Visual culture studies have sought a middle ground between vision understood in a purely physiological and naturalistic sense and the historically and culturally conditioned production of images: they have found it in the notion of “ gaze ”.
Salles and the gaze
Georges Salles he is the first author to expressly title one of his works after the concept of "Regard“, according to which “Every eye is obsessed, ours as well as that of primitive peoples. At every moment it shapes the world according to the scheme of its cosmos.“. It is equipped not only with perceptive capabilities but also and above all with an active and culturally conditioned modeling of reality. His work can be read as an attempt to understand the historical dimension of perceptionThe gaze Salles speaks of is that of the fine arts amateur, who sensitively savors a refined image with a disposition similar to that of a gourmet toward a work of culinary art. But this humanistic discussion of the gaze was destined to suffer severe blows in the context of twentieth-century French thought.
Animal mimicry
During the same period, Roger Caillois was investigating the complex meanings of camouflage , particularly animal ocelli, such as those found on the wings of butterflies or the backs of certain insects. These circular formations, often brightly colored, do not intimidate predators because they resemble the eyes of an even more dangerous predator; quite the opposite: the eyes themselves are frightening because they resemble ocelli. The circular shape, fixed, bright, and oversized, is a hypnotic device of fascination. What these works seem to have in common is the effort to decouple the gaze from its apparently structural connection with the eye, questioning the traditional binary opposition between an active subject (the viewer) and a passive object (the image). What is established is rather a relationship of quasi- intersubjectivity between the viewers and the images.
Painted glances
Particular attention has been paid to the gaze that comes to us from portrayed and self-portrait faces. A true pioneer in the analysis of gazes represented in paintings was Alois Riegl , at the beginning of the 900th century. Studying the evolution of the Dutch group portrait – and in particular the famous “ Anatomy of Dr. Tulp ” by Rembrandt (1632) – he distinguished between “ internal unity ” (obtained by the faces in the group looking at each other) and “ external unity ” (established through the gaze that one of the characters in the group directs directly towards the spectator outside the painting). The topos of the gaze that the image directs towards the spectator as if he were a living organism has enjoyed considerable literary success. Among the numerous examples we could cite “ The Oval Portrait ” by Edgar Allan Poe and “ The Picture of Dorian Gray ” by Oscar Wilde.
The role of death
The image is born constitutively together with death and the human being's awareness of it. The awareness that our body is destined for decay, decomposition, and therefore disappearance is accompanied in various cultures by the development of different thanatopraxis aimed at the iconic management of the corpse, that is, the elaboration of an antidote that, by opposing nullification, can represent a lasting substitute. There are also important etymological parallels in this regard: the Greek idol refers to the spectre or ghost of the dead, in Roman law the ius imaginum was the right reserved for nobles to publicly display the funeral masks of their ancestors. In the Middle Ages, the term "representation" referred to a modeled and painted figure that "represents" the deceased during funerals. The photographic image also appears in the experience of death: it is born in the cemetery and immediately dedicated to immortalizing the corpses , often packaged in such a way as to make the deceased appear asleep. But on closer inspection, even the selfie confronts us with a time that has irremediably passed. To quote Barthes , photography is a disturbing return of the dead.
Universal language
The culture of the iconosphere is linked to religions. The very etymology of " religio " refers to the act of " religare ," gathering a community around a deity, and this function is accomplished even more easily in the presence of a visible object, an iconic representation. Heraclitus had already mocked the worshippers of sacred images: they begin to pray to such images as if one were chatting with the walls of their houses, unaware of who the gods and heroes are. As for the monotheistic religions, Judaism and Islam, it is commonly believed that both are iconophobic and anti-conic. Christianity , on the other hand, is characterized by a complex representational strategy that has influenced the history of images in Western civilization. God becomes flesh in Christ, but also in the veil where he leaves traces of his face. From the first centuries of Christianity, awareness of the potential of images has been clear. St. Augustine himself states: " When you see a painting, seeing is enough to praise it; when you see a text, seeing is not enough ." The image, as a universal language, can serve as a much more effective tool for evangelization than the written text, which presupposes knowledge of the language and a good level of education.
Carmen Pupo
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Sociologist, copywriter, and journalist. I focus on topics related to inclusion and social rights. I also write about music, new media, and technology.
