ABSTRACT
Building on Henry Maguire’s longstanding interest in Byzantine gardens and parks, this chapter investigates a strange disjuncture between Byzantine texts and images purporting to depict the earthly paradise.
Middle Byzantine texts that offer the reader tours of the landscape of the afterlife consistently depict paradise as a garden of extraordinary fecundity, graced with various fruits and flowers. Visual representations from the same period, however, tend to reduce this vegetation to just a few discrete elements while emphasizing the human denizens of paradise: Abraham and the souls of the righteous, the Good Thief and the Mother of God. This last appears virtually without fail in Middle Byzantine depictions of the earthly paradise, despite her equally consistent absence from the texts that describe it.
The hagiographical texts have the better claim to theological consistency, as they imply the Mother of God’s presence with her son in the highest heaven. The Virgin’s prominence in the visual representations of the earthly paradise is not merely accidental, however. Her placement there appears to be a function of a broader cultural pattern of association of women in general – and Mary in particular – with paradisiacal landscapes. Even as these images stint on the representation of the foliage and flowers so vividly described by the textual sources, they identify the Mother of God with Eden and present her as the foremost blossom of paradise.
