Symbolism (art)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mikhail Nesterov's The Vision of the Youth Bartholomew. This legendary work inaugurated the Symbolist movement in Russian painting.

La mort du fossoyeur ("The death of the gravedigger") by Carlos Schwabe is a visual compendium of symbolist motifs. Death and angels, pristine snow, and the dramatic poses express
symbolist longings for transfiguration "anywhere, out of the world".

The cover to Aleksander Blok's 1909 book, Theatre. Konstantin Somov's illustrations show the connection between symbolism and Art Nouveau artists such as Aubrey Beardsley

Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin. The
movement rejected realismand naturalism, and included poetry and other arts. Symbolists
believed that art should represent absolute truths that could only be described indirectly.[1] Thus a
symbolist painting may look realistic, but actually it represents a non-visual idea.
In literature, the style started with the publication Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857)
by Charles Baudelaire. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and
translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and
images.[2] The name "symbolist" itself was first used by the critic Jean Moras, who invented it to
distinguish the symbolists from similar styles of literature and art. [3] Symbolism in art is related to
the gothic component ofRomanticism.[1]
There were several groups of Symbolist painters and visual artists, including Gustave
Moreau, Gustav Klimt, Odilon Redon,Henri Fantin-Latour, Gaston Bussire, Edvard
Munch, Flicien Rops, and Jan Toorop. Symbolism in painting was even more widespread
geographically than symbolism in poetry. Its ideas affected Mikhail Vrubel, Nicholas
Roerich, Martiros Saryan,Mikhail Nesterov, Lon Bakst, Elena Gorokhova in Russia, as well
as Frida Kahlo in Mexico and David Chetlahe Paladin in the United States. Auguste Rodin is
sometimes considered a symbolist sculptor.[4]
The symbolist painters used mythological and dream imagery. The symbols used by symbolism
are not the familiar emblemsof mainstream iconography but intensely personal, private, obscure
and ambiguous references. More a philosophy than an actual style of art, symbolism in painting
influenced the contemporary Art Nouveau style and Les Nabis.[5]

Iconology
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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, i.e. 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.
[1]

[2]

[3]

Though Panofsky strongly differentiated between iconology and iconography, both approaches
are still frequently confused, "and they have never been given definitions accepted by all
iconographers and iconologists". It should also be noted that Panofsky's "use of iconology as the
principle tool of art analysis brought him critics." For instance, in 1946,Jan Gerrit Van
Gelder "criticized Panofsky's iconology as putting too much emphasis on the symbolic content of
the work of art, neglecting its formal aspects and the work as a unity of form and
content." Furthermore, iconology is mostly avoided by social historians who do not accept the
theoretical dogmaticism in the work of Panofsky.
[4]

[5]

[6]

Contents
[hide]

1 Iconology in contrast to iconography

2 Nuances of iconology

3 Studies in iconology

4 References

5 Further reading

6 External links

Iconology in contrast to iconography[edit]

Erwin Panofsky defines iconography as "a description and classification of images", while
iconology is "an iconography turned interpretive". According to his view, iconology tries to reveal
the underlying principles that form the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or
philosophical perspective, which is modulated by one personality and condensed into one work.
According to Roelof van Straten, iconology "can explain why an artist or patron chose a
particular subject at a specific location and time and represented it in a certain way. An
iconological investigation should concentrate on the social-historical, not art-historical, influences
and values that the artist might not have consciously brought into play but are nevertheless
present. The artwork is primarily seen as a document of its time."
[7]

[8]

[9]

Warburg used the term "iconography" in his early research, replacing it in 1908 with "iconology"
in his particular method of visual interpretation called "critical iconology", which focused on the

tracing of motifs through different cultures and visual forms. In 1932, Panofsky published a
seminal article, introducing a three-step method of visual interpretation dealing with (1) primary or
natural subject matter; (2) secondary or conventional subject matter, i.e. iconography; (3) tertiary
or intrinsic meaning or content, i.e. iconology. Whereas iconography analyses the world of
images, stories and allegories and requires knowledge of literary sources, an understanding of
the history of types and how themes and concepts were expressed by objects and events under
different historical conditions, iconology interprets intrinsic meaning or content and the world of
symbolical values by using "synthetic intuition". The interpreter is aware of the essential
tendencies of the human mind as conditioned by psychology and world view; he analyses the
history of cultural symptoms or symbols, or how tendencies of the human mind were expressed
by specific themes due to different historical conditions. Moreover, when understanding the work
of art as a document of a specific civilization, or of a certain religious attitude therein, the work of
art becomes a symptom of something else, which expresses itself in a variety of other symptoms.
Interpreting these symbolical values, which can be unknown to, or different from, the artist's
intention, is the object of iconology. Panofsky emphasized that "iconology can be done when
there are no originals to look at and nothing but artificial light to work in."
[10]

[11][12]

[13]

[14]

According to Ernst Gombrich, "the emerging discipline of iconology [...] must ultimately do for the
image what linguistics has done for the word." However, Michael Camille is of the opinion that
"though Panofsky's concept of iconology has been very influential in the humanities and is quite
effective when applied to Renaissance art, it is still problematic when applied to art from periods
before and after."
[15]

[16]

Nuances of iconology[edit]
In 1952, Creighton Gilbert added another opinion about the meaning of the word "iconology".
According to his view, iconology was not the actual investigation of the work of art but rather the
result of this investigation. The Austrian art historian Hans Sedlmayr differentiated between
"sachliche" and "methodische" iconology. "Sachliche" iconology refers to the "general meaning of
an individual painting or of an artistic complex (church, palace, monument) as seen and
explained with reference to the ideas which take shape in them." In contrast, "methodische"
iconology is the "integral iconography which accounts for the changes and development in the
representations". In Iconology: Images, Text, Ideology (1986), W.J.T. Mitchell writes that
iconology is a study of "what to say about images", concerned with the description and
interpretation of visual art, and also a study of "what images say" the ways in which they seem
to speak for themselves by persuading, telling stories, or describing. He pleads for a
postlinguistic, postsemiotic "iconic turn", emphasizing the role of "non-linguistic symbol systems".
Instead of just pointing out the difference between the material (pictorial or artistic) images,
"he pays attention to the dialectic relationship between material images and mental images".
According to Dennise Bartelo and Robert Morton, the term "iconology" can also be used for
characterizing "a movement toward seeing connections across all the language processes" and
the idea about "multiple levels and forms used to communicate meaning" in order to get "the total
picture of learning. "Being both literate in the traditional sense and visually literate are the true
mark of a well-educated human."
[17]

[18]

[19][20][21]

[22]

[23]

Studies in iconology[edit]
Studies in Iconology is the title of a book by Erwin Panofsky on humanistic themes in the art of
the Renaissance, which was first published in 1939. It is also the name of a peer-reviewed
[24]

series of books started in 2014 and published by Peeters international academic

publishers, Leuven, Belgium, which addresses an audience that seeks to understand any aspect
and any deeper meaning of the visual medium along the history of mankind in the fields of
philosophy, art history, theology and cultural anthropology.
[25]

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