Praying for Salvation in a Versatile Medium: Painted Donors’ Inscriptions in the Middle Byzantine Churches of Cyprus

In art-historical studies of monumental Byzantine painting, painted donors’ inscriptions incorporated into monumental iconographic programs are treated primarily as texts: their language and, in the case of metrical inscriptions, their metre are recorded and commented upon; potential intertextual connections are identified; the prosopographic and historical information they contain is carefully mined; and, more importantly, their content is painstakingly analysed in order to identify the intentions of the patrons, the spiritual, the emotive, as well as the social, in commissioning the painted ensemble. Inspired by recent fruitful developments in epigraphic studies, which privilege the materiality of the painted inscriptions, what I propose to do is look at patrons’ inscriptions surviving in a small number of painted Cypriot churches dated to the 12th century not simply as texts but as texts-on-display, the inflection of whose message was inseparable from their material matrix. According to this approach, the material characteristics of the inscriptions, i.e., the medium, the colour, the shape, the size and the spacing of letters; the layout of words against the actual or painted supports or within frames; their disposition on the wall-surface and their physical relationship to other aspects of the painted decoration, as well as questions of visibility and legibility, are all considered integral in the communication of their message. Indeed, it will be argued that the materiality of the painted inscriptions did not simply impact the visual perception of this message by the viewer or reader, but that it was constitutive of meaning. Not least, the versatility afforded by the painted medium allowed for the individualisation of donors’ inscriptions in our Cypriot case-studies. Form and emplacement added nuance to, not to say helped activate, the content of the words by providing non-textual ‘subtext’ on the individual patrons’ self-perception and their negotiation of their relation to God on the one hand and their social milieu on the other within the physical, social, and spiritual space of the church.