[Blog Post] An Allegory of Salvation (Koen Gheuens & Cary Rapaport)

[RenegadeHealer]

I agree with Koen — I think you're well qualified to explore this line of inquiry, Barbrey. I'd read your paper just for the historical background you're able to find about capturing the principles of apophatic theology in visual form. Although I'm familiar with it as a verbal exercise, I have no idea what precedents there were, at the time the VMs was written, for illustrating such concepts.

Thank you for the compliments about my writing — I'm a pretty verbal thinker; writing (both fiction and nonfiction) and philology are big hobbies of mine, and I'm a "lawnchair linguist", who originally wanted to be a linguistic scholar or interpreter. The text is what always captured most of my interest about the VMs, naturally. Still, I avidly follow and greatly respect the work of visual thinkers like Koen Gheuens, Yulia May, Diane O'Donovan, and Marco Ponzi, who are using historical iconography to find precedents for the VMs's illustrations. Reading these folks' blogs feels like stepping into a Dan Brown novel, except better.

I'm thoroughly convinced that the iconographic and cryptographic analyses of the VMs need each other; I don't think either one will be able to solve the mystery without evidence from the other.