International congress of byzantine studies belgrade, 22 27 august 2016

Aleksandr Preobrazhenskii
Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russian Federation; 
[e-mail]
Saints as Donors and Donors as Visionaries. 
On Some Modifications of Donor Portraiture in Byzantine World
Byzantine art provided the medieval culture of Orthodox lands with a few iconographical types 
of donor portraiture including widely used image of donor holding the church he has built, as well 
as image of donor or deceased person praying before Christ, the Holy Virgin or saint. While having 

---

637
a constant meaning, sometimes these formulas could be subject to substantial changes introducing 
new ideas into traditional schemes. Though the transformations in question were characteristic 
mainly for the Late Medieval or Early Modern period, especially for the Russian visual milieu, their 
first examples appeared much earlier, that is in the Middle Byzantine era.
The first group of these compositions covers the images of saints as church 
ktetors
. These 
pictures are rather often based on historical facts such as the fact of construction of the church 
or donation of the icon by a certain person who later was acknowledged as a saint. Such images 
can be found in Post-Byzantine Greece and in the Balkans where they coexist with “normal” 
donor imagery. In Late Medieval Russia they became more widespread while the life-time donor 
images ceased to be produced. Alongside with such images of Russian saints another type of their 
depictions imitated the iconography of votive and tomb compositions with donor in prayer. Having 
substituted the donors, the praying saints would turn in mediators and intercessors for the faithful 
and witnessed appearance of holy persons of the highest rank or communicated with them at the 
limitary zone between heavens and earth. It seems rather significant under these circumstances 
that sometimes such symbolic compositions would obtain a secondary and literal interpretation as 
images of specific historical events like vision or apparition of the Virgin before the saint. The cases 
of such misreading or rereading of ancient formulas can be found not only in Russia but in Post-
Byzantine world as well.
The images just discussed were in fact retrospective portraits of the real founders, sometimes 
based on their lifetime depictions. Being used as icons, they proclaimed the saintly founders’ role as 
protectors of their churches and monasteries. A very similar idea was basic for images of the second 
group which can be qualified as “pseudo-donor portrait” of a holy person who holds a church 
although he has never built or founded it. Usually such compositions feature a church dedicated to 
the saint in question (like some 12
th
c. Russian images of holy princes Boris and Gleb), a city guarded 
by the saint (images of St Nicholas of Mozhaisk), or the edifice standing for Ecumenical Church 
(apostles Peter and Paul). All these variants with their local or universal meaning can be of different 
origin which needs investigation, and possibly should be compared with Western iconographical 
tradition. However, together with images of real saintly donors they demonstrate flexibility and 
ambiguity of Byzantine donor iconography, as well as specific features of local traditions, and allow 
to explore the ways of interpreting the donor imagery by Medieval or Late Medieval audience.