In the year 944, two wonders arrived in the city of Constantinople from foreign lands: First, a textile that had Christ's face miraculously imprinted on it, known as the Mandylion. Second, male conjoined twins from Armenia. In this talk, I will focus on the depiction of these twins in a historical chronicle known as the Madrid Skylitzes. My aim is to show how the multifaceted meanings of the conjoined twins operated in the context of imperial rule, political intrigue, and religious authority across the text’s Constantinopolitan origin and the manuscript’s eventual illustration in Norman Sicily.
Roland Betancourt is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine. Betancourt is the author of three monographs, Performing the Gospels in Byzantium: Sight, Sound, and Space in the Divine Liturgy (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020), and Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2018), as well as several edited volumes.
The Lindner Lecture Series is funded by the Sacks Art Lecture Endowment which supports an annual lecture within the Department of Art. The series is named after the Carl H. and Martha S. Lindner Center for Art History which supports student and faculty programs and research in the Art History Department within the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at UVA. The Lindner Lecture Series brings speakers to Grounds to present exciting new research in art history. Since the Fall 2022, speakers are nominated and selected by the faculty and graduate students of the Art Department.
