Healing Miracles at the Hodegetria in Mystras: Bethesda and the Haemorrhaging Woman
Healing of the Paralytic at Bethesda and the Woman with the Haemorrhage, Hodegetria of the Brontochion Monastery, Mystras, c. 1312–22.
The paired wall paintings of the Healing of the Paralytic at Bethesda and the Healing of the Woman with the Haemorrhage belong to the early fourteenth-century decoration of the katholikon of the Virgin Hodegetria, usually known as the Aphentiko, in the Brontochion Monastery at Mystras. The church, when Metropolitan Nikephoros Moschopoulos presented the monastery with a precious Gospel book in 1311/12, was already functioning; its foundation under the hegoumenos Pachomios belongs towards the end of the first decade of the fourteenth century. Its architecture, marble revetment and painted decoration have long been recognised as evidence of unusually close artistic connections between Mystras and Constantinople.
The surviving paintings are generally dated to 1312–22. Modern scholarship places the Bethesda composition on the east wall of the narthex and identifies it as part of an extensive sequence devoted to Christ’s miracles, among the most developed such cycles in early Palaiologan monumental painting. The two episodes seen together here form part of that larger pictorial argument: healing is treated through different bodies, different Gospel narratives and sharply different kinds of encounter with Christ.
Healing Miracles at the Hodegetria in Mystras
Across the broader field at the left and centre, the Bethesda episode unfolds among numerous figures and fragments of an architectural setting. The present section of wall is severely damaged, yet the distinction between the two narratives remains perceptible. At the right the composition contracts around tall standing figures and a much smaller, bent figure who approaches Christ from below, the essential relationship around which the Healing of the Woman with the Haemorrhage is organised.
What survives of the original palette is subdued by abrasion and plaster loss. Areas of blue-green ground remain between warm ochres, reddish garments, dark passages of drapery and pale haloes. Large lacunae interrupt bodies and architecture; in some places the paint layer has disappeared almost completely. A broad irregular lacuna along the lower centre further interrupts the continuity between the two scenes and obscures portions of the original ground. Published documentation of the church records extensive loss and distress among its wall paintings, although the surviving portions still show the high level of the painters responsible for the programme.
The damage has substantially altered the visual rhythm. Overlapping figures, architectural divisions and repeated actions would originally have directed the eye across the wall with much greater clarity; now, surviving silhouettes appear almost isolated within areas of exposed plaster. The elongated bodies, differentiated gestures and linear articulation of the garments remain legible in places, particularly where reddish and dark draperies retain enough paint to preserve their structure.
The Paralytic at Bethesda and Its Unusual Narrative Form
The Healing of the Paralytic at Bethesda derives from John 5:1–15. Christ encounters a man who has been ill for thirty-eight years beside the pool of Bethesda (John 5:5–7). The sick gathered there awaiting the movement of the water, and the paralytic explains that he has no one to place him in the pool when it is stirred (John 5:3–7). Christ heals him directly and commands him to take up his bed and walk (John 5:8–9).
At the Hodegetria this narrative was expanded considerably. A recent Cambridge study describes the composition as an unusually elaborate treatment of the subject. Christ appears blessing the sick man while he is still on his bed; farther back, the paralytic occurs again, restored to health and carrying his pallet (John 5:8–9). Another invalid is represented being assisted towards a quatrefoil pool, where an angel stirs the water, a pictorial elaboration associated with the traditional form of the Bethesda narrative.
Successive moments are therefore compressed into one pictorial field. The sick man appears first in incapacity and again after the cure, while the pool, attendants and repeated figure allow time to be read spatially across the wall. Byzantine narrative painting often used such repetition when a sequence of actions had to be represented within one composition. At the Hodegetria, however, the Bethesda account becomes unusually dense, the command of Christ and the physical evidence of recovery set within a wider scene of waiting and movement.
Much of this complexity is difficult to recover from the damaged surface alone. Architectural masses and figures survive only in fragments across the left side, and several heads and haloes are clearer than the bodies to which they belong. The scholarly identification of the full composition is therefore important for reading what now appears discontinuous: the surviving paint once belonged to a carefully staged progression from incapacity to restored movement.
The subject also carried liturgical resonance. In the Orthodox calendar the paralytic of Bethesda is commemorated during the post-Paschal period, and the Gospel reading for the Sunday of the Paralytic recounts the cure at the pool (John 5:1–15). Water, healing and restored bodily strength thus belonged to the narrative itself and to its recurrent place within the liturgical year.
