WEARING IMAGES. INTRODUCTION

In the past decades, studies on the materiality and the efficacy of images, as well as the artistic and social practices related to them, have allowed scholars to explore how much images' making, use, handling and display contributed to the activation of their powers of presence through their interaction with the viewer. Further, the growing interest in the articulation between the history of art and the anthropology of images has brought to light the close links between the art object and the body: in fact, if the body can be the medium of the animate art object, the art object can potentially act as a substitute of the animate body. But what happens when the body is the support of a distinctive image, when it inscribes an image on its own surface, whether directly on the skin or through intermediary props such as clothing or corporeal parure? Wearing Images investigates the different modes of interaction between the image and the body that wears it in the Early-Modern period, when devotional, political, dynastic or familial images could be worn as medals, jewels, badges, embroidered garments or tattoos.