This essay examines the representational paradox of “visible invisibility” on the basis of examples from visual art and literature history of the early modern era and the late Middle Age. It focuses on the body and the face as visual codes for the representation of the visible and the invisible. In the examples it presents, the different relationship between visibility and invisibility owes less to a difference between textual and visual art and much more to a paradigm change in the history of aesthetics. In this sense, it considers similarities and differences in modern and premodern representation techniques, and their significance for the artwork's apparatus of signs. This essay was presented at “Die Macht des Gesicht ” (The power of the face), a symposium at the Universität Basel in Basel, Switzerland, from July 26 to 28, 2007.
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