How has the use and the perception of the image changed across history? If during the Renaissance the painting was understood as a window to the world, today in 2025 we are surrounded by generative images that no longer depend on an external referent but on algorithms and data sets. Between those two extremes, the image has been rethought many times, each moment redefining its status, its function, and its relation to the body.
The Renaissance: the window
In the Renaissance, the image was first and foremost a mimetic tool. The central metaphor came from Leon Battista Alberti, who described painting as a window (finestra aperta) through which the viewer could see the world. Representation was understood as faithful imitation, a rational construction of space based on perspective and proportion.
As Alberti famously explained, portraiture is nothing else than to make the absent present:
“To portray consists in making present what is absent, in bringing the thing itself before the eyes.” (Alberti, cited in El giro pictórico)
The image here is not autonomous; it is subordinated to reality and judged by how well it imitates it.
Romanticism and Impressionism: expression
By the nineteenth century, the image began to shift its role. No longer was it only a mirror of nature; it became a medium of subjective expression. Romantic painting sought to capture inner states, emotions, and imagination. With Impressionism, the emphasis turned to the fleeting perception of light and atmosphere, privileging the experience of vision rather than the object itself.
As Clement Greenberg later noted about this transition in modern art:
“The modern painters of the last period have abandoned the representation of recognizable objects. What they have abandoned by principle is the representation of the type of space that recognizable objects occupy.” (Modernist Painting)
The image was no longer only a copy of the world but a testimony of perception and individuality.
Cézanne and the early avant-gardes: matter
At the end of the nineteenth century, Cézanne prepared the way for the avant-garde by dismantling illusionism and making painting more material. His brushstrokes, distortions, and refusals of linear perspective insisted that the painting was not simply a transparent window but also a constructed surface.
Cézanne himself suggested that perception was multisensory, even synesthetic:
“Cézanne even affirmed that we see the smell of things. His task, therefore, was to recapture the very moment in which the world was new, before being fractured into the dualisms of subject and object.” (Downcast Eyes)
With Cubism, this insight radicalized into collage and papier collé, where fragments of reality (newspaper, wallpaper) were literally pasted on the canvas. This affirmed that the picture plane was not illusion, but matter.
Greenberg and modernism: self-criticism
Clement Greenberg’s theory of modernism was one of the most influential attempts to define the image in the mid-twentieth century. For Greenberg, modernism meant that each art had to use its own means to criticize itself.
He famously wrote:
“Modernism consists in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself.” (Modernist Painting, 1960)
In painting, this meant insisting on flatness, on the surface of the canvas as the true essence of the medium. He explained:
“In front of these works one becomes aware of the flatness of the paintings before, and not after, becoming aware of what this flatness contains… their success in doing so is a success of self-criticism.” (Modernist Painting)
The image thus became autocritical: it was not about depicting a story or imitating nature, but about revealing what painting itself was.
Beyond modernism: the expanded field
From the 1960s onwards, the modernist notion of medium purity came under challenge. Artists turned toward hybrid practices: land art, video art, performance, and installation blurred the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and media. Rosalind Krauss described this as the post-medium condition, where digital and technological processes made it impossible to separate arts into neat categories.
As she observed:
“The post-medium condition marks the end of the differentiation of media… digitization promises universal convergence, the translation of all media into each other.” (Krauss, cited in Hansen)
The image was no longer tied to a surface or discipline; it expanded into space, environment, and concept.
Visual culture and politics
In the 1980s and 1990s, the focus shifted again. The image came to be understood as a social and political construct. Theories of feminism, postcolonialism, and cultural studies highlighted how images participate in systems of ideology, representation, and power. The “visual culture” approach no longer restricted images to art but included film, advertising, television, and photography.
Jacques Rancière captured this shift in his critique of modernist orthodoxy:
“Postmodernism has updated everything that ruined the theoretical building of modernism: the passages and mixtures between arts that annihilate the orthodoxy of the separation of the arts.” (The Politics of Aesthetics)
The image here is not autonomous; it is embedded in culture and politics.
The pictorial turn
W.J.T. Mitchell identified a “pictorial turn” at the end of the twentieth century. For him, images were no longer passive representations but active agents in culture. They do not only reflect reality but intervene in it, sometimes even confronting the viewer.
He described this turn as:
“The pictorial turn is largely a philosophical confrontation with the excess of images. Mitchell explains it as an anxiety and uneasiness that announce an imminent change in the cultural universe.” (Image Theory)
This meant that the image could no longer be reduced to language, text, or sign—it had its own agency, its own life.
The digital image
With the rise of computers and the internet, the image took on a new form: data-driven, modular, and in constant circulation. Lev Manovich described the language of new media, where the traditional concept of image dissolves into interfaces and algorithms.
He declared:
“The image, in its traditional sense, no longer exists! … What we see on the screen in real time are not ‘images’ in the classical sense, but a new type of representation for which we do not yet have a term.” (The Language of New Media, cited in Hansen)
Hito Steyerl, in parallel, described the poor image: low-resolution, endlessly shared, degraded yet politically powerful precisely because of its circulation. The digital image became not an object, but a flow.
The generative image
Today, in 2025, we are confronted with another mutation: AI-generated images. These images are not based on a referent or an artist’s hand, but on the statistical recombination of massive data sets. They are hybrid, algorithmic, and posthuman.
As Joanna Zylinska explains:
“AI images are no longer based on a direct referent, but on processes of data training; they become hybrid, generative, posthuman.” (AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams)
Thomas Nail adds that in our era we must think of the image not as a static representation but as a flow, fold, and field: a process in motion, mobile and alive.
Conclusion
From window to expression, from matter to autocriticism, from expanded field to agency, from digital flow to generative process: the history of the image is not linear but a series of displacements. Each moment reveals that the image is never fixed; it constantly redefines itself through technology, politics, and the body.
The contemporary challenge is not to lament the “end of the image,” but to recognize its metamorphoses: how every new medium reshapes what an image is, what it does, and how it relates to us.