The Temple Veil as a Spatial Icon Revealing an Image-Paradigm of Medieval Iconography and Hierotopy (original) (raw)
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Notes of epistemology of the images
This article has as its subject of analysis the images as they are perceived by the observer. As a heuristic symphony this work is a paradigmatic crossover of the phenomenology, the genetic epistemology and the hermeneutics, amalgamated by semiotics. In the first paragraph, a phenomenological reflection of the images is carried out, reaching a division between internal images and external images and between objective images and sign images. In the second paragraph, a genetic analysis of a thought in images is carried out, reaching a division of the sign images in signal images, index images, icon images, symbol images and sign images with its correspondingly levels of abstraction and societal. Finally, in the third paragraph, hermeneutics of the object images as a cultural unit or culturema is carried out. It ends by framing the present study in visual studies and highlighting their relevance in the context of visual culture.
Image-paradigms: the aesthetics of the invisible
A. Simsky. Image-paradigms: the aesthetics of the invisible // Icons of space. The advances in hierotopy. Ed. Je. Bogdanovic, London and New York: Routledge, p. 29-45, 2021
Hierotopy, spatial icon, and image-paradigm are three formative notions within the hierotopic discourse. In this chapter, we shall focus on the image-paradigm, the most recent and, at the same time, the enigmatic member of this trio of hierotopic fundamentals. It was introduced by Alexei Lidov as an instrument to analyze the imagery of sacred spaces. Although the image-paradigm has already been used in a number of case studies, its definition and theory have received as of yet little attention. Its ontology, functioning, and aesthetical aspects remain to be clarified. In this chapter, I endeavor to shed some more light on this novel concept. However, before we give it our undivided attention, we shall first trace the historical course of hierotopic thought, which started with the conception of the spatial icon and concluded (at least at this moment of writing) with the image-paradigm. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003154464-4/image-paradigms-andrew-simsky https://www.routledge.com/Icons-of-Space-Advances-in-Hierotopy/Bogdanovic/p/book/9780367723491
International Conference "The Thinking of the Image - La pensée de l'image - Das Denken des Bildes"
What shall we call an “image”? Is it that from which knowledge proceeds or that which anticipates knowledge? Is image something only able to be recognised as object of thinking or it shows per se, in its polysemy and equivocal constitution, a deep, still unexplored generative form of thinking? From the point of view of the understanding of the digital age, where we entered in, to a strong consideration of the new frontiers of science, knowledge, and philosophy and from here up to societal and cultural dimensions, the thinking of the image still remain an enigma. Since the ancient world, the philosophical antiquity from Plato to Aristotle has left this question as a legacy. This question has continued to pursue the history of thought: Islamic World and Christianity, Middle and Modern Age. It can be found massively in contemporary philosophy, culture studies, history of art and ideas. The aim of the international conference is, perhaps for the first time, to study and to explore in a genuine interdisciplinary approach the multiversal horizon of human imagery and, in particular its constructive, generative capacity of building a world-meaning. The international conference is organised on the behalf of the IEA of the University Aix-Marseille (IMéRA) in collaboration with the LESA, Laboratoire d’Études en Sciences des Arts (EA 3274) and the Research Group on the Transdisciplinary Approaches to the Image and Imaginary: Fausto Fraisopi, Professor at Freiburg University and Senior Research Fellow at IMéRA, Agnès Callu, Research HDR at the CNRS (LAP - Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Politique, EHESS/CNRS, UMR 8177), Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Research Director at the CéSor (Centre d’études en sciences sociales du religieux EHESS) and Alexander Schnell, Professor for Philosophy at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal and Director of the Institute for Transcendental Philosophy and Phenomenology.
Syllabus: "Incomprehensible Certainty: Theological Aesthetics of the Image"
In this seminar, we will explore the role of images in theology, phenomenology, and aestheticsboth ancient and modern. Our guiding hypothesis will be that the power and efficacy of images is closely bound up with their distinctive ontology -one that cannot be effectively assimilated to propositional, mimetic, or otherwise referential models of cognition. While the rise of modern epistemologies and, concurrently, of modern aesthetics has tended to construe the image as a subsidiary version of "representation" (Vorstellung), Platonic, Patristic, and Byzantine accounts of the eikon tend to characterize images, and the phenomenology of their experience, in far more supple and richer language. Here the apprehension of the image qua icon is not animated by a protocol of affective detachment and objective cross-referencing but, instead, by its transformative impact on the beholder and the formation of a liturgical and ethical community. What accounts for the icon's distinctive efficacy are several factors: 1) a formal element, such as the return of "inverse [or "reverse"] perspective" in early-20 th century Eastern Orthodox icon theory, yet also realized in post-impressionist (Western) modernist art; 2) the situational dynamic of the image, such as its embedding in, or alluding to, ambient liturgical frameworks and purposes; and 3) the image's materiality, such as the modernist image's reaffirmation of color as a principal means for unveiling (and entangling the beholder in) perceptible qualities that not only fall outside the scope of propositional knowledge but, in their incontrovertible reality and presence, exhort us to recover an ontology anterior to modern procedural rationality.
‘Image-Paradigms’ as a Category of Mediterranean Visual Culture. A Hierotopic Approach to Art History. In: Crossing Cultures. Papers of the 32nd International Congress in the History of Art. Melbourne, 2009, p. 148 – 153., 2009
The imagery that I have attempted to disclose and discuss in this paper leads to an important methodological statement: the iconic curtain as well as some other important phenomena of Mediterranean visual culture cannot be described in traditional terms of art history. They challenge our fundamental methodological approach to the image as illustration and flat picture, being quite distinct from what we may call iconography. The artists, operating with various media including standard depictions, could create in the minds of their experienced beholders the most powerful images, which were visible and recognisable in any particular space, yet not figuratively represented as pictorial schemes. These images revealed specific messages, being charged with profound symbolic meanings and various associations. At the same time, they existed beyond illustrations of theological statements or ordinary narratives. So, this is a special kind of imagery, which requires, in my view, a new notion of image-paradigms. The introduction of this notion into contemporary art history, and humanities in general, will allow us to acknowledge a number of phenomena, not only ‘medieval’ and ‘Mediterranean’, which define several symbolic structures as well as numerous concrete pictorial motifs.
Visual Thought in Modern Orthodoxy: Art History as Theology
Journal of Visual Theology / Визуальная теология, 2023
In this paper I will discuss the visual category of "reverse perspective", i. e., the principle of constructing pictorial space in the icon. I will show that in Russia one of the most basic terms in Western art history, i. e., perspective, was thoroughly reworked, even turned on its head as suggested by the terminology, in order to serve a project of modern Orthodoxy. The main proponent of the theory of "reverse perspective" was Florensky, who in his essay of that title, written in 1919, uses several different definitions of the term. In the first section of the paper, I will mention briefly six such definitions, all of which are still current in contemporary scholarship. In the second and third sections, I will suggest a possible theologically-grounded elaboration of one of Florensky's ideas of what constitutes "reverse perspective". According to the interpretation proposed here, "reverse perspective" becomes the visual analogue of two basic Christian dogmas-that of a timelessly eternal God and that of "theosis" or "deification". In the last section, I will give a short background to the relationship between art history and theology, which lies at the heart of my approach.