change or alteration’ and was ‘named our high priest’, who ‘offers and is offered, who accepts and is distributed’ at the same time.^[251] Putting this in theoretical terms consequently means that now there is a very good reason to introduce these recognizable verses from the Prayer of the Cherubic Hymn into our discussion in a meaningful way, as a text that is key to understanding the Byzantine approach to Christ’s priesthood. Not only because of the content of the Prayer in itself, which assumes the sole place in the liturgy where Christ is explicitly denoted as High Priest, but also because of the great influence of the verses in question on the Byzantine ecclesiastical culture of the historical period under discussion. To be more precise, the last of the verses in question opened the eucharistic dispute that led to the Holy Synod of 1156–1157 and resulted in the official condemnations of a number of highly-placed theologians, who had tried to question the rational inconsistencies of this text.^[252] The probable mediaeval origin of the prayer is in itself of less interest to our research than the latest modifications of the abovementioned sacrificial sentence from this inspiring liturgical text, which happened to be at the very center of the controversy: while the first two participles, referring to the High Priest who offers [ό προσφέρων] and is offered [προσφερόμενος], originated from the ancient patristic heritage and were therefore already present in eighth-century forms of the prayer, the third and fourth participle—who accepts [προσδεχόμενος] and is distributed [διαδιδόμενος]—were gradually added up to the eleventh century, so that in the twelfth century the third was able to become the reason for the eucharistic dispute in question.^[253] The theological reasons that place the third participle at the heart of this controversy are less important to our discussion than the fact that the dispute was so fervently concerned with the reason of Christ’s own offering and acceptance of the sacrifice. Additionally important is the fact that this by no means satisfied the late Byzantine passion for eucharistic/sacrificial subjects, which by the end of the twelfth century had opened up new liturgical dilemmas and brought Byzantine society to the point where ‘the doctrine on the Holy Sacraments was brought to light and divided the Christian flock into opposing factions; and those things which merited both honor and silence were loudly condemned in the agora and on the crossroads by anyone who wished to do so’.^[254] Yet probably the most expressive and most creative affirmation of the period’s obsession with sacrificial themes can ultimately be found in Byzantine art itself. In particular, one of the most intricate and most widely accepted iconographic/programmatic innovations of late Comnenian art was the representation of the infant Christ as an eucharistic oblation, lain on the liturgical vessel placed on the altar table, depicted amid the assembled bishops officiating the Eucharist in the lowest register of the altar program. Although extreme theological generalization would be required in order to identify Christ as a priest in such an image, which is usually termed a Melismos in contemporary theory, we can straightforwardly and confidently argue that He is represented as a sacrifice here. Not only was the most typical inscription accompanying such a portrait of Christ (Ὁ μελισμός) the title of the rite of breaking the consecrated bread (= Christ’s eucharistic body), which by the twelfth century was followed by a reading of formulas with a purely sacrificial intonation (‘Broken and distributed is the Lamb of God’), but also the other most prominent inscriptions behind the figure of the infant Christ, such as Thyomenos [Ὁ Θυόμενος = Sacrificed One] or Amnos [Ὁ ἀμνός = Lamb], are liable to no other interpretation than the sacrificial.^[255] Against the backdrop of such an ambiance attuned to the sacrificial, the advent of the infant Christ within the iconographic space known as the Melismos, Amnos, or Sacrificed One, thus together with the almost unquestioned acceptance of such an iconographic innovation in the late-Byzantine programmatic context, finally suggests that the ambition to represent Christ as a eucharistic sacrifice must have been far stronger in the Byzantine altar programs of eleventh and twelfth centuries than the need to represent him as a priest. However, as I am about to demonstrate, the different semantic aspects of our subject by no means need to be interpreted using competing contemporary categories if their historical context is properly perceived.

Although there is no room here to expand on the subject of sacrifice, we may plainly conclude at this point that the theme of the sacrificial was a prominent subject of important liturgical changes that continued into the eleventh century and had a strong echo within ecclesiastical culture within the period that followed. Furthermore, the obvious amplification of sacrificial accents in Byzantine liturgical life could hardly pass unnoticed among educated creators of monumental ecclesiastical pictorial programs and, consequently, might have fostered the artistic recycling of a specific sacrificial detail from the text of Jewish Antiquities by the eleventh century. Nevertheless, there is still not sufficient reason to expect that the semantic nuances of the secretly-read priestly prayer could have been publicly communicated in the imagery of the altar conch in the eleventh-century Ohrid Cathedral; nor is there sufficient reason to suppose that in eleventh-century Ohrid anyone except a few highly-educated priests could have been able to recognize the priestly and sacrificial associations based on the text of Josephus, no matter how popular it might have been among Byzantine intellectuals. And this finally brings us to the second essential objection that I have brought against the abnet hypothesis: who would have been able to understand the attachment of such a priestly semantic association to the infant Christ’s third garment save the bishop and a handful of educated priests?

Like the previous question, this one can be answered only if the conclusions emerging from this study are taken into account. In other words, only if we agree that the third garment of the infant Christ was a semantically saturated symbolic device, with multiple layers of meaning attached thereto, including everything explored and explained so far, can we finally understand the ways in which its priestly message was actually conveyed. If we remind ourselves, furthermore, that the images on the walls of Byzantine churches were not produced in order to be listed as exceptional UNESCO Heritage sites, but were, like contemporary films, for example, aimed at different and numerous social groups, then the coexistence of the numerous semantic layers found in their specific pictorial forms will not seem so unexpected. Although from time to time award-oriented films do appear today, in most cases directors and producers of this art form tend not to make a choice between large audiences and good reviews. A similar situation can be imagined behind the scenes of Byzantine artistic production: the images were primarily aimed at the majority of the congregation attending the liturgy, on whose needs the painters, as well as the priests, were most focused, although the needs of the priestly elite, which decided everything in the ecclesiastical domain, were by no means neglected. This brings us to the methodological point where the existence of different kinds of consumers for the different layers of meaning within a single composite symbol should be put forward. Without there being any need to neglect or inflate the importance of any type of spectator of Byzantine imagery, it seems that the priestly layer of meaning found in the third garment in its initial developmental phase was readable only by a minority, while the other previously examined layers functioned as its popularly recognizable semantic attribute. To be more precise: while there can be no doubt that the text of Jewish Antiquities could have an impact on the introduction of the specific forms of the third garment only via the Byzantine clerical/intellectual elites, the priestly associations thereby generated could hardly have been recognized by anyone outside those elites. Only the later export of ‘those things which merited both honor and silence’ to ‘the agora and the crossroads’ might potentially have fostered a wider popular reception of such an originally priestly semantic aspect of our mysterious pictorial device. However, this sort of interpretive possibility must be treated with the greatest caution: the late-twelfth-century controversy did spark public interest in the interpretation of the Eucharist, but it was focused on the question of the corruptibility or incorruptibility of the consecrated host, and here Christ’s priesthood and the theological texts concerned were hardly relevant.^[256] Thus, it seems most likely that, in the given cultural context, the supposed priestly formal/semantic origins of the third garment remained permanently obscured for the majority of the Christian flock. In other words, the priestly reading from Josephus might have inspired the invention of the chest-and-shoulders type of third garment, but this would hardly have been interiorized within the collective memory of Byzantine spectators, save for a few elite members of the priestly caste.

Furthermore, such an interpretation can be supported by the key pictorial sources examined in this study. Thus, if we look closely at the third garments of the infant Christ from the Ohrid Cathedral (figs. 4 and 34), we can see the narrow white band wrapped around his chest in four strips and then a single strip thrown over each shoulder. While this image corresponds with the literary description in Jewish Antiquities of the priest who, prior to attending the sacrifices, throws the loose end(s) of the sash over his shoulder(s), the corresponding representation from Lagoudera leaves us with a different impression. Namely, the figure of the infant Christ in the Arakiotissa Virgin of the Passion is wound with the third garment in a divergent manner: two strips around the chest and then again twice around each shoulder (figs. 31, 72). Wrapping two strips around each shoulder can hardly be considered to be an image of throwing the sash over the shoulders, which strongly suggests that the basic forms of pictorial device were intuitively adopted from the artistic past, while their original textual source must already have been forgotten, or was at least unattainable for the authors of this ensemble. In summary, we may therefore note that the Ohrid third garment introduced the strong association with swaddling, with a strip being wound four times around the chest, but also made possible the priestly association with throwing the sash over the shoulder, while in its later Lagoudera counterpart only the association with the swaddling, or rather the re-swaddling, of the infant Christ is retained, without any genuine possibility of referring to the text of Jewish Antiquities. Let us not forget that later changes in the form and color of the third garment (fig. 1, 10–12, 16) are significant enough to suggest that exciting semantic development of it in fact never ceased throughout the history of Byzantine art—which places such subjects outside the scope of the present study—and add them to the backdrop of the early formal development of this pictorial motif, which has just demonstrated that its priestly semantic origins could have been easily forgotten already by twelfth-century artists. Now, if even the educated metropolitan masters of the Lagoudera fresco ensemble were able to miss the priestly literary origins of the idea, then it becomes even clearer that the majority of the attendees within the liturgical space could hardly have thought in such categories. In other words, it now seems even more impossible that anyone but a few educated Byzantine high priests would have been able to perceive the priestly semantic overtones at some point attached to the third garment. Of course, this does not at all mean that the key subject of our research was hermetically enclosed within the spheres of clerical communication. The interpretation here put forward salvages the greater part of the semantic load attached to the third garment that was recognizable to the widest audience and, moreover, is able to position it in harmonious continuity with the highly intellectualized and mystical priestly layers of meaning. And this harmony in fact begins to resonate as soon as we enter the mediaeval liturgy itself, where, as contemporary liturgics reminds us, the priests silently read the parts of sacred text reserved only for their caste and therefore virtually incomprehensible to the liturgical majority, whereas all participants could recognize and communicate those parts of the text that belonged to all.^[257]

Consequently, if we place the findings of this study against the backdrop of intrinsically mediaeval logic of liturgical mystification, then there is actually not the slightest need to expect that the priestly semantic aspects of the third garment motif were accessible to anyone save the priestly caste.^[258] On the other hand, of course, the same liturgical logic shows us that the majority of those participating in the liturgical life needed to be provided with other semantic aspects of the given motif recognizable to them, the way they were provided with essential parts of liturgical text for their participation and understanding.^[259] And this is where the conclusions of this study and the conclusions of earlier research on our subject can finally start to work together toward a new interpretative synthesis. Though its priestly semantic aspects did seemingly exist, the key message conveyed to anyone able to descry the third garment of the infant Christ at the summit of the Ohrid Cathedral apse was not a priestly one, but rather one based on the threefold Birth-Death-Resurrection set of asymmetrical associations. However, it is to be expected that, like in the liturgy itself, where the aspects of the meaning reserved for the clergy and those reserved for the rest of the community were in perfect harmony within one and the same dynamic performative event, different semantic aspects of our subject would not have been at odds with each other. This is why it is very important to stress here that not only are the kenotic and priestly semantic layers not at odds with each other, but they are highly compatible in the given cognitive context. Moreover, there is no instance of Christian clericalism, either medieval or modern, that could allow itself to neglect the extraordinary self-sacrificial aspects of Christ’s priesthood. From the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews, through the post-iconoclastic mystagogical tractates, down to the Prayer of the Cherubic Hymn and twelfth-century liturgical disputes, it was clear to every Christian priest that Christ Himself was simultaneously the priest and the sacrifice, which consequently meant that his Divine kenosis could not stand in opposition to His priesthood. The biblically attested knowledge that the Son of God deprived Himself of his elevated status—that he ‘made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross’ [Philippians 2:7–8]—was a well-known precondition for the specific initial act of His priesthood: His own sacrificial death, which was the only possible way for Him to became the priest ‘who offers and is offered, who accepts and is distributed’.^[260] Thus, it is important to make it clear that kenoticism was not an aspect of Christ’s priesthood but its most genuine and most intrinsic precondition. If this fact is viewed from the perspective of the visual arts, however, it means that any symbolic formula denoting Christ’s priesthood denotes at the same time His kenosis, and vice versa. However, in addition to the birth/death symmetry, this kind of priestly/kenotic symmetry is not a self-sufficient key to an understanding of Christian worship and the corresponding artistic production. Or, to be more specific and more vivid: in addition to the image of the child whose birth means his death, the image of priest who sacrifices his life and surrenders himself to humiliating death would have been morbid and senseless were it not viewed/depicted from the perspective of faith in the Resurrection. Thus, the kenotic priestly self-sacrificial act makes sense only from the perspective of Christ’s Resurrection: ‘Therefore God also has highly exalted Him’ [Philippians 2:9], as ‘a High Priest, who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens’ [Hebrews 8:1]. And this, finally, is why there is great reason to believe that the priestly semantic aspects of the third garment of the infant Christ would have been recognized by the widest Byzantine audience, even if primarily based on its symbolic/iconic connection with His kenotic Birth, self-sacrificial Death, and glorious Resurrection. Thus, although much of it was reserved for the priestly/intellectual elite, there is reason enough to believe that priestly semantic aspect of our subject would actually have been recognized, at least in part and intuitively, by the widest Byzantine audience. However, the findings of this study as a whole suggest that there is far greater reason to believe that the threefold dynamics of Christ’s Birth, Death and Resurrection—recognizable and existentially important to any Christian of those (and later) times—was the semantic load that was experienced as the primary message of the third garment by the Byzantine social majority.

Taking into account this threefold dynamic and its most important, ‘asymmetric’, Resurrectional argument, we finally see our way toward a possible answer to one of the most difficult of the questions that the hermeneutic apparatus constructed hitherto has come up against. Namely, without this argument it would not be possible to understand either the self-sacrificial priestly associations or those based on the death/birth symmetry within the atmosphere of eschatological triumph found in the Ohrid Cathedral altar imagery, with the figure of the infant Christ surrounded with heavenly glory and placed in his Mother’s lap like an emperor on His heavenly throne.^[261] Moreover, when viewed within the most general programmatic context, this figure of Christ bears a close resemblance to the figure in the triumphant composition of the Ascension depicted on the ceiling of the basilica, which likewise emphasizes the triumphant eschatological overtones of the image in the apse (fig. 3).^[262] If, therefore, the third garment was only a sign of the birth/death or sacrificial/priesthood symmetries, its presence would be at the very least confusing in this context; but with the addition of the resurrectional semantic load, all of its layers of meaning, uncovered over the course of this study, in fact begin to form a perfect fit with the triumphal atmosphere of the Ohrid Cathedral apse. In this way, the third garment becomes a perfect sign of the Divine kenosis, of God’s descent and ministry among humankind, but above and beyond this, it also becomes the perfect sign of Christ’s ultimate triumph: His victory against death itself. It becomes a ‘banner of Resurrection’, the ultimate symbolic signifier of Him who, by His death, puts death to death. The descent of the Heavenly Lord in His glorious mandorla into the world of mortals thus presupposed His clothing Himself in human nature and seating Himself in His mother’s lap, which consequently presupposed His accepting the initial powerlessness of a swaddled newborn child and the ultimate powerlessness of a dead body in its winding clothes, while all this makes sense only if the ultimate victory over the powerlessness is presupposed in His glorious Resurrection and Ascension to heaven.

