“A picture’s worth a thousand words.’’ This adage is so commonplace that we might not recognize that it says something fundamental about verbal and visual representation: the power of images to communicate directly and immediately is, at least potentially, vastly greater than the power of verbal description. It is paradoxical that this adage thrives in a culture that tends to be both highly literate and highly literal. The discursive precision of words remains for us the hallmark of certainty and truth, despite our saturation in electronic visual media. This points to a disorienting fact: how we see is not a physiological given, but a cultural process. Different cultures and historical periods can see, hear, and read differently than we do, and conceive and value these modes of perception differently.
Postmodern critics have effectively challenged the notion that texts are finished products and dominate the construction of meaning (for example, White 1987; Barthes 1988; Derrida 1988; Goldhill 1994; Elsner 1996), while, at the same time, contemporary art historians have emphasized the dynamic nature of seeing and being seen, the variety of ways of seeing, and the ability of images to convey multiple meanings (for example, Mitchell 1986, 1994; Bulloch et al. 1993; Elsner 1995; Belting 2003; relevant observations in Foucault 1983 and Bourdieu 1999). These methodological insights have opened up new ways of exploring the relationship between visual and verbal representation in general, and highlight the perceived interplay between image and text that was increasingly acknowledged during the second century ad in, for example, the works of Lucian and the Greek novels. In the light of this new understanding, I shall first describe how political and divine power were conceived and presented in Late Antiquity and how the human person was represented as image, and I shall then discuss in what manner early Christianity can be thought of as a visual culture. I shall suggest that the cultural passage into Late Antiquity is marked by a greater frequency and a more profound significance of visual conceptions and metaphors.
A Companion to Late Antiquity. Edited by Philip Rousseau © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-11980-1
World History
