Ideology and IconologyAuthor(s): Giulio Carlo Argan and Rebecca WestReviewed work(s):Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Winter, 1975), pp. 297-305Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1342905 .Accessed: 30/08/2012 07:43

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Ideology and Iconology

Giulio Carlo Argan

Translated by Rebecca West

Is it possible to compose a history of images? It is obvious that history can be composed only from that which is intrinsically historical; history has an order of its own because it interprets and clarifies an order which

already exists in the facts. But is there an order in the birth, multiplica- tion, combination, dissolution and re-synthesis of images? Mannerism had discredited or demystified form with its pretense of reproducing an order which does not exist in reality. But is the world of existence, like the world of images, chaos or cosmos?

Erwin Panofsky's' great merit consists in having understood that, in

spite of its confused appearance, the world of images is an ordered world and that it is possible to do the history of art as the history of

images. In order to do this, he had to begin, as indeed he did, with the demonstration that classical art, in spite of the deep-rooted theoretical certitude, is also an art of the image; its forms are nothing if not images to which one tries to attribute the consistency of concepts, with the sole result of demonstrating that even concepts are images and that the intel- lect is still another sector or segment of the image.

Warburg and his circle in Hamburg, in which Panofsky first began to develop his ideas, had already demonstrated with patient philological research that the artistic culture of the Renaissance lives by the legacy of images received from classical antiquity. It lives, in other words, by his-

1. See, e.g., Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, N.Y., 1957; Harmondsworth, 1970); Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York, 1939, 1962, 1967); Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (New York, 1969); Idea: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeshicte der alteren Kunsttheorie

(Leipzig and Berlin, 1924) [Idea: a concept in art theory, trans. Joseph J. S. Peake (Columbia, S.C., 1968)].

297

298 Giulio Carlo Argan Ideology and Iconology

torical images. Before Christian revelation, when the essence of the true was still hidden under the veil of appearances, all knowledge was made

up of images; the wisdom of the ancients in interpreting the universal

allegory of nature was the sign of the divine and the proof of its eternity. The divine in things is myth; classical art is the representation of a

mythological universe, a necessary type of representation since myth does not exist except through representation. Myth is tied to form, and art is the expression of a mythic conception of the world. The return to the ancient or, more precisely, the palingenesis of the ancient is the very meaning of the history of art as cyclical and non-evolutive history. An- cient images reach the new humanistic culture through the obscurity, indistinctness, and irrationality of the Middle Ages, a fact which once

again demonstrates their survival in the depths and their transmission

along with the very flux of existence.

Panofsky's iconological method has nothing to do with that sub-

sidiary science of art history known as iconography, a science which can be reduced finally to the formation of classes of objects having certain common countersigns. It is instead an historical method because it forms series, not classes; that is, it reconstructs the development and the con- tinuation of traditions of images. We must not forget that Panofsky built on the systematic study of canons and on the principles of authority in Renaissance classicism: perspective, proportion, idea. But his conclusion, which must be reached by anyone who, like Panofsky, has seriously studied Cassirer's theory of symbolic forms, was this: in spite of mathematical or philosophical foundations, perspective and propor- tional systems are still iconologies of space and of the human body. They do not indicate a higher level of consciousness but, rather, point to the substantial analogy between those forms retained as conscious and those retained as images of the unconscious.

The process of traditions of images as Panofsky reconstructed it is tortuous, fortuitous, full of uncertainty, past echoes, and unexpected turns. It absolutely does not possess a logic; it has no constant direction,

Giulio Carlo Argan, who has seriously influenced the course of art

history and criticism in postwar Italy, is professor of modern (post- medieval) art at the University of Rome. He has written on Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Borromini, Brunelleschi, and Gropius and three volumes of critical essays on modern art. His Skira volume on Baroque art, Europe of the Capitals, is his only major work published in English. "Ideology and Iconology" originally appeared in Italian in the journal Storia dell'arte, which he edits, and in Psicon. Rebecca West, translator of this article and assistant professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the Univer- sity of Chicago, presently is collaborating on a translation of Dario Fo's theater.

