Lo sguardo parlato

The shadow has long been vested with power and meaning linked by tradition and culture. The relationship between the elements of the shadow, light and the cast image of the object can be the used as a legitimate metaphor for the individual, community or society and its relationship to reality or being in general. This relationship was re-elaborate or created by the rhetoric tradition, namely by the literary depictions of paintings, sculptures and so on. The unique semiotic and ontological property of the shadow allows ancient poets and philosophers to capture it and hold it through tracings and other apparatus, before photography and other modern media; historically this has given the shadow the distinct capacity to span time—to fuse past and present together and as a set-up strived to represent the real with the unreal. That’s the illusionistic and sublime point of Philosotratus the Older’s Eikones. That’s the main matter of the paper.