Are we living in a world of images in which the culture of the word is lost, or is the word returning in triumph with the Internet? Where do we place television, DVDs, video games? The human relationship with images has always been a difficult one, as Maria Bettetini recalls in her book Contro le immagini: Le radici dell’iconoclastia (Against Images: The Roots of Iconoclasm). It’s only 160 pages long, but I don’t wish to mislead anyone: it’s a dense book aimed at readers who know something about philosophy and theology. Since its density makes it difficult to summarize, I’ll make only a few general observations on the human ability, unknown to animals, of fashioning “simulacra.”
For Plato, if objects are imperfect reproductions of ideal models, images are imperfect imitations of objects, and therefore pale secondhand imitations. But in Neo-Platonism images become a direct imitation of ideal models, and the word agalma means statue as well as image, but also splendor, dignity, and therefore beauty.
The ambiguity was present in the Hebrew world, where it was forbidden to make images of God or to utter his true name. Yet God had created humankind in his own image, and if we read biblical descriptions of the Temple of Solomon, we see that there were depictions not only of plants and animals of every kind, but also of cherubs. And since the same prohibition on portraying heavenly things applied in the Muslim world, places of worship used abstract calligraphic forms, though the Muslim culture has furnished us with splendid and highly imaginative miniatures.
With Christianity, not only had God assumed a “visible” body, but this divine body had left images of its face on veils and bloodstained handkerchiefs. Christianity needed images too, Hegel would later explain, to represent not just the glory of the heavens, but also the disfigured face of Christ in pain and the cruelty of his persecutors.
At this point, the matter becomes ever more complicated, since Neo-Platonists like Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite tell us that divine things can be spoken about only in the negative, so that if it’s necessary to refer to God, it’s better to use the most outrageously dissimilar imagery, such as a bear or a panther. Yet people who had read Pseudo-Dionysius had formed the idea that every earthly thing was none other than the image of a celestial thing, and every creature of the world is almost a “picture” of things that would otherwise escape our senses, so that it was right and proper to produce pictures of these pictures.
But for uneducated people it was easy to pass from the fascination of the figure to identifying it with the thing it represented, and to slip from the cult of images into idolatry, the return of the Golden Calf. Which led to iconoclasm and the famous Byzantine campaign against images.
Conversely, the Church of Rome didn’t relinquish the use of visual representations, since, as would often be repeated, Pictura est laicorum literatura, and illiterate people can be taught through images alone. And yet there was debate over what power was exerted by this multitude of figures that populated abbeys and cathedrals, and a cautious theory was developed in the time of Charlemagne that images were good, but only to stimulate the memory, and that it would in the end be difficult to decide if a female image represents a Virgin to be venerated or a pagan Venus to be abhorred unless it had a titulus, or label. It’s as though the Carolingians had read Roland Barthes, who theorized about the verbal anchoring of images, not for the celebration of God but for the sale of new commercial idols, and who had anticipated the theory of a verbal-visual culture, such as today’s, in which television—image plus word—has simply replaced the cathedral. And it is, I suggest, on television screens that the pope is venerated, and at times idolized, by people who no longer go to church.
This prompts other reflections that bring Maria Bettetini’s slim but disturbing book to its conclusion. She fears that the beauty of images, including sacred images, makes people forget God (this had already worried Saint Bernard), and complains laically that in new images there is a “loss of aura.” But she also feels that contemporary art first destroys or disfigures traditional images, as with Picasso or informalism, then plays around by multiplying them, as with Warhol, and finally substitutes, jettisons, recycles, re-creates them, in a sort of permanent “iconoclasm lite.”
So the times in which we live are still more complicated than those that worried Plato.
2007