Iconography Essay

Viewing a work of art is a multidimensional phenomenon. There is the primary act of looking, wherein one sees a combination of shapes and lines and can immediately identify it as a familiar object. For example, the red, rounded figure on the table in a given painting, whose circumference lessens towards its bottoms and which protrudes a thin, brown stem from its top, is fairly quickly identifiable to the viewer as an apple. However, there is a level of looking at art that is secondary to this, which was notably commented on by German art historian Erwin Panofsky. Artists use certain visual motifs that refer to a theme or concept -- which Panofsky refers to as an image. The study of these images, alone and in collection, is what the historian uses to define iconographic analysis or, in more simple terms, iconography. By understanding the ideas that are denoted by the imagery in art, the viewer is better able to understand the meaning of the artwork itself.

By its very nature, religious art aims to forge some kind of connection between the human viewer and the holy. Specific imagery in artwork can provide a concrete, readable representation of outside concepts that are otherwise too broad and complex to express literally. This enables religious stories, dogma, and ritual to be conveyed in a way that, once identified in the image, imparts the desired connection to the religion in the viewer. Religious art standardizes these images so that they apply to the entire canon of work, and so work using similar icons can have be understood as having comparable