The three faces of the divinity

The concept of the time -that’s Past, Present and Future- is, of course, an universal thematic and it has been considered in different ways and from many points of view, by different symbolic traditions.

Quoting a well-known istance, we can remind of the Roman Janus , god of the gates, that's of beginning and of end. In fact, his character symbolised the "moment " of the passage between what has already happened and what will happen.

It is known that the typical iconography of Janus shows him as the god with two heads, one head of an old man (the past) and the other of young men (the future).

This iconography was naturally inherited by the Christianity and, like a large part of the pagan heritage, re-elaborated and used in Christian terms.

We find a sample of this in a capital of Sansepolcro Cathedral

(Arezzo - Tuscany)- picture above - where we clearly see the "shaved" face of a young man on the right, while the bearded head of an old man is on the left. Between them, quite hidden in the foliage, there is a third character of smaller dimensions.

In this case, of course, the two faces on the two sides represent Jesus who was among the people giving them the Redemption (1) and Jesus who will be among the elects when at the End time He will come again glorious on the earth.

As for the central figure, hidden by the volutes, it represents the resurrected Christ who is in the Heaven where nothing is conditioned by the becoming of the terrestrial events.

So, we can consider this third character as living in the "eternal present", that’s an absoluteness that is not allowed to the mortals and neither conceivable by them.

That's why the figure is hidden in the foliage.

An other example of this kind of iconography can be found (not by chance) in the "logo" of the index page of this website Index page