Das criaturas-imagem, emblemáticas e inquietantes: a Bibliotheca, o Teatro e as Histórias Preternaturais

Abstract

At the dawn of Modern Era, the exegesis of the Great Book of Nature led to artifices that woven under the precepts of the doctrine of signatures and of the similarities hidden in things, reshaped the world in unprecedented versions of natural histories - in them, the marriage of image and text, patronized by technical transformations, amalgamated the knowledge coming from the lapidaries, herbals and bestiaries, travels, hunting, fables, myths, habits, cuisine, natural philosophy, medicine, emblems as well as direct observation of the creatures and phenomena. Inhabit these natural histories a large community ofcreatures crossing times under different judgments and practices that permanently reconfigure what we can know and understand about them. Das Criaturas-Imagem Emblemáticas e Inquietantes: a Bibliotheca, o Teatro e as Histórias Preternaturais (Of Emblematic and Uncanny Image-Creatures: the Library, the Theater and the PreternaturalHistories) studies the migration of these creatures along the epistemic discontinuities: gathered by the encyclopedic desire; admired for its peculiarities; proscribed by its imaginative dimension; forgotten and tangled to error and anecdote; repressed and reborn as uncanny impression. To traverse the subterranean alleys of visual thought, thisinvestigation reverses the protagonism of texts, so common in historiography, and begins to listen to the images. It also makes use of the catoptric box of similarity to update artifices that allow thinking about the image-creatures: the library as an incarnation of thought; the theater of memory as a sortilege capable of activate the ancient powers of theimages; the doctrine of signatures as a way to get close to images and get them close of each other.