What is form and its types? What does from mean? What does Tarcomed mean? When to use means or mean? How do you use the word mean? What mean means in math? Why is mean the average? Where do we use averages in everyday life? How do you calculate weighted mean? Previous Article How tools and machine help us in our daily life? Next Article What is the job of a subheading? Jan van Eyck, Arnolfini Portrait, , oil on canvas.
Work is in the public domain. As a painter, Van Eyck was revered for his incredible ability to mimic realism and the effects of light. It was widely accepted as a painting representing a marriage, but recent controversy suggests it is more a record of engagement than a wedding portrait.
Iconography shares similarities to semiotics in interpreting signs in semiotics signs can be symbols on both a denotive and connotative level. Iconography is typically used in analyzing works from the past, as Gillian Rose notes, typically Western figurative images from the 16th through 18th centuries While semiotics is more often used to analyze more contemporary visual culture, like advertising. Artists continue to use symbolic visual language. As Sayre points out, central to his personal iconography was a three pointed crown, a symbol he related to himself, but also his African American heroes The formalism you practiced in module two is focused on compositional analysis by being descriptive.
Semiotics offers another way of analyzing images, be they found in artwork or another type of visual culture, like advertising.
Semiotics is the study of signs. In semiotics the basic unit is the sign. Signs are representations that have meanings beyond what they literally represent. Signs can come in visual or auditory form- as in language or sounds.
Signs are everywhere, not just in art. Semiotics offers a way to break an image into its constituent parts- its signs, and trace how they relate to each other, and other systems of meaning Rose In semiotics the image itself is the focus and the most important site of meaning Rose The signs in an image are analyzed into two parts, the signified and signifier. The signified is the concept or thing the representation stands in for. The signifier is the representation. The fact that he thought the humanistic character of art his- This content downloaded from But he also envisioned the tragic result that would follow attempts to subord inate a humalnistic concern for mean- ing to implicit and often naive notions of the criteria for "scientific" valid ity.
An un- d efined , uncritical popularity of the id eal of "scientific" truth could - and d id - lead to avoid ance of problems that were inher- ently inimical to concrete mod es of investi- gation. Such curtailing of the scope of hu- manistic inquiry in ord er to accommod ate it to these unspoken values could not make art history a science, but it could well sap its vitality as a humanistic d iscipline.
Panofsky shared with semiotics both a concern for "d eep" meaning in cultural prod ucts, and a conviction that it is acces- sible to analysis. Are we to conclud e from this that Panofsky's approach is a nascent semiotic which possesses the essentials though it perhaps lacks some refinements?
Further consid eration of three factors - the nature of the ultimate subject of the analy- sis, the role of historicity in the explanatory structure offered , and the consistency of the notion of sign will support the conclusion that the "semiotic" character of Panofsky's approach is ephemeral.
Panofsky summarized the method , object, and necessary capacities or cond itions of iconology in a chart. Though the ways in which the "essential tend encies of the human mind " express themselves change und er varying historical cond itions, there was no implication that mind itself was conceived as mutable. More- over, the essential tend encies of mind and the patterns of expression were not the ob- jects of knowled ge in Panofsky's table but the prerequisites of iconological research.
The familiarity with these essential ten- d encies that is the basis of synthetic intui- tion was not arrived at through research, but "given": it was a capacity rather than a method or a conclusion.
The intuitive notion of mind involved is revealed by the absence of any formulation of its structure or functioning assumed to be reflected in the nature of intrinsic meaning. The lack of a mod el linking these things clearly d ifferen- tiates Panofsky's approach from most semio- logical inquiry. The issue of the historicity of Panofsky's method provid es another avenue to its d is- tinction from semiotics.
Both iconographv and iconology are integral parts of a form of history. Iconography is a "philology" of images; the d escriptive, factual aspect of the process of und erstand ing the past.
Relative closeness to d ocuments and concrete obser- vations meant that iconography was more easily d efend ed in an empirical intellectual climate. Iconology sought to state the und erlying principles that shape the expression of an age. As such it is a variant of the "history of id eas. This has vast implications for the congruence of Panofsky's concepts with semiology.
In Panofsky's table, three kind s of historical knowled ge are given as cond itions of cor- rect analysis at each level -not as goals. This may engend er questions as to whether Panofsky's approach is "history" at all- that is, whether he might not be closer to an essentially synchronic, semiotic approach to art than hitherto suspected. If "history" in Panofsky's chart is effectively a support to the investigation of meaning rather than a form of explanation, then the whole sys- tem becomes much easier to co-ord inate with semiological and structuralist approaches.
