Introduction
You often look at pictures, paintings, and digital screens without realizing that an image is not identical to its physical medium. Traditional art history and media studies struggle to separate the material object from the mental projection it triggers. You confuse the surface you see with the image living in your mind.
Images are not identical to their physical media but live through the human body and gaze, spanning from ancient death cults to modern digital and photographic technologies.
Hans Belting explains this dynamic by exploring how you create, host, and interpret visual media across history. The book begins by establishing the triad of picture, medium, and body, then moves to the spaces where modern technologies project your memories. You will trace how portraits evolved from heraldic signs into physiognomic art, examine how early cultures used images to tame death, and study how shadows, cinema, and photography bridge absence and presence.
- How do your body and gaze generate images from physical surfaces?
- Why did ancient cultures invent icons to conquer death and absence?
- How do digital screens and photography alter your perception of presence?
1. Picture, Medium, and the Body
An anthropological approach to images treats them as culturally determined phenomena that differ fundamentally from physical works of art. A work of art is a tangible object with a historical record that can be dated and exhibited. An image defies such reification.
An image is distinct from the physical picture or medium that hosts it, relying on the living human body as its primary locus and generating organ.
An image straddles the boundary between physical and mental existence. It functions simultaneously as a product of a given medium and a product of the self through dreams, imaginings, and perceptions.
Images Versus Media
Images must be distinguished from the physical pictures or media that host them. The same image can migrate across different media. Images require a medium as a support, host, and tool to become visible and to be transmitted to viewers.
The image does not coincide with the physical object or medium. Human users intentionally shift their focus between the image and the medium. Semiotics and art history often reduce pictures to mere iconic signs or autonomous works of art.
An anthropological approach recognizes that images require a medium to become visible in the external world:
- The medium encompasses both form and matter.
- It serves as a carrier that gives physical presence to an otherwise disembodied image.
Images are defined by the paradox of making a physical absence visibly present through the chosen medium. Because the real object or person is absent, images rely on the tangible presence of a medium such as stone, bronze, or a photograph. This mediality is rooted in a body analogy, mirroring how memory uses body experiences to imagine absent events or people as present.
The Living Body as Medium
Internal and external representations are not rigidly separated into a dualism. Endogenous images in the brain constantly react to exogenous images in the public sphere. This ongoing interaction relies on the body in-born capacity to process both private and collective imaginations.
The human body acts as a living, natural medium that generates internal images and animates external pictures through the act of perception. Internal images from memory and imagination colonize our bodies and brain.
When you encounter external pictures, you substitute their fabricated medium with your own body. You use your imagination and sensory organs to bring the image to life through an act of symbolic animation.
2. The Locus of Images and New Media
The human body hosts internal memories and dreams that interact with external spaces, cinematic projections, and virtual environments.
The living human body serves as the natural, primary locus and living organ where images are received, generated, and interpreted. Unlike external media screens or museum walls, the human body retains personal images linked to life experiences in time and space. The body functions as a place where internal personal memory intersects with collective traditions, preserving them against external loss.
A proverb cited by the author states that when an old man in Africa dies, an entire library or archive of images burns down with him.
Dreams and Cinematographic Spaces
Dreams and supernatural visions operate through the body as an involuntary image-producing mechanism that blurs the boundary between internal phantasms and external collective media. During sleep, the body generates visual dreams through a process similar to the mnemonic topographical techniques of the brain. Religious visions and states of possession demonstrate that the human body acts as both a locus and a medium for images and forces outside conscious control.
Descartes recorded three dreams on the night of November 10, 1619, in his notebook Olympica, debating whether his imagination conveyed divine or poetic truth.
The movie theater functions as a public locus of images where collective projection merges with individual hallucination and personal memory. Cinematic technology temporarily suspends linear time and physical location, throwing the spectator back onto their own internal image archive. Viewers experience films as if they were their own dreams, blending fictional narratives with personal recollections.
