Victor Stoichita on Art History, Shadows, and the Future of Images

Victor Stoichita, born in Bucharest in 1949, is a renowned art historian known for seminal works such as 'L'invenzione del quadro' and 'Breve storia dell'ombra'. In an interview, he discusses his intellectual influences, including Warburg and Panofsky's iconology, visual semiotics, and more recently mediology and anthropology. He explains that his book 'L'invenzione del quadro' originated from his 1989 doctoral thesis in Paris, exploring the genesis of the painted panel as a Western device to capture the visible world. 'Breve storia dell'ombra' examines the myth of the origin of painting from Pliny the Elder's story of a shadow traced on a wall, tracing the history of a forgotten but significant 'remainder'. This research was accompanied by two exhibitions: one at the Museo Thyssen in Madrid and another at the Fondation de l'Hermitage in Lausanne. Stoichita, who describes himself as an emigrant with a genius loci of the journey, advises young art historians to travel, look, think, understand, communicate, and live. Regarding the future, he believes it will be dominated by artificial intelligence, the digital world, and space exploration, with artistic creation increasingly confronting virtual reality—a relationship that has always existed between fiction and virtuality and will be redefined.