By Nazar Kozak | National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine Thematic

Overview

The Akathistos cycles are the Late and post-Byzantine sequences of pictorial scenes that illustrate an Early Byzantine liturgical hymn known as the Akathistos to the Mother of God.

Composed in the 5th century, in between the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon (as Leena Marry Peltomaa argues based on its dogmatic content), the Akathistos hymn was firmly associated with the city of Constantinople. The Synaxarion's entry on the fifth Saturday of Lent (that day when the Akathistos is performed at the Orthros service) tells the story of how in the aftermath of the 626 siege, the people of Constantinople sang the Hymn in thanksgiving to the Virgin for her miraculous interference in the city's defense. (They sang it standing and from this custom comes the name Akathistos – meaning "not sitting" in Greek.)

Despite the hymn's long-term circulation in Byzantine liturgical practices, it was only in the Palaiologan era (1261-1453) that it found its way into the the Byzantine iconographic repertory. The earliest extant Akathistos cycles are dated to around the year 1300. At first, they circulated only in the Balkans, but eventually, in the post-Byzantine times they spread all around the Orthodox world from Cyprus in the south to the Tsardom of Muscovy in the north, and from the Ruthenian Galicia in the west to the Caucasus on the east.

Visual structures of Akathistos cycles corresponds to the textual structure of the Akathistos hymn. The Hymn consists of twenty-four strophes or stanzas (gr. oikoi) preceded by initial verses (gr. prooimii). Most of the Akathistos cycles contain twenty-four scenes that illustrate these twenty-four stanzas of the main part of the hymn, but also some cycles feature the illustration of the second prooimion or even contain additional illustrations for selected strophes. The opposite tendency is also evident—some cycles skip some of the strophes and thus consist of a lesser number of scenes than 24. In most cases, the identification of the Akathistos scenes is assisted by the inscriptions featuring the initial lines of the strophes.

To a great extent, the iconography of the Akathistos cycles was based on the iconography of the Christological and Mariological cycles. The scenes of the Annunciation, including the Annunciation at the Well, Visitation, Doubts of Joseph, Nativity, the Story of the Magi, Flight into Egypt, Presentation in the Temple, Road to Calvary, Crucifixion, Anapeson, Anastasis, and other were adopted for the illustrations of the Akathistos strophes. For that reason, it can be difficult to identify partly preserved Akathistos cycles because their iconography can match well-known Gospel scenes. This of course does not mean that the Akathistos iconography was completely unoriginal.

The Akathistos illustrators were quite inventive in the reinterpretation of the existing iconography as well as in creating new schemes. The most well-known of those inventions is the illustrations of Strophe 21 that explore the metaphor of the Virgin as a candle. The Virgin is either represented with a candle in her hands or next to the column crowned with flames, or even inside a giant mandorla of burning flames. Speaking on the level of a basic compositional layout, the most popular scheme that can be identified in the Akathistos scenes represents the main actor (the Virgin, Christ, the Virgin with Christ Child, or even an icon) venerated by two symmetric groups of people (apostles, saints, kings, bishops, orators, singers, laymen).

Although each strophe was illustrated in multiple ways, the individual Akathistos cycles are not completely different. Quite the contrary; they can be linked into groups or types based on the shared similarities or sets of traits that distinguish the groups from one another. The optics used for the identification of these traits should not focus on minor iconographic details because in that case, the types of the Akathistos cycle will multiply exponentially. Rather, the most reasonable criterion here should be the subject matter of a scene and a scene's placement in the sequence of a cycle.

The majority of the extant Akathistos cycles are available for study in the wall-painting and icons, yet there are also several examples in books and liturgical textiles. Among the most well-known and well-preserved Akathistos cycles one can mention the wall-paintings in the Marko Monastery (1376–81), the Ferapontov monastery (1502), the Moldoviţa monastery (1537), and the refectory of the Great Lavra at the Mount Athos (1535–41); the icon in the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow Kremlin (ca. 1400); the miniatures in the Tomič Psalter from the State Historical Museum in Moscow (ca. 1360) and the Munich Serbian Psalter from The Bavarian State Library in Munich (1396–1410); the woodcuts in the Triodion printed in Kyiv in 1627; the epitrachelion of Archpriest Dorotheos from the Stavronikita Monastery at the Mount Athos (16th century).

