Giovanni Pirari's Talk: 'Thinking the Icon'

On May 29, 2024, within the framework of the seminar 'West and East: Universalism of Culture', the research fellow of the International Laboratory for the Study of Russian and European Intellectual Dialogue, PhD, Giovanni Pirari, made a presentation

The report was devoted to the philosophical analysis of transformations of aesthetic paradigms of visual representation of space, in particular, the issue of perspective, in Western European Renaissance painting. The speaker focused on Pavel Florensky's critical interpretation of perspective. In the work Obratnaya Perspektiva, Pavel Florensky questioned the cultural and anthropological shifts that had become the basis for the development and adoption of a perspective image of space in painting. He contrasted it with the 'inverted perspective' characteristic of ancient Russian iconography, considering it as an expression of an alternative vision of the world and the position of man in it.
Based on that, the speaker extends the analysis to other examples of prominent European thinkers and artists who recognized an artistic feature in ancient Russian icon painting that was radically different from the Western tradition. That fact makes ancient Russian icon an object of aesthetic reflection, which is of great importance for the philosophical understanding of the Western depiction of space in painting.This research approach leads to the question: is it possible to explain the historical phenomenon of nihilism, the spiritual 'twin' of the age of technology, by the loss of symbolic perception of the image and reality in general, and not to consider it only as a result of the development of conceptual abstract thinking.

You can watch the videorecording of the seminar in English on the YouTube channel of the Laboratory.