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The “Pictorial” or “Iconic Turn” is a central issue in the contemporary theory of images and visual cultural studies. Should the theories concerning the “Iconic Turn” and formulated in the last 20 years by scholars such as Gottfried Boehm, William Mitchell, Hans Belting be taken as critical theories of crisis? Is the currently experienced “turn towards images” (and their progressive rehabilitation after a long standing philosophical and theological rejection) a sign and symptom of some crisis of people’s relation with images, language and, generally speaking, with the representation forms of reality? The main hypothesis of this essay envisages two sets of problems: first, the analysis of the relation between the possible idea of turning point and the concept of crisis; secondly, the thorough investigation of the relation connecting the iconic turn to the project of “critical iconology” or “critique of visual culture,” as outlined by Hans Belting and William Mitchell. From the interpretation of the “Iconic Turn” as situation of crisis and aesthetic, anthropological, and epistemological transformation follows the need for the sciences of image to provide a “critical iconology” in order to be able to theoretically reformulate the ideological and political presuppositions of some dominant contemporary forms of visual representation.

The “Pictorial Turn” as Crisis and the Necessity of a Critique of Visual Culture