Fleshing out the sexed and gendered body in art

Abstract

This chapter discusses the polysemous nature of the sexed and gendered human body in art within the cultural boundaries of Byzantium from the early empire up to its fall in 1453. There are several notions central to the study of this subject: body, performative embodiment, and visual rhetorics of sex and gender. In contrast to the codified and abstract human body characteristic of ‘official’ art, ‘unofficial’ images, found mostly in illuminated manuscripts and on luxury objects, display a rich aesthetic grammar of the human body. They offer multifarious insights into sex and gender variants in Byzantine art and reflect not only circumstantial style and iconography, but also patronage, agency, and multiple aspects of Byzantine society. Indeed, a main argument of the essay is that what is at stake when examining the visual materials is the rhetorical potential of images to reflect the ideologically driven, traditional gender-hierarchical order of Byzantine patriarchal society and that society’s need to maintain it. The essay concludes with a few thoughts regarding future studies.