Iconology

Definition
 The historical analysis and interpretive study of symbols or
images and their contextual significance; iconography.
 The study of icons or symbolic representations.

Introduction
 Iconography is the description, classification, and interpretation of the
subject matter of a work of art. Derived from the Greek words eikon,
meaning image or icon, and graphia, meaning description, writing, or
sketch, the word iconography is one of the least understood, most
abused, and most flexible terms in the English language. Its primary
purpose is to understand and explicate the meaning behind what is
represented. Simply described, it is by definition closely related to the
equally complex but more abstract term iconology, traditionally
understood as a more advanced (and secondary) phase in visual
definition. Iconology has been described as "the description,
classification, or analysis of meaning or symbolism in the visual arts that
takes into account the tradition of pictorial motifs and their historical,
cultural, and social meaning" (Baca, p. 89). Whereas these two terms
were historically distinct, with the latter usually seen as the ultimate
aim of all iconographic research, it is clear that modern usage has
lessened their division. They have, to a certain extent, become
interchangeable.

History
 Iconology is a method of interpretation in cultural history
and the history of art used by Aby Warburg, Erwin
Panofsky and their followers that uncovers the cultural,
social, and historical background of themes and subjects
in the visual arts.
 It 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.

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 high point in the modern academic
study of iconography, which he used in hugely influential works
like his "little book" Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art
and his masterpiece, Early Netherlandish Painting.
 Many of his works are still in print, including Studies in
Iconology: Humanist Themes in the Art of the Renaissance
(1939), Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955), and his eponymous
1943 study of Albrecht Dürer. Panofsky's ideas were also highly
influential in intellectual history in general, particularly in his use
of historical ideas to interpret artworks and vice versa.

Aby Warburg
 Aby Moritz Warburg, known as Aby Warburg (June 13,
1866 – October 26, 1929), was a German art historian and
cultural theorist who founded a private Library for Cultural
Studies, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg,
which was later moved to the Warburg Institute, London. At
the heart of his research was the legacy of the Classical World,
and the transmission of classical representation, in the most
varied areas of western culture through to the Renaissance.
 Warburg described himself as:
Amburghese di cuore, ebreo di sangue, d'anima Fiorentino
(Hamburger at heart, Jew by blood, Florentine in spirit)

Historical Development
 Italy at the end of the sixteenth century provided the first
scholarly studies in iconographical classification, all of which
appeared within twenty-five years of each other. These
include Andrea Alciati's Emblematum liber (Augsburg, 1531),
Pierio Valeriano's Hieroglyphica (Basel, 1556), and Vincenzo
Cartari's Le imagini, con la spositione de i dei de gli antichi
(Venice, 1556). All of these were superseded by what is now
seen as the first study to deal with the theory of
iconography, Cesare Ripa's Iconologia (c. 1555–1622), a
slightly ironic publication in that it was initially published
without any image whatsoever (not until the third edition in
1603 were woodcuts included). Ripa's study formed the basis
for much subsequent research and is one of the most
comprehensive iconographic manuals for the student of
personifications. It was thanks to the success of his study
(and the inclusion of images in subsequent editions) that
Ripa's original focus on his subject matter, as documented by
the textual, was lost.

Cesare Ripa (fl. 1593)
 Little is known of Ripa apart from the fact that he was
probably born in Perugia between 1555 and 1560 and is next
recorded in the service of Cardinal Antonio Maria Salviati,
for whom he acted as controller of the household in Rome.
His Iconologia was first published in 1593 to great acclaim
and included descriptions of over 1,250 personifications
ranging from Abondanza (I, 1 Abundance) to Zelo (V, 417
Zealousness), each of which is described in detail as a
manual for writers, artists, and illustrators of the period.
The personifications are always described in terms of human
forms with their attributes and poses clearly delineated.
This dictionary of visual imagery is highly subjective; Ripa
not only drew widely on existing representations but, when
such precedents did not exist, created structures showing
how they should be depicted. The modern iconographic
research into nonvisual material is very much in keeping
with Ripa's focus, which was intended to encompass all of
the arts, visual and otherwise.