In Place of a Conclusion

Since all authentic art historical research attempts in one way or another to comprehend artistic phenomena in their most authentic historical and cultural context, I shall now try to be similarly thorough in my attempt to sum up this study in terms most apposite to the epistemological categories of Byzantine culture itself. And one of the richest sources of terms, thoughts, and images relevant to our discussion can surely be found in a specific passage from an apocryphal homily on the feast of Presentation of Christ in the Temple, ascribed to St Cyril of Jerusalem. In addition to possessing great poetic power and the authority of its (supposed) author, this text is important to Byzantine art studies because of its use in twelfth-century synodal discussions on the aforementioned eucharistic controversies, a use inspired by the indisputable congruence of this poetic vision with the innovative sacrificial additions to the text of Prayer of the Cherubic Hymn, which themselves gave rise to the disputes in question.^[263] In the context of the present research, the text is particularly relevant because it meaningfully illustrates and interconnects the two most important artistic examples discussed in this study: the ground-level sacrificial image of the Virgin of the Passion at Lagoudera, itself derived from the iconography of the Presentation in the Temple, and the glorious enthroned Virgin and Christ from the summit of the Ohrid Cathedral apse.

I see a child who brings a sacrifice [θυσίαν προσἄγον] on Earth according to the Law, but who in heaven receives the pious sacrifices [εὐσεβεῖς θυσίας δεχόμενον] of all. [I see him] on the cherubic throne, seated as is becoming to God. He himself is offered [προσφερόμενον] and purified; he himself offers and purifies all; he is the offering, he is archpriest [ἀρχιερεὺς], he is the altar, he is a propitiation; he is the one who offers [ὁ προσφέρων] and one offered as a sacrifice [θυσία προσφερόμενος] above the world, he is the tree of life and of knowledge. He is the lamb, and he is the genuine fire; he is a whole burnt-offering [ὁλοκαύτωσις] and he is the blade of the Spirit; he is the shepherd, and he is the sheep; he is the sacrifice [θύτης] and the sacrificed one [θυόμενος]; he is the one who uplifts [ἀναφερόμενος] and the one who accepts the sacrifice [θυσίαν δέχομενος]; he is the law and the very fulfilment of the law.^[264]

The way in which this ancient text combines sacrificial and victorious/eschatological imagery is truly striking, particularly from the standpoint of the present research and its findings. If we take into account that fact that a sermon is dedicated to the feast of the Presentation—ineluctably evoking the image of the Virgin holding her Child in the Temple and her being reminded of His future passion—then the aforementioned set of expressive theological images begins to look stunningly congruent to the most important conclusions of our research. Thus, if we agree that this vivid literary passage is deeply resonant not only with the sacrificial imagery of the (Arakiotissa) Presentation and the liturgical prayer that inspired piety in the period under discussion, but also with the triumphal image from the altar conch of Ohrid Cathedral, then we might add, based on the findings of the present study, that the pictorial invention of the infant Christ’s third garment can be recognized as a truly authentic symbolic amplifier of such a literary/iconic/eucharistic resonance. And in such an amplified semantic harmony we may finally recognize the priestly semantic overtones as an organic and meaningful element of the symbolic structure attached to this mysterious polysemic pictorial device. Namely, if this unique archpriest needed to be garbed in a priestly stole, it could be imbued with meaning only from the reverse, eschatological perspective: 3) putting on the abnet (priestly band) and throwing it back over the shoulder(s) are associated with Christ’s self-sacrificial priestly ministry; 2) this atypical-priestly association connects the same pictorial device with His Divine kenosis (the swaddling bands) that leads to His self-sacrificial death (the funerary bands); finally, 1) all these associations make sense only if the symbol becomes the sign of His Resurrection (liberation from the bandages) and consequent Ascension to heaven, where He sits on the right hand of God the Father. Only from such a reverse and asymmetric perspective can we finally say that the third garment was wound around the Savior’s heart as the specific raiment of the self-sacrificing priest, who ‘offers and is offered, who accepts and is distributed’, and a Divine Son whose Death and Resurrection make the Church ‘an earthly heaven in which super-celestial God dwells and walks about’.^[265]

What swaddles the Infant whose incarnation was a central theme of Byzantine monumental art is therefore the very sign of his specific identity, a special sign, conceived as a sophisticated theological statement, which speaks of His special life among humankind from the eschatological perspective. This sign was the unique insignia, the exceptional self-sacrificial priestly vestment that acquired meaning only when it was wrapped around His body, since it spoke of His kenotic relinquishing of divine power—culminating in a humiliating and ingloriously human death—from the perspective of the purpose of this divine kenotic self-emptying, which was the ultimate victory over the death and the consequent salvation of humankind. After all, the eucharistic anamnesis itself was in essence established from such a reverse, eschatological perspective, concluding as it does with the ‘remembrance’ of ‘the Cross, the Grave, the Resurrection on the third day, the Ascension into Heaven, the Sitting on the right hand, the Second and glorious Coming-again…’^[266] The need for a pictorial symbol that might express such a paradoxical liturgical logic is far less surprising than the impression that Byzantine art successfully met this need. Thus, only by evoking the fact that the entire Divine salvific plan, which miraculously surpasses the birth/death symmetry, was to be commemorated, re-actualized and experienced within the Eucharist, does the pictorial invention examined in this study become recognizable as the unique stole of ‘another priest, who has come, not according to the law of a fleshly commandment, but according to the power of an endless life’ [Hebrews 7:15–16].

Appendix

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

^[1] On the Greek chiton (χιτών) and himation (ἱμάτιον) and their Roman counterparts (tunica and pallium), see M. G. Houston, Ancient Greek, Roman and Byzantine Costume & Decoration (London, 1977), 67–70, 86–100, 120–30. On the appropriation of this kind of dress code by Christian art (for depicting Christ, the Apostles, or Old Testament saints), see A. Urbano, “The Philosopher Type in Late Roman Art: Problematizing Cultural Appropriation in Light of Cultural Competition”, in Religious Compe tition in the Greco-Roman World, ed. N. DesRosiers and L. Vuong (Atlanta, 2016), 27–40; E. R. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period (volume nine): Symbolism in the Dura Synagogue (New York, 1964), 156–62. On the ways post-iconoclastic art interpreted this dress code, cf, Т. Mitrović, Osnove živopisanja: priručnik (Beograd, 2012), 196–204.

 

^[2] For numerous similar examples, cf. the vast photographic evidence in: C. Baltoyianni, Icons: Mother of God (Athens, 1994). On the Virgin of Tenderness (Eleousa) iconographic type, see M. Tatić-Đurić, “Eleusa. U traganju za ikonografskim tipom,” in Studije o Bogorodici, ed. S. Stanišić (Beograd, 2007), 133–43; O. E. Ėtingof, “K ikonografii Bogomateri «Laskai͡ushcheĭ» (Glikofilusy),” in eadem, Obraz Bogomateri. Ocherki vizantiĭskoĭ ikonografii XI–XIII vv (Moskva, 2000), 67–98.

 

^[3] On the so-called clavi (sing. clavus) in their original Roman context, and on their further adoption by Byzantine artistic culture, cf. Houston, Ancient Greek, Roman and Byzantine Costume, 96–97, 126–45; N. Goldman, “Reconstructing Roman Clothing”, in The World of Roman Costume, ed. J. L. Sebesta and L. Bonfante (Madison, WI, 2001), 221–23; L. Bender Jørgensen, “Clavi and non-clavi: Definitions of various bands on Roman textiles”, in Textiles y Tintes en la ciudad antiqua, Purpureae Vestes 3, ed. C. Alfaro et al. (València, 2011), 75–81. On the formal interferences between clavi and the motif focused on in the present study, see below, n. 5, 37.

 

^[4] On the so-called chrysography, the golden reflexes that are used for modeling various types of Christ’s garments, on panel icons most typically, see J. Folda and L. J. Wrapson, Byzantine Art and Italian Panel Painting: The Virgin and Child Hodegetria and the Art of Chrysography (New York, 2015), 2–19.

 

^[5] In rare cases where this distinction is not drawn and the clavi remain visible on the lower part of the tunic (beneath the additional garment that covers the chest; fig. 16), we can speak of the possibility that artist did not draw a precise distinction between this garment and the clavi; see the examples in: Baltoyianni, Icons, pl. 57, 87; cf. different examples of the third garment that is not covering the shoulders in: ibid., pl. 39–47, 73–86.

 

^[6] Additional emphasis of this self-evident interpretative logic would have been required here because the later developmental phases of the subject under discussion, followed by the above-mentioned changes of color, could only be partially explored within the framework of the present study and require further investigation in the future.

 

^[7] For updated reproductions of the subject and literature on the wall paintings from this church, see: A. M. Lidov, “«Khristos, osvi͡ashchai͡ushchiĭ hram». К istolkovanii͡u ikonograficheskoĭ programmy Sofii Ohridskoĭ,” in idem, Ikona. Mir svi͡atyh obrazov v Vizantii i Drevneĭ Rusi (Moskva, 2014), 239–41, 272–74, fig. 1–3; A. Chilingirov, Ohridskata “Sveta Sofii͡a “ i neĭnata datirovka (Sofia, 2013), 87, 93, 122–49.

 

^[8] A. Wharton Epstein, “The Political Content of the Painting of Saint Sophia at Ohrid”, JÖB 29 (1980): 318–20.

 

^[9] V. J. Đurić, “Ravanički živopis i liturgija”, in Manastir Ravanica. Spomenica o šestoj stogodišnjici (1381‒1981), ed. Hrizostom, episkop braničevski et al. (Beograd, 1981), 53–56.

 

^[10] Though there is a moment in the liturgy, before Holy Communion, at which late-Byzantine liturgical sources do prescribe wrapping the orarion around the deacon’s shoulders and chest, this manner of clothing did not find a place in the iconography of Byzantine art; cf. W. T. Woodfin, The Embodied Icon: Liturgical Vestments and Sacramental Power in Byzantium (Oxford, 2012), 6–7. Nevertheless, even if this was the case, the irregularity of the way in which our curious white bands were wrapped around the infant Christ’s chest and shoulders, in the various examples that will be examined here, make it formally unlike the highly stable formulas for putting on the liturgical vestments (cf. below, especially n. 27; for the entire decoration of the Byzantine deacon, see Woodfin, The Embodied Icon, 5–9).

 

^[11] C. Walter, Art and Ritual of the Byzantine Church (London, 1982), 194 (especially n. 144).

 

^[12] Περὶ τοῦ ἁγίου ναοῦ καὶ τῆς τοῦτου καθιερώσεως, PG 155, 305A–362A; on St Symeon’s liturgical commentaries in their wider historical and ecclesiastical context, see S. Hawkes-Teeples, “Introduction”, in St. Symeon of Thessalonika, The Liturgical Commentaries, ed. S. Hawkes-Teeples (Toronto, 2011), 23–56.

 

^[13] А. M. Lidov, “Obraz „Khrista–arkhierei͡a“ v ikonograficheskoĭ programme Sofii okhridskoĭ,” Zograf 17 (1986): 6; cf. the whole passage in following note.

 

^[14] ‘Over these the white syndon is winded, prostrating from the shoulders to the feet, as the image/symbol of Christ’s burial syndon. Since he [bishop] has the intention to rise and consecrate the tomb of Christ, [which is] the holy altar-table, then he also imitates what pertains to the tomb, signifying Christ who is being buried. And he winds the syndon with three girdles, in honor of the Holy Trinity: [1] over the neck, as a sign of mindfulness and serving to God, [2] under armpits around the chest, for the reasonableness, and [3] around the loins, for purity and might – as for the Father, and the Logos, and the life-giving and purifying Spirit’. [Ἐπάνω δὲ τούτων περιβάλλεται ἀπὸ τῶν ῶμων σινδόνα λευκὴν, διήκουσαν ἅχρι τῶν ποδῶν, εὶσ τύπον τοῦ Χριστοῦ τῆς ἐπὶ τῷ τάφῳ σινδόνος. Ἐπεὶ γὰρ τὸ μνῆμα τοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐγεῖραι μέλλει καὶ ἀγιάσαι, τἠν ἰεράν φημι τράπεζαν, καὶ τἀ τοῦ μνήματος ὠς μιμούμενος τὸν Χριστὸν θαπτόμενον ἐκτυποῖ. Καὶ τρισὶ ζώναις περιζώννυται τὴν σινδόνα είς δόξαν τῆς Τριάδος· ὄπισθεν τοῦ αὐχένος, διά τε τὸν νοῦν καὶ τὴν τῆς δουλείας πρὸς θεὸν ἔνδειξιν, ὑπὸ τὰς μασχάλασ περὶ τὸ στῆθος, διὰ τὸ λογιστικόν · καὶ περὶ τὴν ὀσφὺν, διὰ τὸ καθαρόν τε καὶ ἰσχυρόν · καὶ τὸ μὲν τοῦ Πατρός, τὸ δὲ τοῦ Λόγου, τὸ δὲ τοῦ ζωοποιοῦ καὶ καθαροῦ Πνεύματος.] PG 155, 309B–309C; cf. the Russian translation of this passage, and the way author compares it with the image from the Ohrid Cathedral apse, in: Lidov, “Obraz „Khrista–arkhierei͡a“”, 6.

 

^[15] Lidov, “Obraz „Khrista–arkhierei͡a“”, 6.

 

^[16] Ibid.

 

^[17] Ibid.

 

^[18] Ibid., n. 9 [emphasis added].

 

^[19] It seems that Lidov himself was aware that without any positive explanation of this supposed high probability, his construct enters a vicious circle. Given that since the original article was published, an explanation obviously has not appeared and, consequently, Lidov has not been able to find any firm reason for admitting this hazardous methodological leap, in later editions of the same article, one published three years later and another almost three decades later, he simply erased the quoted additional explanation from the footnote. Cf. A. M. Lidov, “Obraz «Khrista-arhierei͡a» v ikonograficheskoĭ programme Sofii Ohridskoĭ,” in Vizantii͡a i Rusʹ, ed. G. E. Vagner (Moskva, 1989), n. 9; Lidov, “«Khristos, osvi͡ashchai͡ushchiĭ hram»”, 238, 272, n. 11 [the shortened French translation of the article, from 1991, does not contain notes, nor does it contain the named explanation in some other form: А Lidov, “L’image du Christ-Prelat dans le programme iconographique de Sainte Sophie d’Ohride”, Arte Cristiana 79.745 (1991): 245–50].

