Sabine Marienberg - Bildakt at the Warburg Institute

Viewers of Jan van Eycks Portrait of a Man in the National Gallery in London, almost certainly a self-portrait of the artist (

Nicolaus Cusanus reflects on this quality in a well-known passage of De Visione Dei that might almost refer to van Eycks picture: Every one of you, from whichever place you may behold the picture, will think the picture is looking solely at yourself.

Fig. 1 Jan van Eyck: Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban, 1433, oil on oak, London, National Gallery.

This recourse to the first person singular alludes to the fact that notwithstanding their non-organic materiality, pictures seem to be endowed with the capacity to act. Reflections on its universal validity are found in elaborations of a range of philosophical and biosemantic concepts, which while not necessarily related to one another and perhaps even mutually contradictory agree that pictures act with an often uncontrollable semantic force. These theorems range from Aristotles concept of the intrinsic energy of forms

The broad and profound framework of these thoughts reveal the mis-guidedness of every accusation that imagines agentes and their reflection in picture act theory are variants of animism. This kind of critique is grounded neither in essential philosophical traditions nor evolutionary theory. Its vain but understandable vehemence stems from a painful inability to overcome a constructivist conceptualization of subjectivity and its world-defining telos.

The description of active pictures as imagines agentes derives from the earliest known Roman treatise on rhetoric. To characterize pictures that act, the unknown authors coined the term imagines agentes .

The praxis of mnemonics and the activation technique of imagines agentes can be traced back to the ancient cultures of Egypt.

Thomas Hobbes, who founded modern state theory, refers to this context when he draws on imagines agentes and in particular the Egyptian statues mentioned in the Asclepius when conceiving his central work, the Leviathan . The imagines agentes come to embody the commonwealth that would lead the citizens toward peace. According to Hobbes, all contracts remain empty words to those entering into them when there is no visual power to keep them in awe.

Statuette of a Striding Man, probably reign of Pepi II, about 2246-2152 BCE, wood with some polychrome, 35 8,5 8,5 cm, Cambridge, MA, Harvard Art Museums.

Another philosopher of picture activity as relevant as Hobbes and no less inexhaustible is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. This is shown first by his concept of the coup doeil ,