An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body (review)

Abstract

Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. 208 pp. Human beings make images. prehistoric cave paintings to digital photographs, succession of artifacts attests to this remarkably sustained human activity. Indeed, it might be said that as an activity unique to our species, making images makes human beings. The traces we have leftover time in form of images constitute subject of history of art. But might they not also be within purview of anthropology? This position is underlying premise of Hans Belting's An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, published originally in Germany as Bild- Anthropologie in 2001 by Verlag Wilhelm Fink, Munich. Prompted in part by increasing technological basis of in our age, Belting sets out to establish an anthropological perspective as way to avoid risk of reducing images to mere artifacts of technology (15). He predicates his undertaking on specific definition of image. Whereas we commonly consider as something that can be seen, Belting broadens parameters to allow images different identity. Spanning the boundary between physical and mental existence (2), may live in work of art without necessarily coinciding with it. Belting defines this way in order to extend our consideration beyond artifacts produced by specific media to encompass those images-dreams, imaginings, personal perceptions-that we generate corporeally. His central proposition is that and ground every attempt at picture-making (3). Belting conceives of medium as material or tangible transfer point of images. Images rely on media to be manifest, but, in his terms, they are not reducible to their technical support. When he states pictures have always been dependent on given medium, whether it was lump of clay or smooth wall of cave, Belting makes conventional observation. However, he wants to differentiate his use of word medium to specify something that conveys or hosts an (18). Furthermore, Belting includes our bodies within his definition of medium; because they process, receive, and transmit images, they qualify as a living (5). This allows him to into consideration memory, dreams, and imagination. His argument requires that division between internal and external representation- images in world and images in our minds-be erased: images exist in unceasing interaction between physical and mental. His focus on and medium enables him to link diverse artifacts whose relations would otherwise remain obscure, such as coat of arms dating from 13th century and early portraits painted on panels. For Belting, these pictorial forms both take place of body (63), albeit in different ways, with coat of arms signifying genealogy and portrait specific individual within genealogical heritage. While it is intriguing to see heraldic as likeness, we are more likely to accept portrait as depiction of person because of historical shiftfrom an emblematic to an iconic reference to body. Renaissance artists who produced representations of singular individuals present us with living image of incarnate, historical entities, by which Belting intends more than just body, but Self. Belting's study of relation between and death forms core of book. Tracing historical instances of embodiment of dead, Belting explores contradiction between presence and absence, inherent to images but also underlying mysterious divide between life and death. Here he makes his most convincing case in support of position that From an anthropological perspective...embodiment in an image...testifies to an age-old urge to transcend, by means of image, boundaries of space and time that confine human body (61). …