 

^[20] V. Permjakovs, “‘Make This the Place where Your Glory Dwells’: Origins and Evolution of the Byzantine Rite for the Consecration of a Church” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2012), 613–29.

 

^[21] Ibid., 619 [emphasis added]; cf. the original Greek text in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Coislin 213, fol. 9r, in the library’s digital archive: gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10038010r/f9.item [when a reliable English translation, such as the one quoted, is available, then, for the sake of textual economy, only those parts of the ancient texts which I deem essential to this study will be presented in the original language].

 

^[22] Permjakovs, “Make This the Place where Your Glory Dwells”, 620; Greek term corrected, from σάυανον to σαβανόν, on the basis of evidence from the Paris MS Coislin 213, fol. 10r (gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10038010r/f10.item).

 

^[23] Careful analysis of St Symeon’s text, together with analysis of the texts of earlier Byzantine Euchologia, undertaken in the recent study by Miodrag Marković, shows that Lidov’s hypothesis comes up against insurmountable problems at the level of the formal comparison between literary and pictorial sources; M. Marković, “The Virgin of Tenderness from Syracuse: Presentation and Iconographical Analysis of the Icon with Special Reference to the Belt with Straps of the Christ-Child”, in Erforschen–Erkennen–Weitergeben. Gewidmet dem Gedenken an Helmut Buschhausen, ed. H. Buschhausen and J. Prolović (Lohmar, 2021), 261–62. Although Marković does not take the cited eleventh-century manuscript into account, there is no need to explore whether this finding might contradict his comparative method: in further analysis I will try to move beyond the formal obstacles and show that Lidov’s interpretative proposal runs into the most substantial problems when it is examined against the backdrop of the wider liturgical, artistic, and social context.

 

^[24] Lidov, “Obraz „Khrista–arkhierei͡a“”, 17.

 

^[25] N. Chatzidakis, Hosios Loukas (Athens, 1997), 64–66.

 

^[26] See further examples in: H. C. Evans, ed., Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557) (New York, 2004), 162, 169, 172, 255; Baltoyianni, Icons, pl. 39–47, 79–86.

 

^[27] Cf. Houston, Ancient Greek, Roman and Byzantine Costume, 164–67; Walter, Art and Ritual of the Byzantine Church, 7–20; Woodfin, The Embodied Icon, 5–20.

 

^[28] See (with the earlier bibliography) B. Todić, “Arhiepiskop Lav – tvorac ikonografskog programa fresaka u Svetoj Sofiji Ohridskoj”, in Vizantijski svet na Balkanu, vol. 1, ed. B. Krsmanović, Lj. Maksimović, R. Radić (Beograd, 2012), 123–34.

 

^[29] On the exclusion of lay people from the consecration rite in the eleventh-century Euchologion, see n. 22 above; on the presence of same practice by the eighth century, see Permjakovs, “‘Make This the Place where Your Glory Dwells’”, 186, 200; on the same subject in St Symeon’s treatise, see in following note.

 

^[30] “Διατί ἐν τῆ καθιερώσει τοῦ ναοῦ εξάγονται οί λαῖκοί” PG 155, 309D; this is actually the PG title of St Symeon’s explanation (ibid., 309D–312A) which comes immediately after the passage Lidov used for his argumentation (itself titled: “Διατί ό ἀρχιερεὺς περιβάλλεται σινδόνα καὶ ζώννυται”; ibid., 309B; cf. n. 14 above).

 

^[31] In order to demonstrate the notoriety of this fact we can use writings of St Symeon of Thessalonica himself. Namely, one of his most important treatises, addressed entirely to the specified audience, the ‘pious men in Crete’, as the author calls them, is titled ‘Explanation of the Divine Temple’. In a lengthy subtitle author specifies the aim of the text more precisely: ‘An explanation composed by the most holy archbishop of Thessalonika Lord Symeon concerning the divine temple and what pertains to it, and also concerning the priests, deacons, and bishops, and the sacred vestments worn by each, as well as the divine mystagogy, giving an account of each of the rites divinely carried out”. St Symeon of Thessalonika, The Liturgical Commentaries, ed. trans. S. Hawkes-Teeples (Toronto, 2011), 81. A careful look at the structure of this text demonstrates that over the course of fifty-four pages of text in PG, which are divided in 110 sections by the contemporary English translator (‘for the sake of convenience in reference’; ibid., 66), only a single sentence mentions the consecration and anointment of the temple (ibid., 89), nine sections discuss the temple building itself, nineteen sections discuss the clergy and their apparel, while seventy-two discuss the pontifical eucharistic liturgy and its rites (ibid., 68–71). This clearly demonstrates that the ‘Divine Temple’ was to be explained primarily through the liturgy of the Eucharist, but not vice versa, and that the consecration of the church was very far from being a focus of Byzantine liturgical life or theory.

 

^[32] Walter, Art and Ritual of the Byzantine Church, 174–99.

 

^[33] Except for a few miniatures, which do not provide any firm reference point to discuss the existence of iconography of this rite; see ibid., 158–60.

 

^[34] As far as I know, Lidov himself never abandoned this hypothesis. Apart from the cited republished articles (see n. 19 above), the author employed this thesis in his later studies: A. M. Lidov, “Videnie Hrama i Grada. O ierusalimskoĭ simvolike skulʹpturnyh ikon na fasadah russkih hramov XII-XIII vekov, Cahiers du monde russe 53.2-3 (2012): n. 36; idem, The Wall Paintings of Akhtala Monastery. History, iconography, masters (Moscow, 2014), 390–91. As well as by the author himself, this hypothesis was held by reliable researchers from the younger generation, mostly from the Slavic-speaking areas: I. Sinkević, The Church of St. Panteleimon at Nerezi: Architecture, Programme, Patronage (Wiesbaden, 2000), 42, 49–50; S. N. Gukova, Sofii͡a Premudrostʹ Bozhii͡a (k novgorodskomu izvodu), Novgorodskiĭ istoricheskiĭ sbornik 9 (2003): 214; M. Tomić Djurić, “To picture and to perform. The image of the Eucharistic Liturgy at Markov Manastir, II,” Zograf 39 (2015): 135–36; A. Gavrilović, Crkva Bogorodice Odigitrije u Pećkoj patrijaršiji (Beograd, 2018), 139; A. A. Medynceva, “Risunki-graffiti Hrista-ierei͡a iz Novgorodskogo Sofiĭskogo sobora”, Кratkie soobshchenii͡a Instituta arheologii 249.2 (Moskva, 2017): 176–77.

 

^[35] Ch. Baltogianne, “Η Παναγία Γλυκοφιλούσα και το «Ανακλινόμενον Βρέφος» σε εικόνα της Συλλογής Λοβέρδου”, ΔΧΑΕ 16 (1991–1992): 235–36; cf. Baltoyianni, Icons, 82–83.

 

^[36] B. Todić, “Anapeson. Iconographie et signification du thème”, Byzantion 64.1 (1994): 154–55.

 

^[37] R. W. Corrie, “Coppo di Marcovaldo’s Madonna del bordone and the Meaning of the Bare-Legged Christ Child in Siena and the East”, Gesta 35.1 (1996): 51–52.

 

^[38] A. Sеmoglou, “Les images reliquaires de la Vierge de Sainte-Sophie d’Ohrid”, Annuaire de l’Université de Sofia “St. Kliment Ohridski” 94.13 (2004): 193.

 

^[39] Since this study was published at the time my own paper was already completed, and given it offers an essentially different answer to the problem, I have decided to retain my own polemical discussion with the earlier scholarship in those cases where it seemed most important to further my argument.

 

^[40] See in n. 23, above.

 

^[41] Marković, “The Virgin of Tenderness”, 268.

 

^[42] Ibid.

 

^[43] Ibid., 268–69.

 

^[44] A. Wasserstein and D. J. Wasserstein, The legend of the Septuagint: from classical antiquity to today (Cambridge, 2006), 13–15, 270–73; G. Dorival, The Septuagint from Alexandria to Constantinople: Canon, New Testament, Church Fathers, Catenae (Oxford, 2021), 95–116.

 

^[45] For obvious reasons (cf. previous note), the English translation of the Septuagint has been used rather than standard translations of the Old Testament in this study: A. Pietersma and B. G. Wright, eds., A New English Translation of the Septuagint (New York, 2007); cf. Greek text in Septuaginta: id est Vetus Testamentum Graece iuxta LXX interpretes, ed. Alfred Rahlfs (Stuttgart, 1935). On the raiment of the Jewish High Priest in its original biblical and historical context, see: C. Palmer, “Israelite high priestly apparel: embodying an identity between human and divine”, in Fashioned Selves: Dress and Identity in Antiquity, ed. M. Cifarelli (Oxford, 2019), 121–23; A. Edersheim, The Temple: Its Ministry and Services (Peabody, MA, 1994), 67–70; M. Barker, The Gate of Heaven: The History and Symbolism of the Temple in Jerusalem (London, 1991), 111–14.

 

^[46] St Symeon of Thessalonika, On the Sacred Liturgy, in idem, The Liturgical Commentaries, ed. trans. S. Hawkes-Teeples (Toronto, 2011), 176–77, 182–83.

 

^[47] St Germanus of Constantinople, On the Divine Liturgy, ed. trans. P. Meyendorff (Crestwood, NY, 1984), 68–69; on the history of the text (and its interpolations), see P. Meyendorff, “Introduction”, in ibid., 11–14.

 

^[48] L. Pavlović, “Ikonografska epigrafika kod proroka,” Zbornik Matice srpske za likovne umetnosti 20 (1984): 3–46.

 

^[49] In the Conclusion to her study of this iconographic field, Elisabeth Revel-Neher concludes, ‘in the area of pure iconography, Byzantium was always closer to the texts’, and ‘the living tradition of the Old Testament manifested in the Jewish people and its existence in the Byzantine world favored the maintenance of the relationship between the word and the image’; E. Revel-Neher, The Image of the Jew in Byzantine Art (Oxford, 1992), 112. After all, even though during the Middle Ages the position of Jews was often better in the East than in the West of Europe, this still does not mean that religious communication was unconstrained and encouraged. Moreover, the canons of the Quinisext Council (in Trullo) of 692 ‘forbade Christians to visit Jews, to bathe at the same time as them in the public baths, to accept any medical attention from them or to be treated by a Jewish doctor. These were canonical decrees with a clearly segregationalist intention: Jewish practices which persisted, despite all the Church’s efforts, could now only be prevented by keeping the Jewish community, the source of danger, away from any form of contact, even social, with the Christians’. (ibid., 32–33) Accordingly, the state of affairs in this sort of ‘interreligious dialogue’ in the period prior to the painting of Ohrid Cathedral can be illustrated by the following event: ‘In Sparta in about 985, Nikon Metanoites received a delegation which asked him to produce a miracle to stop the plague which was devastating the town. As a condition, he asked for the expulsion of the town’s Jews so that the population would no longer be “contaminated by their disgusting practices and the pollution of their religion.” Byzantium speaks here in terms which will be, from the fourteenth century in the West, exactly those used in the myth of the Jews as spreaders of the plague’. (ibid., 35.)

 

^[50] Marković, “The Virgin of Tenderness”, 270, pl. XXXIX, fig. 33.

 

^[51] D. Winfield and J. Winfield, The church of the Panaghia tou Arakos at Lagoudhera, Cyprus: The Paintings and Their Painterly Significance (Washington, DC, 2003), 184, pl. 25.

 

^[52] B. Todić and M. Čanak-Medić, Manastir Dečani (Beograd, 2005), 395; B. V. Popović, “Program živopisa u oltarskom prostoru,” in Mural painting of Monastery of Dečani – material and studies, ed. V. J. Djurić (Belgrade, 1995), 78, drawing I, 7.

 

^[53] In addition to the bibliography under n. 48, see Revel-Neher, The Image of the Jew in Byzantine Art, 58–71; D. Vojvodić, “O likovima starozavetnih prvosveštenika u vizantijskom zidnom slikarstvu s kraja XIII veka”, ZRVI 37 (1998): 121–53.

 

^[54] See: G. R. Parpulov, Toward a History of Byzantine Psalters ca. 850–1350 AD (Plovdiv, 2014), 69–75; F. L. Horton, The Melchizedek Tradition: A Critical Examination of the Sources to the Fifth Century A.D. and in the Epistle to the Hebrews (Cambridge, 1976), 87–114, 152–72; S. Ubiparipović, “Poslanica Jevrejima u bogosluženju Pravoslavne Crkve”, Srpska teologija u dvadesetom veku 16 (Beograd, 2014): 37–48.

 

^[55] J. Miller, “The Prophetologion: The Old Testament of Byzantine Christianity?” in The Old Testament in Byzantium, ed. P. Magdalino and R. Nelson (Washington, D.C., 2010), 60–66.

 

^[56] The monumental and comprehensive critical edition based on numerous manuscripts of this tradition that was compiled by Engberg, Høeg, and Zuntz, does not mention in its Index Locorum the twenty-eighth chapter of Exodus at all; S. Engberg, C. Høeg, and G. Zuntz, eds., Prophetologium, Monumenta Musicae Byzantinae, vol. 1 [in 6 fascicles] (Copenhagen, 1939–1970), 605–9. An additional aspect of this same problem is the question of the real presence of the Prophetologium as part of folk piety, since the extent of the presence of readings from the Old Testament in Byzantine liturgy is yet to be theoretically clarified (cf. n. 148 below).

 

^[57] C. Mango, “Discontinuity with the Classical Past in Byzantium”, in Byzantium and the Classical Tradition, ed. M. Mullett and R. Scott (Birmingham, 1981), 50; cf. R. Browning, “Literacy in the Byzantine World”, BMGS 4 (1978): 39–54; Miller, “The Prophetologion”, 57–58. Of course, when I say that the highly educated could read the Old Testament the way we read it today, this is sooner a metaphor. Almost no one could do this prior to Gutenberg, since integral manuscripts of the Septuagint were extremely rare (ibid., 58, n. 3).