Critical Inquiry Winter 1975 299

no goal. But we are not saying that it does not have its own order. The artist is one who creates and has a technique, who surely has an order because he presupposes a project and a determined succession of acts. It is the practical exigency of making that recalls past, often remote, even at times obliterated, experiences to the present moment, to the immedi-

acy of the thing to be made. It is the order of making that gives order to mnemonic recoveries and to the movement of the imagination. Obvi-

ously it is not a question of elaborated materials, since the mnemonic datum is often partial and imprecise and will assume a meaning only later. The iconologist knows that he cannot allow himself the luxury of

working with selected materials of certified artistic worth. In order to

study the genesis of art he must start with something which is not yet (or no longer) artistic. He gathers together the greatest number possible of those documents directly or indirectly related to the imagistic theme which he has decided to consider. He is like a geographer who studies a water course:- he must isolate its origin, calculate its path, keep in mind all of its branches, and then describe its behavior which depends upon its

tendency to overflow, rush, or stagnate. It can of course happen that an iconological theme is presented in

some famous masterpiece which magnifies it, but more often its pres- ence or its passage is signalled by artistically impoverished figurations-by second- or third-hand documents such as illustrations, popular publications, plaques, monies, playing cards, and such. In some cases it can be a question of vicarious or provisory documents such as

copies or derivations based on lost works of art. But it is certainly symp- tomatic that the storiographer of the iconological method prefers this

copious and "worthless" imagery. The image which is worn out, con- sumed, recited for the thousandth time, or deformed by the careless habit by which it has been adapted to the most varied occasions is often much more eloquent for the historian of the image than the scholarly, purified, controlled version which is established by the lucid structure of a formal system. The image which is discredited or sometimes contami- nated by ingenuous associations, combinations, or even by banal confu- sions (through assonance) with other latent images in the memory is the document of a culture of the diffused image; it is a signifiant to which

may be attributed, as to the words of a spoken language, many signifis. For this reason iconologism, much more than W61fflinian formalism, confronts the problematic of art as that of linguistic structures. Panofsky, not W61fflin, was the Saussure of art history. Needless to say, therefore, that by going back to the original seeds of the image and

following their growth in the fecund ground of the collective uncon- scious, one can thereby deduce the common motivation of the artistic fact's production and fruition, thus re-establishing the unity of the aesthetic act and the continuity between the genetic and the fruitive history of the work of art.

300 Giulio Carlo Argan Ideology and Iconology

Panofsky often declared himself to be an historian of art, even a

philologist in the humanistic sense of the term, and not a gatherer of

iconological documents. His objective remained, in spite of all else, the value judgment which, however, he preferred to call "re-creative synthe- sis." "It is not true," he said, "that the art historian first constitutes his

object through a re-creative synthesis and then begins his archaeological research, as one first buys a ticket and then boards the train. Actually, the two processes do not occur successively, but rather proceeed in an interwoven manner; not only does the re-creative synthesis serve as a basis for the archaeological research, but the latter in its turn serves as a basis for the process of re-creation. Both qualify and correct each other in a reciprocal relationship." The work of the iconologist is completely different from that of the iconographer; the latter describes the conno- tations of the figure as an entomologist describes the characteristics of an insect; the former synthesizes, not analyzes, because he reconstructs the

previous existence of the image and demonstrates the necessity of its rebirth in that present absolute which is the work of art.

