Iconology is a method of interpretation in cultural history and the history of the
visual arts
The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, filmmaking, design, crafts and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual art, and textile arts al ...
used by
Aby Warburg
Aby Moritz Warburg, better known as Aby Warburg, (June 13, 1866 – October 26, 1929) was a German art historian and cultural theorist who founded the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (Library for Cultural Studies), a private library, ...
,
Erwin Panofsky
Erwin Panofsky (March 30, 1892 in Hannover – March 14, 1968 in Princeton, New Jersey) was a German-Jewish art historian, whose academic career was pursued mostly in the U.S. after the rise of the Nazi regime.
Panofsky's work represents a hig ...
and their followers that uncovers the cultural, social, and historical background of themes and subjects in the visual arts. Though Panofsky differentiated between iconology and
iconography
Iconography, as a branch of art history, studies the identification, description and interpretation of the content of images: the subjects depicted, the particular compositions and details used to do so, and other elements that are distinct fro ...
, the distinction is not very widely followed, "and they have never been given definitions accepted by all iconographers and iconologists". Few 21st-century authors continue to use the term "iconology" consistently, and instead use iconography to cover both areas of scholarship.
To those who use the term, iconology is derived from synthesis rather than scattered analysis and examines symbolic meaning on more than its face value by reconciling it with its historical context and with the artist's body of work – in contrast to the widely descriptive iconography, which, as described by Panofsky, is an approach to studying the content and meaning of works of art that is primarily focused on classifying, establishing dates, provenance and other necessary fundamental knowledge concerning the subject matter of an artwork that is needed for further interpretation.
Panofsky's "use of iconology as the principle tool of art analysis brought him critics." For instance, in 1946,
Jan Gerrit Van Gelder "criticized Panofsky's iconology as putting too much emphasis on the symbolic content of the work of art, neglecting its formal aspects and the work as a unity of form and content." Furthermore, iconology is mostly avoided by social historians who do not accept the theoretical dogmaticism in the work of Panofsky.
In contrast to iconography
Erwin Panofsky defines iconography as "a known principle in the known world", while iconology is "an iconography turned interpretive". According to his view, iconology tries to reveal the underlying principles that form the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical perspective, which is modulated by one personality and condensed into one work. According to Roelof van Straten, iconology "can explain why an artist or patron chose a particular subject at a specific location and time and represented it in a certain way. An iconological investigation should concentrate on the social-historical, not art-historical, influences and values that the artist might not have consciously brought into play but are nevertheless present. The artwork is primarily seen as a document of its time."
Warburg used the term "iconography" in his early research, replacing it in 1908 with "iconology" in his particular method of visual interpretation called "critical iconology", which focused on the tracing of motifs through different cultures and visual forms. In 1932, Panofsky published a seminal article, introducing a three-step method of visual interpretation dealing with (1) primary or natural subject matter; (2) secondary or conventional subject matter, i.e. iconography; (3) tertiary or intrinsic meaning or content, i.e. iconology. Whereas iconography analyses the world of images, stories and allegories and requires knowledge of literary sources, an understanding of the history of types and how themes and concepts were expressed by objects and events under different historical conditions, iconology interprets intrinsic meaning or content and the world of symbolical values by using "synthetic intuition". The interpreter is aware of the essential tendencies of the human mind as conditioned by psychology and world view; he analyses the history of cultural symptoms or symbols, or how tendencies of the human mind were expressed by specific themes due to different historical conditions. Moreover, when understanding the work of art as a document of a specific civilization, or of a certain religious attitude therein, the work of art becomes a symptom of something else, which expresses itself in a variety of other symptoms. Interpreting these symbolical values, which can be unknown to, or different from, the artist's intention, is the object of iconology. Panofsky emphasized that "iconology can be done when there are no originals to look at and nothing but artificial light to work in."
According to
Ernst Gombrich
Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich (; ; 30 March 1909 – 3 November 2001) was an Austrian-born art historian who, after settling in England in 1936, became a naturalised British citizen in 1947 and spent most of his working life in the United Kin ...
