Fact Check: Iconography

Iconography, as a branch of art history, studies the identification, description and interpretation of content of images: the subjects depicted, the particular compositions and details used to do so, and other elements that are distinct from artistic style.

A secondary meaning is the production or study of religious images, called "icons," in the Byzantine and Orthodox Christian tradition. This usage is mostly found in works translated from languages such as Greek or Russian, with the correct term being "icon painting."

In the broader history of art, "an iconography" may also mean a particular depiction of a subject in terms of the content of the image, such as the number of figures used, their placing and gestures. The term is also used in many academic fields other than art history, e.g. semiotics, media studies, and archaeology, and in general usage, for the content of images, the typical depiction in images of a subject, and other related senses. Sometimes distinctions have been made between iconology and iconography, although the definitions, and so the distinction, varies. When referring to movies, genres are immediately recognizable through their iconography, i.e., the motif used (or some identified "icons") that become associated with a specific genre through repetition in the time period, like Dracula or a Haunted House in horror, for example.

Early Western writers who took special note of the content of images include Giorgio Vasari, whose Ragionamenti interpreted the paintings in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Ragionamenti reassuringly demonstrates that such works were difficult to understand even for well-informed contemporaries. Lesser known, though it had informed poets, painters, and sculptors for over two centuries after its 1593 publication, was Cesara Ripa's emblem book Iconologia. Gian Pietro Bellori, a 17th century biographer of artists of his own time, describes and analyzes, although not always correctly, many works of art. Lessing's study (1796) of the classical figure Amor with an inverted torch was an early attempt to use a study of a type of image to explain the culture it originate in, rather than the other way around.

Iconography as an academic art historical discipline developed in the nineteenth-century in the works of several influential scholars, who were all specialists in Christian art, the subject of which was the main focus of study in this period where French scholars were featured prominently. They looked back to earlier attempts to clasify and organize subjects encyclopedically like Cesare Ripa and Anne Claude Philippe de Caylus' Recueil d'antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grècque, romaines et gauloises as guides to understanding works of art, covering both religious and profane, in a more scientific manner than the popular aesthetic approach of the time. These early contributions paved the way for encyclopedias, manuals, and other publications useful in objectively identifying the content of art.

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This Chapter is sponsored by Fendi.