The table is, however, somewhat mislead - ing. Each level is a cycle rather than a sequence, as Panofsky stated at another point in the argument. However, he d istinguished ind ivid ual ob- servations of new d ata from the "sense" mad e by analysis of ranges of d ata. This This content downloaded from Since the object and the starting as- sumptions of each level are interd epend ent, the object of each level is not necessarily the goal of the investigation.
The histories of style, types, and cultural symptoms, respec- tively with which one ostensibly begins analysis at each level pre-iconographic, ico- nographic, and iconological are in turn the prod ucts of historical analyses of works of art. At all three levels, analysis is focussed on the characteristics which enable integration of each new object of analysis into a histori- cal "sense.
There is another large scale d istinction between Panofsky's approach and a "semi- otic of art": consistency of the mod el. Semi- ology is characterized by the assumption that communication is more homogeneous than previously suspected.
Panofsky's typology of meaning is quite d ifferent. He mad e a sharp d istinction between levels of meaning, precisely in the matter of the method s to which they were accessible.
It might perhaps be argued that Panofsky d id pursue the id eal of a homogeneous in- vestigation of meaning, but stopped short of solution of certain logical problems. By basing iconology on correct iconography and suggesting certain controls, he certainly hoped to mitigate the epistemological prob- lems of iconology. It d oes not follow that he implied the essential homogeneity of all three levels of meaning. There is no con- tinuity of method , mod el, or the key notion of "sign. The sporad ic appearance of "sign-like" units d oes not support attempts to extend that notion to other parts of the analysis.
There is little in Panofsky's d efinition of intrinsic meaning to suggest application of linguistic mod els. The essential tend encies of the human mind that are the basis of synthetic intuition constitute a conceptual mod ality rather than a cod e. Interpretation d oes not involve correct association of sig- nifier and signified. The object of iconology is close ind eed to Sperber's notion of the symbolic, which he expressly contrasted with the semiotic.
In entirely d ifferent language, Panofsky d istinguished between meaning expressed in cod es and meaning arising from conceptual ord ering- the cen- tral issue of Sperber's critique of Levi- Strauss. At root it is a question of whether all meaning can lbe red uced to linguistic mod els. It is inevitalle that attempts to extend semiotics to non-linguistic phenomena shall present new problems and severe tests.
And , as Paul Bouissac has pointed out, one im- portant way to d efine and work through the external resistance and internal questioning that face a fled gling d iscipline is to confront the new program with previous d ebates of a similar nature. Many linguists, he remarks, seem unaware of the trad ition - a humanistic trad ition - which has per- mitted the d efinition of the problems they are trying to solve.
They tend to proceed ind epend ently, or to view id eas parallel to their own in earlier generations as "proto- semiotic. From this perspective, the question here is whether Panofsky's "semiotic of art" was as yet naive, or whether the d iscrepancies between his id eas and those of contemporary semiotics arise at least in part from the failure of semiotics fully to encounter or resolve the problems that shaped his en- quiry.
The application of the tools of semi- This content downloaded from A consistent vocabulary and method based squarely on the most concrete d imensions of language cod es conveys a sense of greater homogeneity than Panof- sky achieved.
But the question is still open as to whether aspects of semiotics that tran- scend the analysis of cod es and venture into what Sperber called the "symbolic" have really transcend ed the epistemological sta- tus of "synthetic intuition. Sebeok, ed. The Hague, , is virtually alone in the attempt to d evelop elements of a semiotic of visual form.
Rebecca West, Critical Inquiry, Winter, , and Originally published in Italian in Storia d ell'arte. He observed that new d isci- plines tend to seek a "genealogy" in prior statements of key principles, and that: "The result is generally a gratifying fallacy in as much as the texts which are recovered or unearthed for this purpose receive their relevancy precisely from the point of view which they are assumed to have generated , and not the re- verse" p.
Alice L. Mor- ton Cambrid ge, , a revised version of the French text published by Hermann Paris, Panofsky's further work in iconography and iconology concerns mostly Renaissance material. The approach is conceived , then, as a tool for analysis of an art that balances naturalism and id ealism in largely narra ive representation of pred ominantly literary subjects.
The question of how art can "mean" when it d oes not fit this mod el d oes not arise. It is also important that much iconographical work on Panofsky's pattern involves the painting of the Netherland s in the fifteenth century. Northern art is, in Worringer's classic characterization, "literary": it is more focussed than even contemporary Italian art on meaning conveyed by motifs that refer d irectly to literature. The immed iate concern here, however, is not the valid ity of these d istinctions, but their role in Panofsky's theory, and their implications for a rapprochement with semiotics.
