Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium (review)

This handsome volume offers a source-intensive examination of when and how processional icons of the Mother of God were used in the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. Bissera V. Pentcheva of Stanford University brings broad knowledge of early and Middle Byzantine texts to bear on the civic cult of Marian icons, demonstrating that processional practices, for which historians had generalized backward from the Middle Byzantine period to assert a Justinianic or even early fifth-century origin, in fact emerged only much later. With this correction the author identifies a pattern familiar in cultural phenomena and artifacts of the immediate post-Iconoclastic period (that is, after 843) in Byzantium, by which ancient origins were claimed for recently devised responses to new exigencies. In the case of images of the Mother of God, Pentcheva shows that these were first chosen for the coinage of emperors Leo III (reg. 717–741) and his son Constantine V (741–775) in order to claim divine authorization for hereditary rule as a principle of political stability. Later, when the generals Nikephoros II Phokas (963–969) and John I Tzimiskes (969–976) used their military successes to claim the throne from weakened scions of the Macedonian dynasty, they reverted to the ancient image of the Theotokos crowning or sharing the scepter with the victor. At the same time, Pentcheva argues, Marian images on celebrated Constantinopolitan panels (today's "icons")—the Hodegetria Mother of God and the Virgin of the Blachernae—were linked by emperors to imperial fortunes through the highly visible role such panels played in public services at and in motion between significant cult sites. While earlier images of Christ were certainly carried in procession—as apotropaia on city walls during the Avar siege of 626, for example—the author demonstrates that those of the Virgin appeared in public only in the late tenth century and then with increasing frequency over the next two hundred years. Through careful analysis of such images on coinage, seals, and in other more familiar visual media such as manuscripts and murals, and through detailed consideration of a range of texts—many translated into English here for the first time—Pentcheva paints a more nuanced picture of how the Byzantines came to believe that icons of the Mother of God literally embodied both civic and religious values. The impact of two of these icons on Constantinopolitan Orthodox practice, even in its monastic settings, represents one of the most original findings of this study as argued in its second half.

In addition, the author provides many more particular insights. Three examples: cumulatively, it emerges that epithets of the Mother of God did not, for the Byzantines, mark fixed iconographic types but rather evoked her powers and/or functions as described in contemporary hymnody and prayer. The author defines another trope in the Byzantine aesthetic repertoire, connected to the eleventh-century renewal of interest in Neoplatonism. The divine presence in an image manifested itself via changes in color, shape, and smell, noted (and, with Psellos, described) by the sensitized beholder in what the author describes as "spiritual seeing." And the icon of the Mother of God Hodegetria, identified by the tenth century with the portrait of Mary painted by the apostle Luke, was appropriated for the city by the Emperor John II Komnenos, who enfolded it in a complex ritual journey to the dynastic funerary chapel in the Pantocrator monastery, thereby creating an emblem of the Byzantine state.

The strengths of this work are twofold: its closely argued reworking of the history of Marian cult images in Constantinople through the Middle Byzantine period (that is, up to the Fourth Crusade of 1204) and its scrupulous attention to the texts that make such a reworking possible. Hymns, prayers, hagiography, various types of services, chronicles, biography, and pilgrim accounts from Late Antiquity through the fifteenth century are reproduced in their original language and provided with reliable translations. This generous exposition makes Icons and Power a valuable...