Abstract

In the 15th century, Leon Battista Alberti presented, in De pictura, a vision of painting and the painter that would help revolutionize the art of that period and beyond. Attention to the religious dimension highlights how, despite the painter’s vision of becoming an artist from a craftsman, it remains a substratum to be reinterpreted in light of a break with nostalgic returns to the past. The theme of imagination and surface becomes of capital importance in the discourse around images, their creation and their use. The recovery of the question in a Christian key offers the possibility of retracing the relationship between images and religion from Augustine to Thomas, passing through the iconoclastic question. Finally, memory and preaching will paint a picture of a complex millennium, through which we arrive at the idea of the painter as an architect also through the contribution of Christian philosophy and theology. The Protestant Reformation and the reform movement within the Catholic Church in the 16th century will impose a renewed attention on images and their use. In the Catholic context, the issue was resolved with the use of the Second Council of Nicaea and the need for bishops to be vigilant about images. This encourages the Cardinal Archbishop of Bologna, Gabriele Paleotti, in his effort to give a renewed form to the creation and use of images, as well as in their relationship with religious experience. Thus ancient themes return, the main one being the function of preaching and its connection with images. It is possible to find in his Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane (1582) an important moment of restart, which however will end with a return to the amazing feeling of Baroque art. However, his reflection can still open important avenues of research today to understand the relationship between images, liturgical action and the media in the era of the civilization of the image.