The art of being Byzantine: History, structure and visual narrative in the Madrid Skylitzes manuscrip

This study focuses on the Skylitzes Matritensis, the only extant medieval illustrated chronicle in Greek. The 574 surviving illustrations of manuscript, which is housed in the National Library of Spain in Madrid, provide rich scenes of imperial, civic, and military life in the Byzantine empire. I examine the manuscript's narrative program, organization and structure in order to reconstruct its ideological origins. While debate about the manuscript has primarily focused on reclaiming its Byzantine identity and explaining the combination of "Byzantine" and "Western" images, my study explores the relationship between text and images and analyzes the choices inherent in the production of the visual narrative.;Chapter one examines the history of the manuscript and the debates about the provenance of the imagery. Chapter two discusses the stages of production of the manuscript and analyzes the conceptualization of the visual narrative. I argue that the visual narrative was created ad hoc and provide case studies of how the visual narrative was selected and executed. Chapter three analyzes the vulnerable, unflattering and irreverent representations of imperial murder which repeatedly transgress the boundaries of Byzantine ideology and official iconography. Chapter four examines the treatment of iconoclasm and the restoration of Orthodoxy in the visual narrative. I conclude that the images reveal a curious ideological distance from the triumphant visions of Orthodoxy prevalent in Byzantine art and discourse. Chapter five explores how the manuscript fits into the cultural world of Norman Sicily. I demonstrate that Roger II drew heavily upon Byzantine models and extended his political competition to appropriation of imperial style in word and image. In view of the fact that the manuscript fits well with what we know about Roger's reign, as well as the fact that certain omissions in the visual narrative might even be explained by circumstances of Roger's life, I suggest that the manuscript was commissioned after 1144 by someone at the court of Roger II, if not Roger himself.