 

^[58] Much has been written about this inspiring and meaningful image; cf. for example: S. Radojčić, “Prilozi za istoriju najstarijeg ohridskog slikarstva”, ZRVI 8.2 (1964): 359–60; A. Grabar, “Les peintures murales dans le choeur de Sainte-Sophie d’Ochrid”, CahArch 15 (1965): 259–60; A. Lidov, “Byzantine Church Decoration and the Great Schism of 1054”, Byzantion 68.2 (1998): 383–85; Walter, Art and Ritual of the Byzantine Church, 193–96; Todić, “Arhiepiskop Lav,” 123–34 (with a comprehensive overview of the earlier bibliography at n. 39–40); A. Kriza, “The Life-Giving Body of Christ: The Leaven Debate and Byzantine Sanctuary Decoration”, in Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress of Byzantine Studies, ed. D. Dželebdžić and S. Bojanin (Belgrade, 2016), 743–44.

 

^[59] See the fifth chapter: The Third Garment Re-swaddled: On Christ’s Priesthood from the Obverse Perspective.

 

^[60] Walter, Art and Ritual of the Byzantine Church, 239–49.

 

^[61] Todić, “Anapeson”, 154.

 

^[62] PG 155, 309B; see the translation of the whole passage and the original Greek text, at n. 14 above.

 

^[63] On the use of this term in the New Testament context, see the beginning of chapter four (n. 143–46).

 

^[64] Winfield and Winfield, The church of the Panaghia tou Arakos, 244–49; A. Nicolaïdès, “L’église de la Panagia Arakiotissa àLagoudéra, Chypre: Etude iconographique des fresques de1192”, DOP 50 (1996): 109–11; A. Stylianou and J. Stylianou, The Painted Churches of Cyprus (Nicosia, 1997), 178–80; M. J. Milliner, “The Virgin of the Passion: Development, Dissemination, and Afterlife of a Byzantine Icon Type” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2011), 32–40, 84–85, 108–13; C. Baltoyianni, “Christ the Lamb and the ἐνώτιον of the Law in a Wall Painting of Araka on Cyprus”, ΔΧΑΕ 17 (1993–1994): 53–58; S. Ratseva, “The Virgin of the Passion: Origin and Semantics in the context of Medieval Image Tradition”, Art Studies Quarterly 3.37 (Sofia, 2004): 10–14, 64; H. Belting, The Image and its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion (New Rochelle, 1990), 116–19.

 

^[65] Winfield and Winfield, The church of the Panaghia tou Arakos, 244–49; Stylianou and Stylianou, The Painted Churches of Cyprus, 166–67; Milliner, “The Virgin of the Passion”, 84–85.

 

^[66] Winfield and Winfield call this white band a ‘stole’: The church of the Panaghia tou Arakos, 248.

 

^[67] Lidov not only tries to identify Christ in the Arakiotissa fresco-icon as a ‘bishop, establishing and consecrating the temple of new faith’ (Lidov, ‘Obraz „Khrista–arkhierei͡a’, 15), but applies the same concept of ‘Christ-the-bishop, consecrating the Church’ to numerous portable icons from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (ibid., 17), which cannot be definitely connected to any actual church altar, or even to the actual church building itself.

 

^[68] Cf. H. Maguire, “The iconography of Symeon with the Christ child in Byzantine art”, DOP 34–35 (1980–1981): 263; L. Hadermann-Misguich, “Aspects de l’ambiguïté spatiale dans la peinture monumentale byzantine”, Zograf 22 (1992): 8; Baltoyianni, “Christ the Lamb”, 53–54; Nicolaïdès, “L’église de la Panagia Arakiotissa”, 79–83; Winfield and Winfield, The church of the Panaghia tou Arakos, 192–93, 244–49.

 

^[69] Winfield and Winfield, The church of the Panaghia tou Arakos, 193–94, fig. 282. [Here and elsewhere in the present study, the NKJV translation of the New Testament was used.]

 

^[70] On the Presentation of Christ to the Temple iconography, in general terms, see: D. C. Shorr, “The iconographic development of the Presentation in the temple”, The Art Bulletin 28.1 (1946): 17–32; Ι. Sinkević, “Changes in the composition of the Presentation of Christ in the temple in Palaeologan times”, Kulturno nasledstvo 28-29 (Skopje, 2002-2003): 33–38. About this subject in sacrificial context, cf. Baltoyianni, “Christ the Lamb”, 53–58; Maguire, “The Iconography of Symeon”, 264–69.

 

^[71] Marković, “The Virgin of Tenderness”, 271, fig. 22; Il Menologio di Basilio II (Cod. Vaticano Greco 1613), 1: Testo (Torino, 1907), 78–79; El “Menologio” de Basilio II Emperador de Bizancio: Vat gr 1613 (Madrid, 2005), fol. 287.

 

^[72] A. S. Jacobs, “Blood will Out: Jesus’ Circumcision and Early Christian Readings of Exodus 4:24–26”, Henoch 30.2 (2008): 311–332; idem, “Dialogic Differences: (De-)Judaizing Jesus’ Circumcision”, JECS 15 (2007): 291–335; L. B. Glick, Marked in your Flesh: Circumcision from Ancient Judea to Modern America (Oxford, 2005), 93–96.

 

^[73] E. Kitzinger, “The Mosaics of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo: An Essay on the Choice and Arrangement of Subjects”, The Art Bulletin 31.4 (1949): 275, n. 36; L. Ross, Medieval art: A Topical Dictionary (Westport, CT, 1996), 51.

 

^[74] The bipartite spatial distribution of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple compositions and attempts at its indirect programmatic association with the sanctuary space first appeared in the mosaic ensembles of the Palatine Chapel and Martorana, in Sicily. Somewhat later, in the second half of the twelfth century, in two Russian fresco ensembles of the period—the Savior-Transfiguration Church of the St. Euphrosyne Monastery, Polotsk, and the Church of St. Cyril, Kiev—a bipartite Presentation composition flanked the apsidal conch and was unambiguously linked to this space. Later on, this scheme was slightly adjusted in the unrivalled pictorial/spatial arrangement at Lagoudera (fig. 6), and again masterfully applied at the beginning of thirteenth century on the east front wall along the apse of the Church of the Mother of God, Studenica (Serbia). Later, we find reinterpretations of the same programmatic/iconographic idea in the triumphal arches of two Serbian churches from Palaeologan period: the St Achileos church, Arilje (late-thirteenth century) and Sts Joachim and Anna church, Studenica (early fourteenth century). For detailed discussion of this subject see: T. Mitrović, “Iz majčinog naručja na časnu trpezu. O uticaju ikonografije Sretenja na programski razvoj oltarskog slikarstva vizantijskih crkava”, Zograf 43 (2019): 57–74; cf. related thoughts on Presentation of Christ in the Temple iconography, in: M. Constas, “‘Veil of Flesh, Well of Living Water’: The Paradoxes of the Annunciation”, in idem, The Art of Seeing: Paradox and Perception in Orthodox Iconography (Alhambra, CA, 2014), 102–5; A. Weyl Carr, “The Presentation of an Icon at Mount Sinai”, ΔΧΑΕ 17 (1993–1994): 239–48.

 

^[75] S. M. Pelekanidis, et al., The Treasures of Mount Athos: Illuminated Manuscripts: Miniatures – Headpieces – Initial Letters, vol. 1 (Athens, 1974), 208, 444, fig. 260; Kitzinger, “The mosaics of the Cappella Palatina”, 281–82; for Lagoudera, see n. 68, above.

 

^[76] Sinkević, “The Church of St. Panteleimon at Nerezi”, 49–50; E. Kitzinger, Mosaici di Monreale (Palermo, 1960), fig. 4, pl. 102; S. Boyd, et al., “The Church of the Panagia Amasgou, Monagri, Cyprus, and Its Wall paintings”, DOP 28 (1974): 294–96, pl. C.

 

^[77] On this image of the Presentation, see the reference in the previous note; on the date of the church see Boyd, et al., “The Church of the Panagia Amasgou”, 316–23.

 

^[78] Ibid., 295–96, 330–43.

 

^[79] St Germanus of Constantinople, On the Divine Liturgy, 82–85.

 

^[80] Sinkević, The Church of St. Panteleimon at Nerezi, 49–50, fig. 37; D. Bardzieva Trajkovska, St. Panteleimon at Nerezi: Fresco Painting (Skopje, 2004), 73–74, fig. 54–55; V. J. Djurić, Sopoćani (Beograd, 1963), 54, pl. XII; E. Tsigaridas, Μανουήλ Πανσέληνος Εκ του Ιερού Ναού του Πρωτάτου (Thessaloniki, 2008), 108–11, fig. 4–5.

 

^[81] See: N. Patterson Ševčenko, “Christ Anapeson”, ODB 1:439; D. I. Pallas, Die Passion und Bestattung Christi in Byzanz: Der Ritus – das Bild (München, 1965), 181–96; Todić, “Anapeson”, 134–65; Belting, The Image and its Public, 104; Baltoyianni, Icons, 82–83.

 

^[82] Physiologus, trans. M. J. Curley (Chicago, 1979), 3–4.

 

^[83] Ibid., 4.

 

^[84] Cf. R. Ward, “Bestiaries, Aviaries, Physiologus”, in Handbook of Medieval Studies: Terms–Methods–Trends, ed. A. Classen (Berlin, 2010), 1635–37; M. J. Curley, “‘Physiologus,’ Φυσιολογία and the Rise of Christian Nature Symbolism”, Viator 11 (1980): 1–10; Todić, “Anapeson”, 140–55; N. Constas, “‘To Sleep, Perchance to Dream’: The Middle State of Souls in Patristic and Byzantine Literature”, DOP 55 (2001): 104–5.

 

^[85] Belting, The Image and its Public, 118 [emphasis added]. Although Belting’s study and earlier research by Demetrius Pallas on the imagery of the Passion of Christ do place a stronger emphasis on this semantic aspect of the iconography of the Anapeson, in one way or another all the research referred to in n. 81 above would probably support the conclusion in question.

 

^[86] C. McNelly Kearns, The Virgin Mary, Monotheism, and Sacrifice (Cambridge, 2008), 271–75; S. J. Shoemaker, “A Mother’s passion: Mary at the Crucifixion and Resurrection in the earliest Life of the Virgin and its influence on George of Nikomedeia’s Passion homilies”, in The cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium: Texts and images, ed. L. Brubaker and M. B. Cunningham (Farnham, 2011), 53–67. For the subject of Christ’s kenosis, see bibliography in n. 98 below.

 

^[87] C. Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton, 2002), 131–137; idem, “The body within the frame: A use of word and image in iconoclasm”, Word & Image 9.2 (1993): 143–53; I thoroughly discuss this subject, with arguments particularly relevant for the subject of the following discussion, in: Mitrović, “Iz majčinog naručja na časnu trpezu”, 46–53.

 

^[88] Cf. J. R. Martin, “The Dead Christ on the Cross in Byzantine Art”, in Late Classical and Mediaeval Studies in Honor of Albert Mathias Friend, Jr, ed. K. Weitzmann (Princeton, 1955), 189–96; V. N. Lazarev, “Sistema zhivopisnoĭ dekoracii vizantiĭskogo hrama IX-XI vekov”, in idem, Vizantiĭskai͡a zhivopisʹ (Moskva, 1971), 96–97; H. Maguire, “The Depiction of Sorrow in Middle Byzantine Art”, DOP (1977): 31, 161–66; R. Viladesau, The Beauty of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts, from the Catacombs to the Eve of the Renaissance (Oxford, 2006), 48–55; V. D. Sarabʹi͡anov, “Strastnoĭ cikl Sofii kievskoĭ i ikonografii͡a Strasteĭ Gospodnih v vizantiĭskom iskusstve ІХ–ХІ vv.”, VizVrem 69 (2010): 279–98; R. M. Jensen, The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy (Cambridge, MA, 2017), 150–68.

 

^[89] N. Tsironis, “From Poetry to Liturgy: The Cult of the Virgin in the Middle Byzantine era”, in Images of the Mother of God: Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium, ed. M. Vassilaki (London, 2016), 92–95; M. Vassilaki and N. Tsironis, “Representations of the Virgin and their association with the Passion of Christ”, in Mother of God: Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art, ed. M. Vassilaki (Athens, 2000), 456–61.

 

^[90] See below, together with bibliography in n. 91–92.

 

^[91] H. Maguire, Art and Еloquence in Byzantium (Princeton, 1981), 96–101; H. Belting, “An image and its function in the liturgy: The Man of Sorrows in Byzantium”, DOP 34 (1980–1981): 2–15; N. P. Ševčenko, “The service of the Virgin’s Lament revisited”, in The cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium: Texts and images, ed. L. Brubaker and M. B. Cunningham (Farnham, 2011), 247–62.

 

^[92] Quoted from: Maguire, Art and Еloquence, 100–101 [cf. Greek text in ibid., n. 74, 75; or, integrally, in S. Gassisi, “Un’ ufficiatura perduta del Venerdi santo”, Roma e l’Oriente 5 (1913): 309, 312]; cf. also, H. Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago, 1994), 285.

 

^[93] Cf. in n. 91 above.

 

^[94] This mainly pertains to the famous kenotic “Christological hymn” from the Epistle to the Philippians (see below, especially in n. 98).

 

^[95] Here and elsewhere in this study, Greek keywords are inserted in New Testament quotes from: Byzantine Greek New Testament (Kʳ/family 35 textform), compiled and arranged by: The Center for the Study and Preservation of the Majority Text (Rockville, 2014). On the kenotic charge of the quoted verses, in widest interpretative context, see n. 98.

 

^[96] On the way in which this term is used in the New Testament text see the beginning of chapter four (n. 201–4).

 

^[97] See n. 129 below.

