What is the purpose of the different portraits of holy figures in religious art? Do they only have a referential role in historical figures or simply depict passages from the Scriptures for the popular understanding of the Holy Texts that most people today dismiss as anachronistic?
Having as a basic framework the representation of Jesus in Western and Eastern art - from the early Christian symbolic period to pagan influences and the Byzantine style - we will see how iconographic portraits invite the viewer into a dialogue between the Self and the Other, the earthly and the transcendent, ultimately leading the individual to a new way of relating where the point of reference ceases to be the perishable nature but the eternal and the archetypal.
When gazes meet, the face emerges, transcending subjectivity, entering into ecstasy and communion, followed by the return, the inner contact with the Self. Then, the rift between the unconscious and the conscious, the individual and the world, the mortal and the divine, is bridged, transforming into a dialogue, into a radically new way of active (daily) presence and existence.