The iconological method is often criticized by many, as is the his-

tory of criticism, for having a purely subsidiary utility. Granting, for the sake of argument, it is said, that it can be interesting to explain the

meaning of a work whose subject escapes us (for example, an allegorical composition), it is a fact that most of the time it does not escape us, and from the first glance we know if the painting before us represents the crucifixion or Saint Jerome Penitent, a portrait, a landscape, or a still life. Is it worth the trouble to undertake laborious research in order to reconstruct, at best, the history of allegory, of myth, of figurations, or of

genres? One could answer that the iconological method has produced excellent results even when the work of art is not figurative, as Wittkower's2 and Krautheimer's3 illuminating contributions to the his-

tory of architecture have demonstrated. Or one could ask the objector to indicate one figurative work which is not in some way allegorical, since

allegorization is a constant, constitutive, and structuring process of rep- resentation. Moreover, the "disreputable" subject is never missing, and the critic who wishes to study the artistic phenomenon in its integrity cannot help but deal with it. In order to find a work of art without a

subject we would have to come to our own times, to works that exclude a

subject in a polemical manner, but then the very lack of a defined subject constitutes a theme, as in the case of those humorous vignettes under which is written "without words." If Raphael portrays the Madonna with Child in a way different from that of Duccio, there must be a reason, and we cannot guess it simply by attributing all the iconographical newness to

2. See, e.g., Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London, 1949; most recently Baltimore, 1973).

3. See, e.g., Richard Krautheimer, Studies in Early Christian, Medieval and Renaissance

Arts, trans. Alfred Frazer et al. (New York, 1969).

Critical Inquiry Winter 1975 301

the brilliant inventiveness of the artist. From Raphael to Duccio, the

image of Madonna with Child has made a long voyage whose stations

certainly cannot be reduced to the interpretations which the theme has received from the great masters. Obviously, that which a superficial kind of criticism attributes to the imaginative will of Raphael is actually a

process of the imagination which can be researched and reconstructed with the inevitable result of discovering that the materials elaborated in the course of that process are perfectly separate cultural experiences.

Iconological research can also be done into the portrait, the land-

scape, or the still life, but it certainly would not consist in ascertaining who the characters are, or what place, fruit, or flower we see rep- resented. The iconology of a portrait is the pose, the dress, the social or

psychological meaning which can be attributed to the figure; the iconol-

ogy of a landscape or of a still life is the mode of perspective, the

configurations, the rendering of places and things as significant. Titian's

portrait of Charles V on horseback obviously partakes of the icono-

graphic class of portraits of Charles V or even of the more extended class of warriors on horseback. But this is a classification which is of no use to history (if not perhaps occasionally as a method of dating), just as classification according to technique, such as "oil painting on canvas," is of no use. An iconological historian like Panofsky would place it instead in the series (not class) of portraits with historico-allegorical significance. He would then proceed to establish that significance and, bearing in mind the occasion for which the portrait was painted (the victory over the Protestants at Muhlberg), he would explain that the emperor, armed with a lance like any common soldier and in the act of emerging from a

symbolic forest, is here portrayed as miles christianus. All this would still be nothing more than an historical curiosity if the choice of theme had not influenced the psychological interpretation of the character, as is easily seen when this painting is compared with others painted by Titian him- self (for example, the one in Munich). We need only think then of Poussin, Claude Lorrain,-or Corot in order to be persuaded that there is an iconology of landscape easily recuperable in the choice of perspective and in naturalistic components such as trees, rocks, water, and clouds, as well as in the choice of season and time of day. Nor does it help to invoke the instinctive emotion of the artist as he stands before the "real" (given that it is a question of real landscapes), since he has chosen that reality and pursued that emotion; of course the emotion is still a fact of the memory-imagination, even if brought about by some external stimulus. Even in the most "objective" of seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes, iconological research demonstrates how an intense activity of the imagi- nation is joined to observation; diverse meanings, recondite symbologies determine the choice of objects (fruits, flowers, game, fish, crystals, mu- sical instruments, etc.), and there is a profound sense of space and time in the grouping and in the objects themselves. If we did not already

302 Giulio Carlo Argan Ideology and Iconology

know that a still life often has allegorical or allusive meanings (the five senses, memento mori, vanitas rerum, etc.), we would still have to deduce that a still life is also an allegory.

