段馨君 Iris Hsin-chun Tuan
Associate Professor
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
NCTU
CH2. ICONOLOGY
INTRODUCTION
This chapter introduces us to an approach to
the analysis of visual culture that concerns
itself with the subject-matter or content of
visual texts.
 Follow the system devised by the famous
iconologist Erwin Panofsky.
 Along the way, we will look at examples ranging
from Northern Renaissance paintings to a
Beatles CD cover.

When we look at a painting, the first — and
certainly the easiest — thing we look at is
usually its content.
 It is a very good place to start, and we must
never be afraid to begin (as Dylan Thomas Put
it in Under Milk Wood ) at the beginning.

Video link： Under Milk Wood
Dylan Thomas
JOHN CONSTABLE’S FAMOUS THE HAYWAIN
with simple paintings such
as John Constable’s
famous The Haywain of
1821, we can figure out
very quickly what it is
supposed to be.
 Looking at paintings such
as this, then, need not
require an art historical
education.

John Constable
All it does require is common sense, and a
keen eye for observational derail. It is simple
detective work based on readily apparent
evidence.
 Imagine, then, that we are confronted with a
‘mystery painting’ about which we know
nothing.
 We need to get to work purely visually on the
evidence presented by the ‘mystery text’ itself.

A portrait, on the other hand, is a picture of a
person. They may be shown full-length, halflength, head-and-shoulders or just the face.
 The ‘still life’ is another easily recognized
genre.
 The things depicted need not be remarkable
in their own right, as still lives are often
distinctly everyday in their subject-matter.
 It is worth also mentioning the so-called
‘genre painting.’ A genre painting is a scene
from everyday life.

the similarity of terms is not the only problem in
describing types or genres of painting.
 Categorizing a painting is not an exact science, nor
is it a simple one.
 Broad classification into immediately recognizable
genres is, however, a very useful place to start when
beginning to describe a painting.
 In detail, from their dress, what can we surmise
about their lifestyle, their job, their social class?
Again, just as we would with a stranger on a train
look at every clue to see what it may visually reveal
to us.

The location of a scene depicted in a visual text
can provide a third area for analysis.
 For example, we can use the geographical clues
to help us place it with some degree of accuracy.
 As we begin to assemble more knowledge and
information, we should be able to start an
approximation of the age, period or even year
that a painting depicts.
 The absence as well as the inclusion of
seemingly tings such as these in a painting can
both provide valuable evidence.

Looking at a painting is, in many ways, just
like looking through a window. The visual
world is there to be read.
 A painting may even depict a particular
moment. It could be a dramatic moment such
as when a group Spanish soldiers face a
Napoleonic firing squad, or it could be as
gentle as a passing squall at sea.

Unfortunately, not all paintings are as easy to read
as Constable’s The Haywain.
 Fortunately, however, this can make many visual
texts much more interesting.
 “the sense that some aspects of Western
philosophy and science have come to adopt a
pictorial, rather than textual, view of the world”.
 The methodology we have just used is ideal for use
on ‘’what-you-see-is-what-you-get’’ paintings, and
especially those where we suspect that all we
need to know is contained within the painting itself.

If historical or celebrity
portraits begin to cause
us trouble, the ‘what-yousee-is-what-you-get’
approach proves yet
more problematic with
and mythical and
religious scenes.
 A young, medieval man
pulling a sword from a
stone (a strange activity)
can turn out to be the
mythical King Arthur of
the round table.

King Arthur of the round table
King Arthur and the
Sword in the Stone
The story of Adam and Eve from the book of
Genesis.
 The New Testament provides the life and
death of Jesus Christ, together with his
family and followers.
 The ‘nativity’ (the scene surrounding Christ’s
birth in a stable)

The story of Adam and Eve
Nativity
The ‘crucifixion’ (in which Christ is nailed to a
cross)
 The ‘deposition’ (in which the body is removed)
 The ‘pieta’ (in which his mother mourns over
the corpse in her lap).

Crucifixion
deposition
Pieta
A knowledge of Christian scripture
and tradition helps us identify these
scenes from their familiar ingredients
and characters.
 They are very much bound up in
convention, as the physical
appearance of the places and the
people portrayed usually owes much
more to art history than to scripture.
Mary, the Mother of Christ, for
example, is frequently dressed in
blue in religious paintings.

Mary, the Mother of
Christ
The most expensive paint was
typically reserved for this key
figure. Lapis lazuli, a blue
gemstone.
 The physical appearance of
Christ. He is never described in
the Bible, and so his typical
depiction as tall and bearded
with long, golden-brown hair is
another art historical tradition.

Lapis lazuli
Christ

Saint George, the (non-biblical) patron saint of
England, for example, is instantly recognizable
not by his facial features, but by the way he is
nearly always shown killing a dragon. Without the
dragon, it’s probably not Saint George.
Saint George
Similarly, we recognize Saint
Christopher from his traveller's
staff and the infant Christ he
carries across the river.
 Saint Peter carries keys, Saint
Francis is surrounded by animals,
and Saint Jerome is usually
accompanied by a cardinals hat
and a friendly lion, from whose
wounded paw he removed a
painful thorn. Without the hat and
the lion.. . it probably isn't Saint
Jerome.

Saint Christopher
Saint Jerome
Consult ‘emblem books’ such as Giarda’s
Icones Symbolicae of 1628.
 Historia, for example, is depicted as a female
figure with three faces so she can look at the
past, present and future at the same time.
 In the eighteenth century, Richardson’s

Iconology or a Collection of Emblematical
Figures of 1799

Sterility
ARNOLFINI WEDDING PORTRAIT
As the concepts start to become more
abstract, it is time for another case study.
 Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding Portrait of
1434

At face value, we can see that husband and
wife are a prosperous couple; they are
expensively and fashionably dressed, and
their room is furnished luxuriously the
standards of the day.
 Many of what may appear to be ordinary
household objects also have an emblematic
significance.
 This is achieved through a technique known
as disguised symbolism’ in which everyday
things can have a double life by having both
a realistic and symbolic existence.

