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Iconography (from the Greek, eikon, "image" and graphia, "writing") is the study of the subject matter, or content, of works of art, as opposed to their style.  The content of a painting or a sculpture can convey the artist's meaning in several ways.  In general, works depicting only real persons, places, and objects--that is, portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and the like--may be said to have only one level of meaning, the surface or primary level.  A secondary level of meaning is added when a work contains an imagined person or a fictional or mythological scene or when the artist attempts to render some abstract concept in concrete terms.  Because these secondary levels of meaning cannot be explained in words in a painting or a sculpture, the artist must use a type of sign language--a visual shorthand, drawing on conventions and formulas that the audience will recognize.

In traditional Christian art, a broken wheel placed beside the figure of a woman tells the viewer that the figure represents Saint Catherine, whereas a woman holding a bridle and reins personifies the virtue of temperance.  The function of iconography is to recognize and explain images of this kind and to search literature for the origins of personages and scenes. The term iconology is sometimes used for the study of the way in which a work of art is related to the cultural background of its era.

In this article the word image denotes any portrayal of an object or action that contains a secondary meaning.  The word attribute signifies an object, such as Saint Catherine's wheel, that is associated with a human figure simply to give that figure a recognizable identity.  A symbol, however, is an object or figure that by itself represents something else, often an abstract idea.  In many 15th- and 16th-century paintings, for example, a skull is used to represent the idea of mortality--a so-called memento mori.  Finally, the artist may link together individual symbols so as to convey some thematic idea or axiom;  this combining of symbols into an overall pattern is known as an allegory.  A great fondness for allegory was shown by Italian Renaissance artists, who often constructed elaborate chains of symbols.  To arrive at the allegorical or overall meaning of the painting the observer must discern the symbols' interrelationships, as well as their individual meanings.

ORIGINS AND HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

Ancient Greece

The earliest recorded images were those associated with the rites of ancient religions, especially those in which the deity had human form (see \TGreek art\t).  To propitiate or petition the gods, worshipers offered sacrifices to statues in temples;  the statue was thought to contain the actual presence of the deity, and the temple was considered to be its "house." This \Tanthropomorphism\t of divinities was developed significantly by the great poet Homer (c.8th century BC), who organized the ancient Greek gods into a kind of family or pantheon and gave each one an individual personality and specific physical characteristics.  Following Homer's lead, the classical Greek artists endowed each god with recognizable attributes:  Zeus was sometimes accompanied by an eagle, the bird sacred to him; Poseidon, who ruled the sea, carried a trident;  Artemis, the huntress, had a bow and quiver;  and so on.

Ancient Rome

The Romans, much more than the Greeks, used art to magnify the glory of their own accomplishments (see \TRoman art\t).  Arches, columns, altars, and public buildings were decorated with sculpture commemorating the triumphs of Roman generals, and patrician families basked in the reflected glory of the images of the ancient gods and heroes from whom they claimed descent. Statues of the later emperors, who regarded themselves as gods, often depicted the rulers with the appropriate divine attributes.  Along with symbols and attributes, allegory was well understood by the Romans.  An altar, called the Ara Pacis, built (9 BC) in honor of Emperor Augustus and dedicated to peace, shows in one panel a contented and fruitful Mother Earth holding two infants in her lap and seated amid various symbols of the abundance and prosperity that Augustus's peaceful reign had brought.

Early Christian Iconography

The plethora of symbols and attributes used by the Romans contrasted sharply to the few, simple images used by the early Christians, who had to be circumspect in the face of religious persecution (see \TEarly Christian art and architecture\t).  On sacramental cups, seals, and lamps the Holy Spirit was symbolized by a dove and Christ by a fish (perhaps because at the time fish was one of the elements of the sacred meal) or by a shepherd carrying a sheep on his shoulders (from Luke 15:3-7).  The Savior was also represented by a monogram formed by combining the Greek letters chi and rho (XP), the first two letters of the Greek word for Christ.

Byzantine Iconography

When Christianity became (4th century) the official religion of the Roman Empire, its imagery began to reflect borrowings from the emperor's court at Constantinople (see \TByzantine art and architecture\t).  Christ was no longer depicted as a youthful shepherd, but as an enthroned emperor and judge with a dignified beard.  The Virgin Mary, whose cult developed rapidly after about 400, appeared crowned and robed like the empress, and saints dressed like courtiers approached the throne of God with veiled hands, as was the custom in the courts of Eastern monarchs.

The repertoire of symbolic subjects included scenes from the New Testament reflecting the annual cycle of the principal festivals of the Church.  Subjects from the Old Testament, which earlier had served as examples of God's power to save--the Hebrews in the fiery furnace, Noah and the flood--now reflected the belief that, as part of God's plan, certain episodes in the Old Testament prefigured events in the New Testament.  Jonah, who formerly symbolized the idea of salvation, now became the type--the original model--of Christ, whose death and resurrection was seemingly foreshadowed by Jonah's miraculous encounter with the great fish.  Throughout the Middle Ages the Scriptures were ransacked for correspondences of this kind, which exemplify the iconographic principle of typology.

