Lecture - Image Anthropology. Death and the making of pictures October 13, 2008

Lecture - Image Anthropology. Death and the making of Pictures, by Prof. Hans Belting. By defining an image as the presence of an absence, Prof Belting creates an interesting distinction between image and medium. While image is what we carry in our minds, medium is when an image acquires a material dimension. So when we bring in funerary images on our purveiw, they combine the functions of an image and a medium. When the making of pictures involves death, it heightens the paradox of the copy and the real. Thus, be in ancient Egypt or ancient Greece, funerary paintings play out the double role of manifesting the missing body of the dead and existing by its own right as an artifact. Prof Belting will explore how the iconic presence of the dead admits and even intentionally stages the finality of that absence which is death. Prof. Hans Belting is an emeritus Professor of Art History and Medieval Theory.

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