CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
UNOFFICIAL ART AND THE RESISTANCE TO ORTHODOXY

Henry Maguire

ORDER AND DISORDER IN BYZANTINE ART

The Byzantines were obsessed with taxis, or order: in the Church order was the expression of proper belief, in the state it demonstrated proper government.¹ The outer manifestation of order in the Church was its liturgy, the controlled sequence of actions and words performed at the appropriate times of day and year.² In the state its principal expression was the ceremony of the imperial court, elaborately staged rituals which in many ways echoed those of the Church.³ Byzantine official art, also, was controlled by strict conventions. Religious art was almost entirely restricted to two-dimensional or low-relief forms. There was very little church sculpture that was created fully in the round. Christian iconography, also, kept within well-defined boundaries. There were established portrait types for Christ and the major saints, which regulated the physiognomies of their portraits and the details of their clothing.⁴ A series of such portraits appears in Figure 24.1, a “Menologion” icon of around 1200 from the collection at Mt Sinai.⁵ It is one of a series of twelve such panels, one for each month, which portray the saints in orderly rows corresponding to the sequence in which they were celebrated during the church year. Each saint has his particular characteristics of facial features and hair, and the costume appropriate to his or her rank or station in life, whether monk, nun, deacon, bishop, soldier, doctor or office-holder at court.

The most important narrative scenes, especially those from the New Testament, followed standard compositional schemes, which allowed for little variation on the part of individual artists.⁶ Each Nativity scene, for example, was made up of conventional components, which included the child lying in his stone manger in a cave at the center of the image, the Virgin sitting or reclining beside the crib, the midwives giving the child his first bath in a chalice-shaped basin at the bottom of the composition, St Joseph sitting in a hunched position at the bottom left or the bottom right of the frame, the star at the top shining its ray of light on the infant, and a group of shepherds, differentiated according to age, below. These elements made up the standard iconography of Christ’s Nativity from the ninth century onwards.⁷

Although there were some exceptions, the general rule in religious iconography

Figure 24.1 Menologion icon for March. Painted panel, Monastery of St Catherine, Mt Sinai. Reproduced through the courtesy of the Michigan-Princeton-Alexandria Expedition to Mt Sinai.

was a remarkable uniformity, especially when Byzantine art is compared with medieval art in the West. In western Europe there was much less standardization of the portrait types of the saints, and much less conformity to standard models in the depiction of biblical scenes. The relative freedom enjoyed by western artists enabled them to manipulate biblical iconography in novel ways, in order to express typological, metaphorical or theological ideas. But Byzantine church artists, who officially were supposed to shun novelty, were not encouraged to engage in such experimentation. The Byzantine image was fixed and “true”; it was not subject to alteration on an individual’s whim.

Byzantine imperial art, also, was controlled by established conventions. The emperor, for example, was never portrayed from the back, or in profile, for such views would have been an affront to his imperial dignity. Furthermore, like the saints, the emperor was frequently given a halo, through which he was likened rhetorically to the sun.⁸ In addition to his crown,⁹ the emperor’s rank was usually conveyed in art by the attribute of the loros, a long jeweled band decorated with precious stones. Although it seems that in real life the emperors donned this garment only on the most important of occasions, as it was cumbersome and heavy, in art it served as a conventional symbol of imperial status.¹⁰ The unchanging nature of imperial art is well illustrated by works such as the eleventh-century mosaic in the gallery of St Sophia in Constantinople, which originally showed the empress Zoe accompanied by her first husband, the emperor Romanos III. After the death of Romanos, and the second marriage of Zoe, the mosaic was altered to show the empress together with her third husband, Constantine IX. In order to effect the change, the mosaicists had only to replace the face of the new emperor; the rest of his image, that is, the imperial costume with the loros, they left in place, for this was the unchanging costume of all emperors, no matter which individual was holding office at the time.¹¹

