ABSTRACT
The British Museum Triumph of Orthodoxy icon (late fourteenth century) is the earliest known pictorial representation of the restoration of the holy icons, a feast first celebrated on 11 March 843 and commemorated by the Orthodox Church since then on the first Sunday of Lent. This chapter presents the iconography of the British Museum icon, proposing new ways of interpreting it. Central to its iconography is the icon of the Virgin with Child in the upper register supported by two angels and flanked, according to the surviving inscriptions, by the Empress Theodora together with her young son, Emperor Michael III, on the left and the Patriarch Methodios with three monks on the right. The middle years of the late Byzantine period were torn by the debate over Hesychasm and the relationship with the West.
