Emperor, Empress, and the Divine in San Vitale and the Binyang central cave

Abstract

This essay compares historically unrelated religiopolitical iconographic programs exe-cuted in Byzantine Empire and Northern Wei China of the sixth century, and points out the common mechanism, through which these two cultures made use of religious imagery to promote imperial authority. They deployed different religious topoi befitting their respective Orthodox Christian and Buddhist-Confucian statecrafts, but arrived at surprisingly similar visual experiences. The key to the visual tactic employed in both sites, I would argue, lies in the trinity and multiplicity of the divine.