한스 벨팅의 종교미술 연구: 도상에서 기능으로

Abstract

This essay brings to light Hans Belting’s thesis on icon and its art historical contribution in the Post-Panofskian era. My discussion focuses on two of his major works, Image and its Public in the Middle Ages (New Rochelle, New York, 1990; German original published in Berlin, 1981) and Likeness and Presence: a History of the Image before the Era of Art (Chicago, 1991; German original published in München, 1990). These works, both translated into English, have been widely circulated and read among the academic communities beyond the field of art history, turning his name into THE authority on the issue of icon. The historians of religious art usually point out as his most important contribution the way Belting narrated the comprehensive history of icon by connecting successfully its Eastern prototypes to their offshoots in the West. This aspect indeed is very significant, given the contemporary situation of our academic field where the Western European and the Byzantine art histories are deemed as separate specialties. On the other hand, I see as the most important that Belting discussed icon not in search of the mystified “latent meaning” of Panofskian iconography, but as regards its function in the context of liturgical and para-liturgical devotion. Furthermore, he widened the scope of icon’s function from the mere receptacle of our veneration to the manifestation of the presence of the holy. For criticism, I have to point out that such an ambitious attempt to write a meta-history of icon, literally from its beginning to the end, is inevitably prone to generalization and thus vulnerable.