ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the kinds of response that patrons' expectations could elicit from eleventh-century Byzantine artists. They can be roughly grouped under three headings: labels, frames, texture. A panel hung in a similar manner inside John Chrysostom’s study is seen in some of that author’s eleventh-century portraits. The last icon must have been comparable to a small eleventh-century diptych preserved at Sinai and to the series of miniatures in the Psalter of 1058. The logic behind certain eleventh-century framing devices is illustrated by a few painted vignettes in the famous Theodore Psalter of 1066. If the writer refers to a particular quality of the painting he describes, it is very likely to be the emphatically ‘hazy’ brushwork seen in some eleventh-century Crucifixion scenes. The devotional imagery discussed is the product – or rather the gradual outcome – of a specific set of patrons’ expectations rooted in the specific conditions under which such imagery was used.
