It is often thought that since remote, rare, and ephemeral events such as apparitions are not available to the direct observation of scholars, the question of their nature as events must be set aside in scholarly inquiry. This results in a focus on meaning that can ignore the qualities of the event as reported and as apprehended by devotional imagery that emerges over time to provide access to the event and its relevance for devotional practice. It also encourages concepts of revelation that are not able to consider the event as a visual form of experience and regard revelation itself as something that must be either true or false. This essay proceeds otherwise, arguing that revelation is not a single, closed event, but an ongoing visual process in which sketchy schemata interact with fixed imagery to interpret the event in an ongoing history of iconography and visual interpretation. The essay focuses on the visuality of devotion to Our Lady of Fátima as a case study in how seeing works and imagery functions to make revelation a visual process whose devotional life is ongoing.

人们通常认为，由于学者无法直接观察到诸如幻影之类的遥远、稀有和短暂的事件，因此在学术研究中必须将其作为事件的性质问题搁置一旁。这导致对意义的关注可以忽略事件的质量，这些事件的质量被随着时间的推移出现的灵修意象所报道和理解，以提供对事件的访问及其与灵修实践的相关性。它还鼓励无法将事件视为经验的视觉形式并将启示本身视为必须是真或假的事物的启示概念。这篇文章以其他方式进行，认为启示不是一个单一的、封闭的事件，而是一个持续的视觉过程，在这个过程中，粗略的图式与固定的图像相互作用，以在图像学和视觉解释的持续历史中解释事件。这篇文章侧重于对法蒂玛圣母的奉献的视觉性，作为一个案例研究，说明如何看待作品和图像如何使启示成为一种视觉过程，其奉献生活正在进行中。