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What's in a name? Images of Christ inscribed with epithets in middle and late Byzantine art

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posted on 2023-06-09, 22:26 authored by George Bartlett
This thesis discusses images of Christ from the Middle and Late Byzantine periods where he is given epithet inscriptions in addition to IC XC. As a collective, these inscriptions have not yet received sustained academic attention, with scholars often making passing reference to epithets and alluding to a wider body of similar material, without any substantial empirical evidence. This thesis collates, presents and analyses images of Christ that are inscribed with epithets in order to show the merit of studying them together and to ask what difference the inscriptions made to objects on which they were displayed, had only IC XC been included. To attempt to answer this question, I explore the ways that it is important to consider Christ’s epithets as part of a collective, how the epithets were understood as names, functioned as devotional entities, and affected the meaning of the images they inscribed and vice-versa. I show that Christ’s epithets offer an important insight into how the Byzantines understood and used His image, something that is important for examples of Byzantine art about which little contextual information is known. Further, I explore the ways that epithets were part of wider ideologies concerning identity in Byzantium. I argue that epithets commented on the ways in which names could reveal aspects of divine identity in Byzantine Orthodox belief and were used by certain individuals in order to add to their constructions of selfhood, whilst bolstering their political and social identities. I also examine the ways that certain epithets have been mishandled in Byzantine art scholarship, being incorrectly conflated with iconographic ‘types’. Instead, I argue that the ways in which epithets related to the images they inscribed were quite complex. This provides new insight into how the Byzantines perceived image and text to work together to create meaning.

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File Version

  • Published version

Pages

295.0

Department affiliated with

  • Art History Theses

Qualification level

  • doctoral

Qualification name

  • phd

Language

  • eng

Institution

University of Sussex

Full text available

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2020-12-11

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