Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index
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Title:
Empress Ariadne
Creator:
Description:
This ivory plaque depicts Empress Ariadne within a domed structure, the curtains of which have been tied back. Her sumptuous robes bear the imperial portrait. In her hands she holds the imperial regalia: the globus cruciger and a scepter. According to Liz James, Ariadne's frontality, her placement within the domed niche and the way its curtains are drawn back present the empress not as a fecund mother-goddess, which had been the guise of previous empresses. Rather, here she appears totem-like and suprahuman, and thus is an equal counterpart to the emperor. Diliana Angelova argues that this image reveals a change in the conception of the imperium as "a partnership of a male and female sovereign."
Source:
Wikimedia Commons
Rights:
Public Domain
Subject
(See Also)
:
Ariadne, Byzantine Empress
Byzantium
Empresses
Imperial Regalia
Politics
Geographic Area:
Eastern Mediterranean
Century:
6
Date:
ca. 500
Related Work:
Current Location:
Florence, Bargello Museum
Original Location:
Artistic Type (Category):
Digital images; Sculptures
Artistic Type (Material/Technique):
Plaques; Ivory
Donor:
Height/Width/Length(cm):
36.5 cm/13.6 cm/
Inscription:
Related Resources:
Liz James, "Goddess, Whore, Wife, or Slave," in Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe (Boydell, 2002), 130-131; Diliana Angelova, "The Ivories of Ariadne and Ideas about Female Imperial Authority in Rome and Early Byzantium," Gesta 43.1 (2004): 1-15.