The Florentine portion represents a personage clad in a robe blazing with jewels, and standing under an elaborate edifice, holding orb and sceptre. The Vienna leaf is practically the same, only the figure is seated on a throne set with precious stones, and extends the right hand in the same manner as the Empress Eudoxia on Fig. 20, whilst the left hand supports the orb. The sex of this personage was long disputed, but now it is considered by most writers to represent a woman, both from the modelling of the form and from the dress. The robes of Emperor and Empress were very similar, but on examining the mosaics of St. Vitale at Ravenna, we find that though Justinian and Theodora both wear the _chlamys_, hers is more lavishly decorated, and she wears a large collar of pendant jewels, while Justinian has the _fibula_. But the head-dresses were always tolerably distinctive till considerably later. Ladies of high rank all wore a kind of wig-like turban, sometimes double, as in the case of Serena (No. 1). That it was a turban and not hair is evident from the striped pattern on that of Serena. This was often bound with jewels, and the imperial family wore diadems with long strings of jewels hanging over the ears, as on the Bargello tablet. These pendants were often, but not invariably, worn by the Emperor, but his diadem fitted close on to his forehead without the intervening wig, as we see on the interesting ninth century casket in the Museo Kircheriano in Rome, where both head-dresses are represented. A large segment is inserted on the front of her robe by a jewelled edging, on which we see the portrait of a chubby boy dressed in the _trabea_, and wielding _mappa_ and _scipio_, a diadem with pendants being on his head. Having decided that the figure is intended for a lady, there remains the vexed question of who she is. Molinier thinks she is of Byzantine origin, not wrought with the delicate art of the tenth to the eleventh centuries, but earlier and coarser, and going through the various historic characters in search of a name, he attributes the portrait to the Empress Irene, widow of Leo IV., and long Regent for her ten-year-old son Constantine IV., for she alone would dare to be portrayed throned, and with all the attributes of sovereignty. It was Irene who, in the middle of the Iconoclastic period, convened a council of the Church, repealed the new laws, and encouraged the use of religious images throughout her realm. This attribution would bring the date of the diptych down to the end of the eighth century, and later than the style would seem to warrant; and it is vigorously opposed by Graeven, who declares that after the first half of the sixth century, there were no more purely secular representations; and that the coins of Irene represent her with both diadem and sceptre surmounted by a cross.