THIS PAPER deals with material culture, and with monuments or artefacts commissioned by private individuals or families . Its focus is exclusively on images, and on images that can be pinned to people acting primarily in their own interests rather than in the service of institutions, ecclesiastical or imperial. We can now determine that an image was commissioned by a specific person only when we are told so in a surviving text or inscription, or when the image itself provides the information by incorporating a portrait of the donor . Such portraits provide our only information on the self-presentation- though always via the mediating artisan-of the patron, and it is accordingly on this group of images that I shall focus here.

The most important collection of patron portraits produced during the early Byzantine centuries (ca. 500-ca. 750) are the sixt h- and seventh-century mosaics commissioned for the church of Hagios Demetrios by the wealthy inhabitants of Thessalonike to commemorate their patron saint Demetrios, his holy companions, and themselves. The panels have been interpreted as ex voto images, made to thank Demetrios and the other holy figures pictured for some previous intervention on the donor ’s behalf. In most cases, neither the saints nor the donors are named; we can, however, rest assured that any individual or family who could afford to commission a panel recording Demetrios’ favour was sufficiently wealthy (and socially significant) to be counted amongst the élite. Though the point is rarely made, these panels are significa nt not only as votive images recording t he special importance of S. Demetrios in early Byzantine T hessalonike, but as portraits of the city notables who paid to have themselves displayed as recipients of the saint’s grace on the walls of Demetrios’ church for posterity. They tell us about evolving definitions of sanctity; but they also tell us about how patronage was used in the construction of élite identity in early Byzantine Thessalonike.

The main point of this chapter is that the mosaics a t Hagios Demetrios track changes in the way that élite identity was represented in Byzantium: as Demetrios was transformed from a healing saint into a focus of urban identity, his élite clients changed from individuals and families t o representatives of civic authority. A second point concerns a series of portraits that have usually been interpreted as representing different stages in t he development of a single child. This interpretation is, I will argue, incorrect; rather t han identifying a single individual, the motif of the gold cross on the foreheads of four children indicates that they have been miraculously healed.