Iconography as an academic art historical discipline developed in the nineteenth-century in the works of scholars such as Adolphe Napoleon Didron (1806–1867), Anton Heinrich Springer (1825–1891), and Émile Mâle (1862–1954) all specialists in Christian religious art, which was the main focus of study in this period, in which French scholars were especially prominent. Altogether 25 scenes, not all involving the Virgin, are depicted. Ī painting with complex iconography: Hans Memling's so-called Seven Joys of the Virgin – in fact this is a later title for a Life of the Virgin cycle on a single panel.

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 originated in, rather than the other way round. Gian Pietro Bellori, a 17th-century biographer of artists of his own time, describes and analyses, not always correctly, many works. Lesser known, though it had informed poets, painters and sculptors for over two centuries after its 1593 publication, was Cesare Ripa's emblem book Iconologia. Ragionamenti reassuringly demonstrates that such works were difficult to understand even for well-informed contemporaries. Scholarship Foundations Įarly 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. When referring to movies, genres are immediately recognizable through their iconography, motifs that become associated with a specific genre through repetition. Sometimes distinctions have been made between iconology and iconography, although the definitions, and so the distinction made, varies. The term is also used in many academic fields other than art history, for example semiotics and media studies, and in general usage, for the content of images, the typical depiction in images of a subject, and related senses. In art history, '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.

This usage is mostly found in works translated from languages such as Greek or Russian, with the correct term being 'icon painting'. The word iconography comes from the Greek εἰκών ('image') and γράφειν ('to write' or to draw).Ī secondary meaning (based on a non-standard translation of the Greek and Russian equivalent terms) is the production or study of the religious images, called ' icons', in the Byzantine and Orthodox Christian tradition. Iconography, as a branch of art history, studies the identification, description and interpretation of the content of images: the subjects depicted, the particular compositions and details used to do so, and other elements that are distinct from artistic style. Holbein's The Ambassadors (1533) is a complex work whose iconography remains the subject of debate.

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