 

^[98] Although the subject of the kenosis (κένωσις = self-emptying) of God does not belong in a list of the most popular theological concepts of mediaeval Christianity, kenotic theology/Christology was a consistent presence in the Church from New Testament times, in the famous Christological hymn from Paul’s Epistle to Philippians [2:5–11]. The images of the Son of God, who ‘made Himself of no reputation [ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν], taking the form of a bondservant [μορφὴν δούλου λαβών], and coming in the likeness of men” and after this “humbled Himself [ἐταπείνωσεν ἑαυτὸν] and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross’ [Phil. 2:7–8] were—with greater or lesser enthusiasm—re-activated or de-activated throughout Christian history, but were never forgotten. Among the ancient authors whose opinion might be relevant to the historical context of our study, St Cyril of Alexandria stands out as the most authoritative proponent of kenotic imagery; after the outbreak of the Nestorian controversy, he famously argued that ‘the discussion of the kenosis [ὁ περὶ τῆς κενώσεως λόγος] must precede other topics’ and later used the kenotic formula from Philippians (‘ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν’) to interpret no less than the second article of the Creed; P. L. Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (Oxford, 2005), 150–51 [cf. Greek text in PG 9, 1341B]. Notably, the concept of kenosis has started to gain huge attention in recent theory, and it seems that such an attention has something to do with the so-called ‘religious turn’ in contemporary philosophy. Presenting only the current research (from the third millennium) is sufficient to illustrate this tendency. Thus, for the subject of kenosis in New Testament context, see: G. D. Fee, “The New Testament and Kenosis Christology”, in Exploring Kenotic Christology: The Self-Emptying of God, ed. C. S. Evans (Oxford, 2006), 25–44; R. P. Martin, Carmen Christi: Philippians ii. 5–11 in Recent Interpretation and in the Setting of Early Christian Worship (Cambridge, 2005), 165–96; for the same subject in a patristic context, see Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God, 135–71; for the same subject in wider historical context, see P. J. Colyer, The Self-emptying God: An Undercurrent in Christian Theology Helping the Relationship with Science (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2013), 29–131; for the same subject in wider theological context, see D. T. Williams, The Kenōsis of God: The self-limitation of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (New York, 2009), 41–49; for the same subject in a (contemporary) orthodox theological context, see N. V. Sakharov, I Love therefore I am; The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony (Crestwood, NY, 2002), 93–115; for the subject of kenosis in contemporary philosophical context, cf. L. D’Isanto, “Kenosis of the Subject and the Advent of Being in Mystic Experience”, Qui Parle 17.1 (2008): 147–73; R. D. N. van Riessen, Man As A Place of God: Levinas’ Hermeneutics of Kenosis (Dordrecht, 2007), 173–205.

 

^[99] Stylianou and Stylianou, The Painted Churches of Cyprus, 54–59.

 

^[100] Ibid., 55; I have used the title Embalmment of Christ based on Stylianou(s)’s identification, although what can be seen of the original scene belongs to the iconography more typically designated by the phrases Entombment and Lament (=Threnos); see the following note.

 

^[101] On the interconnected history of iconographies of the Lament and Entombment, see: K. Weitzmann, “The Origin of the Threnos”, in De artibus opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, ed. M. Meiss (New York, 1961), 476–90; M. Sotiriou, “Ενταφιασμός – Θρήνος”, ΔΧΑΕ 7 (1973–1974): 139–48; I. Spatharakis, “The Influence of the Lithos in the Development of the Iconography of the Threnos”, in Byzantine East, Latin West: Art – Historical Studies in Honour of Kurt Weitzmann, ed. C. F. Moss and K. Kiefer (Princeton, 1995), 435–46.

 

^[102] Maguire, “The Depiction of Sorrow”, fig. 38, 77; Weitzmann, “The Origin of the Threnos”, fig. 11, 16.

 

^[103] Stylianou and Stylianou, The Painted Churches of Cyprus, 59–62.

 

^[104] Such an atypical form is probably why Osterhout had no qualms in stating in passing that the Christ child ‘is dressed in priest’s costume’ in this fresco; R. Osterhout, A Byzantine Settlement in Cappadocia (Washington, DC, 2005), 36, fig. 4, 57.

 

^[105] In addition to the reference from the previous note, see: N. Thierry, “Études cappadociennes Région de Hasan Dagi; Compléménts pour 1974”, CahArch 24 (1975): 189; Lidov, “Obraz „Khrista–arkhierei͡a“”, 14–15; Marković, “The Virgin of Tenderness”, 271.

 

^[106] Osterhout, A Byzantine Settlement in Cappadocia, 61–76.

 

^[107] See the discussion above, followed by n. 78–79.

 

^[108] Maguire, “The Depiction of Sorrow”, 125–74; Sinkević, The Church of St. Panteleimon at Nerezi, 57–58.

 

^[109] Baltoyianni, Icons, 171–73; Milliner, “The Virgin of the Passion”, 91–92.

 

^[110] Cf. the examples of the Virgin of the Passion icons provided by the third garment in: Baltoyianni, Icons, pl. 87–95; on the presence of this motif within the iconography of the Presentation, see the discussion above (followed by n. 68–80).

 

^[111] G. P. Bickford, et al., eds., Handbook of The Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, 1978), 62 (cf. also, presentation at: www.clevelandart.org/art/1966.237).

 

^[112] A. Weyl Carr, et al., Asinou across Time: Studies in the Architecture and Murals of the Panagia Phorbiotissa, Cyprus (Washington, DC, 2012), 260–63, fig. 6.35, 6.37; Stylianou and Stylianou, The Painted Churches of Cyprus, 121–22.

 

^[113] Stylianou and Stylianou, The Painted Churches of Cyprus, 122; on Byzantine funerary practices in the archaeological context see n. 199 and 206, below.

 

^[114] On Dormition/Koimesis iconography, see: R. F. Taft and A. Weyl Carr, “Dormition (Κοίμησις)”, ODB 1:652–53; E. Jones, “The Iconography of the Falling Asleep of Mother of God in Byzantine Tradition”, EChQ 9 (1951): 101–112; A. Davidov-Temerinski, “Ciklus Uspenja Bogorodice”, in Mural painting of Monastery of Dečani – material and studies, ed. V. J. Djurić (Belgrade, 1995), 181–82. On the motive of the Theotokos’ soul, see Maguire, Art and Еloquence, 59–68.

 

^[115] D. Mouriki, “Icons From the 12th to the 15th Century”, in Sinai: Treasures of the Monastery of Saint Catherine, ed. K. A. Manafis (Athens, 1990), 105–8, fig. 28.

 

^[116] Maguire, Art and Еloquence, 103–5.

 

^[117] C. Grozdanov, Kurbinovo, and Other Studies on Prespa (Skopje, 2015), 212, 218; C. Grozdanov and L. Hadermann-Misguich, Kurbinovo (Skopje, 1992), 46, fig. 51; L. Hadermann-Misguich, Kurbinovo: Les fresques de Saint-Georges et la peinture byzantine du XIIe siècle (Brussels, 1975), 147–52.

 

^[118] Grozdanov, Kurbinovo, 213–14, 220–21; Grozdanov and Hadermann-Misguich, Kurbinovo, 46, 57, fig. 52; Hadermann-Misguich, Kurbinovo, 152–55.

 

^[119] Grozdanov, Kurbinovo, 215–16, 222–23; Grozdanov and Hadermann-Misguich, Kurbinovo, 46–47, 57, fig. 52–53; Hadermann-Misguich, Kurbinovo, 155–58.

 

^[120] Grozdanov, Kurbinovo, 224; Grozdanov and Hadermann-Misguich, Kurbinovo, 47, fig. 54; Hadermann-Misguich, Kurbinovo, 158–62.

 

^[121] Grozdanov, Kurbinovo, 126–35, 182–93; Grozdanov and Hadermann-Misguich, Kurbinovo, 42–48, 53–56, fig. 4–7, 33–37; Hadermann-Misguich, Kurbinovo, 53–67, 94–109.

 

^[122] Grozdanov, Kurbinovo, 194; Grozdanov and Hadermann-Misguich, Kurbinovo, 42–43, 55, fig. 38; Hadermann-Misguich, Kurbinovo, 109–118.

 

^[123] Although Bible does not speak of St Symeon as a priest, from the Protoevangelium of James onward he will be represented as a rule—in literature and later the visual arts—as a high-priestly figure; see: McNelly Kearns, The Virgin Mary, Monotheism, and Sacrifice, 245–46; Constas, “‘Veil of Flesh, Well of Living Water’”, 103; Shorr, “The iconographic development of the Presentation in the temple”, 17–21.

 

^[124] Grozdanov, Kurbinovo, 198; Grozdanov and Hadermann-Misguich, Kurbinovo, 43, 56–57, fig. 40; Hadermann-Misguich, Kurbinovo, 118–22.

 

^[125] On Presentation to the Temple iconography see in n. 70 above.

 

^[126] Grozdanov, Kurbinovo, 202–5; Grozdanov and Hadermann-Misguich, Kurbinovo, 43, fig. 42; Hadermann-Misguich, Kurbinovo, 130–35.

 

^[127] Grozdanov, Kurbinovo, 234–37; Grozdanov and Hadermann-Misguich, Kurbinovo, 44, 59–60, fig. 46–47; Hadermann-Misguich, Kurbinovo, 181–86.

 

^[128] Cf. B. E. Daley, “‘At the Hour of our Death’: Mary’s Dormition and Christian Dying in Late Patristic and Early Byzantine Literature”, DOP 55 (2001): 71–89; S. P. Panagopoulos, “The Byzantine Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption”, in StP, vol. 56, ed. M. Vinzent (Leuven, 2013), 343–50; S. J. Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption (Oxford, 2006), 25–77.

 

^[129] A. M. Lidov, “Cerkovʹ Bogomateri Farosskoĭ: Imperatorskiĭ hram-relikvariĭ kak konstantinopolʹskiĭ Grob Gospodenʹ”, in idem, Ierotopii͡a: Prostranstvennye ikony i obrazy-paradigmy v vizantiĭskoĭ kulʹture (Moskva, 2009), 95–96; N. P. Ševčenko, “The Limburg Staurothek and Its Relics”, in eadem, The Celebration of the Saints in Byzantine Art and Liturgy, Bookset Part 16 (Adershot, 2013), 6, n. 12.

 

^[130] J. Wortley, “The Marian Relics at Constantinople”, GRBS 45 (2005): 172; Ševčenko, “The Limburg Staurothek”, 5–6.

 

^[131] The full inscriptions on the caskets of the reliquary are as follows: Ἡ σινδὼν τοῦ ἀθανάτου Χ(ριστο)ῦ καὶ Θ(εο)ῦ and Τὰ σπάργανα Ἰ(ησο)ῦ Χ(ριστο)ῦ τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ Θ(εο)ῦ; A. Boeckh, ed., Corpus inscriptionum graecarum, vol. 4 (Berlin, 1877), 323.

 

^[132] E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols (London, 1971), 22, 183; C. Riggs, Unwrapping Ancient Egypt: The Shroud, the Secret and the Sacred (London, 2014), 96–98.

 

^[133] On swaddling customs in Antiquity, see: M. Harlow and R. Laurence, Growing Up and Growing Old in Ancient Rome: A life course approach (London, 2002), 42–43; V. Dasen, “Childbirth and Infancy in Greek and Roman Antiquity”, in A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds, ed. B. Rawson (Chichester, 2011), 302–3.

 

^[134] W. V. Harris, “The Roman father’s power of life and death”, in Studies in Roman Law in Memory of A. Arthur Schiller, ed. R. S. Bagnall and W. V. Harris (Leiden, 1986), 81–95.

 

^[135] On Byzantine mediaeval swaddling customs, see: A. Moffatt, “The Byzantine Child”, Social Research 53.4 (1986): 718; O.-M. Cojocaru, Byzantine Childhood: Representations and Experiences of Children in Middle Byzantine Society (London, 2022), 72; P. B. Newman, Growing up in the Middle Ages (Jefferson, NC, 2007), 62–66.

 

^[136] Cf. S. Wells, God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics (Oxford, 2006), 210.

 

^[137] The image of the Incarnation as the clothing of Logos in human nature, or His clothing in a human body, was a widely used, biblically grounded, metaphorical tool in Byzantine theology, as well as Christian theology in general. On this kind of imagery in a biblical context, see: M. Barker, The Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian Liturgy (London, 2003), 202–3; J. H. Kim, The Significance of Clothing Imagery in the Pauline Corpus (London, 2004), 224–26; D. Belnap, “Clothed with Salvation: The Garden, the Veil, Tabitha, and Christ,” Studies in the Bible and Antiquity 4 (2012): 43–69. On clothing in human body metaphoric in patristic context, cf. H. Hunt, “‘Clothed in the body’: the Garment of Flesh and the Garment of Glory in Syrian Religious Anthropology”, StP, vol. 64 (Leuven, 2013): 167–76; S. Brock, “Clothing metaphors as a means of theological expression in Syriac tradition”, in Typus, Symbol, Allegorie bei den östlichen Vätern und ihren Parallelen im Mittelalter, ed. M. Schmidt (Regensburg, 1982), 15–21; S. Brock, “The Robe of Glory: A Biblical Image in the Syriac Tradition”, The Way 39.3 (1999): 247–59; N. Constas, “Weaving the body of God: Proclus of Constantinople, the Theotokos and the loom of the flesh”, JECS 3.2 (1995): 169–94.

 

^[138] Saint John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis, 18–45, trans. R. C. Hill (Washington, DC, 1990), 102 [emphasis added]; cf. integral Greek text in PG 53, 205.

 

^[139] Quoted after: Brock, “Clothing metaphors”, 13 [emphasis added].

 

^[140] Gregory Nazianzen, Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning: The Five Theological Orations of Gregory Nazianzen, trans. L. Wickham and F. Williams (Leiden, 1991), 258 [Grégoire de Nazianze, Discours 27-31 (Discours théologiques), SC 250, ed. (trans.) P. Gallay, M. Jourjon (Paris, 1978), 218; emphasis added; cf. PG 36, 100b].

 

^[141] Cf. N. Constas, “Death and Dying in Byzantium”, in Byzantine Christianity, A People’s History of Christianity 4, ed. D. Krueger (Minneapolis, 2006), 12. See detailed discussion on St Gregory’s quote in next chapter (followed by n. 213–18).

 

^[142] Quoted from: H. Maguire, “The Art of Comparing in Byzantium”, The Art Bulletin 70.1 (1988): 101; cf. the Greek text in PG 97, 989A (on the different Greek terms for grave clothes, see below, at the beginning of the following chapter, especially in n. 201–4).

 

^[143] Even more than this, the aforementioned verse of St Gregory the Theologian (n. 140) demonstrates that semantic symmetry gradually entered the language itself, so the term spargana could have been used to denote the grave clothes without any need for additional explanation; see G. W. H. Lampe, ed., A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford, 1961), 1247. Cf. also, in following example: ‘And they were bidden to free the bound corpse from its bandages [ἐσπαργανηωμένον]. Further, the friends who had [previously] carried him out for burial realized that it was really Lazarus himself, because they recognized the bandages [σπαργάνων]’. Saint John Chrysostom, Commentary on Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist, Homilies 48–88, trans. S. T. A. Goggin (Washington, DC, 2000), 184 [emphasis added]; cf. integral Greek text in PG 59, 351.

 

^[144] See n. 92.

 

^[145] E. N. Tsigaridas, “Les peintures murales de l’Ancienne Métropole de Veria”, in Mileševa dans l’histoire du peuple serbe, ed. V. J. Djurić (Beograd, 1987), 94, fig. 5, 18. Cf. similarly ornamented bands on Entombment of Christ from the same church, in: ibid., 96–97, fig. 12, 19; Th. Papazotos, Ἡ Βέροια καὶ οἱ ναοί της (11ος–18ος αἰ.) (Athina, 1994), pl. 2, 37 (on dating of those frescoes, see ibid., 242–49). The reasons why the white band from the Lagoudera Nativity composition is not itself decorated with dotted/floral patterns will be discussed below, at the beginning of fifth chapter.