Medieval European Iconography

From about 1000 to 1300 the French monastery of Cluny (see \Tmonastic art and architecture\t), which was founded in 910 and played a key role in the development of Romanesque and Gothic art, greatly influenced the course of Western European iconography (see \TRomanesque art and architecture\t and \TGothic art and architecture\t).  Medieval sculpture and wall painting reflected the Cluniac monks' view that because all human activities and all creatures under heaven were part of the divine plan, they were all fit subjects for representation. Alongside more traditional subject matter now appeared such secular motifs as the 12 Labors of the Months, depicting the yearly cycle of husbandry;  the birds and animals of the \Tbestiary\t, an allegorical interpretation of natural history that was very popular in the Middle Ages;  and strange humanoid monsters believed to inhabit the outer regions of the Earth.

Renaissance Iconography

The Renaissance period, which began in Italy in the 15th century, ushered in a radical shift in iconography (see \TRenaissance art and architecture\t).  As artists rediscovered the forms and images of classical antiquity, the gods and goddesses of Greek and Roman mythology once more dominated Western European iconography.  Ovid's Metamorphoses (AD 8) provided Italian artists with scenes of the amours of the gods, and French humanist artists used the pagan divinities to personify moral qualities in allegorical compositions.

Underlying this reappearance of ancient imagery was an attempt to reconcile the classical philosophy of the ancient pagan world with Christian teaching.  A popular subject was the combat between Virtue and Vice in all their manifestations: Reason against Passion, for example, in which a civilized Apollo, shown with a bow or lyre, and a chaste Diana, the huntress, would be pitted against Venus, the goddess of love, and her offspring Cupid.  For detailed information about the appearance of the ancient gods, and personifications in general, Renaissance artists often had to rely on contemporary handbooks and dictionaries of classical iconography, which were no less influential for being generally inaccurate.  The most widely used of these source books was Cesare Ripa's (fl.  1600) Iconologia, the 1603 edition of which described, with illustrations, the dress, attributes, and moral symbolism of a wide range of allegorical figures.

Impact of the Reformation

Paradoxically, the Protestant reformers of the 16th century, who rejected religious imagery as blasphemous, indirectly gave religious subject matter renewed strength in Roman Catholic countries, where art became a propaganda device used to uphold specifically Roman Catholic doctrines.  Roman Catholic artists depicted the Virgin Mary treading on a serpent that symbolized the Protestant heresy, as well as such specifically Roman Catholic scenes as the celebration of the Seven Sacraments and the veneration of holy relics.  Artists in Protestant regions such as the northern provinces of the Netherlands, however, turned to \Tportraiture\t and \Tlandscape painting\t or specialized in some particular class of domestic subject (\Tgenre painting\t). \Lstill-life painting\ls occasionally became vehicles for allegory and at times even contained a veiled expression of Christian beliefs.  Many such allegorical compositions used tokens of luxury or pleasure, such as jewels, coins, books, and musical instruments, as symbols of the transitory character of life, whose inevitable conclusion would be symbolized by a memento mori.  The underlying message of the emptiness or vanity of life on earth lent the name vanitas paintings to this type of work.

Modern Trends

Beginning roughly in the last part of the 17th century the European pictorial arts were dominated by two discrete approaches to iconography.  While noniconographic subject matter such as landscape, portraiture, and still life became increasingly important, widespread historicizing movements sparked the conscious revival of past artistic forms and images--\Tneoclassicism\t and \Tromanticism\t in art being the principal movements.  Both trends reflected the lack in early modern art of a broad-based and intrinsic cultural ethos, such as Christianity in medieval art, that could provide artists with a fund of images and symbols of contemporary value.

In the 19th century the gulf between the historicizing and the noniconographic movements widened enormously.  Historicism became the keynote of so-called academic art (see \Tacademies of art\t), officially sanctioned by the political and academic establishment.  Simultaneously, the trend toward nonsymbolic art led to the development of realism (see \Trealism\t, art) and impressionism (see \Timpressionism\t, art).  From the romantic landscapes of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, in which humans and their works assume increasingly insignificant roles, to the series paintings of Claude Monet, in which the painter's sole object is to depict one object or group of objects under various atmospheric and lighting conditions, avant-garde artists gradually banished every trace of literary or moral meaning from their works, concentrating instead on their impressions of the exterior world.

The eventual triumph of the impressionist viewpoint over that of the academic schools resulted inevitably in the exaltation of the role of the individual artist and the rejection of any culture-based iconographic language shared by artist and audience.  Almost all of the great movements that shaped 20th-century art--\Tcubism\t, \Texpressionism\t, \Tsurrealism\t, \Tabstract art\t, and \Tabstract expressionism\t--reflect extremely personal aesthetic visions that defy the kind of literary decoding necessary to interpret fully iconographic works.  With the significant exceptions of Dadaism (see \TDada\t) and \Tpop art\t (examined in the following sections), modern artistic movements by definition lie outside the realm of iconography.