Alongside the well-ordered world of liturgical ceremony and sanctioned art, there was another world, one that existed outside the constraints of official ideology and conventions. This was the unofficial world, of novelty, innovation and lack of control. Like the official world, the unofficial world had its own art and its own performances. The unofficial performances took the form of parodies of the liturgy, in which both lay people and clerics took part, and acts by professional mimes and street entertainers.¹² The performances of the Byzantine mimes are now lost to us, except for a few disparaging references in the writings of Byzantine churchmen and historians, and one or two fleeting depictions in wall paintings and manuscript illuminations.¹³ However, the visual art that belonged to the unofficial world, and that was one of its principal expressions, has survived and can be appreciated today.¹⁴ In this chapter we will look at four of the main characteristics of the unofficial art of the Byzantines, namely innovation, nudity, sexuality and abandon. These characteristics, which might be called “profane,” expressed a disorder that was completely contrary to the ideals of decorum upheld by the Byzantine Church and state.

INNOVATION

One of the guiding principles of Orthodox church art was that artists did not invent. In theory, at least, each icon was an accurate reproduction of its prototype – that is, the original portrait that had been taken from life, either manually or miraculously.¹⁵ In some instances the portrait had been made by an artist painting a sitter, as was believed to have been the case with the icon of the Virgin Mary known as the Hodegetria, which was painted by St Luke.¹⁶ In other instances a miracle produced the likeness, as in the case of the Mandylion, a towel which supposedly had been impressed with the features of Christ when it came into contact with his face, and which was rediscovered in the sixth century.¹⁷ Later copies of such works had to reproduce them exactly, for any deviation would render the icon inaccurate and thus break the chain that linked it to its prototype. Likewise, in the case of narrative scenes illustrating the episodes of the Bible, each one was supposed to accurately portray the settings and the figures as they had been when the event took place. An artist who introduced changes was guilty of falsifying sacred history. Of course, over the course of time the portraits and the narrative scenes did change; there was an inevitable drift and even some periods of limited experimentation. But, if an artist strayed too far from the prescribed limits, the church authorities were quick to correct the error. We have, for example, a letter written by Theodore the Studite, which reproves its addressee for commissioning a representation of the crucified Christ as an angel with wings. Such a composition, said Theodore, should be considered “foreign and alien to the tradition of the church … seeing that in all the years that have passed no examples of this peculiar subject have ever been given by any of the many holy fathers who were inspired by God.”¹⁸

After the conquest of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204, the Byzantines encountered a new wave of religious art from the West. This exposure made the Orthodox Church all the more anxious to preserve the integrity of its own traditions, a concern that was expressed in the anti-Latin diatribes composed in the thirteenth century, which attacked the Latins for heretical forms and iconography in their art.¹⁹ In general, it is true to say that from the end of Iconoclasm in the ninth century to the final fall of Byzantium in the fifteenth, there was a remarkable consistency in religious art which demonstrates the force of the discipline exerted by the Church.

It is against this background that we should view our first example of Byzantine unofficial art, a twelfth- or early thirteenth-century pottery bowl, which was discovered at Thebes, in Greece (Figure 24.2). It is executed in the champlevé technique.²⁰ To make such a vessel, the potter first throws the bowl, then covers it with a thin slip of cream-colored clay. When the slip has hardened sufficiently, the potter cuts the slip away to reveal the red ground of the vessel, leaving behind only those portions of the slip that will form the image (in this case, four heads). The details, such as the eyes and hair, are incised into the remaining slip.²¹ The nature of the technique is such as to encourage swiftness of execution, for the slip dries out relatively quickly, and becomes difficult to work. Also, since each line is cut into the damp clay, which is sticky and viscous, the process encourages the potter to work in broad strokes rather than to attempt a composition based on precise drawing and fine lines. In this respect, the work of the potter differs from that of the painter of a panel, who can easily delineate in detail the accurate features of each saint, as can be seen in the case of the calendar icon from Mt Sinai illustrated in Figure 24.1.