 

^[146] Heretofore, this seems to be the earliest known representation of the Christ in a short tunic; cf. P. Miljković-Pepek, “La fresque de la Vièrge avec le Christ du pilier situé au nord de l’iconostase de Sainte Sophie à Ohrid”, in Akten des XI. Internationalen Byzantinistenkongresses (1958), ed. F. Dölger and H.-G. Beck (München, 1960), 388–91, pl. LVI. LVII; Lidov, “«Khristos, osvi͡ashchai͡ushchiĭ hram»”, 246–50, fig. 8.

 

^[147] Baltoyianni, “Christ the Lamb”, 53–58; cf. additionally Corrie, “Coppo di Marcovaldo’s Madonna,” 45–52.

 

^[148] The problem with the arguments put forward by Baltoyianni is similar to the problems faced by Lidov’s and Marković’s research into the third garment of the infant Christ. Namely, she grounds the sacrificial associations in the general typology connecting Christ with the Paschal sacrificial Lamb and, more specifically, in the Mosaic ‘instructions of how precisely they should prepare the lamb and what parts they should eat from (‘the head along with legs and inner-parts’)’, described extensively in Exodus [12:1–11]. Relying essentially on the presence of this biblical passage in a few Byzantine homilies, Baltoyianni seals her argument with the proposition that ‘these passages from Exodus along with a selection of other verses from the Old Testament which are related to the sacrifice of the lamb are read in the liturgy of the Presentation of the 2nd of February… as is indicated also from the fact that the same texts are read at the liturgy of Holy Saturday’. Baltoyianni, “Christ the Lamb”, 56. However, the author does not refer to any primary or even secondary source that might confirm this claim, which makes it quite unreliable against the backdrop of contemporary liturgical polemics on whether Old Testament readings existed in the Byzantine eucharistic liturgy at all [R. F. Taft, “Were there once Old Testament readings in the Byzantine Divine Liturgy? Apropos of an article by Sysse Gudrun Engberg”, BollGrott III s. 8 (2011): 271–311; S. G. Engberg, “The Needle and the Haystack: Searching for Evidence of the Eucharistic Old Testament Lection in the Constantinopolitan rite”, BollGrott III s. 13 (2016): 47–60]. If, therefore, the possibility of a popular reception of supposed semantic layers becomes blurred at best, then this kind of argument brings us back once more to the assumption that such meanings could be communicated only among elites provided with the highest education of the time. Hence, my interpretation is intended to seek the possibility of a popular reception of these semantic layers.

 

^[149] On the himation, in general terms, see in n. 1 above; on the himation in currently explored context, cf. additionally: S. Pendergast and T. Pendergast, Fashion, Costume, and Culture: Clothing, Headwear, Body Decorations, and Footwear through the Ages (Farmington Hills, 2004), 180–82; E. K. Vearncombe, “What Would Jesus Wear? Dress in the Synoptic Gospels” (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2014), 129–49.

 

^[150] C. Hennessy, Images of Children in Byzantium (Farnham, 2008), 8–9, 73–75.

 

^[151] B. J. Malina and R. L. Rohrbaugh, Social Science commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis, MN, 2003), 336 [cf. biblical examples in: Matthew 11:16–17; Luke 7:32]. On the status of children in the Roman cultural context, see: M. Harlow and R. Laurence, Growing Up and Growing Old in Ancient Rome: A life course approach (London, 2002), 34–53; T. Wiedemann, Adults and Children in the Roman Empire (London, 1989), 5–43; B. Rawson, Children and Childhood in Roman Italy (Oxford, 2003), 95–145. On the status of children in the Old Testament cultural context, see: C. J. H. Wright, God’s people in God’s land. Family, land, and property in the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI, 1990), 222–38; A. Phillips, Some Aspects of Family Law in Pre-Exilic Israel, in idem, Essays on Biblical law (London, 2002), 111–26. On the status of children in the New Testament cultural context, see: W. Carter, Households and discipleship. A study of Matthew 19–20 (Sheffield, 1994), 95–108; J. Grobbelaar, “Jesus and the children in the Gospel of Matthew”, in Theologies of Childhood and the Children of Africa, ed. J. Grobbelaar and G. Breed (Cape Town, 2016), 136–41.

 

^[152] Cf. J. Herrin, A. Kazhdan, and A. Cutler, “Childhood”, ODB 1:420–21; M. Vial-Dumas, “Parents, Children and Law: Patria Potestas and Emancipation in the Christian Mediterranean during Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages”, Journal of Family History 39.4 (2014): 307–329.

 

^[153] See, for example: ‘Humble’ adj (humbler, humblest) 1: not proud or haughty, 2: not pretentious, unassuming, 3: insignificant; synonyms – meek, modest, lowly; ‘Humble’ vb (humbled, humbling) 1: to make humble, 2: to destroy the power or prestige of; The Merriam-Webster Dictionary (Springfield, MA, 2004), 350.

 

^[154] Belting, “An Image and Its Function in the liturgy”, 3–4.

 

^[155] O.-M. Cojocaru, Byzantine Childhood: Representations and Experiences of Children in Middle Byzantine Society (London, 2022), 104.

 

^[156] Radojčić, “Prilozi za istoriju najstarijeg ohridskog slikarstva”, 362; Todić, “Arhiepiskop Lav”, 124–25; Lidov, “«Khristos, osvi͡ashchai͡ushchiĭ hram»”, 250–51, fig. 9.

 

^[157] Djurić, Sopoćani, pl. VIII, XXVIII, XXIX; I. Kanonidis, ed., Πρωτάτο ΙΙ: Η συντήρηση των τοιχογραφιών, Τόμος Α (Polygyros, 2015), 53; P. A. Underwood, The Kariye Djami, vol. 2 (New York, 1966), 166–70, 320–25, pl. 102, 185; K. M. Bapheiadis, Ύστερη Βυζαντινή Ζωγραφική: Χώρος και μορφή στην τέχνη της Κωνσταντινουπόλεως, 1150–1450 (Athina, 2015), fig. 168; C. Bakirtzis, ed., Ayios Nikolaos Orphanos: The Wall Paintings (Nea Smirni, 2003), 112, pl. 26, 31, 37; A. Tsitouridou, Ο ζωγραφικός διάκοσμος του Αγίου Νικολάου Ορφανού στη Θεσσαλονίκη: συμβολή στη μελέτη της Παλαιολόγειας ζωγραφικής κατά τον πρώιμο 14ο αιώνα (Thessaloniki, 1986), fig. 19, 23, 30, 54, 63; G. Babić, Кraljeva crkva u Studenici (Beograd, 1987), fig. XVII, 93; B. Todić, Gračanica: Slikarstvo (Priština, 1999), fig. 39, 43; idem, Staro Nagoričino (Beograd, 1993), fig. XVII, 16, 26, 54, 90; M. Marković, Sveti Nikita kod Skoplja: Zadužbina kralja Milutina (Beograd, 2015), 157, 160, 167, 174, fig. 9, 33.

 

^[158] On color terms and symbolism in the biblical context, see: L. Ryken, J. C. Wilhoit, and T. Longman III, eds., Dictionary of Biblical Imagery (Downers Grove, IL, 1998), 157–59; A. Brenner, Colour terms in the Old Testament (Sheffield, 1982), 143–48; Barker, The Great High Priest, 136–37; M. G. Kline, Images of the Spirit (Eugene, OR, 1999), 42–47.

 

^[159] Sinkević, The Church of St. Panteleimon at Nerezi, fig. XLI, XLIV, 42, 44.

 

^[160] See n. 126 above.

 

^[161] Revel-Neher, The Image of the Jew in Byzantine Art, 72–76.

 

^[162] On the Mandylion (with earlier bibliography), see: M. Guscin, The Image of Edessa (Leiden, 2009); H. Kessler and G. Wolf, eds., The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation (Bologna, 1998); A. M. Lidov, “Mandilion i keramion: Ikonicheskiĭ obraz sakralʹnogo prostranstva”, in idem, Ierotopii͡a: Prostranstvennye ikony i obrazy-paradigmy v vizantiĭskoĭ kulʹture (Moskva, 2009), 111–35.

 

^[163] See n. 202 below.

 

^[164] Crosses seemingly add a Christian flavor to something considered to be the ancient biblical ethnological heritage, an addition quite likely inspired by the aesthetics of Byzantine ecclesiastical vestments (cf. fig. 15 and n. 104–5 above).

 

^[165] Sinkević, The Church of St. Panteleimon at Nerezi, fig. XLVI, LVII, 66, 68; Winfield and Winfield, The church of the Panaghia tou Arakos, pl. 31, fig. 163, 189, 190.

 

^[166] In order to avoid confusion, it is important to note here that double stripes were added to some of the previously mentioned garments from Kurbinovo far less systematically and in to a considerably lesser degree than the floral patterns; cf. fig. 23–26, 28–29, and Grozdanov, Kurbinovo, fig. 198, 205, 221, 222, 224. I deliberately neglected to mention this detail in the previous chapter in order to avoid confusion, since the floral pattern was the key link that optically/formally connected all the garments—and thus making the theological point—while the double stripes appeared at random, obviously without a discernable syntactic role.

 

^[167] E. Bakalova, et al., The Ossuary of the Bachkovo Monastery (Plovdiv, 2003), fig. 57, 58.

 

^[168] V. D. Sarabjanov, Spaso-Preobrazhenskiĭ sobor Mirozhskogo monastyri͡a (Moskva, 2010), fig. 94, 119–21, 154.

 

^[169] S. Pelikanidis and M. Chatzidakis, Kastoria (Athens, 1985), 26–33, fig. 12.

 

^[170] G. Babić, V. Korać, and S. Ćirković, Studenica (Beograd, 1986), fig. 56, 69; M. Kašanin et al., Manastir Studenica (Beograd, 1986), fig. 136, 145.

 

^[171] See: A. Grabar, L’église de Boïana (Sofia, 1978), 57–58, 71–73, fig. XXVIII, XLIX; B. Dimitrov, St. Nicholas and St. Panteleimon Boyana Church (Sofia, 2008), 8, 20, fig. 34–35; R. B. Schroeder, “Transformative Narratives and Shifting Identities in the Narthex of the Boiana Church”, DOP 64 (2010): 103–128, fig. 10, 14.

 

^[172] M. Čanak-Medić and B. Todić, Stari Ras sa Sopoćanima (Novi Sad, 2013), fig. 97, 112; Djurić, Sopoćani, VIII, XXIX.

 

^[173] E. Dimitrova, “The Painterly Assamblage of Saint Nicholas in Prilep and the Issue of Aesthetical Re-branding”, Patrimonium. Mk 7.12 (Skopje 2014), 105–119, fig. 6–11; P. Kostovska, “Programata na živopisot na crkvata Sv. Nikola vo Varoš kaj Prilep i nejzinata funkcija kako grobna kapela”, Zbornik. Srednovekovna umetnost 3 (Skopje, 2001): 63–68.

 

^[174] E. C. Constantinides, The Wall Paintings of the Panagia Olympiotissa at Elasson in Northern Thessaly (Athens, 1992), pl. 40–45, 48.

 

^[175] G. Millet, A. Frollow, La peinture serbe du Moyen Âge en Yougoslavie (Serbie, Macédoine et Monténégro), fasc. 3 (Paris, 1962), pl. 3/3, 9/3; cf. also in n. 177 below.

 

^[176] For the choice no. 1, see fig. 36–42 and n. 157; for the choice no. 2, cf. fig. 52–57, 60–62, and n. 177–89.

 

^[177] M. Marković, “Ikonografski program najstarijeg živopisa crkve Bogorodice Perivlepte u Ohridu: Popis fresaka i beleške o pojedinim programskim osobenostima”, Zograf 35 (2011): 125, n. 134 (cf. also in n. 175 above); S. Pelekanidis, Καλλιέργης: Όλης Θετταλίας άριστος ζωγράφος (Athina, 1973), 37–40, pl. ς.

 

^[178] On this image, quite atypically, a man who opens the grave covers his nose with a cloth decorated with the same kind of double-striped ornament; Pelikanidis and Chatzidakis, Kastoria, 106–113, fig. 7.

 

^[179] Rather than black, (dark) blue was sometimes used in combination with red (fig. 54–57, 60–62). Nevertheless, the color of such a small piece of the painted surface area can hardly be defined precisely based on simple observation, either today or in Middle Ages, especially if we take into account that black and blue were perceived as very close colors in Antiquity and were often combined on the garments of Christ and Virgin, or on the backgrounds of Byzantine frescoes; cf. D. C. Winfield, “Middle and Later Byzantine Wall Painting Methods: A Comparative Study”, DOP 22 (1968): 96–138; L. James, Light and Colour in Byzantine Art (Oxford, 1996), 47–68. Since, moreover, black with the addition of white could be used as an imitation of blue (ibid., 29–30), then one might say that the black and red double-stripe ornament might be recognized as a highly congruent but cheaper version of the blue and red. The example from Dečani, where expensive materials have not been preserved at all (cf. n. 186 below) and where the blue of the double-colored stripes is clearly accentuated, will be researched in the following paragraphs.

 

^[180] See n. 173 above.

 

^[181] Constantinides, The Wall Paintings of the Panagia Olympiotissa, pl. 48.

 

^[182] E. N. Tsigaridas, “Τα ψηφιδωτά και οι βυζαντινές τοιχογραφίες”, in Ιερά Μεγίστη Μονή Βατοπαιδίου. Παράδοση – ιστορία – τέχνη; τόμος Α’, ed. P. Pahomios (Agion Oros, 1996), 250–51, 263–68, fig. 214, 223–25.

 

^[183] A. Gavrilović, Crkva Bogorodice Odigitrije u Pećkoj patrijaršiji (Beograd, 2018), fig. 67, 70; V. J. Djurić, S. Ćirković, and V. Korać, Pećka patrijaršija (Beograd, 1990), fig. 94.

 

^[184] Todić and Čanak-Medić, Manastir Dečani, 331–32; V. Mako et al., “Dečani frescoes: Disposition and inscriptions”, in Mural painting of Monastery of Dečani – material and studies, ed. V. J. Djurić (Belgrade, 1995), 47–49, sch. II.

 

^[185] Todić and Čanak-Medić, Manastir Dečani, 371, fig. 378; M. Marković, “Ciklus Velikih praznika”, in Mural painting of Monastery of Dečani – material and studies, ed. V. J. Djurić (Belgrade, 1995), 108.