Key Issues and Debates

Based on the scope of their engagement with the topic, the studies on the Akathistos cycles can be divided into four groups:

1) studies focused on a single cycle, which is often a part of a broader program of a church or a manuscript decoration. The pioneering works of this kind by Josef Strzygowski (1906) about the Munich Serbian Psalter was succeeded by many others such as the article by Tania Velmans (1972) on the Escorial codex, and the monograph by Maria Aspra Bardabake (1992) on the codex Garrett 13 at Princenton University, to mention just a few example;

2) studies focused on groups of the cycles. For the examples of this category see the monograph by Ruth Farbitius (1999) and the article by Consţanta Costea (2009) on the Akathistos cycles in the 16th-century Moldavian principality;

3) generalized studies on the Akathistos iconography that attempt to discuss as many cycles as possible. The article by Josef Myslivec (1932) and the monograph by Ioannis Spatharakis (2005) are the most cited works in this category;

4) studies focused on the illustration of specific strophes. See for instance an article by Marka Tomic Djuric (2011) about the illustration of the concluding strophes of the Akathistos Hymn;

5) studies that refer to the Akathistos cycles along with other evidence for the main argument. For a recent example of such a study see the article by Alice Isabella Sullivan (2017) on the scene of the Siege of Constantinople.

From their very beginnings at the turn of the 20th century, the studies of the Akathistos cycles were centered on issues of iconography. Scholars identified scenes in the cycles as illustrations of the strophes of the hymn, investigated their compositional sources, compared and contrasted the depictions of the same strophe in different cycles, and identified the iconographic types of the cycles as a specific sequence of specific scenes.

Occasionally, this approach led to broader conclusions. Thus, Nikodim Kondakov (1902) outlined the chronological relationship between different types of the Akathistos cycles, claiming that with time the laconic symbolism was succeeded by lavish narrativism. Joseph Myslivec (1932), in turn, evaluated the originality of the Akathistos iconography. He indentified two divergent modalities that were used for the illustration of the two parts of the Akathistos Hymn: strophes 1-12 and strophes 13-24 correspondingly (to be precise he wrote that strophes 4, 11, and 18 use both of these modalities). As result, according to Myslivec, the first part of the cycle consists of the scenes "taken unchanged" from the pre-existing Christological and Mariological compositions, and the second part (strophes 13-24) consists of "original schemes."

Later on, Jacqueline Lafontaine-Dosogne (1984) contested the conclusion about the traditionality of the scenes of the first part of the hymn (strophes 1-12) by showing their variety both on the level of the subject matter and compositional layouts. More recently, Ioannis Spatharakis (2005) published an exhaustive analysis of almost all known late Byzantine Akathistos cycles to offer a reconstruction of the first unpreserved Akathistos cycle created in Constantinople in the 13th century. However, his sampling from the post-Byzantine was quite scarce.

Several scholars, following the paradigm of Panofsky's iconology, tried to link the Akathistos cycles with the historic context of the time. Probably the best known of such studies connects the emergence of the Akathistos cycles with the rise of the hesychastic movement during the Palaiologan period. Thus, Аlexandra Pätzold (1989) pointed to the occurrence of early Akathistos cycles in monastic churches, which at that time were centers of hesychasm. She also linked certain developments in the Akathistos iconography with the hesychast theological ideas. For instance, according to Pätzold, the representation of the veil raised behind the Virgin in the illustration of Strophe 4 creates a 'negative' space and thus symbolizes the insensible reality of God to which Gregory Palamas constantly referred to in his sermons; and the most popular iconographic scheme used for the illustration of the Akathistos strophes – the representation of believers next to Christ or the Virgin – envisions a core hesychast concept of theosis, that is the deification of man, who through it achieves unity with God.