Hiroshi Sugimoto created a photographic series of empty movie theaters by keeping his camera shutter open for the entire duration of a projected film, leaving only a glowing white screen. Jean-Luc Godard directed the eight-hour film Histoire(s) du Cinéma to explore the collective screen of memory.
Virtual Reality and Places
Modern technological media have detached places from fixed physical locations, turning real geographical sites into images and transforming places into destinations experienced through screens. Instead of physically visiting geographical locations, contemporary society increasingly consumes places as images or travels into pictures. Global media networks replace traditional boundaries, creating spaces of transit and information systems rather than fixed physical localities.
Hubertus von Amelunxen curated an exhibition of French photographers titled Les lieux du Non-lieu, capturing photographic images as places of the place-less.
In traditional Chinese culture, natural sites were transformed into imaginative places of remembrance and escape through poetry and inscriptions rather than physical dwelling. Literati sought refuge in untamed nature, viewing landscapes as images to distance themselves from social pressures. Visitors on site read poetic inscriptions carved onto cliffs or examined landscape scrolls at home, turning physical locations into eternalized places of the imagination.
Historical Chinese travelers visited specific sites like The Red Cliff or The Pavilion of the Orchids to experience natural locations through the time and eyes of ancient poets.
Modern virtual reality and internet spaces attempt to eliminate the physical body, substituting digital existence for biological reality while reviving ancient longings for spiritual immortality. Cyberspace offers users simulated out-of-body experiences where identity becomes a mutable option behind digital masks. Despite claims of total liberation from physical constraints, these digital technologies continue to rely on the human body as their ultimate psychological locus.
In 1984, William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his novel Neuromancer to describe a consensual hallucination accessed via a custom deck.
3. Coats of Arms and Portraits
Portraiture evolved from heraldic body signs into physiognomic representations that bridged the gap between mortality and humanist self-expression.
Heraldic Signs and Panels
The coat of arms preceded the portrait panel as a pictorial medium of the body. You find that it functioned not as a body image, but as a body sign and heraldic abstraction. The same shield painters, or schilderer, created these coats of arms. They identified the bearer of a familial or territorial genealogy rather than a living individual, defining the social body of an estate.
The thirteenth-century donor figures in Naumburg, such as Ditmarus the Comes Occisus, carried shields bearing a second, medial face that concealed their real face and protected their body.
The portrait panel and the escutcheon panel shared identical material and technical foundations as painted wooden panels. Yet they operated through profoundly different symbolic uses. Technical similarities linked them, but their distinct symbolic uses and approaches to representation created an intense intermedial competition between physiognomic duplication and heraldic abstraction.
In Lille around 1529, heraldic panels created for Jehan Barrat and his wife were painted over after 1563 with copies of Robert Campin's portraits of Barthélemy Alatruye and Marie de Pacy, revealing the underlying coat of arms via X-ray images. This original portrait was painted in 1425, while Marie de Pacy died in 1452.
Humanism and the Beholder's Gaze
The invention of the bourgeois portrait challenged the monopoly of the noble body by introducing the mortal body and the theme of transience into the arena of portrayal. Burgher portraits initially found a place in funerary liturgics and church memorials, where the remembrance body of ancestors complemented devotional images.
Jan van Eyck's portrait known as Léal Souvenir depicts a man from Bruges in 1432, featuring a weathered tombstone crack and inscription that point to death and transience. The dimensions of this portrait are 33.3 x 18.9 cm.
The shift toward frontality in portraits abolished the two-dimensional surface quality of the medium and introduced the metaphor of a window to depict a real body conception. Unlike rigid profile views of heraldic figures, the frontal gaze directly addresses the beholder, transforming the painted surface into a window that reveals the interior life through the gaze. Jan van Eyck's signed 1432 portrait of a goldsmith from Bruges features a direct, challenging gaze and frame inscription proclaiming a second body.
Humanist intellectuals sought an afterlife for the mind through literary legacies and print media, creating a new kind of public person distinct from courtly or bourgeois lineages.
