Dar corpo à alma: representações na iconografia medieval

Abstract

What analogies and symbols are used to graphically represent the immaterial soul? What devices are used to make it visible? According to the Jewish and the biblical texts traditions, the soul is a breath that gives life to the body. The Greeks associated the immateriality with the image of a winged Psyche. The first images of the soul in Christian iconography are based on these concepts. Aquinas confirms the possibility of representing it this way, saying that soul and body form a unitary substance. Thus, throughout the Middle Ages, the soul in the picture of a human body appears in distinct iconographic themes: leaving the body on the Virgin or of the saints; in judgments after death, the first and special one, being of the Archangel Michael weighing souls, or in the final one, from which the scenes of Paradise and Hell are designed.