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Pour une histoire du Moyen Âge au visage découvert: en guise d'introduction
In this article the author tries to look at the history of the face in medieval art in a cross-cultural and transdisciplinary perspective. The history of the face in the Middle Ages should be contextualized in a wider horizon, going back to some practices in ancient world, and coming to our modern, contemporary situation. This approach, more anthropological than historical, gives the chance to separate the history of the face from the one of portraiture. Nevertheless, most documents used in the article are representations of man, some of which are tradi- tionally called masques, but the terms of this kind are actually muddling. From a review of terminology applied to the face, the author passes to study some important orthodox icons, especially the famous Trinity attributed to Andrey Roublev and the Synod of the Vergin from Pskov. The interplay of faces on these icons is analyzed in all its pictorial and theological complexity.