Artists like Dürer and Cranach disseminated printed likenesses that paired with texts, creating hybrids of private images and public persons where the mind asserted itself against the decaying body. Konrad Celtis commissioned a memorial woodcut from Hans Burgkmair in 1507. In 1526, Albrecht Dürer created a copper engraving of Erasmus of Rotterdam in the act of writing, accompanied by a framed text inscription discussing the true Erasmus.
As portraits shifted from representing physical bodies to representing the unportrayable Self, a representation gap emerged that required new rhetorical devices like personal mottos. Because the most exacting physical likeness cannot capture a subject, the allegorical speech of the motto and printed text stepped in to let the portrait speak, uniting picture and writing. On the back of Francesco d'Este's portrait, painted around 1460, genealogical coats of arms and personal mottos like me tout form a heraldic face complementing the physiognomic portrait. The overall dimensions of this portrait are 31.8 x 22.2 cm, with the painted surface measuring 29.8 x 20.3 cm.
4. Image and Death in Early Cultures
The human practice of creating images originated as a direct response to death. When a living person transforms into a mute and disintegrating corpse, survivors face an incomprehensible loss. To counter this, early cultures created man-made images as counter-meanings to corpses.
The image provides an immortal symbolic body that allows the dead to be resocialized within the community while their mortal remains dissolve.
In early cult practices, creating an image of the dead involved an ontological transfer where the artifact acquired Being and authority in the name of the body. Rather than mere representations, cult images acted in the place of the body. This expanded the social realm to include the dead and made the community less precarious through ritual animation rather than passive visual resemblance.
Skulls and Ancestor Cults
Neolithic cultures used plastered and painted human skulls as the earliest ritual medium to re-establish the social presence of ancestors. At sites like Jericho, archaeologists discovered human skulls overlaid with chalk, clay, and pigments, featuring inlaid shell or mother-of-pearl eyes. This transformation turned a natural sign of death into a new face bearing the social signs of a living body.
Skulls from Jericho dating around 7,000 BCE and skull statues from Tell Ramad in Syria represent the earliest instances of ritual engagement with the dead. These artifacts enabled a symbolic exchange between the living community and their ancestors.
The Mouth-Opening Ritual
In ancient Egypt, a ritual of animation called the mouth-opening ceremony transformed static statues and mummies into active mediums for the soul. Egyptian tombs utilized hidden serdabs containing multiple statues and sealed burial chambers with mummies. Because physical manufacture alone was insufficient, the mouth-opening ritual was performed to qualify the artifact or preserved body for embodiment and allow the soul to interact with the Hereafter.
By New Kingdom times, the ceremony for the mummy of Hunefer required seventy-five different actions and incantations. Old Kingdom reserve heads date from 2630-2524 BCE, while the life-sized bust of vizier Ankh-haf dates to approximately 2580 BCE.
Sumerian and Babylonian cultures used inscriptions on statues to create speaking images that engaged in dialogue with both living humans and divinities. Statues of rulers and deities were brought to life through the mouth-opening ritual, enabling them to receive sacrificial offerings and intercede between the earthly sphere and the divine realm. The union of image and written text provided an explicit instruction manual for interacting with the dead.
King Gudea ordered his diorite statue placed in the temple of Ningirsu in Girsu to speak to the divinity in his name around 2120 BCE.
Classical Greek culture shifted away from the archaic double of embodiment toward mimesis and remembrance, severing the image from its death cult roots. Under philosophers like Plato, sensory perception and physical artifacts were devalued as mere appearance and illusion. Grave images transformed from active vessels of embodiment into passive metaphors for memory, while the corpse and physical likeness came to be seen as shadows.
Polybius described Roman ancestor processions, while Greek tragedy and philosophy like Plato's critiques rejected image magic in favor of cognitive truth and living speech.
Ancient Roman funerary traditions maintained the archaic power of the double through state-sponsored public processions featuring wax ancestor masks. During noble Roman funerals, living actors wearing the wax likenesses of deceased ancestors escorted the body to the rostra, reenacting their deeds and speech to restore them to public life.
