Framing the Holy: Revetments on Late Byzantine Icons

This study examines icon revetments produced during the late Byzantine period (1261–1453), situating them within the diversity of mixed-media, multisensory, and multivalent devotional images that combined personal piety with conspicuous consumption and the public spectacle of lavish patronage. These works are evidence of the “ornamental turn”—a paradigm shift marked by the increase of ornament on visual works that mediated wealth, spiritual devotion, and social power. Revetted icons do not make arguments about the faithful representation of prototypes; they make arguments about faithful veneration. Beginning with a historiographic study of ornament, the thesis examines how the ornamental vocabulary on revetments manifests relationships between specific decorated icons. Indices of ornament motifs and a catalogue of surviving icon revetments and frames from the eleventh through fifteenth centuries constitute the appendices. In chapter 2, I argue that the previously unstudied decorated strips added to the icon of the Mother of God Hodegetria in Ohrid were part of a larger project aimed at legitimizing Serbian emperor Stefan Uroš IV Dušan (r. 1331–55) and his archbishop Nicholas in Ohrid. They structured their leadership in the Balkans on their contemporaries in Constantinople. In chapter 3, I present a new reading of the dedicatory prayers inscribed on the icon of the Mother of God in Freising. These texts manifest the icon veneration of wealthy individuals whose gifts of enamel, silver, and gold mediated their desire for divine aid and broadcasted their piety to viewers. Inscriptions on other revetments complement the central holy figures whose gestures direct viewers to names and key sentiments of the inscribed prayer. In chapter 4, I argue that the hitherto unexamined facture of the revetted icon of the Virgin in Fermo was an invention born of the desire for Byzantine imagery in thirteenth-century Italy. It was designed to emulate the materiality and ornamental vocabulary of Byzantine revetted icons. By drawing conclusions about how elite individuals conceptualized the efficacy and materiality of revetments, this dissertation augments the burgeoning discourse on late Byzantine icons. Examining the ornamental turn reveals new insights into how these objects functioned in late Byzantine political, social, and devotional matrices.Ph.D