The Jealousy of Rembrandt: Transparency and Opacity in the History of Visual Media

The technological progress of devices of representation and control in both religion and law promises to bestow upon their users an increasingly perfected mastery of the real, conceived as a collection of items on which direct and computable agency can be exerted. In the domain of law, the discourse of technicians swerves more and more towards an imaginary of cold revelation, in which the patient accumulation of data and their quantitative treatment lay the ultimate truth of human nature bare. The contemporary religious discourse too does not escape this ideology. The chapter bears on the genesis of this epistemic trend at the onset of modernity and on its dialectic with alternative approaches. It then follows the outcomes of such contraposition until the present era.