Featured Content Page about: iconography

Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. The word ''iconography'' literally means ''image writing'', and comes from the Greek ''εικον'' (image) and ''γραφειν'' (to write). A secondary meaning is the painting of icons in the Byzantine and Orthodox Christian tradition. 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. Sometimes distinctions have been made between ''Iconology'' and ''Iconography'', although the definitions and so the distinction made varies.

Iconography as a field of study

Foundations of iconography

Early Western writers who took special note of the content of images include Giorgio Vasari, whose ''Ragionamenti'', interpreting the paintings in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, reassuringly demonstrates that such works were difficult to understand even for well-informed contemporaries. Gian Pietro Bellori, a 17th century biographer of artists of his own time, describes and analyses, not always correctly, many works. 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.

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.

Iconographic analysis in articles on individual works

Works cited