The composition of the bowl strikingly reflects its mode of production, for the images are roughly drawn and have an immediate quality, very different from the studied accuracy of a religious icon. The vessel is divided by lines into four quadrants,

Figure 24.2 Spinning heads. Ceramic bowl found in Thebes, Collection of the First Ephorate of Byzantine Antiquities, Athens. After Papanikola-Bakirtzis 1999: no. 51.

each containing a disembodied head in profile. At first sight this imagery is puzzling, and seems to defy rational explanation. However, one way to interpret the design is to see it as a kind of parody, or humorous inversion of religious art. If we compare the heads again with the calendar icon from Mt Sinai in Figure 24.1, we see that they break all of the rules of Byzantine church art. Not only are the heads roughly drawn and not differentiated according to canonical portrait types, but each one of them is in profile, whereas religious icons were required to be frontal or in three-quarter view, so that both eyes would be visible. Most importantly, instead of being lined up in an orderly row, the heads on the bowl are completely lacking in stability. Whichever way round the bowl is placed, three of the heads will always be in disorder, either on their sides or upside down. It is this disturbance of the iconic image that gives the pot its humor. We know that the Byzantines enjoyed making fun of the forms and rituals of their own Church. A Byzantine canonist, Theodore Balsamon, complained in the twelfth century that the mimes liked to “wear every kind of stage mask, and freely mock the monks and clergy.” Furthermore, he said: “certain clerics on certain festivals disguise themselves with various masks. With sword in hand and wearing military costumes, they enter the middle aisle of the church, and then they come out [dressed] as monks, or even as four-legged animals.”²² The heads on the bowl are evocative of the masks worn at such carnivals; they imply a temporary disruption of the regimentation imposed by the Church, an irreverent humor that evidently was enjoyed not only by lay people but even the clergy themselves.

NUDITY

In the Byzantine empire, the mocking of church rituals could be found at the highest levels of society, even in the court of the emperor himself. A good example of this phenomenon is a story told in the tenth-century biography of Basil I, who reigned from 867 until 886. This tale was intended to blacken the character of Basil’s predecessor, Michael III, whom Basil eventually supplanted by having him killed. Basil’s biographer portrays Michael as a unworthy ruler who deserved to die, among other reasons because he was a drunkard who staged blasphemous parodies in the palace in collaboration with his sidekick, a disreputable individual called Groullos, which was a name given to clownlike performers. On one occasion, Basil dressed the bearded Groullos in patriarchal vestments and had the jester sit on the great throne in the Chrysotriklinos, the imperial throne room. Basil then summoned his own mother, the saintly Theodora, who had restored the worship of icons to Byzantium, telling her that she was about to receive the patriarch’s blessing. Theodora entered the Chrysotriklinos, and fell at the feet of the supposed patriarch, entreating him to say a prayer on her behalf. In response, Groullos rose from his throne and, in the words of the text, “turned his rear toward her” and “emitted a donkey-like noise from his foul entrails.” The emperor, who appropriated for himself the title of “bishop of Colonville,” enjoyed this joke enormously.²³

The scatological humor that is described in this story also appears in some Byzantine works of art, which portray performers thrusting out their behinds in the manner of Groullos. These characters can be found both on ivory and bone carvings, produced for the higher levels of society, and on ceramics, enjoyed by those lower down on the social scale. For example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owns a tenth- or eleventh-century casket decorated with bone plaques portraying a variety of figures, including the old man illustrated in Figure 24.3.²⁴ This individual, with his bottom bared and protruding, can be related to a number of other similar figures on Byzantine bone and ivory boxes and ceramics, such as the half-naked dancer at the left end of the box, now in St Petersburg, illustrated in Figure 24.6.²⁵ The type can be traced back to the cinaedi of the Roman world, whose antics were illustrated in floor mosaics, wall paintings and pottery lamps.²⁶ To judge from these depictions, the cinaedi performed naked, or nearly naked, and, like the old man on the casket, were frequently pot-bellied. Their performances involved much lewd posturing, with their bare behinds pushed out. Frequently they carried sticks, like the character on the Byzantine box in the Metropolitan Museum, with which they engaged in mock fights. Such fights with sticks were described, again with disapproval, by another twelfth-century church canonist, Zonaras, when he complained that the Byzantine mimes of his own day “incite unseemly laughter with blows to the temple and loud noises.”²⁷