Polybius described the Roman funeral procession where a deceased nobleman was surrounded by the masks of all his ancestors. Marius campaigned in 107 BCE challenging ancestry requirements based on inherited images, and the 79 BCE funeral of Vespasian noted by Suetonius involved an archimimus wearing the deceased emperor's mask.
5. Shadows, Media, and Photography
Images share a secret analogy with shadows through their mimetic relationship to the human body. The shadow cast by your body has a dual character because it defines and contradicts your physical presence at the same time. Light produces shadows, yet they remain the literal absence of light. Historically, the shadow served as a natural image of the body and guided human picture-making.
Pliny recounts that the first picture was simply a traced shadow on a wall. Dante describes the dead in the Underworld as shadows who are visible and can speak, yet lack bodies and offer nothing to touch.
Shadows and photographic media link physical absence with visible presence, bridging Dantean literary visions and modern digital screens.
Shadows and Painting
In modern mass media, the absence of a body is no longer proof of death. The thanatos effect of photographs has disappeared in live images where living and dead people appear indistinguishable.
Robert Rauschenberg used transfer drawings in his 1959 Dante cycle, taking images of contemporaries from news photos to populate his hell as shadows and clichés. This series comprised 34 massive panoramic drawings in the Dante's Inferno sequence.
Masaccio broke with traditional image separation by introducing optical cast shadows into his frescoes. In the Brancacci Chapel, he incorporated cast shadows that simulate real bodies catching light from the actual chapel window around 1428.
In 'The Expulsion from Paradise' and 'St. Peter Curing the Sick with His Shadow', Masaccio used cast shadows originating from real light sources. This double fiction dissolved the strict boundary between the image and the viewer, anticipating modern screen technology and deception.
Peter Greenaway and Tom Phillips produced TV Dante for London's Channel 4 in 1990, covering the first 8 cantos of the Inferno. This electronic production blends text, sound, and multiform layers on screen to simulate the virtual world of the human brain.
The Transparency of Photography
Photographs operate as an anthropological medium of memory and imagination rather than pure technical replicas of the world. A medium serves merely as an archive of dead images until animated by your gaze.
Maxime Du Camp photographed ancient Egyptian monuments like the Great Sphinx and Abu Simbel in 1850 alongside Gustave Flaubert, preserving a world that has since changed or been relocated.
To overcome the limitations of mechanical indexicality, contemporary photographers stage the world as a deliberate fiction to reveal deeper truths. You find that artists deploy elaborate mise-en-scène techniques to treat the world as raw material for the imagination.
Jeff Wall exhibited his lightbox transparency The Storyteller in 1986, featuring Vancouver Native Americans staged under a highway overpass to examine the act of storytelling.
10 Key Ideas
- An image is distinct from the physical picture or medium that hosts it, relying on the living human body as its primary locus and generating organ.
- The human body hosts internal memories and dreams that interact with external spaces, cinematic projections, and virtual environments.
- Portraiture evolved from heraldic body signs into physiognomic representations that bridged the gap between mortality and humanist self-expression.
- Humanist intellectuals sought an afterlife for the mind through literary legacies and print media, creating a new kind of public person distinct from courtly or bourgeois lineages.
- The image provides an immortal symbolic body that allows the dead to be resocialized within the community while their mortal remains dissolve.
- Neolithic cultures used plastered and painted human skulls as the earliest ritual medium to re-establish the social presence of ancestors.
- In ancient Egypt, a ritual of animation called the mouth-opening ceremony transformed static statues and mummies into active mediums for the soul.
- Ancient Roman funerary traditions maintained the archaic power of the double through state-sponsored public processions featuring wax ancestor masks.
- Shadows and photographic media link physical absence with visible presence, bridging Dantean literary visions and modern digital screens.
- Photographs operate as an anthropological medium of memory and imagination rather than pure technical replicas of the world.