Visualizing Female Deviance: Condemned Women in Monumental Painting of Medieval Serbia

Research on the portrayal of women in Byzantine and related Orthodox medieval societies usually focuses on images of female saints and secular women of high status. However, a wider array of depictions existed, and representations of damned women might offer new insights into medieval societal perspectives regarding women, power, control, sexuality, and morality. This paper examines surviving images of female offenders, who are punished for their sins, from fourteenth-century churches of the Byzantine sphere in medieval Serbia. It highlights representations from the Serbian Orthodox Church of the Mother of God Ljeviška and the Gračanica and Visoki Dečani Monasteries. These images demonstrate the complex and innovative intermingling of the traditional Byzantine, local Balkan, and Western European characteristics. Artists depicted sexually promiscuous women, bad mothers, and other female perpetrators as young, naked, and with pronounced female features that seem attractive, seductive, and, from a modern perspective, quite scandalous for a holy space. The unusually extensive place given to the images of sinners in these churches, along with certain peculiar visual details, also served as effective tools for directing church audiences to pay special attention to them. Unconventional for Byzantine art, these iconographic and stylistic choices raise questions about the functions of these images in sacred spaces. This presentation aspires to situate the images of condemned women from medieval Serbia within broader Byzantine legal, social, and artistic frameworks. It demonstrates that while male church leaders and lawmakers developed and controlled the stereotypes on female immorality and the role and position of women in society, patrons and artists developed the surprising pictorial language for female ‘sinfulness’ in religious art.