Émile MÂle (1862–1954)
 Mâle was the first art historian to deal exclusively with medieval
iconography, albeit largely with French medieval material. A student
of literature at the École normale supérieure in Paris until 1886, his
first appointment was as professor of rhetoric at the university at
St.Étienne. His reputation was established once he accepted the
position of chair in the Department of Medieval Archaeology at the
Sorbonne, Paris, in 1908. His studies largely focused on the French
origins of both Romanesque and Gothic sculpture and were
conducted from a strongly nationalistic and religious perspective.
His major work, L'art religieux du XIIe siècle en France, was
published in 1922 and was the first in a series of similarly titled
studies that evaluated the entire medieval period as a progressive
movement, from a stylistic and iconographical stance. Named
director of the École français de Rome in 1923, Mâle was criticized
both during his lifetime and afterward for his tendency to view
iconography as a finite concept and for his unwillingness to see
beyond his own period or area of expertise.

Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968)
 Born in Hanover, Panofsky received his Ph.D. in 1914 from the
University of Freiburg. He is recognized as one of the most
influential scholars of the twentieth century, not only for his
academic studies but for his analysis of the methodologies of
iconographic analysis and interpretation, which culminated in
Studies in Iconology (1939). Before assuming part-time teaching
duties at New York University in 1931, he taught at the Universities
of Munich, Berlin, and Hamburg (1926–1933), where he was strongly
influenced by Aby Warburg and what was then known as
iconographical analysis. After the Nazis came to power, Panofsky left
Germany for good and took up teaching in New York. In 1935, at the
invitation of his friend Charles Rufus Morey, Panofsky transferred to
the newly established Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton
University, where he remained until his death in 1968. His writings
are characterized by a rare erudition and range. A humanist in the
broadest sense, Panofsky wrote on such diverse topics as Gothic
scholasticism, Albrecht Dürer, German sculpture, and Suger and the
Abbey of St. Denis as well as Mozart, the cinema, and the detective
story.

Methodology
 If Ripa was among the first iconographical theoreticians
to realize the importance of structure and
systematization in this field, others did not follow his
path until the beginning of the twentieth century.
Informal, loosely defined, and independent structures
were developed at the end of the nineteenth century
with many scholarly studies in which related concepts
and themes were grouped together, and significant and
dominant subjects were discovered with the amassing of
large bodies of visual data.
 It was from such studies that the twin applications of
methodology to cataloging and interpretation developed.
The former, albeit on a less-developed basis, was in
place prior to Panofsky's work.

Three Level
 The first of these is usually the broad level
descriptor or general subject heading,
such as portrait or landscape—an
iconographic descriptor at its broadest.
 The second is the pre-iconographic
description of the work—the generic
elements in the work, such as bridge,
lake, table, and so forth.
 The third level is the specifics of the
work—for example, an identified person's
name, the name of a battle or of a
bridge—an amalgam of the iconographical
and iconological.

Trends and Developments
 Computerization and its application to art history has been
the most dominant factor in the popular renewal of interest
in iconography. User studies have shown the popularity of
accessing subject matter in such venues as museum and
gallery databases. There has been a similar renewed interest
in scholarly research.
 Iconography is developing along twin tracks whereby the
traditional is being refined with a greater need for detail
and new needs are being created with the opening up of
new fields.
 Large-scale iconographical projects have developed in art
history with specializations, such as mythology, music,
classical and legal material, medicine, and costume, to
name just a few. Up to the end of the twentieth century,
iconographical studies were largely concerned with Western
art and the representational but must now encompass the
abstract, stylized, non-Western, and nonrepresentational.

Charles Rufus Morey (1877–
1955)
 Chairman of the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton
University, Morey was a historian of early Christian art whose
primary field of study was the iconography of Italian art of the pre-
700 period. Apart from his scholarly studies, which ranged from
research on gold-glass mosaics to early Latin manuscripts and
iconographical motifs of the origins of early Christian art, he is best
remembered for founding the Index of Christian Art in 1917. As an
iconographer he realized that the major obstacle to understanding
the development of particular themes and subjects lay in the lack of
available knowledge. It was this that led to his establishment of the
world's largest iconographically organized archive of medieval art.
Morey's studies, while now slightly outdated, demonstrate his belief
that the full understanding of a work of art depends on the use of
iconography in a contextualized manner. A close friend of Panofsky,
Morey believed that iconography was an organic entity that was
constantly developing and that could be understood only in relation
to what was known at any one time.

