Gilbert Dagron
Describing and painting. An essay on the iconic portrait
Is it theological to depict Christ as both man and God ? Where should worship of the "holy images" end? How does man, " created in the image of God ", fit into this hierarchical vision of the visible and invisible ? The answers to these fundamental questions, which were at the heart of the iconoclastic crisis of the 8th-9th centuries and of Byzantine art, are not, or not only, religious. They are to be found in the philosophy of representation of late Antiquity, in the relationship between a certain type of painted portrait and the coded words of physical description, in a " reception " that makes a schematic image the medium of visions and dreams, in the passage from the historical to the imaginary.
Gilbert Dagron takes up and completes the material of several studies spanning more than twenty-five years, and seeks to show the iconoclasm that remains in iconic portraiture after theologians celebrated the " triumph of images ", and the reasons that led some of the great initiators of modern painting (Kandinsky, Matisse) to claim the Byzantine icon as their own. It is based on selected iconography - mosaics and paintings, coins, illustrated manuscripts - which bear witness to a rich culture that was and remains one of the models of European aesthetics.
Dagron G., Décrire et peindre. Essai sur le portait iconique, Paris, Gallimard, October 2007, 300 p.
ISBN : 978-2-070-77923-9
Publication : October 4, 2007
