Il soggetto nello specchio dell’arte. Niccolò da Cusa e Antonello da Messina

Nicholas of Cuba’s De visione Dei is a major turning point for both the philosophical (from a personalistic viewpoint) and artistic (in the domain of painting in particular) thought between the 15th and 16th centuries. This paper will develop some aspects of this mystical treatise, by connecting them not only with the Flemish tradition of Cusa’s time, but also with artists such as Antonello da Messina and Leonardo da Vinci, in which the introspective investigation of a human 'face’ reaches previously unattainable depths. The innovative definition of the artistic image (above all in the genre of the portrait( and the philosophical interpretation of the human being as an individualized "imago Dei" are connected by a singularising, dynamic notion of "contractio", which is based both on the famous formula "sis tu tuus et ego ero tuus" and on the related metaphysical concept of the "viva imago”.