 

^[186] I am not talking about the mimetic painterly imitation of gold, but about a literally gilded painting surface; on the abundant use of gold in this fresco ensemble, see in Todić and Čanak-Medić, Manastir Dečani, 513.

 

^[187] Ibid., fig. 379; Marković, “Ciklus Velikih praznika”, 110, fig. 5.

 

^[188] Todić and Čanak-Medić, Manastir Dečani, 387; S. Kesić-Ristić, “Ciklus Hristovih stradanja”, in Mural painting of Monastery of Dečani – material and studies, ed. V. J. Djurić (Belgrade, 1995), 129.

 

^[189] Todić and Čanak-Medić, Manastir Dečani, 380; M. Marković, “Hristova čuda i pouke”, in Mural painting of Monastery of Dečani – material and studies, ed. V. J. Djurić (Belgrade, 1995), 135.

 

^[190] Todić and Čanak-Medić, Manastir Dečani, 387–88, fig. 310; Kesić-Ristić, “Ciklus Hristovih stradanja”, 128, fig. 3.

 

^[191] Todić and Čanak-Medić, Manastir Dečani, 388–89; B. V. Popović, “Program živopisa u oltarskom prostoru”, in Mural painting of Monastery of Dečani – material and studies, ed. V. J. Djurić (Belgrade, 1995), 82–84, fig 7, 23; virtual electronic insight into the spatial position of those images in church space can be obtained at: www.blagofund.org/Archives/Decani/VR/decani_church_vr/

 

^[192] The high probability of this kind of scenario at Dečani may be deduced from: Todić and Čanak-Medić, Manastir Dečani, 326.

 

^[193] On prominence of this space, see Todić and Čanak-Medić, Manastir Dečani, 331; one fact should be additionally stressed in this context: while gold was abundantly used in this part of the church (ibid., fig. 378–82), in the images depicted in the altar vault it is not present (cf. ibid., fig. 312).

 

^[194] Together with the Crucifixion itself, [1] the Lament and [2] the Entombment of Christ were certainly the very cornerstones of post-iconoclastic development of the iconography of the Passion; on the interdependent historic development of those two iconographic formulae, see n. 101, above.

 

^[195] Saint John Chrysostom, Commentary on Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist, Homilies 48–88, 439–40; cf. integral Greek text in PG 59, 465.

 

^[196] See the beginning of the previous chapter, especially n. 129–31; the various Greek terms for grave clothes found in the Gospel accounts will be examined in the following paragraphs.

 

^[197] H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon (Oxford, 1996), 1624; cf. also, n. 216 below.

 

^[198] Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon, 1247.

 

^[199] For differing opinions on this problem cf. J. Kyriakakis, “Byzantine burial customs: The care of the deceased from death to the prothesis”, GOTR 19.1 (1974): 48–49; E. A. Ivison, “Mortuary Practices in Byzantium (c950–1453): An Archaeological Contribution” (PhD diss., University of Birmingham, 1993), 174–75; S. V. Moore, “A Relational Approach to Mortuary Practices Within Medieval Byzantine Anatolia” (PhD diss., Newcastle University, 2013), 133–37.

 

^[200] Cf. Ivison, “Mortuary Practices in Byzantium”, 174.

 

^[201] The Liddell and Scott lexicon shows that the swathing was the basic meaning aspect present in the semantic heritage of this term, which was metonymically widened towards the meaning of the grave clothes; cf. Liddell and Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, 935; Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon, 740.

 

^[202] Liddell and Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, 1621; Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon, 1244.

 

^[203] Cf. D. A. Smith, “‘Look, the place where they put him’ (Mk 16:6): The space of Jesus’ tomb in early Christian memory”, HTS Theological Studies 70.1 (2014): 5 (https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v70i1.2741); K. Troost-Cramer, Jesus as Means and Locus of Worship in the Fourth Gospel: Sacrifice and Worship Space in John (Eugene, OR, 2017), 91, especially n. 93.

 

^[204] The Liddell and Scott Lexicon shows that words based on othon (ὀϑον-) basically denote fine linen (clothes) and only secondarily linen bandages for wounds (Liddell and Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, 1200); according to Lampe, in post biblical use, othonē (ὀϑόνη), in the singular, remains a term used for fine linen, while in the plural it could mean linen grave clothes (Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon, 936). The word syndon, on the other hand, originally denoted a sort of fine and expensive fabric (Liddell and Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, 1599), while later—with the obvious influence of the biblical texts under discussion—it could be a fine linen cloth, but also the winding sheet for Christ’s body (Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon, 1233).

 

^[205] On this aspect of Egyptian funerary practices, see Riggs, Unwrapping Ancient Egypt, 93–94; F. Dunand and R. Lichtenberg, Mummies and death in Egypt (London, 2006), 97–121. On this aspect of Byzantine funerary practices, see the next footnote (Byzantine artistic representations of this aspect of funerary practice will be examined and interpreted in the discussion below, however).

 

^[206] S. V. Moore, “Experiencing Mid-Byzantine Mortuary Practice: Shrouding the Dead”, in Experiencing Byzantium: Papers from the 44th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, ed. C. Nesbitt and M. Jackson (London, 2013), 195–210; N. Poulou-Papadimitriou, E. Tzavella, and J. Ott, “Burial practices in Byzantine Greece: archaeological evidence and methodological problems for its interpretation”, in Rome, Constantinople and Newly-Converted Europe – Archaeological and Historical Evidence 1, ed. M. Salamon et al. (Kraków, 2012), 379; cf. also, in n. 199 above.

 

^[207] Pelikanidis and Chatzidakis, Kastoria, 17, fig. 11; D. C. Winfield and E. J. W. Hawkins, “The Church of Our Lady at Asinou, Cyprus. A Report on the Seasons of 1965 and 1966”, DOP 21 (1967): 262, fig. 2; Sinkević, The Church of St. Panteleimon at Nerezi, 54–56, fig. XLI. The similarity of the wound body of Lazarus to images of Egyptian mummies from the Roman period, when precise geometrical winding patterns became popular (Dunand and Lichtenberg, Mummies and death in Egypt, 78–79), is striking. In the background of the fact that the custom of mummification became widespread among all social strata of this period (ibid., 72), and was not abandoned in Christian Egypt up to the Arabic conquest (ibid., 123–28), the possibility that some painters (or patrons) were in contact with the image of actual Egyptian mummies becomes quite plausible.

 

^[208] See discussion at the end of previous chapter, followed by n. 184–89. A highly interesting and quite unusual example of careful painterly distinction of the narrow swaddling bands can be found in the winged personification of Virgin’s soul, represented in the Dormition scene from the catholicon of the Žiča Monastery, Serbia (fig. 41); there, the difference between the bands and the shroud beneath them is accentuated by the yellowish tone of the first, applied over the plain white hue of the second; D. Vojvodić, Srednjovekovni živopis Žiče (Beograd, 2016), 42, fig. 10, 178.

 

^[209] See n. 224 below.

 

^[210] See n. 226–28 below.

 

^[211] Grozdanov and Hadermann-Misguich, Kurbinovo, 42–43, 46–47.

 

^[212] Cf. the quotation from the previous paragraph with the more detailed discussion below, at the end of this chapter (followed by n. 224–28).

 

^[213] C. A. Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the knowledge of God: In your light we shall see light (Oxford, 2008), 135–36.

 

^[214] Gregory Nazianzen, Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning, 258 [emphasis added; see n. 140 above for the integral Greek text of the quotation]; for the interpretation of this specific passage in its literary context, see the relevant commentary in F. W. Norris, “Introduction and Commentary”, in Gregory Nazianzen, Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning, 154–58.

 

^[215] See ibid., 258–60. Not only for the sake of its beauty, the end of twentieth chapter deserves to be quoted here at length. ‘He is weakened, wounded – yet he cures every disease and every weakness. He is brought up to the tree and nailed to it – yet by the tree of life he restores us. Yes, he saves even a thief crucified with him; he wraps all the visible world in darkness. He is given vinegar to drink, gall to eat – and who is he? Why, one who turned water into wine, who took away the taste of bitterness, who is all sweetness and desire. He surrenders his life, yet he has power to take it again. Yes, the veil is rent, for things of heaven are being revealed, rocks split, and dead men have an earlier awakening. He dies, but he vivifies and by death destroys death. He is buried, yet he rises again. He goes down to Hades, yet he leads souls up, ascends to heaven, and will come to judge quick and dead, and to probe discussions like these’. Ibid., 259–60 [cf. Greek text in: Grégoire de Nazianze, Discours 27-31, 222]. On the influence of Gregory’s poetry on later Byzantine liturgical hymnography, including the famous Easter Canon written by John Damascene, see in P. Karavites, “Gregory Nazianzinos and Byzantine Hymnography”, JHS 113 (1993): 81–98.

 

^[216] Luke 2:7, 2:12; cf. terminology in the quotation from Saint John Chrysostom at n. 143, above.

 

^[217] Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon, 208.

 

^[218] Liddell and Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, 191–92.

 

^[219] H. Yenipinar and S. Şahin, Paintings of the Dark Church (Istanbul, 1998), 85–86.

 

^[220] See above, n. 195.

 

^[221] C. S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, vol 1 (Grand Rapids, MI, 2012), 1182.

 

^[222] Cf. wider quotation above, n. 195.

 

^[223] Theodore of Mopsuestia, Commentary on the Gospel of John, trans. M. Conti, ed. J. C. Elowsky (Downers Grove, 2010), 160. Cf. interpretation in: Smith, “Look, the place where they put him”, 5.

 

^[224] St. Romanos the Melodist, On the Life of Christ: Kontakia, trans. E. Lash (San Francisco, 1995), 167–68; cf. integral Greek text in Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica, ed. P. Maas and C. A. Trypanis (Oxford, 1963), 224. Оn the introduction of this text into the Easter Vigil, see D. Krueger, “The transmission of liturgical joy in Byzantine hymns for Easter”, in Prayer and Worship in Eastern Christianities, 5th to 11th Centuries, ed. B. Bitton-Ashkelony and D. Krueger (London, 2017), 141–43.

 

^[225] St. Romanos the Melodist, On the Life of Christ, 1–12.

 

^[226] G. Bertoniere, The Historical Development of the Easter Vigil and Related Services in the Greek Church (Rome, 1972), 159–61, 243–68.

 

^[227] The Pentecostarion, trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Boston, MA, 1990), 29 [emphasis added]; cf. integral Greek text in Πεντακοστάριον; Χαρμόσυνον (Venetia, 1890), 2.

 

^[228] Bertoniere, The Historical Development of the Easter Vigil, 204–9.

 

^[229] On the possibility of applying the idea of the so-called reverse perspective to the concept of time in eastern Christian art and more widely, cf. C. Antonova, Space, Time and Presence in the Icon: Seeing the World with the Eyes of God (Burlington, 2010), 13–23.

 

^[230] On all these images see above (n. 187–90); on the iconography of the Entombment, see in n. 101. The Lamentation of Christ, as a composition with a similar emotive charge, was also represented in the space under the Dečani dome, on east side of south-west pillar, behind the Entombment depicted on its north side, but, rather curiously, there no drapery was represented beneath the body of Christ; Todić and Čanak-Medić, Manastir Dečani, 387, fig. 432. Perhaps such a rather atypical iconographic interpretation of this scene, without the monumental shroud that was usually represented beneath Christ’s body, was also connected to the pictorial concept here described.

 

^[231] See: R. M. Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art (London, 2000), 162–66; B. W. R. Pearson and F. Harley, “Resurrection in Jewish-Christian Apocryphal Gospels and Early Christian Art”, in Christian-Jewish Relations through the Centuries, ed. S. E. Porter and B. W. Pearson (Sheffield, 2000), 86–92; A. D. Kartsonis, Anastasis: The Making of an Image (Princeton, 1986), 19–28. Cf. additionally, bibliography in n. 236, below.

 

^[232] Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art, 169–70; N. Zimmermann, “Catacomb Painting and the Rise of Christian Iconography in Funerary Art”, in The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Art, ed. R. M. Jensen and M. D. Ellison (London, 2018), 22–26.

 

^[233] ‘Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again”. Martha said to Him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day”. Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?”’ [John 11:23–26]. For interpretation of the aforementioned semantic connection from different perspectives, cf. R. E. Brown, The Gospel According to John (i-xii): introduction, translation, and notes (New York, 1966), 422–37; J. Kok, New Perspectives on Healing, Restoration and Reconciliation in John’s Gospel (Leiden, 2016), 206–242; B. Saylor Rodgers, “Romanos Melodos on the Raising of Lazarus”, BZ 107.2 (2014): 811–30; Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art, 170–71; L. M. Jefferson, “Miracles and Art”, in The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Art, ed. R. M. Jensen and M. D. Ellison (London, 2018), 316–18; Pearson and Harley, “Resurrection in Jewish-Christian Apocryphal Gospels and Early Christian Art”, 83–84; F. Harley McGowan, “Death is Swallowed Up in Victory: Scenes of Death in Early Christian Art and the Emergence of Crucifixion Iconography”, Cultural Studies Review 17.1 (2011): 101–124.

 

^[234] On the early development of this iconographic theme, see above, n. 231.

 

^[235] L. Kötzsche, “Four plaques with Passion scenes”, in Age of Spirituality: Late Antique and Early Christian Art, Third to Seventh Century, ed. K. Weitzmann (New York, 1979), 502–4; G. Vikan, “Leaf from a diptych with Women at the Tomb”, in ibid., 504–5; N. Bhalla, “Christian Ivories: Containment, manipulation, and the creation of meaning”, in The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Art, ed. R. M. Jensen and M. D. Ellison (London, 2018), 209–211, fig. 13.1.

 

^[236] F. Harley, “The Narration of Christ’s Passion in Early Christian Art”, in Byzantine Narrative: Papers in Honour of Roger Scott, ed. J. Burke (Melbourne, 2006), 221–32; F. Harley-McGowan, “Picturing the Passion”, in The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Art, ed. R. M. Jensen and M. D. Ellison (London, 2018), 290–307. Prior to iconoclasm even the representations of the Crucifixion depicted Christ alive, with eyes wide open; Jensen, The Cross, 74–96; Viladesau, The Beauty of the Cross, 41–48.

 

^[237] After all, even the Crucifixion itself was viewed from this kind of resurrectional perspective in early Byzantine art, by representing the ‘dead’ Christ with His eyes wide open; see the bibliography under the previous note.

 

^[238] On the Byzantine passion for epistemological paradoxes and antinomies, cf. V. V. Bychkov, “Iz istorii vizantiĭskoĭ ėstetiki”, VizVrem 37 (1976): 160–91; B. Tatakis, Byzantine Philosophy (Indianapolis, 2003), 3–7.

