Visual communications of love in Athens and Venice: Plato and Tomas Mann

The article is devoted to the study of ontological, aesthetical and anthropological features of visual communication in Plato and Thomas Mann. I compare T. Mann's Death in Venice artistic conception with the philosophical understanding of the image, contemplation, beauty and Eros of Plato, primarily in the dialogues Phaedrus and Symposium (with some reference to F. Nietzsche and the film by L. Visconti). The author explores the specifics of the visual-plastic worldview and the contemplative cognition of being, determined by the erotic foundation of the aesthetic contemplation of the human image as phenomenal manifestation of truth, fundamentally different from the one revealed in speech communication, and even capable of being autonomous from it, and represents the philosophical and artistic phenomenology of the development, transformation and implementation of such consciousness. The role of Athens and Venice as particularly significant historical-cultural topoi of visual communication is specially emphasized.