Description
Book SynopsisImage conflicts make history visible. Torn between acceleration and delay, history shows itself in them as a dynamic process of updating, which demands sacrifice to maintain different myths of fulfillment. The idol who emerges from his absence becomes a silent actor on the historical stage entire image cultures casts a shadow and in every modern age is a ghost again. The study, located at the interface between visual history and the philosophy of history, examines the pictorial topos of the destruction of ancient and non-European (role models) in the Christian power discourse of the 16th-18th centuries in the sense of a critical-analytical description. Century. In this context, visual typologies of the Christian ruler or martyr are discussed, who, as a picture destroyer, structurally imitates the act of the destruction of Egyptian idols by Christ during his flight to Egypt. These two figures become prototypes of denominational interpretation of history, especially in the Catholic Baroque. They contribute to the anachronistic fictionalization of the Middle Ages as the early days of orthodoxy and at the same time as a preliminary stage of global missionary work. The destruction of ''foreign'' images goes hand in hand with the semantic standardization of ''own'' images as tools for a controlled metaphorical transfer. This topic is v. a. illustrated by case studies on church and imperial image propaganda in the context of recatholization in the countries of the Habsburg crown.
