Byzantine Bacchanal
A Byzantine Emperor and His Favorite
Workshop of Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640)
Oil on canvas, circa 1618
Museum of the Bacchanal
Masculine Sovereignty at the Byzantine Court
The scene unfolds at the heart of the sumptuous and intimate excesses of the Byzantine court of the eleventh century, within a universe of oriental splendor where gold, fabrics, and perfumes seem to saturate the air¹. Two male figures face one another in sovereign proximity. On the left, Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos, born around the year 1000 and reigning from 1042 to 1055, bears the mark of a refined power exercised through presence as much as through decree. On the right, his favorite Romanos Boilas, a courtier active in the mid eleventh century, embodies grace and privileged access to imperial intimacy. Their faces draw close in a gesture suspended just before a deep kiss. The painter makes the passion of this moment unmistakable by placing the emperor’s tongue prominently at the very center of the composition². They are surrounded by figures and precious attributes that evoke both the Christian East and the sensual survivals of Antiquity³.
Vegetal crowns, finely worked jewelry, and flesh bathed in warm light compose an atmosphere heavy with incense, murmurs, and luxury. The viewer’s gaze is invited to enter a disorienting and enchanting world, that of a dreamed Constantinople, where power is expressed through beauty, display, and the visible attachment between chosen men⁴.
Flemish Baroque as Theater of Desire and Power
Attributed to an assistant of Peter Paul Rubens active in his Antwerp workshop, the work fully belongs to the Flemish Baroque through the carnal vigor of the figures, the warm saturation of the flesh tones, and the theatrical closeness of the faces⁵. It enters into direct dialogue with Rubens’s bacchanals, notably The Triumph of Bacchus and The Bacchanal with Silenus, where ritualized intoxication, closely grouped male bodies, parted lips, and collective sensuality become an asserted visual language. One also finds here the grammar of the kiss and of carnal contact developed in mythological scenes such as Venus and Adonis or The Abduction of Ganymede, where desire circulates through the gaze, the mouth, and the tension of bodies, independently of the protagonists’ gender. The broad and supple handling, composed of luminous blends and warm impasto, as well as the abundance of gold, ornaments, and winged figures, further aligns the work with compositions such as The Kermesse or The Garden of Love, where sacred and profane merge. Within this continuity, the Byzantine scene transposes the Rubensian universe of festivity, eros, and sovereignty into a dreamed imperial Orient, where power is expressed above all through the body, surrender, and the intensity of the gaze⁶.
The Reign of Proximity
Under Constantine IX, the court of Constantinople experiences a singular moment in which authority is exercised through personal attachment as much as through institutions⁷. The emperor surrounds himself with men chosen for their culture, wit, capacity to please, and ability to share his daily life. Male beauty, grace, elegance, and bearing are not secondary qualities. They fully participate in the distribution of power. Romanos Boilas stands at the heart of this system. His trajectory rests on a direct relationship with the emperor, marked by constant proximity, lasting favor, and public visibility. He embodies a figure in which affect and authority converge without concealment.
The Imperial Favorite
Born into a great aristocratic family, Boilas appears in the sources as a close associate of the sovereign, integrated into the most intimate circle of power, enjoying direct access to the emperor and exceptional visibility in court ritual. His position does not rest solely on formal administrative offices, but on a central relational role grounded in trust, proximity, and the capacity to embody imperial elegance⁸. He is described as a man of extreme refinement, fond of adornment, sumptuous clothing, and self staging practices that fully participate in the Byzantine political language.
A Court Chronicler
The perspective offered on this court by Michael Psellos, born in 1018 and still active after 1078, allows us to grasp the affective and social tone of this reign⁹. A direct witness, political actor, and keen observer, Psellos describes a world in which male relationships are intense, emotionally charged, traversed by rivalry, admiration, and the desire to please. His writing emphasizes personal bonds, elective affinities, and dynamics of favor, which structure court life as much as official titles.
Desire and Power
When he evokes Romanos Boilas, Psellos dwells precisely on his luxury, his sense of appearance, his ease within imperial circles, and his privileged place at Constantine IX’s side. This portrait does not suggest marginality, but rather a courtly norm, in which attachment between men, visible and codified, participates in the political order¹⁰. Homosexuality is never named as such, yet it circulates as a structuring social energy, perceptible in gestures, gazes, the distribution of favors, and affective hierarchies¹¹.