We have noticed that, in practice,
interpreting ‘disguised symbolism’ is not
quite as simple as looking things up in a
code book.
 Direct translation is not always possible.
There are various theories about the
Arnolfini portrait both in general and in detail,
and Signora Arnolfini’s stomach is just one
of the areas of dispute.

THE ANNUNCIATION

The Annunciation from the
Merode Altarpiece painted
by the Master of Flémalle.
 It takes a working
knowledge of the Christian
New Testament, however, to
delve beyond the
appearances of this work.
The concept of a virgin birth is not an easy one,
and is certainly neither communicated nor
explained by the surface content of the painting.
 This painting is a complicated and challenging
text, built up of layers of meaning.
 There is yet another level of meaning which is
shared by both this Annunciation and The
Arnolfini Wedding Portrait.
 Both are full of deliberate symbols, and we
suspect that there would have been little point in
putting them in if viewers had not been expected
to have understood them.

ICONOLOGY
Is a structured way of looking at paintings
 which will not only help us to understand
them at all the different levels
 Occasionally referred to as “iconography”
 It is a method that helps us to study the
subject-matter of works of art at each of the
levels we have just been discussing.

ERWIN PANOFSKY
In 1939, he published Studies in Iconology, a
book that has remained influential ever since.
 Not only does he demonstrate iconology at work
with plentiful examples and case studies from the
Renaissance, he presents us with a structured,
progressive and logical system for iconological
analysis that we can use for ourselves and on
images of our own choice.

ART, THREE LEVELS OR ‘STRATA’ OF MEANING
The first level he calls the ‘primary’ or ‘natural’
level, and it is in turn subdivided into the
‘factual’ and the ‘expressional’ sections.
 To understand the meaning at this primary level,
we do not need any inside cultural,
conventional or art historical knowledge.
 We need only to bring our ‘practical experience’
of daily life into play.

The ‘secondary’ or ‘conventional’ level is where
the real work of iconology begins.
 we have to know the conventions in use in order
to understand a painting at this second, deeper
level of meaning.
 We have progressed from the mere
identification of level one to the interpretation of
images in level two.

The third (and deepest) level is where we find
what Panofsky calls the intrinsic meaning or
content.
 This is the Level of meaning which reveals the
‘basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a
religious or philosophical - unconsciously qualified
by one personality and condensed into one work.’
 It is important to stress one and two, this is an
unconscious process.
 Panofsky’s iconological method has helped us
find a structured way of penetrating three layers of
meanings in a visual text.

THE BEATLES’ ABBEY ROAD ALBUM
Many people already
have a copy of this; the
image is also widely
available on the Internet.
 Certainly, the cover is
among the most
memorable, and the site
of the original shoot has
become a tourist
attraction for people
from all over the world.

Music：The Beatles - "Abbey Road"
Leading the procession: we have the priest
(John Lennon) dressed completely in white.
 He is followed by the sober-suited pallbearer or
funeral director (Ringo Starr).
 Bringing up the rear, in his working denims and
sneakers is the grave-digger (George Harrison).
 That leaves only Paul McCarcney as the corpse.

John Lennon
Ringo Starr
George Harrison
Paul McCarcney
The purely visual evidence provided by this
image, using the same methodology that Erwin
Panofsky applied to Renaissance painting.
 The result, if we are careful, should tell us
something not only about Abbey Road, but also
about the usefulness of the iconological
approach in the modern world.
 What can an analysis of the Abbey Road cover
tell us about the intrinsic ‘attitudes’ of the culture
from which it arose?

In other words, does it unconsciously tell us
about the zeitgeist (the spirit of the age) of
Britain at that time?
 It must have been a very casual era.
 The musicians here are not the clean-cut,
tuxedo-wearing artistes of previous times.
 The whole 'PauI is dead' phenomenon is
actually only a part of a far greater cultural
obsession with the cult of the dead rock star.

Music：Dead Rock Stars & Pop Music Stars
Think of Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Jimmy
Hendrix and Elvis Presley (to provide just a
handful of examples) to realize that death and
rock celebrity seem so often to go hand in.
 Dying young, indeed, seems to give the
charismatic performer some eternal life.

Kurt Cobain
Jim Morrison
Elvis Presley
Jimmy Hendrix
Music：Elvis Presley - Always On My Mind
Iconology needs not be limitted to the art of
centuries past.
 Panofsky was indeed much more interested in
Western European painting than in contemporary
popular culture,
 the way of looking he advocated can still be used
to unlock meanings in all manner of visual texts.
 We started with the basic identification of subjectmatter and have moved through the interpretation
of symbolism to an intrinsic analysis that has
taken us way beyond the conscious intent of the
individual artist to provide an insight into the
deeper cultural values of whole society.

FURTHER STUDY
Panofsky provided the classic text on this subject,
his thinking is indebted to the German art
historian Aby Warburg (1866—1929).
 Warburg himself published little, but he in many
ways set the scene for Panofsky by learning how to
‘decode’ the subject-matter of Renaissance
frescoes (the Palazzo Schifanoia at Ferrara, Italy is
his most famous example) rather than simply
responding to their formal qualities.

Aby Warburg
Iconology underpins many traditional histories
of art, as the identification of subject-matter is
important to nearly all figurative works.
 The medieval and Renaissance periods are
particularly rich in emblems and symbols,
 both overt and disguised, and so studies
concentrating on these periods are especially
interesting to those who enjoy the iconological
approach.
