Between Concepts and Realities: The Boyana Church as a “Mirror” of Its Patrons
Résumé
By focusing on the famous donor portrait of sebastokrator Kaloyan and his wife Desislava painted in 1259, and an overlooked 14th-century fresco of the Presentation of the Virgin funded by Ivanko and Slav, this study approaches the visual and epigraphic representations of donors within the Boyana church as 'constructed likenesses' as opposed to the concept of 'naturalistic' and 'realistic' representations. The analysis of the visual strategies shows that the portrait of the refounders' couple resonates with Middle-Byzantine ideals of beauty and rhetorical devices known from eulogies and secular Late Bulgarian texts while promoting taxis through details such as costumes and scale. In the case of the Presentation of the Virgin, the symbiosis between image and text in favor of Ivanko and Slav's self-fashioning is achieved through theatrical iconography, adapted structure for the donor inscriptions and their carefully chosen placement within the composition. The reception of the two images by patrons and viewers alike is tackled from the perspective of metaphorical mirrors. Different degrees of perception ranging from exemplary virtuousness to vanity are outlined depending on the eye of the beholder.