Dissimilarity and Symbolic Language in the Representations of the A-rational between Late Antiquity and Middle Ages

A specific type of philosophical interpretation developed between late antiquity and middle ages, and in particular is tied to a Neoplatonic vision of the ontological degrees of the material world and its symbols. The issue of how to interpret images, either poetic or artistic, can be clearly found in Thomas Aquinas, who compares the difficulty of the human intellect in understanding the poetic depictions to the impossibility of fully grasping the divine in a purely rational way. Through analysis of philosophical texts from Porphyry to the Ps. Dionysius, from Eriugena to Thomas Aquinas, a distinct theory of interpretation of the divine through dissimilarity can be detected, The possibility of allegorical interpretation of a text is easily transferable to a work of art. The observation of some artworks which embody the complex interpretative system elaborated during the Late Antiquity helps to understand the peculiarity of the Neoplatonic exegesis.