, "the emerging discipline of iconology ... must ultimately do for the image what linguistics has done for the word." However,
Michael Camille
Michael Camille (1958–2002), Mary L. Block Professor at the University of Chicago, was an influential, provocative scholar and historian of medieval art and specialist of the European Middle Ages.
In ''The New York Times'' obituary of Michael ...
is of the opinion that "though Panofsky's concept of iconology has been very influential in the humanities and is quite effective when applied to Renaissance art, it is still problematic when applied to art from periods before and after."
Nuances
In 1952,
Creighton Gilbert
Creighton may refer to:
Places Canada
* Creighton, Saskatchewan
* Creighton, Simcoe County, Ontario
* Creighton Mine, a mine in Greater Sudbury, Ontario
* Creighton Mine, Ontario
Walden ( Canada 1996 Census population 10,292) was a town in ...
added another suggestion for a useful meaning of the word "iconology". According to his view, iconology was not the actual investigation of the work of art but rather the result of this investigation. The Austrian art historian
Hans Sedlmayr
Hans Sedlmayr (18 January 1896, in Szarvkő, Kingdom of Hungary – 9 July 1984, in Salzburg) was an Austrian art historian. From 1931 to 1932 and from 1938 onwards, he was a member of the Nazi Party.
Positions as a University Professor
Sedlm ...
differentiated between "sachliche" and "methodische" iconology. "Sachliche" iconology refers to the "general meaning of an individual painting or of an artistic complex (church, palace, monument) as seen and explained with reference to the ideas which take shape in them." In contrast, "methodische" iconology is the "integral iconography which accounts for the changes and development in the representations". In ''Iconology: Images, Text, Ideology'' (1986),
W.J.T. Mitchell writes that iconology is a study of "what to say about images", concerned with the description and interpretation of visual art, and also a study of "what images say" – the ways in which they seem to speak for themselves by persuading, telling stories, or describing. He pleads for a postlinguistic, postsemiotic "iconic turn", emphasizing the role of "non-linguistic symbol systems". Instead of just pointing out the difference between the material (pictorial or artistic) images, "he pays attention to the dialectic relationship between material images and mental images". According to Dennise Bartelo and Robert Morton, the term "iconology" can also be used for characterizing "a movement toward seeing connections across all the language processes" and the idea about "multiple levels and forms used to communicate meaning" in order to get "the total picture” of learning. "Being both literate in the traditional sense and visually literate are the true mark of a well-educated human."
For several years, new approaches to iconology have developed in the theory of images. This is the case of what
Jean-Michel Durafour
Jean-Michel is a French masculine given name. It may refer to :
* Jean-Michel Arnold, General Secretary of the Cinémathèque Française
* Jean-Michel Atlan (1913–1960), French artist
* Jean-Michel Aulas (born 1949), French businessman
* Jean-Mic ...
, French philosopher and theorist of cinema, proposed to call "econology", a biological approach to images as forms of life, crossing iconology, ecology and sciences of nature. In an econological regime, the image (''eikon'') self-speciates, that is to say, it self-iconicizes with others and eco-iconicizes with them its iconic habitat (''oikos''). The iconology, mainly Warburghian iconology, is thus merged with a conception of the relations between the beings of the nature inherited, among others (
Arne Næss
Arne Dekke Eide Næss (; 27 January 1912 – 12 January 2009) was a Norwegian philosopher who coined the term " deep ecology", an important intellectual and inspirational figure within the environmental movement of the late twentieth centur ...
, etc.) from the writings of
Kinji Imanishi
was a Japanese ecologist and anthropologist. He was the founder of Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute and, together with Junichiro Itani, is considered one of the founders of Japanese primatology.
Early life and education
Kinji Im ...
