The face of Jesus as the archetype of man

What is the purpose of the different portraits of holy persons in religious art? Do they only have a referential role in historical figures or do they simply illustrate passages of the Scriptures for the popular delicacy of the Sacred Texts that today most of us pass over as anachronistic? Having as a basic framework the course of representation of Jesus in Western and Eastern art - from the early Christian symbolic period, to pagan adoptions and the Byzantine way - we will see how the hagiographic portraits invite the viewer to a dialogue between the Ego and the Other, the the earthly and the transcendent, as a result of which they push the individual into a new way of relating where the point of reference ceases to be the perishable nature but the eternal and the archetype. When the eyes meet, the face flows outward, emerges from its subjectivity, comes to ecstasy and communion, to be followed by the return, the inner contact with the Self. Then, the rift between the unconscious and the conscious, the individual and the world, the mortal and the divine is bridged, changed into dialogue, into a radically new way of active (daily) presence and existence.