The Challenge of Depicting Cross-Dressing Female Saints in Byzantine Art: The Case of Saint Euphrosyne of Alexandria

Maria Parani of the University of Cyprus examines how Byzantine artists depicted holy women who lived in male monastic disguise, taking Saint Euphrosyne of Alexandria as her case study. At least fourteen early Byzantine lives recount women who put on male monastic dress to enter monasteries. According to her sixth- or seventh-century life, Euphrosyne escaped a marriage arranged by her wealthy Alexandrian father, Paphnutius, by cutting her hair, dressing as a man and entering a monastery near Alexandria as the eunuch Smaragdos for thirty-eight years, revealing her identity to her father only on her deathbed.

Parani surveys the rare surviving images of the saint from the tenth to the fourteenth century. An early tenth-century fresco at Ayvali Kilise in Cappadocia shows her in the standard tunic and maphorion of a female saint. In the Menologion of Basil II, she appears twice: once beside Paphnutius as a nun, and once in a deathbed scene by Michael of Blachernae, where a slightly pointed hood hints at her male disguise while her restraint contrasts with her father's grief. Eleventh- and twelfth-century manuscripts in London and Oxford and calendar icons at Mount Sinai depict her as a nun or female martyr. The fullest cycle is in the twelfth-century Church of the Transfiguration at Polotsk in Belarus, commissioned by Abbess Euphrosyne of Polotsk, where nineteen wall-painting scenes distinguish Euphrosyne-Smaragdos from bare-headed monks by a pointed hood. A fourteenth-century menologion of Demetrios Palaiologos in Oxford gives her a hybrid costume of maphorion and monastic scapular.

Unlike Mary of Egypt, Euphrosyne was always painted with her head covered. Parani suggests that because she was an elite daughter who defied paternal authority, artists avoided presenting cross-dressing as an imitable path. In the discussion, Eftychia Rizopoulou-Egomenidou, Stavroula Constantinou and Christodoulos Papavarnavas raise questions on modern icons, the Metaphrastian text and the portrayal of eunuchs.