The Martyr with the Vial

St. Anastasia the Pharmakolytria is depicted in the standard Byzantine manner of a holy woman martyr — clad in a long robe and the maphorion, bearing in her right hand the cross of martyrdom — and given one distinctive attribute that identifies her among all the martyrs: a small vial, flask, or phial of medicine or healing oil held in the other hand, the painted emblem of the healer and Deliverer from Potions. This file treats that iconography: the martyr-portrait and its meaning, the vial as her attribute and its kinship with the medicine-box of the Unmercenary Healers, the prescriptions of the Hermeneia tradition of Dionysius of Fourna, the conventions of dress and color, and a structured note on what the vial signifies and on the confusion of the several Anastasias in icons.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; Deliverer from Potions)

The Standard Martyr-Portrait

The icon of St. Anastasia is, first of all, the icon of a martyr, and it speaks the settled visual language by which the Orthodox tradition depicts the holy women who witnessed unto death. She is shown standing, frontal, in the hieratic stillness of the saint who has passed beyond time into the Kingdom — not in narrative action but in glorified repose, presented to the veneration of the faithful (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, on the martyr-portrait and the principles of the icon). The frontal, motionless figure is itself theological: the icon does not illustrate an event but renders a person transfigured, the martyr as she now is in glory, available to be addressed in prayer. To read such an icon is to read its few, deliberate signs — the dress, the gesture, the object in the hand — each of which carries meaning fixed by tradition (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”).

The governing sign of every martyr is the cross. In her right hand, held upright before her breast, Anastasia bears the small cross of martyrdom — not the great processional cross nor the cross of blessing, but the slender hand-cross that in Byzantine iconography is the universal attribute of the martyr, the sign of the confession sealed in blood and of victory through the Cross of Christ (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1). This cross is what she shares with every martyr in the calendar — with Barbara, Marina, Catherine, Panteleimon, and the whole army of witnesses; it says this saint is a martyr and nothing more particular than that. It is the second object in her hands that says which martyr (see The Death by Fire for the martyrdom the cross proclaims).

The Vial in Her Hand

The attribute that singles Anastasia out is a small vial, flask, or phial — a little vessel of medicine, healing liquid, oil, or myrrh — held characteristically in the left hand while the right holds the cross. This small painted vessel is her distinctive iconographic mark, the emblem of the Pharmakolytria, the Deliverer from Potions, and the sign by which the saint depicted is read as a healer to whom the sick and the poisoned pray (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”; Greek Menaion, 22 December; and treated alongside the patronage in The Healer and the Cup). The logic of the attribute is the logic of the title: because she is the one who looses the bonds of the pharmakon — the drug that may heal or harm — the icon places in her hand a small vessel of pharmakon in its good and merciful sense, the remedy, the antidote, the healing oil, held out as the cure that answers the poison (see Deliverer from Potions).

The two objects together compose the whole statement of the icon. The cross in the right hand names her a martyr; the vial in the left names her the healer-martyr, the Pharmakolytria. Where the bare cross would leave her one anonymous witness among hundreds, the vial fixes her identity and her patronage in a single compressed sign: in her hand is the cure for the very evil her title says she looses (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1; Greek Menaion, 22 December). The attribute is reported here as exactly what it is — an iconographic convention of the developed cult, a way of depicting the saint that grew with her veneration as a healer — and not as a detail of biography. Nothing in the historical core or in the connected Passio describes Anastasia carrying a vial of medicine; the flask is the cult’s emblem for the Pharmakolytria, attested in the iconographic tradition and the hymnography and pinned to that tradition (METHODOLOGY §3.5; Passio Anastasiae; Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936).