Similarly, Efthalia Constantinides (1992) linked the translation of the Akathistos Hymn into visual media to the victory of the hesychasts over the unionists in 1282 and interpreted the constant employment of the mandrola motif in the Akathistos iconography as evidence of the hesychast influence on art. A case of bridging a single Akathistos cycle with a political context of its age could be also found in E.B. Gromova's (2005) monograph on the late Byzantine Akathistos icon from the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow Kremlin. She explains the misordered placement of the Akathistos scenes on this icon by the author's or donor's desire to encode visually a narrative about early Muscovite history.

The Akathistos cycles have been also discussed in scholarship associated with the "new" art history. Thus, Nancy P. Ševčenko (1991) addressed the Akathistos cycle in her study of the icons' role in the Byzantine liturgy. While Henry Maguire (2012) in his monograph on the representation of nature in Byzantine art referred to the alleged “artistic poverty” of the Akathistos cycles in the representation of nature-derived metaphors (lavishly present in the Akathistos hymn) as evidence of the nature's negation in Byzantine art after iconoclasm.

Recently (2022), I have revisited the iconographic typology of the Akathistos cycles through the lens of the mobility paradigm and the mapping methodology to understand how accessing the iconographic mobility of the types of the Akathistos cycles can impact the understanding of the geography of post-Byzantine art. I argue that seen through an iconographic mobility lens this geography emerges as a coherent interconnected whole rather than a patchwork of national schools. My research drew on the corpus of the forty-three Akathistos cycles preserved in 16th-century wall-paintings across Eastern Europe.

If the breakthrough in computational processing of visual data itself would be achieved in the future it may lead to unprecedented insights into the connections between the Akathistos cycles across time and space, especially in light of the graph theory. These insights potentially will have far-reaching implications for expanding our knowledge about (post-)Byzantine societal structures and processes of transregional exchange.

Further Reading

Constantinides, Efthalia C. The Wall Paintings of the Panagia Olympiotissa at Elasson in Northern Thessaly. Athens: Publication of the Canadian Archeological Institute at Athens, 1992.

The chapter on the Akathistos cycle at this specific church provides an analysis of broader issues related to the circulation of the theme in Late Byzantine art.

Kozak, Nazar. “The Akathistos on the Move and the Geography of Post-Byzantine Art.” In Eclecticism in Late Medieval Visual Culture at the Crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic Traditions, edited by Maria Alessia Rossi and Alice Isabella Sullivan, 221-238. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2022. DOI:10.1515/9783110695618-011

Based on the data driven from the forty-three Akathistos cycles preserved in the 16th-century wall-paintings, this study strives to rethink the big picture of post-Byzantine art geography through the optics of iconographic mobility.

Lafontaine-Dosogne, Jacqueline. “L'illusıration de la première partie de l'Hymne Acathiste et sa relation avec les mosaïques de l'enfance de la Kariye Djami,” Byzantion 54 (1984): 648-702.

The author argues for the iconographic variety of the illustration of the first twelve strophes of the Akathistos Hymn.

Pätzold, Аlexandra. Der Akathistos-Hymnos: Die Bilderzyklen in der byzantinischen Wandmalerei des 14. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GMBH, 1989.

The monograph provides a comprehensive study of the Akathistos cycles in the 14th-century wall-paintings from the standpoint of the iconographic taxonomy, image/text relationships, and ideological implications.

Spatharakis, Ioannis. The Pictorial Cycles of the Akathistos Hymn for the Virgin. Leiden: Alexandros Press, 2005.

The monograph offers a comprehensive taxonomy of the illustrations for each of the twenty-four Akathistos strophes and contains the most excessive corpus of illustrations. Based on this data the authro attempts to reconsturct the first Akathistos cycle painted in Constantinople.

This contribution was sponsored by the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture at Hellenic College Holy Cross.