International Conference 

- Iconography 2024 -

Levels of Unreality, Metaverses and the Worlds of Images

4-6 December 2024

IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca

Piazza San Francesco 19, Lucca (Italy)

The Call for Applications is now closed

Call for applications

Two years after the conference “Iconography 2022” (Padua-Venice 12-14 December 2022), the LYNX Center of the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca and the Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Padua continue to stimulate new refections on the status and role of images through diachronic and interdisciplinary perspectives.

The next conference, “Iconography 2024”, will be held at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca from 4 to 6 December 2024, organised by Maria Luisa Catoni, Riccardo Olivito and Monica Salvadori. “Iconography 2024” will bring together specialists from various disciplines to focus on the techniques and devices through which images create alternative worlds, different ‘levels of unreality’, metaverses and bridges between real and virtual dimensions.

Building on the success of the “Iconography 2022” that examined aspects of ‘space’, the 2024 conference concentrates on a second fundamental element through which we interact with images, namely their ‘meta-iconographic’ value. Particular attention will be placed on the ability of images to create or recall - through mimetic processes, symbolic allusions and specifc techniques - dimensions and realities beyond the context in which the images themselves are created, displayed and received. As Ernst Gombrich famously pointed out in ‘Art and Illusion’ about the relationship between function and form of images:

“The test of the image is not its lifelikeness but its efcacy within a context of action”. Indeed, one of the central values of images lies in the very relationship between ‘context of action’ and ‘efcacy’, which can also be expressed in the effectiveness with which the real and the virtual relate to one another.

Through the analysis and discussion of specifc case studies, the conference aims to investigate, also from a theoretical and methodological point of view, the multiple dynamics of interaction between images and contexts (physical or ‘metaphysical’). This implies an investigation of the set of tools and devices through which images create different levels of ‘unreality’ and prompt the interaction with the observer. This inquiry examines also how images become activated in order to interact with and within the worlds they create. Finally, it considers the dialogue between different images in the same space or the transformations, also semantic, that the addition of new images or their reorganisation in a given context inevitably entail.

Focusing on the Greek and Roman world, but with the aim of extending the refection to different chronological and cultural contexts, the conference aims to constitute an opportunity for new refections on the status of images and their functions. This includes consideration of the status that images assume in relation to the place of display and reception, and their capacity to be in a continual process of redefnition, challenging the relation between real and virtual.