ACADEMIA SUMMARIES

Images for Personal Devotion in an Age

of Liturgical Synthesis: Bilateral Icons
in Byzantium, ca. 1100-1453
The original paper contains 9 sections, with 10 passages identified by our machine learning
algorithms as central to this paper.

Paper Summary

SUMMARY PASSAGE 1

Section 1
Study of Byzantine Christians' changing identities through language inflected by liturgical and non-
liturgical texts evokes the ways bilateral icons participated in devotional practices independent of
liturgical prescriptions and processions. The gradual involvement of bilateral icons at the agrypnia,
when Byzantine Christians delivered some of their most fervent hymns, accounts for their proliferation
in the Palaiologan period. In addition to outlining their general progression beginning in the twelfth
century and continuing through the fifteenth, the dissertation contributes the following: it revises a
predominant interpretation that links bilateral icons to Good Friday services; it distinguishes between
impulses behind bilateral icons' inception and forces that drove their rising numbers, connecting the
former to developments in Byzantine Christian piety and the latter to the history of the monastic rite; it
argues that Byzantine Christians' language, identities, and devotional habits were mediating, decisive
factors between liturgical texts and bilateral icons; and it curbs the tendency in scholarship to
represent bilateral icons in direct dialogue with monastic liturgy, demonstrating the need to address
the intermediate subjects of spoken devotional language, memory and creativity in Byzantium, and
the impact of ritual on Byzantine Christians' pious practices.
SUMMARY PASSAGE 2

Introduction
Analysis of liturgical hymns, lections, and refrains, however, does not provide absolute understanding
of bilateral icons' functions, and it does not demonstrate a processional function. Yet this same
analysis evokes the impact of liturgical services on the devotional language and changing identities of
Byzantine Christianslanguage and identities they brought to their veneration of bilateral icons. This
dissertation argues that the genesis of bilateral icons lay neither in the liturgy per se, nor in changes
to liturgical services but among the liturgically inflected devotional habits and language of Christians,
which were themselves developing in the tenth and eleventh centuries, whereas the proliferation of
bilateral icons was linked to monasteries' adoption of Byzantium's Neo-Sabaitic rite and this rite's
characteristic agrypnia.

SUMMARY PASSAGE 3

Bilateral Icon Defined, A Very Brief History, And Questions Raised

Is there a relationship between bilateral icons and medieval memory? Perhaps the most pressing
question that emerges following a brief scan of the catalogue is one no scholar has answered: Why,
beginning in the late thirteenth century, did bilateral-icon production increase among sites of northern
mainland Greece, Cyprus, and, possibly, in Constantinople? Although art historians mention Good
Friday to explain bilateral icons, this approach ignores the existence of this Feast's liturgical services
for nearly a millennium prior to the appearance of bilateral icons, it mistakenly represents
continuations of weekly practices as novel additions to Good Friday, and it overlooks what I will argue
was a mediating entity between bilateral icons and the liturgy, that is, the individual Byzantine
Christian whose language, devotional practices, and identities were shaped by attendance at
liturgical services.

SUMMARY PASSAGE 4

State Of The Scholarship

Moreover, religious and military processions account for the choice to depict a second icon on a
panel's reverse, and these same events provided bilateral icons with a communal setting of viewers
(Grabar's "fidèles"). intent of bilateral icons. Although one scholar has argued for the impact of other
Feast days on a fourteenth-century bilateral icon (while still asserting its unproven processional
context), 10 Good Friday remains in scholarship as the germ and primary liturgical setting of bilateral
icons.
SUMMARY PASSAGE 5

Scope Of The Dissertation

This dissertation represents bilateral icons as products of broader developments in the liturgical and
devotional practices of Byzantine Christians. The term "Byzantine Christian" refers to a Greek-
speaking member of Christianity's medieval Orthodox rite and familiar with lections, hymns, and
additional texts used in this rite's liturgical services. This Byzantine Christian might be male or female,
and as we will see, the degree to which she/he was familiar with liturgical texts, as well as the ways
she/he learned them depended on one's status as an ecclesiastic, a monk, a lay woman, or a
layman.

SUMMARY PASSAGE 6

Proposals For Bilateral Icons' Settings And Patrons

form Mary's epithets on bilateral icons. These connections do not argue for bilateral icons' liturgical or
processional functions, but they do evoke the expectations and emotional tenor with which a
Byzantine Christian approached bilateral icons. In this chapter, I argue that available evidence draws
Marian bilateral icons toward two intended contexts in the fourteenth century, a monastery and the
monastic agrypnia, but these contexts neither demonstrate a function grounded in liturgical
participation, nor do they separate the panels from non-ecclesiastic, nonmonastic Christians, who
were, at times, patrons of bilateral icons.

SUMMARY PASSAGE 7

Between Bilateral Icons And The Liturgy:

The previous chapters, combined with the three appendices provide new explanations for the
common pairing's popularity in Palaiologan Byzantium, they revise long-standing assumptions about
bilateral icons, suggest motivations behind the bilateral icon's origins, and they offer the first working
history of the Byzantine bilateral icon. The following sections treat each of these topics individually,
emphasizing the overlooked impact of Byzantine Christians' mnemonic and devotional practices that
mediated between bilateral icons and the liturgy.
SUMMARY PASSAGE 8

Conclusions
Upon bilateral icons' appearance in the twelfth century, monasteries did not immediately involve the
panels in liturgical services, and they may not have commissioned the panels. The extant material
does not support assignment of the earliest bilateral icons to monastic institutions or services.
Instead, the panels' development was similar to that of the stavrotheotokion: bilateral icon and hymn
started out independent of liturgical prescriptions but were shaped nonetheless by pre-existing
liturgical and devotional traditions, and over time they became members of liturgical offices.

SUMMARY PASSAGE 9

Writers Of The Stavrotheotokia And Paraklētikoi Kanones

Investigated Previously Composed
she/he delivered. Bilateral icons' origins lay not in changes to a single Feast's services, not in a direct
relationship between poetry and painting, and not in the dissemination of a single type of 23 One
wonders if the roots of bilateral icons run even deeper, touching upon the competing cycles of
liturgical readings (mostly hymns) that came to characterize the Stoudite liturgy over the course of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries. Certain liturgical texts, including the liturgical typikon and Menaion,
were intended to regulate these competing cycles and first appeared as manuscripts in the eleventh
century; see ODB, 2:1338, s.v.

SUMMARY PASSAGE 10

Bilateral Icons With Scriptural Verses, Then, Not Only

Accommodated An Individual Byzantine
John 10:9, and see Appendix C, no. 72; and see Å evÄ​enko,"Evergetis Synaxarion," 395. 38 This
bilateral icon's companion image of the Crucifixion problematizes hypothetical placement of this and
any bilateral icon in a sanctuary screen; see below, Appendix B, p. 243. by liturgical services, have
earned her/him: "Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom
prepared for you since the creation of the world" (Fig. 58). 39 39 Matthew 25:34, and see Appendix C,
no.