The Byzantine Empire
The Byzantine Empire, direct heir to the Eastern Roman Empire, was for more than a millennium one of the most powerful, refined, and enduring states of the Mediterranean world, with Constantinople as its capital, a political, religious, and cultural center where Roman heritage, Christianity, and eastern influences converged¹². At the period that concerns us here, in the mid eleventh century under the reign of Constantine IX Monomachos from 1042 to 1055, Byzantium remains a great imperial power, wealthy and sophisticated, endowed with a complex administration, a sumptuous court, and considerable intellectual influence, even as internal fragilities begin to appear. The empire still controls vast territories in the eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans, and Constantinople remains the richest and most populous city in Europe.
A World Under Threat
Yet this brilliant civilization is already engaged in a long decline. A little more than two centuries later, in 1204, Constantinople is captured and pillaged not by Muslim rivals, but by other Christians, the Latin crusaders of the Fourth Crusade, a trauma from which the empire would never truly recover¹³. The Byzantine Empire would survive on, weakened and reduced, until 1453, the date of the final capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans, roughly four centuries after the period evoked here, leaving behind the image of a civilization in which power, the sacred, and the flesh were intimately intertwined.
Splendor and Surrender
The celebration unfolding in the painting belongs to that ambiguous zone which later sources, and even more so modern perspectives, would describe as bacchanalian, not in the strict ancient sense, but as a Christian and imperial survival of an imaginary of ritualized excess¹⁴. At the Byzantine court, these celebrations combine solemnity and abandonment, liturgy and controlled intoxication. Floors of polychrome marble, inlaid with porphyry and serpentine, reflect the light of golden lamps and perfumed torches. Heavy silk hangings, embroidered with metallic threads and vegetal motifs, fall from porticoes. Tamed animals, peacocks with iridescent plumage, leopards held on leashes, slender dogs brought from the East, circulate among the guests as signs of domination and luxury. The air is saturated with precious perfumes imported from afar, Arabian incense, myrrh, benzoin, nard, styrax, mingled with the warm scent of bodies, spiced wine, and ripe fruit. Ornaments glitter upon the flesh, supple gold necklaces, engraved stones, finely worked earrings, vegetal crowns interlacing foliage and gems. In this dense, almost hypnotic atmosphere, the feast becomes a symbolic space in which hierarchies are displayed, power is performed through beauty, proximity, and the intensity of gazes, and excess is never rupture but coded language.
Poetry of Desire
In this world saturated with sensation, poetry occupies an essential place. It circulates in low voices, recited, murmured, exchanged as a sign of distinction and complicity. The Byzantine court of the eleventh century is a place where eros is thought, spoken, and disciplined through language. Poets give form to what gestures suggest. John Mauropous, born around the year 1000 and deceased around 1075, a contemporary of Constantine IX, expresses with troubling precision this experience of desire born of the gaze and of bodily presence¹⁵. His verses, presented here in learned English translation, speak of love’s gentle wound without ever reducing it to the act.
“I saw you, and my soul was wounded at once.
For Love did not wait for words or promises,
but entered through the eyes,
settled in the heart,
and made himself master of my breath.
I burn, yet I do not flee the fire.
I am struck, yet I do not turn away.
Such is the sweetness of this pain,
such the tyranny of desire.”
These lines resonate as an intimate echo of the painted scene. They remind us that, in Byzantium of this period, desire between men, far from being unspeakable, finds its place within a culture of the gaze, emotion, and form, where poetry accompanies and illuminates what feast and flesh render visible.
QFA
Curiosity Piqued?
1. Averil Cameron, Byzantine Matters, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2014.
2. David Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002.
3. Henry Maguire, Byzantine Art and the West, Washington, Dumbarton Oaks, 2010.
4. Bissera Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon, University Park, Penn State University Press, 2010.
5. Svetlana Alpers, The Making of Rubens, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995.
6. Elizabeth McGrath, Rubens Subjects from History, London, Harvey Miller, 1997.
7. Dion Smythe, Byzantine Masculinities, Leiden, Brill, 2019.
8. Averil Cameron, Gender and Society in Byzantium, London, Variorum, 1993.
9. Stratis Papaioannou, Michael Psellos Rhetoric and Authorship in Byzantium, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013.
10. Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, New York, Routledge, 2005.
11. James Davidson, Desire and Denial in Byzantium, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007.
12. Jonathan Shepard, The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
13. Jonathan Phillips, The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople, London, Pimlico, 2005.
14. Peter Brown, The Body and Society Men Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York, Columbia University Press, 1988.
15. Marc D. Lauxtermann, Byzantine Poetry from Pisides to Geometres Texts and Contexts, Vienna, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2003.