Figure 24.3 Naked performer brandishing a stick. Detail of a bone casket, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.237). Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In Byzantine popular art, nudity could be a means of deriding the heroic stereotypes of secular culture. For example, another twelfth-century pottery bowl excavated at Thebes depicts a warrior slaying a large serpent with his sword (Figure 24.4).²⁸ Snake- and dragon-slayers frequently appear on Byzantine pottery.²⁹ Often they can be identified with the legendary hero Digenes Akritas, whose deeds were recorded in oral poetry and in an epic verse romance probably composed in the twelfth century. On a twelfth- or early thirteenth-century ceramic bowl found in the Agora at Athens, a warrior appears beside a crested dragon which he has just killed with five arrows shot through the neck, a deed that is recorded in an Akritic ballad.³⁰ But on this and on other ceramics depicting dragon-slayers, the hero is attired in full armor, appropriate for his dangerous exploits.³¹ On the plate from Thebes, however, the hero is plainly naked. By this means, the artist probably intended to make fun of the legend. The Byzantines did not inherit the ancient Greek concept of the heroic nude; for them, nudity in secular contexts was shameful or ludicrous.³² Naked, or seminaked, warriors also frequently disport themselves on the eleventh- and twelfthcentury ivory and bone caskets, including the one in the Metropolitan Museum.³³ Here, again, the nudity was a site of derision. Some of the naked warriors on the boxes are pot-bellied, and thus far from the ancient Greek ideals of male beauty.³⁴

SEXUALITY

In the epic of Digenes Akritas, the serpent or dragon becomes a symbol of sexual lust. At one point in the poem, a handsome youth appears, who tries to seduce the wife of the hero. On being rebuffed, the youth turns into a fearsome dragon, which Digenes has to destroy.³⁵ This episode follows immediately on another, in which Digenes Akritas himself is the perpetrator of a sexual assault on a girl. Thus the slaying of the

Figure 24.4 A naked hero fights against his dragon. Ceramic bowl found at Thebes, Collection of the First Ephorate of Byzantine Antiquities, Athens. After Papanikola-Bakirtzis 1999: no. 50.

dragon can be seen as an effort by Digenes to purge himself from his own sexual misdeed. Accordingly, the dragon in the poem represents supernatural evil that drives the lust of both the youth who attempted to seduce Digenes’ wife and of the hero himself.³⁶ With the poem in mind, we can see that the meaning of the bowl from Thebes goes beyond the simple humor of an epic hero in the buff; there is also a subsidiary theme of the hero’s struggle against sexual desire, which is suggested both by his nakedness and by the phallic nature of his sword. It can also be noted that the facial features of the dragon-slayer in the bowl are remarkably similar to those of the serpent. As the two opponents stare at each other, eyeball-to-eyeball, they ape each other’s physiognomies. The features of the beast become human and the man’s features become bestial. Thus, as in the epic, the man has acquired some of the characteristics of the beast that he is trying to destroy.

The object held in the man’s upraised hand is also ambivalent. The hero apparently clasps it by a handle at the bottom. This fact, and its small size, suggest that it may be a mirror rather than a shield. If so, it could refer to the mirror that Perseus used when he killed the monster Medusa – had Perseus looked at her directly he would have been turned into stone. But it is also possible that the mirror reflects the warrior rather than the monster – or, rather, that the man looks into the mirror and sees his own vices as the monster that he must slay.

