ABSTRACT
Standing on either side of the blessing Christ, in the mosaic panel from the east bay of the South Gallery of the Church of St Sophia in Constantinople, the Empress Zoe and her third husband Constantine IX Monomachos are recorded for posterity in an act of piety – a donation of funds to the Great Church (Fig. 13.1). The imperial couple is portrayed with the familiar Byzantine formula chosen to demonstrate imperial authority, to evoke ‘the emperor’s God-given and Godlike power’; they are depicted in the sphere in which the divine is represented, their bodies shown frontally, in all the splendour of their imperial dress. 1 In images such as this, where ‘the personal becomes political’, viewers expected to see the emperors’ two bodies, both public and private, representing both the person of the emperor and the power of the imperial office. 2 But there is more to be seen in this pair of imperial portraits. This paper will focus on the way the physical body of the emperor, and empress, is represented in the light of a physical ideal that is dominant in Byzantium – the ideal of physical beauty. In depicting the likeness of emperors, how does imagery and writing speak about the emperor’s body in relation to contemporary perceptions of the ideal, beautiful body? How, in turn, does physical beauty relate to the ideal image of the emperor and empress and negotiate the balance between the ideal persona of an imperial figure and the depiction of its physical self? 3 This paper will first look into the special role ascribed to physical beauty as an attribute of the imperial body in Byzantine writing. In this light it will then set written likenesses of Zoe and Monomachos against the broader context of contemporary writing on the ‘beautiful body’, and discuss the issue of reality versus idealisation before juxtaposing imagery and texts to discuss beauty as a quality of the gendered body.
