The word "vision", said Thomas Aquinas, can have two meanings: in the first, it signifies perception by the organ of sight; in the second, it is applied to internal perception due to the imagination or intellect(Summa theologica, I, q. LVII, a, 1).
In the mystical sense, the visionary ordeal is not necessarily an optical experience, although it is an experience of the image. This image can take on varying degrees of clarity. Most mystics agree, however, that the encounter with the transcendent is, in its essence, ineffable, inenarrable, unrepresentable, which does not prevent Western culture from having countless literary texts and just as many works of art that speak of it. Yet these are problematic and paradoxical images and texts, since they represent what, a priori, can neither be seen nor represented.
It is precisely this great problem of "representing the unrepresentable" that this series of lectures sets out to tackle. Spanish painting of the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries will provide most of the examples, but the scope of this research is much broader. It's about tackling an extreme case of figurative representation, in a limited geographical space but against a very broad backdrop. This backdrop is formed, on the one hand, by Western art of the same period and, on the other, by the spirituality of the Counter-Reformation, which rediscovered the role of the imaginary in the exercise of faith.
To take on this task, the lectures will take the most direct route: interrogating the original language of images, trying to decipher the mechanism of their functioning as images relating an experience of image (a "vision"). They will consider the mechanisms of metapictural splitting at work in vision paintings, and question the role of the ecstatic body in communicating an unimaginable experience. The interpretative approach, simple in its starting point, is not without its risks and difficulties, as the fundamental characteristics of the Western imaginary are undeniably pushed to the limit.