The Movement and the Experience of "Iconic Presence". An Introduction

Abstract

Although the notion of “iconic presence” had previously appeared in several various fields, in Medieval Art History, it started to be discussed mainly after the publication in 1990 of Bild und Kult, and further developed in Bildantropologie . Consequently, it became a quite widely diffused concept. The notion of “iconic presence” was re-discussed in 2016, introducing its explicit definition: “Iconic presence is presence in and as a picture. The physical presence of a picture in our world refers to the symbolic presence which it depicts” . The image is in this sense understood as a threshold between the tangible and imaginary world.