Bishop Joachim of Amissos Lectures at Dumbarton Oaks

On July 18, 2025, His Grace Bishop Joachim (Cotsonis) of Amissos, PhD,  presented a lecture on the iconography of Byzantine lead seals for the group of international graduate  students enrolled in the 2025 Byzantine Coins and Seals Summer Program at Harvard University’s  Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, DC. His Grace is the Director of HCHC’s  Archbishop Iakovos Library and Learning Resource Center and an internationally recognized authority on  the iconography of lead seals, of which the Dumbarton Oaks 17,000-specimen collection is the largest and  most comprehensive in the world. 

The presentation covered topics including the images found on seals, iconographic changes over time, their  chronological distributions, their significance for the study of Byzantine devotional life, art history, and as  means of constructing personal identity and social hierarchies. During the presentation, lead seals related  to various themes and topics discussed during the lecture were brought out from the collection to be  passed among the students for them to have a “hands-on” and direct experience with the material. 

Over the years, Bishop Joachim has published in academic journals on topics related to this material. In  2020, Routledge Publishing House issued a two-volume set in its celebrated Variorum Collected Studies  series of all his scholarly articles devoted to the study of the sacred imagery of Byzantine lead seals: The Religious Figural Imagery of Byzantine Lead Seals, I: Studies on the Image of Christ, the Virgin and Narrative  Scenes; II: Studies on Images of the Saints and on Personal Piety. 

Also in 2020, Dumbarton Oaks published His Grace’s volume, Catalogue of Byzantine Seals at Dumbarton  Oaks and in the Fogg Museum of Art, Volume 7: Anonymous, with Bilateral Religious Imagery, presenting  572 anonymous lead seals bearing sacred images on both sides, representing the first attempt to analyze  this type of seal chronologically and typologically. The extended introduction in this latter volume outlines  the significance of such seals, establishing an accurate and consistent terminology, their relationship to  other collections, the nature of their selectivity, their iconographic types and distribution, the pairings of  sacred figures, the method for  determining obverse and reverse, establishing dating criteria, and placing this type of seal within the  historical, artistic, and religious trends of Byzantine culture.