The Sign of the Unmercenary Healer

The small vessel of medicine is not Anastasia’s alone; it belongs to a shared iconographic vocabulary, that of the healer-saints of the Orthodox East, and her place within that family is the key to reading her flask. The Holy Unmercenaries — the Anargyroi, the “silverless ones” who healed without fee — are depicted with the instruments of their healing: most characteristically the small medicine-box, casket, or chest, often paired with a spoon, lancet, or surgical probe, the physician’s or surgeon’s kit borne as the emblem of the one who cures freely in Christ’s name (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons; Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1). St. Panteleimon the Great Martyr, the unmercenary physician of Nicomedia, is regularly shown holding a small medicine-box in one hand and a spoon or narthex-probe in the other; Cosmas and Damian, the Anargyroi of Asia, carry the same instruments (see St. Panteleimon the Healer). The vial in Anastasia’s hand is the feminine and martyric counterpart of that medicine-box: where the physician-saints carry the surgeon’s kit of their craft, the martyr-healer carries the single small vessel of the remedy, and both signs say the same thing — here is a saint of the cure, a healer to whom you may turn (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1; Greek Menaion, 22 December).

The parallel is more than visual. Like the Anargyroi, Anastasia heals freely, by intercession, asking nothing; like Panteleimon, she is a martyr whose healing patronage is read out of her martyrdom, the one who conquered death now invoked against the body’s afflictions (see Martyr and Healer). The difference is one of specialization within a shared vocation: where Panteleimon is the unmercenary physician without restriction and Cosmas and Damian the silverless healers of every sickness, Anastasia’s patronage is focused by her title on the particular evil of the pharmakon — poison, noxious drug, and the sorcerous potion. The icon, by giving her the vial rather than the surgeon’s box, places her among the unmercenary healers while reserving to her the special office her title names: the deliverer who holds out the antidote against the poisoner’s draught (see Deliverer from Potions; The Healer and the Cup).

The Hermeneia and the Painter’s Conventions

The conventions by which such saints are depicted were not improvised by each painter but transmitted as a craft tradition, and the great surviving witness to that tradition in the post-Byzantine Greek world is the Hermeneia tes zografikes, the Painter’s Manual of Dionysius of Fourna — a Mount Athos monk and iconographer who compiled, in the early eighteenth century, the accumulated technical and iconographic lore of the Athonite painting tradition (Dionysius of Fourna, Hermeneia, ed. Papadopoulos-Kerameus, 1909; trans. Hetherington, 1974). The Hermeneia is not the origin of the conventions it records — those go back through the Byzantine centuries — but it is the systematic written codification of them: how to prepare pigments and grounds, and, crucially for our purpose, how each saint and scene is to be shown, the physiognomies, ages, garments, and attributes prescribed for the figures of the calendar (Hetherington, introduction to The Painter’s Manual, 1974).

For the holy women martyrs the Hermeneia tradition prescribes the type the icons of Anastasia follow: the woman saint shown in the long robe (chiton) and the maphorion — the enveloping veil-mantle of the holy women of the East, drawn over the head and shoulders — bearing the martyr’s cross, the face youthful or in the bloom of holy womanhood, named in the accompanying inscription (Dionysius of Fourna, Hermeneia, ed. Papadopoulos-Kerameus, 1909). The manual organizes the martyrs by their feasts and supplies for each the distinguishing marks by which the painter is to render and the viewer to recognize them; it is in this codified system of attributes that an object such as Anastasia’s vial functions — the fixed sign appended to the common martyr-type to identify the particular saint (Dionysius of Fourna, Hermeneia; trans. Hetherington, 1974). The Hermeneia is cited here as the standing witness to the Athonite and post-Byzantine iconographic conventions within which Anastasia’s portrait is composed, not as a text that invents her attribute; the precise wording of its notice for any one saint should be checked against the edition consulted (Dionysius of Fourna, Hermeneia, ed. Papadopoulos-Kerameus, 1909; trans. Hetherington, 1974).

Dress and Color

The conventions of dress and color are themselves bearers of meaning in the icon, never merely decorative. Anastasia, as a holy woman of the early Church, is clothed in the long chiton and the maphorion, the mantle-veil that is the universal garment of the venerated women of the Orthodox iconographic tradition, from the Theotokos to the women martyrs and the holy mothers; it marks her as a woman of God and frames the face that is the icon’s true subject (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, on garment and color in the icon). The colors of the garments are chosen within the tradition’s symbolic register — the deep reds, purples, and dark mantles that in the iconographic language signify, variously, royalty in Christ, the blood of martyrdom, and the dignity of holiness — though the precise palette varies by school, period, and painter and is governed by convention rather than by a fixed rule for this particular saint (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons; Dionysius of Fourna, Hermeneia, ed. Papadopoulos-Kerameus, 1909).

