The Affirmation of Gender in Byzantine Art through St. Mary of Egypt
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56349/emblecat.240Keywords:
Mary of Egypt, Byzantine, gender, masculine, femenine, sainthood, holiness, anchoressAbstract
Byzantine pictorial cycles in churches follow a strict, well-planned theological symbolism. Not everyone can be a painter, nor can a painter paint whatever they wish. Nevertheless, orthodoxy gets questioned with paradigmatic figures such as Mary of Egypt: a woman saint represented in Byzantium as any other male anchorite saint. Her figure conveys questions of gender and sainthood, subverting the wrongful idea of Catholic binarism, which orthodoxy seems to dismantle with Mary of Egypt. Although the legitimacy of her figure is under scrutiny, Mary of Egypt is a significant subject of study for both artistic and social purposes. As Jeannete Lindblom states: “even the lives of purely fictional saints reveal a lot about society, religion, culture and so forth, and about the social and political history of the period”.
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