Passioni iconiche

Each culture elaborates a grammar for the representation of passions according to specific figurative and stylistic features that vary across time. This essay looks into this phenomenon by confronting it with the concept of iconization of passions. The latter takes its cue from several works by Roland Barthes and from Ugo Volli’s study about the fact that journalistic photography in many cases works as an icon, rather than an index, so that a photograph can represent, for instance, not a single subject or an individual, but rather a class or category as a whole. Here, this concept is extended to the study of the representation of passions: some texts or features representing passions are particularly successful and thus enter the collective encyclopedia as signifying a pathemic configuration almost by default. In this sense, these representations of passions work as cultural icons. The reflection on these concepts will be supported by examples taken from the religious culture, with particular reference to the Christian–Catholic tradition and its codification of the representation of the themes of ecstasy and weeping.