Pseudo-Dionysius and the Dormition of the Virgin Platytéra (‘Wider Than the Heavens’), in F. Dell’Acqua, E. S. Mainoldi (eds.), Pseudo-Dionysius and Christian Visual Culture, c.500–900. New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture 9, London – New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 239–82.

The majority of commentators believe a passage from the treatise On the Divine Names of Dionysius the Areopagite to be the earliest authoritative account of Mary’s Dormition. This chapter argues that this passage shaped the way the transition of the Mother of God to the afterlife was imagined and represented in words and pictures in medieval Byzantium and the West – although this has been contested by some modern interpreters. Eighth-century homilists, who for the first time explicitly quote Dionysius among their sources for the Dormition, connect Mary’s Assumption into heaven to the belief that her womb contained the uncontainable. The image of the Platytéra (Πλατυτέρα των Ουρανών, that is ‘wider than heaven’), whose earliest known figural developments coincide in dating with the Corpus Dionysiacum, seems also to be alluded to by Dionysius in On the Divine Names. In this chapter, I shall retrace the origins of the connections between the pseudo-apostolic author and the supernatural event of the Assumption, through its liturgical commemoration, homilies, and visual depictions between the sixth–eighth centuries. I shall also take into account of how a figural illustration of the Platytéra was conceived early in the ninth century in a central Italian monastery against the background of an articulated reasoning on Mary as vessel of the Incarnation imbued with Pseudo-Dionysian thinking and wording. That the figure of Dionysius came to be indelibly sealed in the medieval imagination with the Dormition of Mary, is attested by a late medieval mural painting in the prominent church of S. Francesco in Assisi, as well as by the most influential hagiographical collection of the late medieval West, the Legenda Aurea.