The display of authority in medieval Byzantium and modern Japan between art and performance

The “epiphany” of the sovereign in a ritualised space was a common custom in medieval court ceremonies. In Byzantium, imperial coronations offer the occasion to explore the origin of this practice, how the ritual was performed, and its ideological meaning. The paper aims to investigate these aspects through the exam of textual and visual sources. Then, it considers the astonishing familiarity of this custom with the modern ascension rituals in Japan. In early Byzantium, coronation ceremonies showed a warlike character, which their military setting emphasised. The emperor, screened by shields, suddenly appeared with the insignias of power. In the middle Byzantine period, these ceremonies acquired a more performative aspect, which involved processions, both public and private. The emperors stressed their change of status through the change of clothes, which sometimes occurred out of sight. In the late period, sources documented a particular moment during the presentation of the newly crowned emperors. After accomplishing the sacral rites, the raising of a curtain revealed the imperial family, who hieratically sited on thrones. Despite the omission of curtains in post-Iconoclastic imperial imagery, their presence in early Byzantine artworks would confirm the antiquity of such practices. Interestingly, the present-day Japanese emperor’s coronation ceremony offers an outliving of this tradition. Concealed behind curtains and “unveiled” after a solemn pause, the Tennō (“heavenly sovereign”) shows himself as a modern Basileus, giving evidence of the cross-cultural mobility between Byzantium and the East and its echo far beyond the fall of Constantinople.