Hugo Ball e la vera immagine dell’arte. Riflessioni estetico-teologiche

This essay explores the theological meaning of the image in the works of Hugo Ball, the artist of avant-garde dada (1886-1927) who converted to a mystical Catholicism in his later years. Reflecting the role of the image in the history and philosophy of the occidental art, we realize that it caused a new relationship between the artwork and the artist based upon a constitutive theorem of secularization: the artsit with the art of self-portrait emancipates himself from the transcendence, while the oriental icon, on the contrary, conserves a primitive aura. Hugo Ball, in his intellectual and artistic production, developed a Bildwissenschaft, a science of the image at the intersection of aestethics, theology and politics, that has its theoretical core in the link between word and image, but also in the links between symbol and body, and last but not least between immanence and transcendence. This core persists from Ball's dada-beginning until his book on the byzantine christendom and is a guideline to the comprehension of his whole work.