RAISING ON A SHIELD IN BYZANTINE ICONOGRAPHY
Christopher WALTER
Among the more curious subjects which recur in Byzantine iconography is that of raising a newly appointed ruler on a shield. That the pictures reflect an actual ceremony leaves no room for doubt, although it is possible to have more than one opinion upon the periods of Byzantine history when the ceremony was in current use and upon the manner in which it was executed. On the whole the ceremony has interested Byzantinists more than the representation of it in pictorial form. Good monographs exist concerning its origins and its persistence or revival in the last centuries of the Byzantine epoch. Unfortunately, however, they do not study the ceremony for itself but rather in relation to other ceremonies, those of coronation and unction.
Art historians have also treated raising on a shield in relation to other themes. If we leave aside Kurt Weitzmann's early article upon the Paris Psalter, the first serious consideration of the subject occurs in Hugo Buch- thal's more developed study of the same Psalter1. Buchthal attempts a
1. H. Buchthal, The Miniatures of the Paris Psalter, London 1938, p. 24-25. (I presented the main themes of this article to the Conférence Gabriel Millet at the École pratique des hautes études [Paris], directed by Suzy Dufrenne, on December 14th 1974, and to Donald Nicol's seminar at the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, King's College [London], on January 24th 1975. I thank those who were present for many pertinent criticisms. My argument depends to some extent on conclusions which I set out to establish in two communications ; at the time of writing the present article, they had not been published : The coronation of a co-emperor in the Skyllitzes matritensis, Actes du XIVe congrès international des études byzantines, II, Bucharest 1975, p. 452-458 ; The iconographical sources for the coronation of Milutin and Simonida at Gracanica, delivered at Gracanica, October 12th 1973, at the Symposium « L'art byzantin au commencement du xive siècle »).
