Fernande Hölscher is invited by the Assembly of the Collège de France, at the suggestion of Pr Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge.
When the Greeks presented the statues of the gods with their wishes, prayers and thanks, they were not faced with a stone, a piece of wood or any other material, but encountered the divinity itself in its specific representation. This important fact has been questioned by rationalists, both ancient and modern, particularly in German research ; according to them, the Greeks could not have ignored the materiality of statues and must have conceived them as symbols of the gods represented.
On the contrary, I try to show that the Greeks conceived and developed various strategies for disregarding the materiality of statues of the gods and, by the same token, envisaging the gods as such. The " vitality " of statues in general, which is even heightened in the case of statues of gods, helps to understand an important aspect of Greek religion and may at the same time explain certain peculiarities in the iconography of Greek vases. The presentation will address the various aspects of the power of the divinity in its image in five sections :
