The analogy between the dead body and the inanimate body of the statue is rather abused, based as it is on some qualifying traits they quite obviously share: stiffness; stillness; a single, unchangeable expression. Indeed, the very idea that the statue is ‘a dead body which stands firmly erect, greeting pedestrians from a distance’ is perfectly consistent with the broader analogy between images and death. This analogy, as Hans Belting has pointed out, is ‘as old as the figurative power itself’. The function of the image as a livingsubstitute for the dead body—that is, ‘not as a stony metaphor of the person who passed away, but as a real metonymy, an exalted yet physical extension of its own flesh’—goes back to the idea that ‘figuring and transfiguring are […] one and the same thing’. This connection between images and death is still considered both by visual anthropologists and by scholars of visual culture as one of the main presuppositions of art-making. Therefore, it is regarded not only as the historical origin of images but also as the gesture behind their invention (in its different forms) which seems to fill a gap, literally re-presenting an absence and filling a void, particularly the void left by death.