James Hall

DEVELOPMENT OF ICONOGRAPHIC STUDIES

Origins

With the exception of the Renaissance and baroque manuals of classical iconography, little effort was made to study systematically the forms and meanings of Western iconography until the 18th century, when classical mythology and symbolism became a necessary feature of every well-bred person's education, rather than the exclusive province of artists and scholars.  This process had been stimulated by the researches of archaeologists and antiquarians, especially of Greek and Roman ruins.  Johann Friedrich Christ (1700-56), the first art historian to occupy (1735-56) an academic chair, gave his lectures at Leipzig University under the heading of the archaeology of literature.  Although important, these early researches remained narrowly focused on the historical derivation of symbols and themes, and no coherent theory of iconography was developed at this time.

Iconology

The next great advance in iconography as an analytical tool came in the early 1900s, when a number of art historians became interested in defining the meaning of a work of art in terms of its social heritage and purpose.  Describing their research procedures by the term iconology, these scholars sought to reduce the entire meaning of a work of art to a textual definition.  Most prominent among this new breed of art historians was the German Aby Warburg (1866-1929), who was the first to use the term iconology.  At the 10th International Congress on the history of art, held in Rome in 1912, Warburg introduced an innovative methodology to art history by presenting a study of Italian 15th-century art in which the figures in various paintings were identified according to precise literary sources.  This purely iconographic method of identification broke clearly with the stylistic method of art-historical analysis.  Rather than interpreting a work within a strictly aesthetic context, Warburg and subsequent iconologists, such as Erwin \TPanofsky\t, pursued this method of interpreting a work of art by means of original historical texts, in contradistinction to those who analyzed art as a matter of connoisseurship, or an analysis of style.

The iconologist's interdisciplinary approach to the study of art led to a tremendous expansion in the 20th century of what was considered to be part of the study of iconography, as well as of what was considered to be art.  Panofsky's publication of an essay on film titled "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures" (1947) introduced the study of cinema as a serious art form.  The art of primitive peoples, children, and the mentally impaired also received critical attention for the first time, and the use of these sources by artists such as Pablo \TPicasso\t and Paul \TKlee\t furthered their acceptance as objects of iconographic study.

One of the more significant developments in the mid-20th century was the publication of numerous iconographic studies of what is termed popular culture--which entered the vocabulary of "high" art with the early-20th-century collages of the Dadaists.  Movies, comic books, advertisements, and pinup magazines all have been analyzed iconographically.  This field of study was accelerated by the success of pop art, which took well-known popular icons, such as soup-can labels, and presented them in a serious aesthetic context.  Rather than creating icons, artists capitalized on the availability and popularity of existing icons.  The modern iconographic approach to the study of art has reinforced this trend toward appropriating the images and symbols of popular culture for aesthetic purposes.  Necessarily, this type of art has been analyzed primarily as a sociological phenomenon and only secondarily as an aesthetic event.

Valentin Tatransky

Bibliography:  Beckwith, John, Early Christian and Byzantine Art (1970;  repr.  1980);  Cirlot, J.  E., A Dictionary of Symbols, trans.  by Jack Sage, 2d ed.  (1972);  Cooke, Bernard, The Distancing of God:  The Ambiguity of Symbol in History and Theology (1990);  Demus, Otto, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration (1948;  repr.  1976);  Grabar, Andre, Christian Iconography:  A Study of Its Origins (1968;  repr.  1980);  Hall, James, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (1974);  Hecksher, W. S., The Genesis of Iconology (1967);  Hutter, Irmgard, Early Christian and Byzantine Art (1988);  King, John N., Tudor Royal Iconography (1989);  Lasko, Peter, Ars Sacra:  800-1200 (1973); Male, Emile, Religious Art in France:  The Late Middle Ages, trans.  by M.  Mathews (1987);  Milburn, Robert L., Early Christian Art and Architecture (1988);  Moore, Albert C., The Iconography of Religions (1977);  Panofsky, Erwin, Early Netherlandish Painting (1953) and Studies in Iconology (1939; repr.  1962);  Ripa, Cesare, Baroque and Rococo Pictorial Imagery:  Iconologia, trans.  by Edward A.  Maser (1971); Seznec, Jean, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans.  by Barbara Sessions (1953;  repr.  1972);  Schiller, Gertrud, Iconography of Christian Art, 2 vols.  (1971, 1972);  Twining, Louisa, Symbols and Emblems of Early and Medieval Christian Art (1980);  Wagner, Geoffrey, Parade of Pleasure:  A Study of Popular Iconography in the U.S.A.  (1955);  Whittick, Arnold, Symbols, Signs and Their Meaning (1960).