Around the head is the halo (nimbus), the disc of gold that in the icon is not a naturalistic glow but the rendering in light of the saint’s participation in the uncreated glory of God — the visible sign that the person depicted is a vessel of holiness, transfigured and deified by grace (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons). The inscription naming her — Ἡ Ἁγία Ἀναστασία ἡ Φαρμακολύτρια, “Saint Anastasia the Pharmakolytria” — completes the icon, for in the Orthodox understanding the inscription is integral to the image: it is the naming that binds this particular likeness to this particular saint and makes the veneration offered to the icon pass, as the Seventh Council taught, to the person it represents and not to the wood and paint (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons; see Orthodoxy: Icons and Iconoclasm for the theology of the named image). The epithet in the inscription and the vial in the hand say the same thing in word and in sign: this is the healer, the Deliverer from Potions.

The Meaning of the Vial and the Confusion of the Anastasias

[Disputed: what the vial signifies, and the confusion of the several Anastasias in icons. (A) Medicine-flask or anointing-vessel. The small vessel in Anastasia’s hand is most often read as a flask of medicine or healing liquid — the pharmakon in its good sense, the antidote answering the poison, consonant with her title Pharmakolytria and assimilating her to the medicine-box of the Unmercenary Healers (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia”; Greek Menaion, 22 December). But the same small painted vessel can equally be read as a cruse of oil or myrrh, an anointing-vessel — assimilating her instead to the myrrh-bearing and anointing imagery of the Church’s healing rites, the alabaster of holy oil rather than the physician’s phial. The vessel does not by itself disclose which is meant; the two readings — medicine-flask and myrrh-cruse — are not always sharply separable in the developed iconography, and both cohere with her patronage as healer and as Deliverer from Potions. (B) The origin and date of the attribute. Like the Pharmakolytria title itself, the vial belongs to the developed Byzantine and post-Byzantine cult and is not derived from the historical core or the earliest Passio (Delehaye, Étude sur le légendier romain, 1936); the precise date at which the flask became her fixed and standard attribute is not securely settled by the sources consulted here, and this file reports it as a convention of the developed iconographic tradition (METHODOLOGY §3.5). (C) Confusion with Anastasia of Rome and other Anastasias. Because Orthodox tradition venerates more than one saint named Anastasia — the 22 December Great Martyr and Pharmakolytria treated here; Anastasia of Rome the virgin-martyr, commemorated in the Greek tradition on 29 October; and others — the figures and their attributes can be confused in icons, in inscriptions, and in popular identification, and details migrate between them (Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1; Synaxarion of Constantinople, ed. Delehaye, 1902; and see The Passio and the Conflation). The vial-and-cross type described here is that of the 22 December Pharmakolytria; where an icon’s inscription or attributes are ambiguous, the identification of which Anastasia is depicted may itself be uncertain.]

References

Dionysius of Fourna. Hermeneia tes zografikes (The Painter’s Manual of Dionysius of Fourna). Ed. A. Papadopoulos-Kerameus, St. Petersburg, 1909; trans. Paul Hetherington, London: Sagittarius Press, 1974. (The prescriptions for depicting martyrs and holy women; cited as the codification of the Athonite iconographic conventions.)
Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Trans. G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky. Boston: Boston Book and Art Shop, 1969; rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1982. (The principles of the icon and of martyr-iconography: frontality, garment, color, halo, and the named image.)
Bibliotheca Sanctorum, vol. 1, s.v. “Anastasia.” Rome: Pontificia Università Lateranense, 1961. (The iconography and the distinction of the several Anastasias.)
The Greek Menaion for 22 December. (The healing patronage of the Pharmakolytria that the vial depicts.)
Synaxarion of Constantinople (Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae). Ed. Hippolyte Delehaye. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1902. (The commemorations of the several Anastasias.)
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Étude sur le légendier romain: Les saints de novembre et de décembre. Subsidia Hagiographica 23. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1936. (The developed cult and the conflation.)
Passio Anastasiae (Latin) and the Greek Passio (BHG 76–81). Cited as the legend; the vial is not among its details.
METHODOLOGY.md, this repository.