Epigrams on Works of Art 151The majority of Byzantine verse inscriptions on works of art are dedicatory
texts in which the donor presents his pious oblation to Christ, the Holy Virgin,
or one of the many saints, and prays that his munificence may be rewarded in
the hereafter. The material evidence once again presents a somewhat distorted
image of the kinds of epigrams that were inscribed on Byzantine monuments
and artefacts. Luxury objects and expensive buildings bear the name of their
pious donors for an obvious reason: if a person spends a fortune hoping to
obtain spiritual salvation, he understandably wants people to know who paid
for the expenses (just like modern sponsors usually demand that the scientific
programme they are funding, the sports event they are sponsoring or the
public building they are financing bears their name). Dedicatory inscriptions
are inscribed on stone or other sorts of material that do not wear out easily,
such as ivory or precious metals. Epigrams that describe a specific work of art,
on the contrary, are usually inscribed on mosaics, frescoes and icons – materials
that do not last as long as stone. It is precisely because of this material aspect
that descriptive inscriptions are rare, whereas there are dozens of dedicatory
inscriptions^6. However, the manuscripts, and especially the lemmata attached
to the poems, leave no doubt that Byzantine works of art were often inscribed
with descriptive epigrams. Most of these works of art and their inscriptions
have disappeared, but the texts found in manuscripts may help us in recaptur-
ing the past and reshaping in our minds the visual world of the Byzantines.
And this is precisely why art historians should pay special attention to epi-
grams^7. For the epigrams that we find in Byzantine manuscripts, may fill in
some of the formidable lacunae in the epigraphic material, and may occasion-
ally provide evidence for monuments that have been lost.
I certainly do not mean to suggest that all the epigrams on works of art we
find in Byzantine collections of poems and anthologies were once intended to
be inscribed. There are simply too many epigrams and too few monuments. In
my view, the majority of epigrams on works of art should not be regarded as
genuine verse inscriptions, which by some unlucky quirk of fate can no longer
be found in situ, but rather as purely literary poems. However, as the “liter-
ary” epigrams closely resemble the “inscriptional” ones, usually it is almost
impossible to establish whether an epigram was originally meant to be in-
scribed or not. Lemmata may provide some circumstantial evidence, and
words like bl6pz and ™nq1de may indicate that an epigram describes a specific
work of art (see, for instance, the first verse of Geometres’ epigram: “Winter it
is that causes pain, flesh it is that suffers here”). But if an epigram is not
(^6) See also TALBOT 1999: 89.
(^7) See C. MANGO, The Art of the Byzantine Empire (312–1453). Sources and Documents.
Englewood Cliffs 1972, 182.