A similar idea, that a man’s appetites and passions are wild beasts that he has to kill or to subdue, can be found in earlier Byzantine literature.³⁷ In the seventh century, the poet George of Pisidia described the transforming power of evil passions in a manner strikingly similar to the imagery on the bowl from Thebes: “anyone who mixes the bestial perversions of the passions with a rational nature destroys his own form, and thus contaminated belongs to beasthood instead of reason.”³⁸ The correct path, according to George of Pisidia, is to turn to the “monster of the passions,” slay it and thus save “the holy virgin of the heart.”³⁹

Another twelfth-century champlevé bowl, which was found at Corinth, portrays the theme of carnal love in a more explicit way (Figure 24.5).⁴⁰ It shows a woman

Figure 24.5 Digenes Akritas and Queen Maximo. Ceramic bowl found at Corinth, Archaeological Museum, Corinth. Hirmer Verlag Munich.

with a crown, evidently a queen, sitting on the lap of a man with long hair, whose ringlets cascade over his shoulder. The couple conduct their dalliance in a gardenlike setting, with leafy plants in the foreground, and a rabbit or hare running beside them. The latter animal may be a symbol of lust, for in the tenth-century dream book by the Byzantine writer known as Achmet, hares were associated with sexual activity.⁴¹ The couple on the bowl are sometimes identified as Digenes Akritas and his lover, Maximo, the Amazon queen.⁴² While the identification is not certain, it is a likely supposition on account of the woman’s crown.

Whoever the lovers are, their portrayal is clearly intended to be humorous. Here again, as in the case of the bowl with the four disembodied heads, the incongruity of the composition is increased by its systematic reversal of a very common religious image that was familiar to every Byzantine, namely the icon of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child. From the ninth century onwards, for example, such an image could be seen depicted in mosaic in the apse of the great church of St Sophia in Constantinople.⁴³ We can read the scene in the bowl as a series of inversions of the sacred model: the sitting person is a man instead of a woman; on his lap we see a grown woman instead of a male child; the hair of the seated figure is not modestly concealed by a veil, as is that of the Virgin, but instead it flows down in a luxuriant stream; the feet are not supported in a dignified manner on a footstool, as are the feet of the Mother of God, but instead they project at all angles beyond the frame, in a disorderly and inappropriate fashion. In the context of the norms of Byzantine visual culture, the image on the pot substitutes the profane for the sacred, and converts maternal into erotic love. Thus the vessel was irreverent on several levels. It was a humorous evocation of the dalliances of the greatest hero of Byzantine secular epic, but, at the same time, it implicitly parodied the much more august canons of Byzantine church art.

ABANDON

We have seen that the regular liturgies of Church and palace were, for the Byzantines, preeminent expressions of the principle of order. But we have also seen a desire to subvert those same rituals through parody and disruption. One theme that occurs frequently in the parodies, and in their condemnation by the authorities, is that of inappropriate, unbridled movement, which was often compared to the dancing of the pagan god Dionysos and his followers. By way of example, we may look at another passage in the biography of Basil I, which records how the jester Groullos mocked an ecclesiastical liturgy. The author claims that the patriarch of Constantinople, the pious Ignatios, was conducting a procession of ecclesiastics to a church somewhere outside the city. As the clerics were proceeding with the appropriate chanting, they encountered Groullos accompanied by his cronies, who had dressed themselves up in ecclesiastical garments and were carrying musical instruments. Groullos himself was riding on an ass. When Groullos and his buffoons met the patriarch and his retinue, they started to strum on their stringed instruments, to strike their cymbals and to break into obscene songs in competition with the chanting of the genuine clergy. They also mocked the real priests by lifting up the bogus church vestments which they were wearing. The author of Basil’s biography explicitly compares Groullos and his band to a Dionysiac troupe, saying that they were “leaping about like Pan and the satyrs as they accomplished their diabolical procession and dance.”⁴⁴ The animal on which Groullos was riding also made a reference to the procession of Dionysos and his followers, for the satyr Silenos traditionally rode on an ass.

