Imperial Bodies and Sacred Space? Imperial Images between Monumental Decoration and Space Definition

Since the first edition of André Grabar’s L’empereur dans l’art Byzantine (Paris, 1936), scholarly literature has devoted much attention to representations of the emperor – and, in more recent years, of the empress – in a wide range of media (from mosaics to coins, weights and manuscript illumination). Much has also been written about monumental images of the imperial couple and family, which appear to have proliferated from the age of Basil I (867-886) onwards and become a leitmotiv in the territories of Byzantine tradition outside Constantinople at a later period. However, monumental images of the imperial couple and family were not exceptional even in Late Antiquity. At that time, just as in Byzantium, they were used to decorate churches and palaces, spaces that for their own nature were commonly considered as sacred. Unfortunately, little if anything of these images, or of the buildings that they decorated, has survived the centuries. In most cases, the only extant evidence is bound to texts, which describe images mediated by the perception or intention of the ancient writer – a beholder of those images but also often a biased witness with interests in conveying a determined view through his/her own writings. It is precisely through these perceptions and intentions that I contextualize monumental imperial dynastic representations into their own cultural, geo-chronological and, when possible, architectural context, in order to define their meaning. This analysis clarifies the development of the theme of dynastic imperial representations, revealing patterns of continuity or radical changes between Late Antiquity and Byzantium, and determines the function of these images within their surrounding spaces. Monumental imperial dynastic depictions center on the body: the representation of the imperial family members as simple portraits or within narrative scenes; the perception of beholders who approach the images and of writers who record their impressions of monumental representations to their audiences; the intentions of patrons for buildings and their decoration; and the sensitivity of iconographers who conceived images as part of specific architectural spaces. Ultimately, this paper investigates the relationship between imperial representations and the sacred spaces in which they could be seen. It defines the meaning of these spaces to the patron or the beholder and the ways in which such images affected the perception of space. This approach sheds new light on a crucial point for the conceptualization of sacred space in Byzantium: whether space was sacralized also by the presence of the imperial images, or if imperial representations just added an imperial feature to a space already considered as sacred.