Visualisation and Social Reproduction

Religious paintings offer an excellent testing ground to compare the various kinds of displacements or translations. The paper focuses on two such displacements: the repetition of the message of Jesus versus the movement of immutable mobiles allowed by perspective. These two regimes offer completely different definitions of what it is to ‘represent’ something: to the re-presentation of the Presence is opposed the accurate representation of distant places and times. In between 1450 and 1520 these two regimes of displacement first merge, then collide, and later go their separate ways. Religion on the one hand, and Science on the other ignore each other. Going to Heaven, and going through the Sky are two different movements of representation that generate different space-times.