RACIALIZED BEAUTY, PATHETIC POWER, AND THE BODY OF CHRIST IN BYZANTINE ART

The image of Jesus Christ is one of the most ubiquitous subjects in the canon of “Western” art. Despite the lack of any description of Christ’s likeness in Christian Scripture, the material record is remarkably consistent in its treatment of his appearance. This dissertation explores how this convention came into being. A close analysis of murals, manuscripts, panel-paintings, textiles, coins, and metalwork throughout the medieval Eastern Mediterranean ranging from the sixth to fifteenth century reveals how the image of Jesus Christ was racialized, canonized, and made beautiful. In the first chapter I bring together the extensive historiography on the formation of Christ’s likeness with recent scholarship on pre-modern race, tracing the process whereby Christ’s image was racialized and made beautiful. Having explored the processes that produced this most canonical of images, I turn to the image of Christ’s Passion—the subject where Christ’s beauty is given most sustained attention. In the second chapter, I argue that the images of Christ’s beautiful, stripped, and vulnerable body in iconography of the Passion were specifically designed to function alongside the liturgy as powerful tools of psychological and emotional persuasion aimed assisting the faithful in a life of repentance. The persuasive image of God’s suffering humanity was a useful devotional device assisting the beholder in overcoming the limitations of their human self-will in order to actively assume a posture of passivity to God’s will. In the final centuries of Byzantium, artists developed an eclectic array of images of Christ’s body that depicted the Christ’s body—stripped and sacrificed—that the faithful would consume in communion. These images, the focus of the third chapter, reveal artists testing the limits of the holy image in an effort to convey a mystery too terrible to be seen. Ultimately this dissertation presents a new history of the most universal image in Eastern Christendom—one that would have a profound impact on the global history of art.

Author dc:creator

• Mackin, Elliot

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Drpić, Ivan

• Arts and Humanities

Language dc:language.iso

en

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://repository.upenn.edu/handle/20.500.14332/62700

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.upenn.edu:20.500.14332/62700