 

^[239] Of course, the infant Lord sits in his mother’s lap, but she most often sits on the throne, flanked by angels, while, more importantly, the most popular liturgical hymnography praises Virgin in the words: ‘he [God] made of thy womb a throne [θρόνον]’; or addresses her as follows: ‘Hail, since you are the chair [καθέδρα] of the king’. Cf. translations and original Greek texts of In Thee Rejoiceth and Akathistos hymns, respectively, in: I. F. Hapgood, ed., trans., Service Book of Holy Orthodox Church (Boston, 1906), 108; A. Goumatianos, “Παρατηρήσεις στην εικονογραφία του «Ἐπὶ σοὶ χαίρει» σε εικόνα από το Βυζαντινό και Χριστιανικό Μουσείο Αθηνών (Τ.134/Κειμήλια Προσφύγων 67)”, ΔΧΑΕ 35 (2014): 245–66; L. M. Peltomaa, The image of the Virgin Mary in the Akathistos hymn (Leiden, 2001), 4–5. On the Virgin-Throne typology, see: eadem, “Epithets of the Theotokos in the Akathistos hymn”, in The cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium: Texts and images, ed. L. Brubaker and M. B. Cunningham (Farnham, 2011), 109–111; M. Barker, “Wisdom Imagery and the Mother of God”, in ibid., 91–108; Todić, Gračanica, 150–51; Maguire, Art and Еloquence, 55; N. Constas, Proclus of Constantinople and the cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity (Leiden, 2003), 319; O. E. Ėtingof, “Ikonografii͡a vethozavetnykh proobrazov Bogomateri srednevizantiĭskogo perioda”, in eadem, Obraz Bogomateri: Ocherki vizantiĭskoĭ ikonografii XI–XIII vv (Moskva, 2000), 45–46.

 

^[240] For the place of this quotation in the liturgy, see Hapgood, Service Book of Holy Orthodox Church, 102–6; on the specific self-sacrificial semantic layers fostered by the introduction of this biblical quotation into the Institution Narrative of Byzantine liturgy, see J. Behr, John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford, 2019), 309–310.

 

^[241] On Melchizedek typology, see: L. Goppelt, Typos: The Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New (Grand Rapids, MI, 1982), 161–70; F. L. Horton, The Melchizedek Tradition: A Critical Examination of the Sources to the Fifth Century A.D. and in the Epistle to the Hebrews (Cambridge, 1976), 152–72.

 

^[242] On the predominant practice of representing the Virgin (and Christ) in the apses of post-iconoclastic Byzantine churches, there is a thorough discussion with up-to-date bibliography in my recent study: T. Mitrović, Ikona i telo (Beograd, 2022), 275–301, 343–67.

 

^[243] On the iconography of the Communion of the Apostles, see: Walter, Art and Ritual of the Byzantine Church, 240–49; S. E. J. Gerstel, Beholding the Sacred Mysteries: Programs of the Byzantine Sanctuary (Seattle, 1999), 48–50; V. Marinis, “A Reconsideration of the Communion of the Apostles in Byzantine Art”, Studies in Iconography 42 (2021): article 2, 1–20; additionally, cf. bibliography at n. 58 above. On the late introduction of Byzantine high-priestly vestments into this iconographic domain, see: Walter, Art and Ritual of the Byzantine Church, 216–17; Woodfin, The Embodied Icon, 23–28. On other atypical and extremely rare iconographic experiments tending to represent Christ as a priest in Byzantine art, see A. M. Lidov, “Christ as Priest in Byzantine Church Decoration of the 11th and 12th Centuries”, in Acts. XVIIIth International Congress of Byzantine Studies, vol. 3, ed. I. Ševčenko, G. G. Litavrin, and W. K. Hanak (Shepherdstown, WV, 1996), 158–70.

 

^[244] On reception of this text in Byzantium, see: T. Kampianaki, “Preliminary observations on the reception of Flavius Josephus in Byzantine historical writings: the accounts of John Zonaras, Niketas Choniates and Michael Kritovoulos”, Byzantina Symmeikta 28 (2018): 209–228; S. Inowlocki, “Josephus and Patristic Literature”, in A Companion to Josephus, ed. H. Howell Chapman and Z. Rodgers (Chichester, 2016), 356–67; K. M. Kletter, “The Christian Reception of Josephus in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages”, in ibid., 368–81.

 

^[245] Cf. Walter, Art and Ritual of the Byzantine Church, 242–43; Mango, “Discontinuity with the Classical Past in Byzantium”, 53–57; E. Jeffreys, “Old Testament ‘History’ and the Byzantine Chronicle”, in The Old Testament in Byzantium, ed. P. Magdalino and R. Nelson (Washington, DC, 2010), 172–74; P. Guran, “The Constantinople – New Jerusalem at the Crossing of Sacred Space and Political Theology”, in New Jerusalems: Hierotopy and Iconography of Sacred Spaces, ed. A. Lidov (Moscow, 2009), 42–55.

 

^[246] In “The Virgin of Tenderness from Syracuse” article, Marković describes this text briefly (on p. 269), but does not quote it, while this turns out to be essential to my following proposal for interpretation.

 

^[247] Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, Books 1-4, trans. H. St. J. Thackeray (London, 1961), 388–89.

 

^[248] Ibid., 390–95.

 

^[249] See the longer quotation above, n. 247 [cf. Greek original in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, 388; emphasis added].

 

^[250] Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, 386–403.

 

^[251] See the translation and original Greek text of the quoted Prayer of the Cherubic Hymn in R. F. Taft, The Great Entrance: A History of the Transfer of Gifts and other Preanaphoral Rites of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (Roma, 1975), 119–20, 144–48; on the history of the prayer and its importance in the wider cultural context, see below, especially n. 252–53.

 

^[252] On this twelfth-century dispute, see: Taft, The Great Entrance, 135–36; M. Angold, Church and Society in Byzantium Under the Comneni, 1081–1261 (Cambridge, 2000), 82–83; A. P. Kazhdan and A. Wharton Epstein, Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Berkeley, 1990), 160–62; P. Magdalino, The empire of Manuel I Komnenos, 1143–1180 (Cambridge, 1993), 279–84; H. Magoulias, “Doctrinal disputes in the history of Niketas Choniates”, PBR 6.3 (1987): 199–226; on the influence of this dispute in the visual arts, see G. Babić, “Les discussions christologiques et le décor des églises byzantines au XIIe siècle: Les évêques officiant devant l’Hétimasie et devant l’Amnos”, FS 2.1 (1968): 368–86.

 

^[253] On the history of the prayer and its liturgical function, see Taft, The Great Entrance, 119–43.

 

^[254] Nicetas Choniates, O city of Byzantium, Annals of Niketas Choniates, trans. H. J. Magoulias (Detroit, 1984), 283; cf. original Greek text in Nicetae Choniatae Historia, ed. I. A. van Dieten (Berlin, 1975), 514. About this late-twelfth-century controversy see Angold, Church and Society in Byzantium Under the Comneni, 127–31; on the influence of this controversy in the domain of visual arts, see E. Vinogradova, “Theological Controversy, Heresy and Byzantine Art: an Approach”, in Orthodoxy and Heresy in Byzantium: The Definition and the Notion of Orthodoxy and Some Other Studies on the Heresies and the Non-Christian Religions, ed. A. Rigo and P. Ermilov (Roma, 2010), 170–71.

 

^[255] On these inscriptions, see Ch. Konstantinide, Ο Μελισμός. Οι συλλειτουργούντες ιεράρχες και οι άγγελοι-διάκονοι μπροστά στην Αγία Τράπεζα με τα τίμια δώρα η τον ευχαριστιακό Χριστό (Thessalonike, 2008), 51–63; on the iconography of Christ-infant as eucharistic oblation, see ibid., 75–115; cf. more briefly: ibid. 242–50 [English summary]; Gerstel, Beholding the Sacred Mysteries, 40–47; Walter, Art and Ritual of the Byzantine Church, 200–212. On the rite of Fraction/Melismos in its liturgical context, see R. F. Taft, “Melismos and Comminution: The Fraction and its Symbolism in the Byzantine Tradition”, in Traditio et progressio: Studi liturgici in onore del Prof. Adrien Nocent, OSB, ed. G. Farnedi (Roma, 1988), 531–52; or, in more detail, R. F. Taft, The Precommunion Rites: A History of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, vol. 5 (Roma, 2000), 319–79.

 

^[256] Cf. bibliography at note 254 with the historical account in: Nicetas Choniates, O city of Byzantium, 283–84.

 

^[257] On the silent (=secret) reading of eucharistic prayers in the Byzantine liturgy, see briefly: R. F. Taft, Through Their Own Eyes: Liturgy as the Byzantines Saw It (Berkeley, CA, 2006), 103–4; or, more extensively: idem, “Was the Eucharistic Anaphora Recited Secretly or Aloud? The Ancient Tradition and What Became of It”, in Worship Traditions in Armenia and the Neighboring Christian East, ed. R. R. Ervine (Crestwood, NY, 2006), 15–57.

 

^[258] Different clerical divisions that distanced the priesthood from the laity in the late-Byzantine liturgy would provide, in themselves, enough inspiration for a lifetime’s study. Those relating to the visual arts and, thus, more or less directly pertaining to the context of present research are examined and interpreted in detail, with an up-to-date bibliography, in Mitrović, Ikona i telo, 165–206.

 

^[259] The existence of this kind of liturgical care on the part of the priestly elites for their flock is nicely illustrated by one quotation from the key eleventh-century mystagogical treatise Protheoria. ‘The Opisthambonos Prayer is like the seal of all supplications and the ordered recapitulation, equivalent to what was said earlier and more solemnly [in the anaphora]. For the whole Divine Service is accomplished especially for the offerers, for those for whom they offered, and then for all the rest, in a single prayer. Since some of those standing outside the sanctuary (ἔξω τοῦ θυσιαστηρίου ἐστώτων) often find themselves puzzled, thinking and saying: ‘What, then, is the purpose and intention and force of the prayers being whispered by the bishop (τῶν παρὰ τοῦ ἀρχιερέως ὑποψιθυριζομένων εὺχῶν)?’ And they want to receive some knowledge of them too. For this reason the Divine Fathers made the form of this [Opisthambonos] Prayer as a recapitulation of all the supplications in these other prayers, teaching those seeking as from the fringe of the garment…’. Quoted in: Taft, “Was the Eucharistic Anaphora Recited Secretly or Aloud?”, 42; cf. integral Greek text in PG 140, 465B. While the contemporary expert reader would probably sooner recognize an attempt to vindicate mediaeval clericalism in this kind of text, it also confirms that high clerics of the period under discussion could not have been absolutely ignorant concerning the spiritual needs of their flock, and that at least some amount of lay participation in the liturgy came within their purview. On the Protheoria itself, see R. Bornert, Les commentaires byzantins de la Divine Liturgie du VIIe au XVe siècle (Paris, 1966), 181–213.

 

^[260] See n. 251 above.

 

^[261] On the Virgin and throne typology, see in n. 239 above; on the iconographic type of the Virgin holding Christ in the clypeus, see: M. Tatić-Djurić, “Bogorodica Nikopeja”, in eadem, Studije o Bogorodici (Beograd, 2007), 159–75; C. Baltoyianni, “The Mother of God in Portable Icons”, in Mother of God: Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art, ed. M. Vassilaki (Athens, 2000), 139–41; E. Tsigaridas, “The Mother of God in Wall-Paintings”, in ibid., 127; R. Ousterhout, “The Virgin of the Chora: An Image and Its Contents”, in The Sacred Image: East and West, ed. L. Brubaker and R. Ousterhout (Urbana, 1995), 94–96; B. V. Pentcheva, Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium (University Park, PA, 2006), 145–47; an inspiring eucharistic interpretation of Christ’s clypeus/glory in the same Ohrid fresco can be found in: M. Evangelatou, “Krater of Nectar and Altar of the Bread of Life: The Theotokos as Provider of the Eucharist in Byzantine Culture”, in The Reception of the Virgin in Byzantium: Marian Narratives in Texts and Images, ed. T. Arentzen and M. B. Cunningham (Cambridge, 2019), 100–108.

 

^[262] On the resemblance between the figure of the infant Christ in the apse and his figure in the Ascension image depicted on the ceiling of the same church, see: Lidov, ‘Obraz „Khrista–arkhierei͡a“’, 7–11.

 

^[263] On the pseudepigraphic status and dating of the homily in the fifth century, see R. Caro, ‘La Homiletica Mariana Griega en el Siglo V, Parte Segunda: Homilias pseudo-epigraficas’, Marian Library Studies 4 (1972): article 5, 596–99. Synodal use of the following quotation as one of the voices of tradition supporting the use of disputed liturgical text/addition (see n. 251–54 above) is witnessed by Niketas Choniates, in Book 24 of his Treasury of Orthodoxy, characteristically titled Σύνοδος Εκκλησίας Ελληνικής περί του δογμάτος “Συ ο προσφέρων και προσφερόμενος και προσδεχόμενος”, λαληθέντος επί του βασιλέως κύρου Μανουήλ Κομνηνού (PG 140, 137B–201A). As it can be deduced from the following quotation (pertaining to n. 264 below), all three participles, which, due to their simultaneous presence in the Prayer of the Cherubic Hymn, caused the liturgical/dogmatic dispute in question and the consequent convocation of the Synod, are simultaneously present in this ancient sermon, which made it a perfect authoritative/patristic support for the synodal validation of controversial liturgical verse.

 

^[264] Translation based mostly on: Walter, Art and Ritual of the Byzantine Church, 210, and Babić, “Les discussions christologiques”, 384; cf. integral Greek text in PG 33, 1192B; cf. the slightly different form of this text, as it was used in twelfth-century synodical disputes and recorded by Choniates, in PG 140, 165D–168A.

 

^[265] St Germanus of Constantinople, On the Divine Liturgy, 57–57; about the Prayer of the Cherubic Hymn, see in n. 253 above.

 

^[266] The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, in Hapgood, Service Book of Holy Orthodox Church, 104; cf. congruent quote from Saint Basil’s liturgy in ibid., 104; on the historical origins of this particular layer of Byzantine liturgy, see J. R. K. Fenwick, The Anaphoras of St Basil and St James: An Investigation into their Common Origin (Rome, 1992), 148–66; on the specific ‘eschatological turn’ fostered within these texts as ‘an innovation of the Byzantine liturgy’, see: A. Andreopoulos, ‘All in all’ in the Byzantine Anaphora and the Eschatological Mystagogy of Maximos the Confessor,’ in StP, vol. 68, ed. M. Vinzent (Leuven, 2013), 303–312.