. For Imanishi, living beings are subjects. Or, more precisely, the environment and the living being are just one. One of the main consequences is that the "specity", the living individual, "self-eco-speciates its place of life" (''Freedom in Evolution''). As far as the images are concerned: "If the living species self-specify, the images self-iconicize. This is not a tautology. The images update some of their iconic virtualities. They live in the midst of other images, past or present, but also future (those are only human classifications), which they have relations with. They self-iconicize in an iconic environment which they interact with, and which in particular makes them the images they are. Or more precisely, insofar as images have an active part: ''the images self-eco-iconicize their iconic environment''."
Studies in iconology
''Studies in Iconology'' is the title of a book by Erwin Panofsky on
humanistic
Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential and agency of human beings. It considers human beings the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry.
The meaning of the term "humani ...
themes in the art of the Renaissance, which was first published in 1939. It is also the name of a peer-reviewed series of books started in 2014 under the editorship of
Barbara Baert
Barbara Baert (born 1967,Turnhout) is a Belgian art historian, and professor of art history at KU Leuven.
Career
Barbara Baert teaches in the fields of iconology, art theory and analysis, and medieval art. She is the founder of the Iconology Res ...
and published by Peeters international academic publishers,
Leuven
Leuven (, ) or Louvain (, , ; german: link=no, Löwen ) is the capital and largest city of the province of Flemish Brabant in the Flemish Region of Belgium. It is located about east of Brussels. The municipality itself comprises the historic ...
, Belgium, addressing the deeper meaning of the visual medium throughout human history in the fields of philosophy, art history, theology and cultural anthropology.
Peeters Publishers: Studies in Iconology
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References
Further reading
*Ernst Gombrich
Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich (; ; 30 March 1909 – 3 November 2001) was an Austrian-born art historian who, after settling in England in 1936, became a naturalised British citizen in 1947 and spent most of his working life in the United Kin ...
, "Aims and Limits of Iconology." In ''Symbolic Images'' (Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, 2). London: Phaidon, 1972, pp. 1–25.
*Keith Moxey, "Panofsky's Concept of ''Iconology'' and the Problem of Interpretation in the History of Art." ''New Literary History'', Vol. 17, No. 2: Interpretation and Culture (Winter 1986), pp. 265–274.
*Timothy Erwin, "Modern Iconology, Postmodern Iconologies". In David B. Downing and Susan Bazargan, eds., ''Image and Ideology in Modern/Postmodern Discourse''. New York 1991, pp. 309–320.
*Michael Hatt
Michael Hatt (born 1960) is professor of art history at the University of Warwick. He has served there since 2007, before which he was head of research at the Yale Center for British Art. He is the author with Charlotte Klonk of ''Art History: A ...
and Charlotte Klonk
Charlotte Klonk is a German art historian. Klonk is most notable for her work on English landscape art in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as well as for her work on museum interiors, particularly the white cube. She is currently ...
, "Iconography - iconology: Erwin Panofsky". In ''Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods''. Manchester University Press, 2006, pp. 96–119.
*Paul Taylor, "Introduction." In ''Iconography without Texts''. London: Warburg Institute, 2008, pp. 1–10.
*Andreas Beyer (Hrsg.): Die Lesbarkeit der Kunst: Zur Geistes-Gegenwart der Ikonologie. Wagenbach, Berlin 1992, .
*Andreas Beyer: 78 Jahre danach - Bemerkungen zur Geistes-Gegenwart der Ikonologie. In: Lena Bader, Johannes Grave, Markus Rath (Eds.): Die Kunst - zur Sprache gebracht. Wagenbach, Berlin 2017, pp. 135–145,
External links
Encyclopedia.com: Iconology and Iconography
Dictionary of Art Historians: Panofsky, Erwin
Erwin Panofsky, ''Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance''. Oxford 1939.
Lorenzo Giulini, "A Cryptic Dimension in Visual Art"
Maria-Irina Popescu, "Iconography Versus Iconology in Erwin Panofsky's Method"
Richard Woodfield, "Ernst Gombrich: Iconology and the 'linguistics of the image.' "
Jane Davison. "Icon, iconography, iconology: Visual branding, banking and the case of the bowler hat"
Ian Verstegen, "A Plea for a Cognitive Iconology within Visual Culture"
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Art history
Iconography