The 'Christus Patiens' is a work which involves several complexities when trying to date it and to agree upon author attribution. This has made it particularly attractive to both Classical and Byzantine scholars since as early as the 16th century, when its princeps editio was published in Rome by Antonio Blado (1542). However, we consider that its production is to be located within the period of the Komnenos' Dynasty, in the 11th and 12th century of the Byzantine Empire; therefore, our research places it in the centre of the cultural debates pertaining at that time. In addition to these, there is the broad Classical tradition reaching that context, with a set of consolidated textual images and rhetorical systematizations, which take part in and interpellate the whole cultural production emerging from the acceptance and spread of Christianity, as well as its vast theological and dogmatic apparatus.

According to the different forms of incorporating its literary material, the 'Christus Patiens' reveals particular ways of inscription regarding an author who is dialectically involved in his tradition of readings. This poetic practice enables us to open our object of study by incorporating it to the debates of its own time, thus avoiding its abandonment to an absolute past or its seclusion from a probable future. At the same time, the present of the enunciation of the work, which belongs to the cento genre, is submitted to a dialectic tension in relation to other texts of different origins -classical, biblical, apocryphal, liturgical- by means of the decoupage operated on certain images which traverse such textualities, acting as true passage channels. This work aims to present a study and analysis of the complex literary and iconographic framework underlying the 'Christus Patiens', using theoretical and methodological frames which consider not only the literary and philological approach, but also the dynamics of intertextuality and the conformation of symbolic constellations.