Not only those images that come from the inexhaustible mine of

antiquity, but also those that depend on sensory experience can be found gathered together helter-skelter by the artist's imagination. There are also images which we could call "technical" and which are part of the

baggage of notions that the artist carries with him along with the tools of his trade; all those representative habits or conventions which Gombrich4 has studied, for example, and which constitute the catalyst of art. Without those conventions which form a sort of code common to artist and spectator, the work would be indecipherable, and art, not

acting on a specific and accepted cultural terrain, would not collaborate, as it often does, to modify that terrain.

Panofsky was perhaps too modest when he said that iconology is concerned with the subject and not with the forms of works of art. If a Madonna with Child by Raphael is not simply a cult object but a work of art which visibly expresses the tie between natural and divine which can be seen in a determined historical moment, this meaning is not estab- lished solely by the fact that the madonna is a beautiful woman seated in a lovely landscape but also by the progression of the lines which is the same in figure and in landscape, by the relationship between the blue of her cloak and the blue of the sky, and by the subtleties of color which make one feel the diffused presence of the atmosphere. And with this we are already in that hortus conclusus known as style, in which the ideal- formalist critic gets up on tiptoe requesting silence with his finger to his

lips so that the work might speak for itself. But the work is silent. It is

always the scholar alone who speaks in the presence of the work of art, and his entire problem consists in deciding what kind of talking he should do.

But even when limiting itself to the subject, iconological research is still not partial or secondary. Even in architecture, in ornamentation, in the arts which are called minor because of an old classicistic prejudice, the morphology is saturated with iconological meanings. The research which has been done in the great typologies of the temple with a central

plan or of the dome could easily be extended to the particulars of the cornices and the friezes, and as for ornament, processes of the styliza- tion and repetition of images could be studied. As for the applied arts, the innumerable and very subtle threads which link them to custom could be examined. If it is possible to do iconological history of perspec-

4. See, e.g., E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1956; Bollingen Series 35, no. 5 (London and New York, 1960; most recently London and Princeton, N.J., 1972); Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London, 1966; London and New York, 1971).

Critical Inquiry Winter 1975 303

tive, proportions, anatomy, representational conventions, symbolic ref- erences of color, and even of rituality and gesturality in technique, no one has said that it must stop there and that it is not possible to study historically, like so many other iconologies, line, chiaroscuro, tone, pen- strokes, and so forth. It certainly would be possible and it would be a

very useful kind of research, one to recommend to young art historians desirous of exploring new fields. The name would change, however, and this research would no longer be called iconology but, following modern

terminology, semantics or, more exactly, semiotics.

Returning to that mass of documents gathered together by the

iconologist as he follows the main thread of an image until it emerges in the end as a great work of art, as a true historical fact, it is immediately necessary to observe that not all the documents will turn out to be used or equally used; and of those that are used we cannot say that they were evoked or elaborated following some logical or chronological order. We are in the interior workshop of the artist and,just as in any workshop, we find a little of everything: works already completed, studies, sketches, drawings, notes. Furthermore we find casts, prints, reproductions of ancient and modern things which the interested artist has gathered for

possible future works; moreover there are costumes, drapes, carpets, rags, tools, and junk of every sort which might serve to dress a model or

improvise an ambience. Finally, there are canvases, boards, frames, jars of paints, brushes, and pencils. All that raw material is there because it

might be of use, not necessarily to the work in progress or in mind but to all the works which are at the stage of pure possibility or intentionality. The raw materials are the instruments of the artist's poetics more than of his actual work, and often the artist himself will declare that to do the

figure of a king, he prefers to use an old velvet drape rather than a real regal cloak. Gainsborough painted his landscapes in his studio, using as models some pebbles or bits of bark which he had picked up on a walk.

