Beseelte Bilder

The Byzantine professional poet Manuel Philes (c. 1270- after 1335) created a substantial corpus of occasional poems commissioned by rich and powerful people of his time. Among them are some 500 epigrams on images - most of them religious, some secular. A classification of the epigrams by literary criteria will help their study and appreciation. One recurrent technique of composition is the traditional topos of the "living picture", where the picture is described not just as life-like but as living. The present monogaph treats 119 epigrams composed on the basis of this topos and its variations. It encompasses a new critical edition, German translation, commentary and literary interpretation. The latter deals especially with the relationship between epigrams on icons and the literary form of ekphrasis of works of art, the relationship between the notion of the "living picture" and the theory of icons in orthodox theology, as well as the reception of icons as objects of art and cult in a Byzantine context. Philes' use of the "living picture" topos is revealing for the literary aesthetics of his time. While of course reaching back well into ancient Greek rhetoric and poetry, this ancient topos is otherwise employed only rarely in Byzantine epigrams. Philes seems to be the first Byzantine epigrammatist to make extensive use of it, while the Anthologia Planudea serves as his source of inspiration. Yet, Philes is not just copying the ancient literary topos, which had lost its original meaning in the byzantine cultural context, but he adapts it to his contemporary cultural conditions.