What is the purpose of the different portraits of sacred figures in religious art? Do they only serve a referential role to historical figures, or do they simply depict passages from the Scriptures for the popular digestibility of the Sacred Texts, which today most of us overlook as anachronistic?

With the main framework being the representation of Jesus in Western and Eastern art - from the early Christian symbolic period to the pagan adoptions and the Byzantine style - we will see how the iconographic portraits invite the viewer to a dialogue between the Self and the Other, the earthly and the transcendent, resulting in encouraging the individual to a new mode of relationship where the point of reference ceases to be the mortal nature but the eternal and the archetypal.

When the gazes meet, the face reaches outward, emerging from its subjectivity, coming into a state of ecstasy and community, followed by a return, the internal contact with the Self. Then, the fracture between the unconscious and the conscious, the individual and the world, the mortal and the divine, is bridged, transforming into dialogue, into a radically new way of active (everyday) presence and existence.