The Woman with the Haemorrhage and the Moment of Contact
Beside Bethesda appears another kind of healing. The woman suffering from a long-term haemorrhage is described in Matthew 9:20–22, Mark 5:25–34 and Luke 8:43–48. In Mark and Luke the episode is embedded within the account of Jairus and his dying daughter (Mark 5:21–43; Luke 8:40–56): the woman enters the narrative amid the crowd, approaches Christ and touches his garment in the conviction that this contact will heal her (Mark 5:27–29; Luke 8:44).
The right-hand portion of the Mystras painting condenses the event around the vertical figure of Christ and the much smaller woman at his feet. Her lowered posture is central to the iconographic identification. Although abrasion makes the precise action of her hands difficult to distinguish today, her body bends towards Christ’s garment in accordance with the established representation of the episode. Behind and around Christ stand further haloed figures, their narrow upright forms creating a dense human screen.
There is little architectural narration here compared with Bethesda. Proximity carries the action: the woman reaches the sacred figure from below, partly absorbed into the surrounding bodies. Her healing requires no bed or pool, and the painter concentrates the episode through scale, posture and the close convergence of the figures.
The juxtaposition with Bethesda is consequently effective without requiring identical narrative devices. One cure extends through repeated actions and an explicitly represented healing place; the adjacent cure turns on a brief approach within a crowd. In both, bodily restoration is communicated through the disposition and movement of human figures.
The Narthex Programme: Water, Healing and Sacred Space
The miracle scenes at the Hodegetria did not function as isolated Gospel illustrations. Recent research has reconstructed a substantial cycle in the narthex, including the healing of the man with dropsy (Luke 14:1–6), the man born blind (John 9:1–41), Peter’s mother-in-law (Matthew 8:14–15; Mark 1:29–31; Luke 4:38–39), the paralytic at Bethesda (John 5:1–15) and the woman with the haemorrhage (Matthew 9:20–22; Mark 5:25–34; Luke 8:43–48), alongside other episodes from Christ’s ministry. Several Sabbath miracles were placed across a continuous stretch of wall, suggesting an arrangement shaped by thematic and liturgical associations as well as Gospel sequence.
Within this programme, an especially important element is the representation of the Virgin Zoodochos Pege, the Life-Giving Spring. The Hodegetria image is among the earliest surviving Palaiologan representations connected with the Constantinopolitan cult of the Zoodochos Pege, while the narthex also contained images of physician saints. Rhodoniki Etzeoglou devoted a study specifically to this Marian cult at Mystras; more recent scholarship has reconsidered the group of miracle scenes within the same spatial and devotional setting.
The association affects the reading of Bethesda. The pool belongs directly to the Gospel narrative (John 5:2–7), yet within this narthex its water stood near other images concerned with springs, cure and restored bodily strength. Scholarship has therefore connected the Hodegetria programme with a wider Palaiologan interest in miraculous healing and, more cautiously, with liturgical uses of narthex and subsidiary spaces involving blessed water and baptismal associations. No surviving font in the relevant space permits every part of that interpretation to be reconstructed materially, so the argument rests on iconographic grouping and related written evidence.
The broader importance of this development is discussed in the recent study of miracle cycles, which treats the Hodegetria alongside churches in Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Mount Athos, Ohrid and Kastoria. Across these monuments, the increased presence of healing scenes in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries emerges as a characteristic feature of early Palaiologan monumental decoration, with the Hodegetria offering one of the fullest surviving examples.
Fragmentary Palaiologan Painting at Mystras
The present condition of the wall painting makes detailed stylistic reading necessarily selective. Faces have lost modelling, contours break abruptly and extensive areas of the original pictorial surface have disappeared. On the right, the standing figures preserve somewhat more of their drapery structure: elongated folds descend through dark and reddish garments, while haloes continue to establish the sacred protagonists within the damaged field. In the Bethesda section, crowd and architecture have suffered more heavily, leaving disconnected fragments of colour across the wall.
Yet the surviving composition retains the ambition of the original programme. The Hodegetria was conceived on an exceptional scale, with an unusual two-storeyed architectural system, galleries, multiple domes, marble wall revetment and extensive painted cycles belonging to the sophisticated artistic environment developing at Mystras during the opening decades of the fourteenth century. Its architecture and the quality of its decoration reflect the close relationship with Constantinople documented by scholarship.
Within that setting, the pairing of Bethesda and the haemorrhaging woman shows how differently the painters could organise scenes of healing. One narrative expands across several moments and incorporates the pool, an angel, attendants and the healed man’s departure; beside it, a woman bends towards Christ within a tightly compressed group. Their preservation is uneven—at points little more remains than colour, contour and exposed plaster—yet their position within the Hodegetria cycle still allows the two episodes to be read as distinct parts of a larger Palaiologan programme devoted to Christ’s miracles.
(The translation was edited by N. Jones.)
