"Iconic presence is presence in and as a picture. The physical presence of a picture in our world refers to the symbolic presence which it depicts. Similar to body and voice – and different from writing – the picture involves a representation which produces an impression of presence. This presence occupies an absence that is filled with a picture. In the iconic presence, absence is marked. Without denying the absence of what they represent, pictures offer absence as presence. The mask is just such a picture. It creates iconic presence by placing another face on the body. In the case of a dead person it restores the missing face. In the case of an actor, the face itself turns into a mask, and thus conveys a picture. If “iconic difference”(Boehm 1994, 29ff.) is a hermeneutic concern, iconic presence is an anthropological issue. In the context of religion, pictures represent deities who have no direct presence in the physical world; these deities are not held to be absent (let alone non-existent), but in need of a picture in order to become visible. In primal religions, living bodies transform into apparitions through dance and voice. In the Christian tradition, visual artefacts behaved as living bodies that wept, worked miracles, and were carried through “their” town, as if they could walk by themselves"