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

Human beings make images. From prehistoric cave paintings to digital photographs, a 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 left over time in the form of images constitute the subject of the history of art. But might they not also be within the purview of anthropology? This position is the 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 the increasing technological basis of the image in our age, Belting sets out to establish an anthropological perspective as a way to avoid the risk of “reducing images to mere artifacts of technology” (15). He predicates his undertaking on a specific definition of the image. Whereas we commonly consider the image as something that can be seen, Belting broadens the parameters to allow images a different identity. Spanning “the boundary between physical and mental existence” (2), the image “may live in a work of art” without necessarily coinciding with it. Belting defines the image this way in order to extend our consideration beyond the artifacts produced by specific media to encompass those images—“dreams, imaginings, personal perceptions”—that we generate corporeally. His central proposition is that “image, body and medium” ground “every attempt at picture-making” (3).

Belting conceives of a medium as the 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 a given medium, whether it was a lump of clay or the smooth wall of a cave,” Belting makes a conventional observation. However, he wants to differentiate his use of the word medium to specify something that “conveys or hosts an image” (18). Furthermore, Belting includes our bodies within his definition of a medium; because they process, receive, and transmit images, they qualify as “a living medium” (5). This allows him to take into consideration memory, dreams, and imagination. His argument requires that the division between internal and external representation—images in the world and images in our minds—be erased: images exist in the unceasing interaction between the physical and the mental.

His focus on the body and the medium enables him to link diverse artifacts whose relations would otherwise remain obscure, such as a coat of arms dating from the 13th century and early portraits painted on panels. For Belting, these pictorial forms both “take the place of the body” (63), albeit in different ways, with the coat of arms signifying a genealogy and the portrait a specific individual within a genealogical heritage. While it is intriguing to see the heraldic image as a “likeness,” we are more likely to accept the portrait as the depiction of a person because of a historical shift from an emblematic to an iconic reference to the body. Renaissance artists who produced representations of singular individuals present us with the living “image” of incarnate, historical entities, by which Belting intends more than just a body, but a “Self.”

Belting’s study of the relation between the image and death forms the core of the book. Tracing historical instances of the embodiment of the dead, Belting explores the contradiction between presence and absence, inherent to images but also underlying the mysterious divide between life and death. Here he makes his most convincing case in support of the position that “From an anthropological perspective…embodiment in an image…testifies to an age-old urge to transcend, by means of the image, the boundaries of space and time that confine the human body” (61). Ranging from the “skull cult” of the Neolithic period to photographic memorials, Belting describes a historical transformation in the relation of the image and death in Greek thought; specifically noting the turning point in Greek culture...