engleski

Mimesis. A Medieval Eclipse?

To enter a medieval sanctuary – a scholar has recently written – means coming face-to-face with sculpted and painted images that do not seem to belong to our world: their faces do not exhibit individual traits and are often identical to each other. “Like nature, the natural face was considered unworthy of transmission to posterity”. Strangely enough, from the age of Charlemagne to the time of Dante, we encounter not a single portrait of a representative individual in the modern sense. The shift, in late-antique art, from mimeticism to symbolism has often been noted: by the 4th century AD, non-naturalistic modes of representation began to replace lifelike realism. According to H.P. L’Orange, the gradual emergence of a “holy countenance” in the portraits of late-antique rulers, philosophers and saints resulted in an erosion of individual traits: this “stereotyped mask of majesty” was to reappear incessantly in medieval art. Interestingly, however, the 4th century also witnessed a revival of physiognomics, whose interest in physical features as a sign of personal character is well-known. Besides, late-antique and medieval biographic and hagiographic literature provided an abundance of physical descriptions of rulers, philosophers and Christian saints and bishops in which an apparent realism often coexisted with a strong idealization. Keeping in mind that truth-to-nature was just one of the many legacies of the ancient tradition of mimeticism, this paper will explore the tension between realism and idealization in late-antique and early-medieval artistic and literary portraits of saints and philosophers. This will also provide the opportunity to further reflect on the medieval understanding of “personal identity” and its – mimetic? – representation.

Mimesis; portraiture; physical descriptions; physiognomics; charisma

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