Roelof van Straten

How does one identify meaning in a work of art? An Introduction to Iconography presents an outline of the analytical process for finding such meaning and describes tools and where to find them.

But first, what is iconography? It is defined simply as the study of themes, objects and subjects in the visual arts and is a major branch of art history. The first concern is to objectively describe the elements in a work of art. Then the task is to determine what, if anything, those elements mean and to identify literary and artistic sources, published interpretations, and metaphorical meanings.

A subset of iconography is iconology, a branch of cultural history that uncovers the cultural, social and historical background of themes and subjects in the visual arts. As defined in this book, iconology remains a neglected aspect of art historical publications. The author goes to great pains to draw a distinction between iconography and iconology, but then says further discussion is beyond the scope of the book. Not helpful.

The approach to iconography described herein is based on the method of analyzing representational art described by Erwin Panofsky.

In medieval and Renaissance art one commonly finds abstract ideas represented in literature and art by images of Roman gods or personifications of such things as the vices and virtues, for example, or symbolic depiction of allegory. Such personification thrived into the Baroque and Rococo periods, but lost its significance in the 19th century due to the rise of realism, according to the author

The book acknowledges that a person viewing a work of art for the first time cannot be expected to intuit deep symbolic meanings in a painting that may be full of iconic images.

From a personal standpoint, the material in this book was of some interest to me because I tend to be attracted instinctively to iconic art, as contrasted with the kind of art featured, for example, in Umberto Eco's Infinity of Lists, which I reviewed recently. Eco's book was quite a revelation to me because it provided a key to looking at paintings that represent masses of objects or people that I had not quite grasped before and thus failed to appreciate the whole body of such art. An Introduction to Iconography provides a systematic approach to analyzing unfamiliar art and isolating and identifying the hidden meanings. It also supplements the material presented in The Secret Language of the Renaissance by Richard Stemp, which I also read and reviewed earlier this year.

An interesting reference that was originally written during the Renaissance by Cesare Ripa (1593) is his Iconologia which was published by Dover Press under the title Baroque and Rococo Pictorial Imagery, with Baroque illustrations from a 1758 edition published in Germany. This book contains personifications and allegorical images of every imaginable abstract concept that was popular before the 19th century.

An Introduction to Iconography, which was originally published in German, is a very useful reference and contains extensive bibliographic material — mostly in German — for the serious student.… (meer)