Iconography decodes what a picture shows, not how it was painted
Why does one saint hold keys and another a wheel? Iconography is the branch of art history that sets style aside and asks what an image depicts: which figures, how many, where they stand and what they carry. A Dutch database now sorts that content into more than 40,000 categories.
The word joins Greek roots for image and for writing or drawing. Beyond art history it spread into archaeology, semiotics and media studies; film critics use it for the recurring props and settings that let you recognise a western or a gangster picture within seconds. Some translations from Greek or Russian also use it for painting Orthodox icons, although icon painting is the proper term there.
Early readers of pictures included Giorgio Vasari, whose commentary on the Palazzo Vecchio paintings in Florence shows that even educated contemporaries found them puzzling, and Cesare Ripa, whose emblem book Iconologia, published in 1593, guided artists for more than two hundred years. As a formal discipline the field grew up in the nineteenth century among specialists in Christian art, with French scholars such as Émile Mâle leading.
Germany pushed it further. Aby Warburg and his followers, above all Erwin Panofsky, moved from cataloguing motifs to reading meaning, and Panofsky's Studies in Iconology of 1939 set the method. He emigrated to the United States in 1931, where pupils such as Meyer Schapiro carried it on, and in 1942 Richard Krautheimer applied the approach to medieval buildings. Some celebrated readings have not lasted: specialists now largely reject Panofsky's idea that the inscription in van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait makes it a record of a marriage contract. Critics such as Svetlana Alpers attacked the method from the 1950s, yet none produced a full replacement.
Religious art is where the vocabulary runs deepest. Indian traditions rely on mudras, hand gestures with fixed meanings, alongside halos and ritual objects such as the vajra. In the Eastern Church after iconoclasm, painters were expected to copy revered models with minimal change, and Christ Pantocrator became the dominant image of Christ. Photographic archives at the Warburg Institute and Princeton's Index of Medieval Art, plus the Iconclass system with 84,000 keywords, now make such motifs searchable.
Source: Iconography
