Statue e scultura come modelli teorici tra tardo-antico e medioevo

In this article, I try to follow the threads of a reflection on statues as images that runs through the history of semiotic thought from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages. The analysis of  the function of statues as theoretical models appears to highlight analogies that help explain, in various times, the relationship between the Platonic world of ideas and sensible things or between the One and the many, including man and creation (in Plato and his followers); between the Creator and his creatures, among the persons of the Trinity (in the Greek and Latin Fathers, and later on in medieval theology); between form and matter in the sensible realm (in Aristotelianism); and between different types of sign (in medieval semiotics, from Abelard to Ockham), underlining a wealth of unexpected topics.