This volume explores a basic question in the historiography of art: the extent to which iconology was a homogenous research method in its own immutable right. By contributing to the rejection of the universalizing narrative, these case studies argue that there were many strands of iconology.
Methods that differed from the ‘canonised’ approach of Panofsky were proposed by Godefridus Johannes Hoogewerff and Hans Sedlmayr. Researchers affiliated with the Warburg Institute in London also chose to distance themselves from Panofsky’s work. Poland, in turn, was the breeding ground for yet another distinct variety of iconology. In Communist Czechoslovakia there were attempts to develop a ‘Marxist iconology’. This book, written by recognized experts in the field, examines these and other major strands of iconology, telling the tale of iconology’s reception in the countries formerly behind the Iron Curtain. Attitudes there ranged from enthusiastic acceptance in Poland, to critical reception in the Soviet Union, to reinterpretation in Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic, and, finally, to outright rejection in Romania.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, and historiography.
This volume explores a basic question in the historiography of art: the extent to which iconology was a homogenous research method in its own immutable right. By contributing to the rejection of the universalizing narrative, these case studies argue that there were many strands of iconology.
Part 1: Overview
1. Mapping Iconologies: Concepts and Contexts Part 2:
Diverse Concepts of Iconology and Their Use in Western and Central Europe
2.
Iconology or Iconography?: The Term Iconology in Erwin Panofskys Research on
Art
3. Iconology vs. Iconography: G. J. Hoogewerff's Seminal Distinctions
4.
The Political Iconology of Ernst H. Kantorowicz
5. Flat Iconology:
Metamorphoses of a Method in British Exile
6. Imperial Style and the Content
of Architecture: Concepts of Architectural Iconography of the 1930s and
1940s, and Their Afterlife
7. Hans Sedlmayrs Structural Analysis of the
Gothic Cathedral: An Iconological Study?
8. Zofia Ameisenowa, William S.
Heckscher and The Genesis of Iconology (Bonn 1964)
9. Erwin Panofsky, Hans
Sedlmayr, Lech Kalinowski, and the Meanders of Iconology
10. Jan Biaostocki:
From Iconology to the Aesthetics of Image Part 3: (Marxist) Reinterpretation
of Iconology Behind the Iron Curtain
11. Iconology Versus Iconography in the
Soviet Art-Historical Discourse, 1960s1980s
12. Sneaking In: Iconology and
the Process of Renewal in Late Soviet Estonian Art History
13. The Prague
School of Marxist Iconology
14. Helga Sciurie, Friedrich Möbius, and the Jena
Arbeitskreis für Ikonologie und Ikonographie in the German Democratic
Republic Part 4: Absence and Non-Acceptance of Iconology in Some Regions
Behind the Iron Curtain
15. The Absence of Iconology in Romania: A Possible
Answer
16. A Strange Place of Style in Iconology: A Case Study from
Southeastern Europe
Wojciech Baus is Professor at the Institute of Art History of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow.
Magdalena Kuniska is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Art History at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow.
