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Title: New Iconological Perspectives on Marble as Divinus Spiritus
Subtitle: Hermeneutical Change and Iconogenesis
Author(s): BAERT, Barbara
Journal: Louvain Studies
Volume: 40    Issue: 1   Date: 2017   
Pages: 14-35
DOI: 10.2143/LS.40.1.3206243

Abstract :
Every work of art, every ‘iconization’ of a thought, every emotion that calls for visual expression, in short every ‘pact’, is made possible by the mystery of an invisibility that stoops to the flesh with ‘plasticity’ as its only goal. There is in fact no greater mystery imaginable than this process that has given Western art history a discourse about descent into matter, about circumscription, about skin, about bodily fluids. This descent I call iconogenesis. In this essay I discuss three aspects of Iconogenesis as a phenomenon attached to marble: the Incipit miniatures in early-medieval illumination, the marble as ekphrasis (in particular in the Hagia Sophia of Constantinople), and marble as cosmic space.

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