earticle

영어

Pliny the Elder said that multiple cultures agree that the painting began as a shadow trace. A daughter of Butades, the potter in Corinth, traced an outline around a man’s shadow, and it was the very beginning of painting. In this anecdote, the profile, i. e. the portrait substitutes body of the absent lover. It makes the absent body present and replaces his place. In this context Hans Belting put the anthropological value to this visual practice. Human being made images to cope actively with the shock of death and the disappearing of body. With the aid of the representation of the bodily presence, the image struggles to resist the death. This paper is a study on the critical meaning of representation in the context of bodily survival by image. The representation is the paradoxical trick of consciousness, an ability to see something as ‘there’ and ‘not there’ at the same time. So the connection between image and the body would be suspicious. Although this relation was tight in the ancient shadow painting and the medieval effigies, the modern visual practice forsakes this connection and exposes the trick of representation. It insists that image was not real and even expels the medieval visual practice from the boundary of fine arts. The genealogy of the portraiture is formed by two different visual practices. The belief and the disbelief in the image are observed in the process of representation and anti-representation, and this ambivalence transforms the ontological meaning of portrait in the visual representation.