The metaphor Panofsky uses tend s to d epict art as equivalent to the actualities which are the basis of experience. It is not clear whether this d iscrepancy has been simply missed , d ismissed as not pertinent, or resulted from the character of the metaphor and is hence extraneous to inferences about Panofsky's notion of the psycho- logical mechanism in question.
It is also interesting that his remark on the "limitations placed on iconography especially in this country," p. It seems, then, a response to the intensification of empirical bias in the American intellectual environment by the mid s. See foot- note Only this d etail of the meaning of Courbet's picture is ad d uced here. New York, He used the metaphor of the relationship between a hobby- horse and the horse it represents to elaborate the id ea that representations d o not simply imitate what they represent, but constitute a substitute that is significantly d ifferent in function.
Representation and represented must be linked by sufficient evid ence of "likeness" in form and function to be placed in the same class. In the case of the hobbyhorse, both the toy and the horse are "horses" and are "rid able. Interpretation of mean- ing, it follows, should consid er both the id entity of representation and subject, and the d istinction.
Panofsky's system d escribes the psychological mecha- nism for recognition of the first, but not the second. In effect, then, Panofsky's concepts red uce the mean- ing of art to the metaphoric or parad igmatic asso- ciation between representation and represented. His analytical system d oes not explicitly includ e recogni- tion of the change in context implied in the act of representation, nor d oes it provid e for analysis of the function of motifs in this context.
Based on the system of Muld er and Hervey, and ultimately Jakobson, the vocabulary ad apts linguistic concepts of the nature and systematic functioning of com- munication events to the analysis of non-linguistic communicative behavior. Since it applies semiotic concepts to behavior, it is a particularly valuable formulation of these concepts for any consid eration of their applicability to works of art. Panofsky's con- cepts would stand in somewhat d ifferent relationship to other uses of the same terms.
These d ifferences are technical, however. Leach's formulation has been chosen because it d etaches these terms from linguistic and narrative material. Muld er and S. Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism, see pp.
He argues that there is a cog- nitive level of meaning - which he calls "the sym- bolic"- that is not analyzable in terms of sign func- tions, and hence inaccessible to semiotics. The concept is elaborated on p. And , it emerges in the course of the d iscussion that the relationships among signs are highly structured and essential to the actualization of the meaning poten- tial of ind ivid ual signs.
Relationships among symbols are not characterized by such highly d eveloped sys- tems. In the case of signs, recognition of the "context" from which they are d rawn i. Much of this connection is not explicitly expressed in Leach, and where specific aspects of signs or symbols are isolated for d iscussion, it is not always entirely clear whether the metaphoric or metonymic qualities ana- lyzed are characteristic of the internal structure or the external relationships of the signa in question.
In Panofsky's own iconographical work, investigation typically treats each image as a separate problem with comparatively little d iscussion of the implications of their interrelations. His approach gives us no method or vocabulary for the d escription or analysis of these "metonymic" patterns within the work of art. This omission need not, however, lead to the conclusion that Panofsky exclud ed such observations absolutely from his approach. Certain kind s of structured rela- tions among images, such as narrative sequence, axial sequence, and spatial d evices for juxtapositions that transcend illusionistic verity have certainly been wid ely observed and incorporated into conclusions.
It may be simply that the significance of relationships that tie together, for example, the voussoir reliefs that frame Rogier's Mary Altarpiece, or the images d istributed along the center axis of Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Wed d ing have seemed so obvious to Panof- sky and others that no "method " has seemed necessary to their correct interpretation.
In examples like these, the relationship among images is certainly both sim- ple and prominent. There remain, however, two problems: correct inierpretation of more subtle struc- ture, and the logical importance of the kind and extent of structures images may form to evaluation of image as a semiotic concept.
As a humanist of the classical trad ition - whose notion of the "symbolic" came from the Neo-Kantian approach of Cassirer rather than from anthropological or linguistic formulations - Panofsky is a d escend ant of an intellectual trad ition hard to correlate with Levi-Strauss.
He is a likely cand id ate, in fact, for that group Levi-Strauss d enounced as retreating into "history as the last refuge of transcen- d ental humanism. Stuart Hughes, The Obstructed Path, p. Open navigation menu. Close suggestions Search Search. User Settings. Skip carousel. Carousel Previous.
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