2005 Reports

Signa et res : the pictorial discourse of the imaginary in early modern Italy

Krüger, Klaus

The hermeneutics of the Christian Middle Ages assign the religious image and its aesthetic
function a status rich in an ambiguity and tension. The ambiguity is rooted in the question of
the identity of the image, what Gadamer calls its “mode of being”. The tension occurs on
account of the divergence between the various aspects of the image: its independent actuality
and its existence as a reproduction, its concrete irreplaceability and its suspension of its own
status.