ABSTRACT
Like modern images of the family, Byzantine familial representations fall into two broad categories: portraits of an actual family and, occasionally, generic images of intentionally anonymous parents and children, representing the family unit as a social group. Byzantine portraits of actual families were produced for many of the same reasons as are their modern counterparts, and both play the basic and important role of preserving memory. Byzantine biographical family portraits are almost always centred on saintly or biblical families, such as St Basil's, the Virgin's, and of course Christ's. The ninth-century Paris Gregory presents Basil as a child hiding in a cave with his parents, followed by scenes of his life and culminating in his funeral. The portrait as biography' has a strong message of idealised family life, expressed through transparent gender stereotyping, and domestic stability another Byzantine ideal, here translated into the language of dynastic succession.
