Från heretiker till helgon. Giordano Brunos ikonografi genom fyra sekler

Abstract

Title: From Heretic to Saint. The Iconography of Giordano Bruno through Four Centuries

One of the most contested and discussed figures in a number of disciplines, such as Philosophy, Theology, History, Cosmology and a number of others, is the Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno, burnt at the stake in Rome in 1600. This article tries to sort out his complicated iconography by following the series of portraits through the centuries, identifying their relevant contexts and the functions they were meant to fulfil, and also attempting to throw some light on the way mental conceptions and visual representations interact in the process of construction and re-construction of images in different historical and ideological contexts. Nearly all these images were produced during the nineteenth century, i.e., in the century when scholars first started to form more precise ideas of Bruno as a historic figure, when a demand for his visual image was created, and a number of iconographic conventions came into existence. Apart from a few exceptional cases, the material falls into three fairly distinct groups that correspond to three different views, or mental images, of Bruno, each one produced in a special context and dominating for a certain period of time.