Reading Snippet - Art History - a Very Short Introduction (3)

How to read into art - the concept of iconography

In the previous chapters, the author has introduced us to a range of schools of thought that derived cultural-society observations, psychological status of artist and concepts of beauty from artwork. In some way, these thoughts may be over-complicating the appreciation of history of art, and have distracted us from the primary focus - to appreciate a piece of artwork in its own right.

The pure aesthetics of the artwork is as important as the 'beyond-the-artwork' learnings which could be uncovered. It contains messages which the artist wished to visualise, and it required the viewers to see symbols and signals which would allow such messages to be identified, unpicked and understood without the artist's written or spoken annotation. This is where "iconography" joins in the fold.

We could appreciate the aesthetics or historical contexts of an artwork without any knowledge of iconography, and that is how most of us appreciate the 'popular' or unfamiliar artwork - who drew it, the style/school, when it was drawn, why it was historically significant (commissioned by someone famous or for a specific occasion/famous artist/high price etc). But if we start looking deeper into the artwork, we will need to start thinking about why certain items were drawn into the picture, some were omitted, some were given distinctive colouring etc. This kind of analysis in order to reverse engineer why an artist formulated the scene and drew it out in a particular way, and what messages was he trying to input.

A very simple example would be a Greek sculpture of a naked man with a diadem - the diadem itself signalled that the man being carved out was Apollo. Another example was the Dutch paining "Maid with a Milk Jug", which revealed that there were graffiti painted into the back wall and a stove heater was also painted in which was not in the draft sketch - through these items, the artist wanted convey a message of love and warmth, maybe the maid was somehow in love?

By putting on this "iconography" hat when appreciating artwork, we can immediately add new dimensions to art appreciation, and also start describing the artwork beyond who/when/what/how. This act connects our visual observation with art history (what signals and ways of presenting were prevalent during the artist's time?), social history (why are those signals used to denote those meanings? what kinds of issues were top of people's mind that required signalling?) and artist's biography (what affected his choice of signals and the distribution of signals). This is a skill that adds lots of fun and experience into a simple exercise of art appreciation.

Art appreciation can be very simple, but by understanding history of art and utilising those knowledge and skills, we can get a lot more out of it, for both leisure and professional purposes