Obviously they were not real models but stimuli for the working of his

memory-imagination. When, in the course of the artist's work, a more or less remote memory is evoked and brought to the surface, you can be sure that the movement of his imagination is connected to that of his hand or at least to the interest in his work in progress.

All well and good, one might say, but if between the image which the artist creates and the remote iconic predecessor there is no possible historical correlation, why indicate a link which objectively does not exist? Because the fact that the correlation is neither conscious nor direct does not demonstrate that it does not exist at the unconscious level and that it does not function as a profound motivational force. As research goes deeper, the iconological themes tend to group themselves into a few thematics that are found in all ages and in all cultures. Beyond the historical limits of art it is possible to reduce all motivations of human

304 Giulio Carlo Argan Ideology and Iconology

behavior to two basic impulses (as did Marcuse)5--Eros and

Thanatos--just as it is also possible to reduce all languages to a few essen- tial roots, as Thass-Thienemann demonstrated.

Only when all this is recognized will the entire phenomenic area of art appear as an immense net of interacting relationships, with or with- out historical awareness of the connections. And we do not mean by this that it is impossible to speak of Brunelleschi's or Michelangelo's dome without bringing to bear the Indian stupa or the constant link between centralized architectonic form and the idea of the cosmos, any more than it is impossible to speak of a Madonna with Child by Raphael without recalling the mater matuta mediterranea. We have already heard too much of this sort of chatter. We are all persuaded, and Panofsky himself always preached it, that historical research is more valid the more circumscribed and localized it is. The important thing is that re- search lead not to the isolation of a fact or a group of facts but to the individuation of a knot of relationships and that it be recognized that

beyond the illuminated zone in which research moves these relationships extend and branch off infinitely into the immense area of artistic

phenomena of no matter what period or culture. Thus the link which across long and obscure paths joins Michelangelo's Last Judgment to a

Polynesian idol will not be seen as a metaphysical sameness of aesthetic worth but as an historical connection which can, if we desire it, be recon- structed and described.

In many aspects, then, the iconological method begun by Panofsky, although by design rigidly philological, can be qualified as the most modern and efficacious of historiographic methods, open moreover to

great future developments which truthfully it has, not as yet experi- enced, perhaps because Panofsky's own followers have reduced its range, making of it an almost esoteric science for a few initiates and

providing thereby a case for the ideal-formalists who consider it a heterodox methodology.

Returning, as we conclude, to our point of departure, we .must

acknowledge before all else that the iconological method has the merit of

having postulated all the premises for a transcendence of the europocentric limits of the history of art, demonstrating that form, so- called supreme worth of Western art and the basis for argument of its intellectual superiority, is nothing more than a variety of the image; more precisely, it is the method by which the image of the periods known as "classical" is qualified and legitimized. Bringing art from the "intellectual" plane to the plane of individual and collective psychology allows the way to be opened toward a confluence of psychoanalytic and sociological research, toward the dialectical encounter of the Freudian- Jungian line with the Marxist line, a meeting which is one of the essen-

5. See, e.g., Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston, 1955; most recently New York, 1962; London, 1970).

Critical Inquiry Winter 1975 305

tial goals of today's culture. The level of possible connection is the

phenomenological level; in this sense the iconological method owes much, in spite of the apparent discrepancy, to the method of pure visibil-

ity, since wherever an image is brought to perception through a techni- cal procedure there is surely intentionality or desire of creating art. For this reason we would like to see iconological research extended far

beyond the arts traditionally known as figurative, into the vast fields of

urbanology and of architecture, into ornamentation and Kunstindustrie, all already indicated by Riegl6 as the most propitious areas for research and discovery.

6. See, e.g., Alois Riegl, Die Spaitromische Kunst-Industrie Nach den Funden in

Osterreich-Ungarn dargestellt von Alois Riegl (Wien, 1901-23); Part I as Spiitr6mische Kunst- Industrie, ed. Otto Picht (Wien, 1927; Darmstadt, 1964).