Henri van de Waal (1910–
1972)
 Born in Rotterdam, van de Waal began his studies in 1929 at the
University of Leiden, which was to be his academic home for the
rest of his career. He received his Ph.D. in 1940 for a study on the
seventeenth-century Batavian revolt. As a writer he is best known
for his iconological study on three centuries of representing Dutch
national history, Drie eeuwen vaderlandsche geschieduitbeelding
1500–1800: Een iconologische studie (The Hague, 1952), which,
although ready for the printer in 1942, was not published until 1952
as the typescript was destroyed by the Germans during the
occupation of the Netherlands. While interned in a prisoner of war
camp, he began to formulate his theories on structuring a system for
iconographic classification that eventually was called ICONCLASS and
was published between 1973 and 1985. After the war van de Waal
was named director of the University of Leiden's print room and was
later made professor of art history there. His classification system is
based on Panofsky's pre-iconographic and iconographic levels with
nothing iconological in the structure. Factually based, it merges
form and content and is now the most widely used iconographical
classification system in the world.

The Three Levels
of Panofsky
 One significant figure in the research and understanding of
iconology is Erwin Panofsky, the author of the book “Studies in
Iconology” published in 1939, which has continued now to be a
highly influential text in iconology – the understanding and
interpretation of meaning in visual representations.
 According to Panofsky, the study of art objects and images can
be separated into three levels:

First level (‘primary’ or ‘natural’)
 This is the interpretation of meaning
through the familiar.
 Factual descriptions of what we see and
the expressional connotations that derive
from the visual are encompassed in this
level.
 We are able to immediately bring meaning
to the work by associating it with our own
personal practical experiences.

Second level (‘secondary’ or ‘conventional’)
 This level involves a deeper understanding of the
actions or facts presented in the first level.
 A prior knowledge of concepts and conventional
meaning allow the artistic motifs and visual codes
in the image to communicate more and in turn we
are able to recognise the events taking place in the
image.

Third level (‘intrinsic)
 Unlike the previous two levels, this level communicates
things that the creator of the image may not have
consciously been thinking about.
 Through what we know of the world and linking the
objects or codes in the work, this level allows us to
reveal the underlying “basic attitude of a nation, a
period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion –
unconsciously qualified by one personality and condensed
into one work” (Panofsky, 1972, p. 7).
 This level is, for Panofsky, the “ultimate goal of
iconology” (Panofsky, 1972, p. 9).

Icon, Iconography and
Iconology
 As has often been pointed out, the exodus of Jewish scholars from
Germany was one of the greatest brain drains of talent of the 20th
or any other century. “Hitler shakes the trees, and I pick up the
apples.” This famous quote is attributed to Walter Cook who
founded the Fine Arts Department of New York University ( now
the Institute of Fine Arts, also known as “The Institute) and moved
his scholars to a brownstone next to the Metropolitan Museum of
Art.
 According to Harry Bober in “The Gothic Tower and the Stork Club,”
Panofsky was “one of the more resplendent golden apples, joining
the department in 1931.
 The ideas of Erwin Panofsky and how they were employed or not
have depended upon trends in art history. When Panofsky became
part of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University
(called “The Institute” by those in the know) in 1933, his
iconographical system found a permanent home .
 The discipline of art history in America was greatly enriched by his
intellectual and philosophical approach and put what was still a
relatively new field of study in his new country on a sounder footing.

 Because many of its scholars were Jewish, art history was
hunted from Europe by the Nazis. They fled to America,
bringing with them concepts based upon European philosophy
that were ill-understood by their new students.
 Traditionally, the American version of his signature idea:
iconography, was greatly simplified into a clunky game of
matching symbols (icon) to symbolism (iconography), while
neglecting the cultural basis for the meanings (iconology). That
said, when Panofsky arrived at Princeton with his Kantian-
inspired system, he met with opposition from another branch of
Kantian thought–formalist art history and yet another bastion of
artistic thought, Marxism.
 For art historians, Marxist thought or the assertion of Karl Marx
that the economy was the “secret engine” of society, was a
fruitful way of examining a work of art, for a Marxist analysis
would remove the “veil” of the “natural” and reveal the
economic basis of the work itself.
 Formalist art historians, however, preferred to look directly at
the work itself and not at the society that produced it. Rather
than thinking of these two methods as complementing each
other or as adding to a fuller picture of the art, the discipline
tended to place Formalism and Marxism as polar (and political)
opposites.

