Borderline Iconographies: The Limits of Visual Communication in Conveying Christian Dogmas in Early Modern Europe

Notwithstanding Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti’s theory that images, unlike languages, are universally understood (1582) — a belief that supported contemporary Jesuit missions in Asia, Africa and the Americas —, experience soon proved the contrary. Subsequently some basic cognitive problems have been investigated (such as native Americans’ and Asians’ inability to understand chiaroscuro, which, together with perspective is the foundation of the Western notion of mimetic art). Some cultural problems have also been investigated, such as the Chinese revulsion for the image of the crucified Christ and the scandalous regularsize feet of female saints. Less attention has been paid to the different meanings that the same Christian iconographies may have according to different Christian confessions. Thus the main difference between Andrei Rublev’s Old Testament Trinity (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow) and Ludovico Carracci’s Abraham and the Three Angels (Bologna National Gallery) is not about style, but about meaning, despite the fact that both pictures represent the same episode from the Genesis (ch. XVIII, lines 1–8) and that the latter’s invention is partly based on the former’s.In this case differences depend on the East/West division, following the Church schism of 1054 – which engendered growing differences in theological statements, liturgy and iconographies. Even within the West, however, theology, liturgy and religious iconography are dealt with very differently, depending on the North/South division created by the Protestant schism started in 1517. The paper addresses the iconographical issues created by these religious divisions, focusing especially on the representations of the Old and the New Testament Trinity and of God the Father in Eastern and Western Europe, as well as on Protestant aniconism. It also shows how, despite divisions, East and West, North and South have mutually influenced each other’s religious art, in terms of iconography and occasionally of style.