The mocking antics of Groullos and his band evidently bore some resemblances to performances by the mimes. In the twelfth century, Zonaras, echoing a common theme, complained that the mimes “incite their more simple-minded and heedless [spectators] to bacchic frenzy.”⁴⁵

The theme of derisory leaping and jumping recurs in another tale of the disruption of church services, which is told in the life of Leo, the saintly bishop of Catania, a text that was in circulation by the tenth century. Here it was a pagan sorcerer, named Heliodoros, who tried to subvert the liturgy performed by the saint on a feast-day. During the service, Heliodoros began to leap about in a disorderly manner, jumping on members of the congregation, and imitating the kicking of mules. The people laughed at his antics, but also were distressed at the disruption of the service.⁴⁶

These mockeries of ecclesiastical liturgies were not purely literary inventions. We have seen that the canonist Balsamon complained of clerics who dressed themselves up in inappropriate costumes and entered the church on feast-days. The eleventhcentury historian Skylitzes also complained of “the still prevailing custom, on the magnificent and public feast days, of insulting God and the memorials of the saints through improper dances, laughter, and frenzied cries during the celebration of the morning office, which one should offer to God with grief and a contrite heart.”⁴⁷ Here, again, the author stresses inappropriate movement as fundamental to the mockery of the measured conduct of the liturgy.

All of the texts that have been cited here convey a common idea, a desire to break the bounds of decorum, especially by indulging in abandoned movement. They help to explain the great popularity of Byzantine ivory and bone carvings that appear to celebrate freedom of movement as their main theme. A box in the Hermitage Museum illustrates this phenomenon well (Figure 24.6).⁴⁸ It portrays on its front a series of scantily clad figures that are linked only by the variety of poses that they adopt – from the stick-dancer at the far left, who stands on one leg while waving the other one in the air, to the dancer at the far right, who executes a pirouette. These cavorting figures, in their abandoned motion and their nudity, are the complete antithesis of the severely regimented saints on the calendar icon at Mt Sinai (Figure 24.1). The Byzantines must have appreciated such carvings all the more for the comic relief that they provided from the severity of their official art. The art embodied in the dancing figures on the boxes was, of course, anathema to the Church. Commenting on the fifty-first canon of the Council in Trullo, Zonaras wrote: “Correct Christian discipline requires the faithful not to indulge in loose and dissolute living, but to live in a manner that befits the saints. Therefore, this canon forbade whatever gives unnecessary merriment to the soul or weakens and enfeebles its [moral] fibers, and whatever causes shaking with laughter and loud guffaws.”⁴⁹

CONCLUSION

In this chapter we have focused on Byzantine art in a variety of media, especially ivory and bone boxes and ceramics. Although the art that has been discussed here

Figure 24.6 Cavorting warriors and performers. Casket, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. After Goldschmidt and Weitzmann 1930: I, pl. 32.

reflects a culture outside the official orthodoxies of Church and state, it cannot be called “popular” – at least, not in the sense that it excluded the elites. Even if the pottery was cheap, the ivory and bone boxes were relatively expensive products. And we have seen that parodies of ecclesiastical ceremonies were staged in the palace, at least in a biographer’s imagination, and on certain festivals were even performed in churches by the clerics themselves. Just as the restraints of Orthodoxy held all Byzantines of all classes in a tight grip, so did Byzantines of every station have a need for some relief in humor and parody.

In these pages a special emphasis has been placed on pottery, which was an art form produced largely outside the control of Church and state. Although some Byzantine pottery did emulate more costly wares in silver, and thus imitated the forms and iconographies associated with the elite,⁵⁰ many Byzantine ceramic artists produced designs that were completely individual, and innovative in every sense. These strikingly original works have yet to receive their due in the overall assessment of Byzantine art. Traditionally, the art of Byzantium has been associated with the Church, and especially with its greatest creation, the religious icon. Thus, the existence of the unofficial Byzantine art that has been introduced in this chapter, an art unfettered by the constraints of Orthodoxy, has tended to be overlooked. Its inventiveness, physicality and earthy humor do not fit well with the currently preferred view of Byzantine art as a supremely spiritual expression of religious feeling. But the unofficial art existed, nonetheless, and it helps us to see the Byzantines not only painted in two dimensions, like the icons that they revered, but also brought to life in a more rounded fashion as human beings.

