FROM THE ICONISATION OF THE BODY TO THE LIKENESS WITH CHRIST

Text topic: The Body Aesthetics in Christianity

Text author: Тодор Митровић

Representing humans in visual arts is one of the oldest, most accessible,and theoretically thoroughly studied modes of semiotic interchange.Only lately, though, attention of researchers has been drawn to the fact that the relation of likeness between the image and the person (or event) represented by the same image is not a one-directional cognitive formula, and that people often tend to identify their behaviour and their bodies with (their own) images. In other words, together with the basic semiotic proposition implying that the (mimetic/artistic) images are supposed to represent the bodies, it is possible to notice the representational processes through which bodies are becoming images of those very images. The ways this alternative representational mode has been used in Late Antiquity, together with the ways this kind of semiotic interchange influenced the bodily expressions of piety in those periods – resulting in gradual erasure of the cognitive borderlines between bodily and iconic modalities of presence – are the topics of this research.