Natalia Bobrova
State Russian Museum, Russia
Several Byzantine images of the Virgin with the inscription “Н ПЕРΙВΛЕПТОС” survive from the 14th century. The view on the images of the Virgin Peribleptos, reflected in the research literature, is contradictory. There is no detailed and comprehensive analysis of these artworks. The term “Peribleptos” is often used as an iconographic type, not an epithet, but it applies to the artworks very different in iconography. Obviously, it is necessary to clarify the definition “Peribleptos” and to eliminate the contradictions connected with it.
It was M. Tatic-Djuric who supposed that Peribleptos is a specific iconographic type, a variant of Hodegetria. According to her classification of the Virgin’s iconography, the defining characteristic of the Peribleptos is a slight bend of the Virgin’s head towards the Child. In Tatic-Djuric’s view, this type is connected with the lost icon of the Constantinopolitan Peribleptos monastery founded by Romanos III Argyros (1028–1034).
The analysis of surviving monuments does not confirm the classification proposed by M. Tatic-Djuric and leads to the conclusion that all the images with the inscription “Н ПЕРΙВΛЕПТОС” belong to different iconographic types, including not only the various types of Hodegetria, but also of Glykofilousa. In the present paper the iconographic analogies for each of the icons with the inscription “Н ПЕРΙВΛЕПТОС” will be demonstrated. These are typologically similar monuments, which are not marked by such an inscription. These monuments form several groups.
The extant icons and analysis of the sources do not provide solid grounds for the reconstruction of the iconography of the Virgin’s image from the Constantinopolitan Peribleptos monastery. In Palaeologean period monasteries with the same name existed in different regions of the Empire, but there is no information on the iconography of the Virgin’s icons venerated in these monasteries (except Ohrid). The origin of typologically different icons with the inscription “Н ПЕРΙВΛЕПТОС” from two monasteries of the same name (in Ohrid and in Veria) leaves the question open. We have here not quite a standard situation, when the toponym is an epithet, the translation of which, moreover, is ambiguous and requires further interpretation.