IAO: Ophite Iconography

Résumé : IAO is an iconographic proposal, an attempt to illustrate the Gnostic worldview and its myths as understood by the Ophites, a sect of which little is known. It is, perhaps, an exercise of imagination, of what Christian iconography could have resembled if the Ophites had survived. “Gnosticism lacks images in a remarkable way, the abstraction of its texts is only equated by the visual silence of its few and discrete remains. And yet the texts are filled with images! These images are, in fact, visions, allegories, and myths of a yet unexplored richness. And the ambitious proposal here is to consolidate an iconographic programme…”