NOTES

1 Maguire 1997c.

2 Dix 1945; Schulz 1986.

3 Cameron 1987.

4 Dagron 1991; Maguire 1996; Dagron 2007.

5 Mouriki 1990: 108, pl. 30.

6 Millet 1960.

7 Millet 1960: 93–169.

8 Maguire 1997c: 189.

9 On imperial crowns, see Parani 2003: 27–30.

10 On the loros, see Parani 2003: 18–27. See also Woodfin in this volume.

11 Kalavrezou 1994.

12 Tinnefeld 1974.

13 See, especially, the frescoes in the north-west tower of St Sophia in Kiev: Logvin 1971: 38–40, pls 251–6.

14 Maguire and Maguire 2007.

15 Maguire 1996: 5–15.

16 Vassilaki 2000: 390–1.

17 Wolf et al. 2004.

18 PG 99: 957; translation by Mango 1972: 175.

19 Kolbaba 2000: 51.

20 Papanikola-Bakirtzis 1999: 59.

21 Papanikola-Bakirtzis 1999: 17–20.

22 PG 137: 728–9; Tinnefeld 1974: 339–40.

23 Theophanes Continuatus 1838: 244–7.

24 Evans and Wixom 1997: 232–3.

25 Maguire and Maguire 2007: 113–15, 148, figs 106–8, 136.

26 Dunbabin 2004; Maguire and Maguire 2007: 109–10, figs 100–3.

27 PG 137: 693. On Byzantine boxes and the mimes, see Cutler 1984–5.

28 Papanikola-Bakirtzis 1999: 58.

29 Papanikola-Bakirtzis 1999: 40, 177, 182; Maguire and Maguire 2007: 75–81, figs 72–5.

30 Frantz 1940–1: 87–91, fig. 1; Frantz 1941: 9–13, fig. 1.

31 See, for other fully dressed and armed dragon-slayers, Papanikola-Bakirtzis 1999: 40, 177, 182; Maguire and Maguire 2007: figs 73–5.

32 Maguire and Maguire 2007: 106–34.

33 See e.g. Goldschmidt and Weitzmann 1930: vol. 1, figs 6c, 20a, 20c, 27b, 28c, 29b, 30c, 30d, 32b, 32c and 32d; Weitzmann 1972: fig. 29c.

34 Goldschmidt and Weitzmann 1930: vol. 1, fig. 6c; Weitzmann 1972: fig. 29c.

35 Jeffreys 1998: 154–7.

36 Jeffreys 1998: 148–51. I am indebted to Christopher Livanos for the interpretation of these passages, and especially to his paper “Digenes and the Dragon: Indo-European Comparisons,” delivered at Dumbarton Oaks in the colloquium on “Byzantine Literature: New Voices and Current Approaches,” 10 November 2007.

37 Magdalino 1988: 106–7.

38 Trilling 1989: 64.

39 Trilling 1989: 65.

40 Evans and Wixom 1997: 270–1; Papanikola-Bakirtzis 1999: 184.

41 Drexl 1925: 172; Oberhelman 1991: 198.

42 Notopoulos 1964: 130–1.

43 Mango and Hawkins 1965: figs 1–2.

44 Theophanes Continuatus 1838: 245–6.

45 PG 137: 693.

46 Latyshev 1914: 25.

47 Skylitzes 1973: 243–4.

48 Goldschmidt and Weitzmann 1930: vol. 1, 42–3.

49 PG 137: 693.

50 Maguire and Maguire 1992: 14–16; Ballian and Drandaki 2003: 56–7; Maguire and Maguire 2007: 49–53.