Iconography, sense and nonsense

Imagine a painting on panel from the late Middle Ages. What we see is clear enough: Joseph at work in his carpentry workshop while the baby Jesus plays on the floor with wood shavings. On the street we see a pig. His muzzle looks just inside the doorway. We see numerous tools in the workshop and there is a whole stock of mousetraps.

Mousetraps? This is less strange then it seems. Joseph makes mousetraps, a logical ocupation for a carpenter. But with art historical spectacles on our noses we see a deeper layer. The art historian is capable of analyzing this image. He has an auxiliary science at hand: the iconology. This is the science that teaches us what things actually mean. An arrow through a heart means affected by infatuation. A dog stands for loyalty. A pearl? Purity. An opened oyster? This is an erotic symbol.

But what about the mousetraps of Joseph? The skillful iconologist knows what to do with them. The mousetraps are a symbol of the Christian message: God captures sinners in his nets and transforms them into believers, so the activity of Joseph must motivate the viewers of the painting to actively recruit unbelievers towards a good Christian life. The pig is a symbol of the dirt and filth that the devil is constantly trying to send us. The baby Jesus plays with the freshly planed wood shavings, which stand for purity.

The idea behind such analysis is based on the assumption that a painter never does anything without a hidden reason. It is impossible that the painter had a neighbor down the street who produced mousetraps and was willing to sit for the painter, dressed as Saint Joseph. Such a statement is too modern, one assumes that painting always has a didactic aim.

The iconology (the study of the hidden meanings; iconography is the description of it) is not a Dutch invention. The famous art historian Gombrich was the great exponent of this doctrine. But in 1939 Erwin Panofsky described for the first time the principles of iconology. He was the first to explicitly formulate that an artwork has several layers of meaning. His predecessors were very much focused on features, now it was time for the meanings. (It is no coincidence that around the same time in the linguistic science, the semantics, as a new component were developed.) Panofsky distinguished three steps. First is the pre-iconographical description: describe what you actually see. (A pig and mouse traps.) The second step, the actual iconography, describes the relationship between image and reality. For this step it is necessary that you know how people thought and acted in the time that the work was made. (A pig mean the devil to them, and in the mousetrap they recognized a contraption to catch sinners and convert them.) In the third step is the deeper meaning and significance of the work unraveled. (Joseph encourages the viewer to motivate unbelievers to repent.)

In the Netherlands, Utrecht University, in 1950 the first chair iconology was founded. In 1976 there was great public interest in this branch of science, partly because of the very successful exhibition 'Until education and enjoyment' in the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum. Professor E. de Jongh had his students have written the catalog. Suddenly, it became clear for the general public clearly that behind the images of the seventeenth century (and earlier) Masters, existed complex hidden realities for the art historian to unlock.

From the beginning, this method has sparked much discussion. The example of Joseph and the mousetraps is reality based, but it does not mean that now all iconological analysis makes sense. It is undeniable that some images are only to understood if one understands the underlying meaning. An old man with a scythe and hourglass symbolizes the time. Father Time was a known conventional character in both art and literature. On the one hand, the iconography was a wonderful method to understand images, but on the other hand, the method could sometimes (often) be much too rigorously applied. In his desire to interpretation one forgot that there were actually pig roaming the streets in the middle ages, without any symbolic meaning attached. The pig served as the garbage collector, why could a painter not portray the animal without further intention?

The criticism applied, just like the iconological thinking itself, not only to art, but also to literature. In 1978, Karel van het Reve, Professor of Slavic literature, the Huizinga held a now famous lecture entitled The riddle of illegibility. In it he wiped the floor with the literaturescientists, which he considered not in the least scientific. The illegibility of most of their studies was one thing. Worse was the tendency to see nothing but hidden meanings. One hundred years after the publication of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the literary science came up with all kinds of information that would be needed to fully appreciate this book, while Mark Twain wrote for a public that could wel do without them.

The same can be said of painting. Science was in the seventeenth century not needed to understand what that lady meant, with that half-naked breast, the silver coins in her hand, and in the other a oyster, read to cionsume. Nor is it now.

In the wake of the iconology came another development. Scientists started to collects in a systematic way pictural elements Supposed they saw a painting of a man disguised as a lion, then one could systematically search if such a picture orrurs elsewhere on a painting or print.

Pioneer of such data retrieval was Henri van de Waal, professor of art history at Leiden. He devised a system that tried to classify all symbols, themes and motifs in Western art. This system was developed in the fifties and enables the art historian to find if and where the mousetrap is used before in art. The classification divides the complete reality in ten chapters (religion and magic, nature, man and humanity, culture, etc.). These categories are divided in a very large number of branches.

van der Waals' work was later continued by a team of scientists. The system is now managed by the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD) and under the name Iconclass. An example can be found on their website.

Suppose we see a naked woman on the back. Her feet are washed by a servant and she has a letter in his hand. This is Bathsheba, a character from a well-known Bible story. The categorization is Iconclass now reads:

7 Bible (this is the main category)

71 Old Testament

71H Story of David

71H7 David and Bathsheba

71H71 David sees Bathsheba bathing

71H713 Bathsheba receives a letter from David

71H7131 Bathsheba with David's letter

For the sake of still further perfection, there are auxiliary characters, for example, to capture proper names in the system.

Also here it is again by no means accidental that the development of this system in the fifties coincided with the Universal Decimal Code (UDC) which was meant to cover all the topics in each book or magazine. It is expected that this systematic approach to large data collections will be unnecessary as these collections can be included in computer files and those files can in a short time be searched by keyword.

The iconographic method is mainly used for the analysis of works of the seventeenth century and earlier. In the nineteenth century, the realism, impressionism and then various modernist movements came along. About the intentions of those more contemporary painters we are more knowledgable. In the seventeenth-century the lack of information about the intention of artists leaves art historians great freedom. Yet the iconographic analysis also could be, and sometimes is  used for modern art too. Picasso's Guernica should not merely be taken literally, and the same goes for Chagall's rooftop sitting violinists.

The iconography is useful, but also prone to abuse. (Anyone who wants to check that, just take a tour in a museum for historical art.) In 2001 the Leiden art historian Eric J. Sluijter, now professor in Amsterdam, expressed the dilemma aptly. He quotes at the end of his essay Belering and Verhulling? (Teaching and disguising) Constantijn Huijgens, famous Dutch scientist and great art connoisseur, who in 1629 extensively praises Dutch painting (Vercierselen of our Father Lands), and states that the Dutch painters to realitically represent what they see around them, shapes, attitudes, people, animals, interiors, all ... No word on hidden meanings and moral lessons. (Ad van Gaalen 2011; Studio 2000 Magazine)