 Iconography is that branch of the history of art which
concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of
works of art, as opposed to their form. Let us, then, try
to define the distinction between subject matter or
meaning on the one hand and form on the other…
 The meaning thus discovered may be called intrinsic
meaning or content; it is essential where the two other
kinds of meaning, the primary or natural and the
secondary or conventional, are phenomenal. It may
defined as a unifying principle which underlies and
explains both the visible event and its intelligible
significance, and which determines even the form in
which the visible event takes shape.
 This intrinsic meaning or content is, of course, as much
above the sphere of conscious volitions as the
expressional meaning is beneath this sphere.

Religious Iconography
 The Virgin Mary is most often shown wearing a blue robe. This is
symbolic of heaven and her spirituality.
 The cross has been a religious icon since the second century and
represents Christianity. Marking the sign of the cross on someone’s
forehead or chest was used to ward off demons.
 The Holy Spirit is many times shown as a dove. This comes from the
story of Christ’s baptism when the Holy Spirit came from heaven like a
dove. It is also used to represent an individual’s soul.
 Christ is sometimes represented with a fish symbol. This comes from
the Greek "icthus", which is an anagram for Savior, Jesus Christ and
Son of God.
 A snake or monkey is used to represent evil.
 The purity of the Virgin Mary is shown with lilies in a vase and a bowl
or urn of water.
 A halo, which is a circle of light surrounding a person, is widely used in
religious paintings to denote a holy person or saint. Asian religious art
uses flames, called mandorla, around the body or head.

Iconography in Art
 A red poppy is an icon for remembering
those killed in wars, especially in World
War I. Poppies are worn as a way of
sharing in the grief felt for those lost in
war.
 The shape of a heart is widely used to
symbolize love and romance.
 There have been several symbols used for
peace, including the peace sign and
holding the first two fingers in a "V" shape.
In ancient times the olive branch was
used, as well as the dove.

Iconography in Film and
Television
 Icons for the Western genre of films includes ten
gallon hats, spurs, horses, saloons, guns, jails, and
the badge of the sheriff.
 Icons for horror movies may include young girls,
haunted houses, and contrasting shadow and light
in darkened places.
 Bad guys often wear black to symbolize evil and
leather jackets, often black, are worn by rebels or
tough guys.
 Thrillers are often filmed in urban neighborhoods
whereas scary movies are often set in the suburbs.
 Science fiction movies have high tech gadgets and
automobiles that fly.

More Examples of
Iconography
 Countries have symbols for their country including birds, animals,
and plants. Many countries have chosen the eagle as their national
animal, including the United States, Egypt, Serbia, Austria, the
Philippines, Nigeria and Panama.
 Iconography includes the use of flowers and some examples are: the
calla lily for death or grief, the red rose for love and passion, and
mistletoe for love and affection (as used by kissing under it).
 Flags symbolize the country and even the colors have meaning. Red
often represents bravery, blood, or revolution; blue can mean
freedom, peace, or justice; green may symbolize agriculture, the
earth, or Islam; and white may represent purity, innocence, or snow.
 The Statue of Liberty is used as an icon of freedom, friendship,
immigration and enlightenment.
Iconography provides a shortcut way to communicate. Over time an icon
can become an easy way to describe a large idea in a very
abbreviated way.

Reference
 https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/art-and-
architecture/art-general/iconography
 http://iconictheory.blogspot.com/2010/05/iconology.html
 http://arthistoryunstuffed.com/erwin-panofsky-and-
iconography/
 http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-
iconography.html
 Panofsky's Concept of "Iconology" and the Problem of
Interpretation in the History of Art
 Keith Moxey
 New Literary History
 Vol. 17, No. 2, Interpretation and Culture (Winter, 1986), pp.
265-274

Iconology

More Related Content

What's hot

Similar to Iconology

More from Muhammad Sohaib Afzaal

Recently uploaded

Iconology