ABSTRACT
Intriguingly, the presence of representations of children in Byzantine art has not attracted much attention. Yet children and childhood are widespread subjects in Byzantine imagery: playful girls pick flowers on mosaic floors, athletic boys perform tricks on manuscript borders and naked infants cavort on ivory boxes. Youthful martyrs stand gracefully on painted icons, devoted children revere saints on church walls and solemn princes hold insignia in illuminated portraits. Children are rarely associated with Byzantine art or history and studies have largely viewed Byzantium as an adult world. Contrary to expectations, children were depicted frequently and sometimes in consequential contexts or locations. That children played a significant role in visual representation suggests that they had a central part in Byzantine life. Why do we not associate them with Byzantium? Ernst Gombrich, writing about the hold of visual records on the imagination and their ability to mythologize the past, commented, ‘Who could find it easy, after a visit to Ravenna and its solemn mosaics, to think of noisy children in Byzantium?’1 Robin Cormack, responding to this, makes the point that art does not necessarily reflect society and that the Ravenna mosaics ‘have the apparent “seriousness” of “official” art made for adults’.2 But, he also counters with the idea that the recognition of the solemnity of Byzantine art is ‘our perception not the Byzantine one’.3
