ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the facet of imperial imagery - the authority invested in likenesses of the emperor - and asks whether that particular legacy translated itself into religious portraiture. In 1936, Andre Grabar published L'empereur dans l'art byzantin, the main thesis of which was that much early Christian and Byzantine Christian iconography was adapted from imperial imagery. Byzantinists have almost universally accepted the close relationship between Christian and imperial imagery as a comfortable subset of a larger pattern, which saw much early Christian iconography as modified Roman imagery. Images of both the emperor and Christ could be very powerful indeed, but images of God always trumped images of the emperor. A more affirmative role of imperial portraiture is apparent in Roman and early Byzantine courts of law, where an image of the emperor 'stood in' for the emperor himself to authorise the proceedings of law courts.