Gyorgy E. Szonyi - Postmodern Iconology - 2006

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The emblematic way of seeing

and its post-modern reception

Gyrgy E. Sznyi

The history of iconography and iconol-ogy shows close parallels to the changesin semiotics, literary and cultural theory fromessentialism through historicism and structur-alism to pragmatics-oriented reader-responsecriticism, hermeneutics, New Historicism andother post-structuralist trends.

Let us remember how Panofsky denediconography:

Iconographical analysis, dealing withimages, stories and allegories insteadof with motifs, presupposes, of course,much more than that familiarity withobjects and events which we acquire

by practical experience. It presupposesa familiarity with specic themes orconcepts as transmitted through literarysources, whether acquired by purposefulreading or by oral tradition.1

This would suggest that iconographicallydetermined imagery (for example the very con-

ventional emblems) appeals to a knowledge thatis shared by the whole (interpreting) commu-nity. And indeed, until recently scholars dealing

with iconographical/iconological interpretation

looked at this lore rooted in the Classical and Judeo-Christian traditions as something verystable, conservative, almost archetypal amongcultural representations. Led by this conviction,

scholars often used emblem books as visual dic-tionaries of the age in order to decipher hiddenmeanings of works of art.

Not that Panofsky, the founder of iconog-

raphy, wanted it exactly this way. He himself warned against the uncritical reliance on ico-nography, and pointed out the rather limiteduse of this descriptive method: Iconography is,therefore, a description and classication of im-ages much as ethnography is a description andclassication of human races: it is a limited and,as it were, ancillary study which informs us as to

when and where specic themes were visualizedby which specic motifs.2

By now we clearly see that the rise of re-

visionist, poststructuralist iconology was rsttriggered by the realization of the dangers ofthe dictionary analogy we have mentioned. This

was in fact rst voiced by traditional intellectualhistorians, who were not particularly interestedin poststructuralist argumentation. Peter Daly,

who earlier had associated himself with theessentialist camp, in 1993 called attention tothe risks that can follow from adapting oneselfto the dictionary analogy. Such a book, if used

without enough competence, can easily lead tomisunderstandings and misinterpretations; one

only needs to think of the traps laid by syno-nyms and homonyms.3

This danger, of course, characterizes notonly languages but all other sign systems, in-

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cluding iconographical symbols. Any semioticsystem can generate ambiguous meanings intwo dierent ways: 1/ the code as xed by

tradition/convention is itself equivocal; 2/ am-bivalence is generated during reception, i.e. viathe hermeneutical process. As for the former, inEuropean cultural history we encounter a veryold and very strong tradition of using the samesymbolic images in diametrically opposed sens-es: in bonam partem and in malam partem.4

As for the latter, to recognize this process weneed to empathize with some of the dilemmasraised by post-structuralism. Perhaps the mostimportant point is that if the meaning is gener-ated during the reception process between the

text and the audience, then the horizon of ex-pectation, as dened by Hans Robert Jauss, willchange from reader to reader, from communityto community, thus nally resulting in countless

variants of possible correct meanings.This phenomenon has been clearly described

by Daly, as follows:

Emblem books may be regarded asdictionaries which document meaningand use. They are not, however, infallibledecoders of the meanings of motifs in

various contexts because emblematic andiconographic codes do not convey singlesignations, but potentially pluri-signa-tions. The idea that emblems are basedon a one-to-one relationship of thing tomeaning, or image to meaning, is an over-simplication. As repositories of the ver-bal and visual culture of an earlier periodemblems can be an indispensable guide.But like dictionaries they can be used orabused. Seeing is believing, but what we

see is in a sense a function of what we be-lieve, or what we know. What we see alsodepends in some measure on what we arelooking for, and capable of nding.5

This very modern sounding thesis is actuallya direct descendant of Ernst Gombrichs opin-ion from 1948: Our attitude towards the image

is inextricably bound up with our whole ideaabout the universe6 and Our attitude towardswords and images we use continually varies. Itdiers according to the level of consciousness.What is rejected by wide-awake reason may stillbe accepted by our emotions. [...] In the historyof European thought this duality of attitudes issomehow reected in the continuous co-exist-ence of Neo-Platonic mysticism and Aristote-lian intellectualism.7

These views by now are fully accepted intraditional emblem research, too, or perhaps

we should say, by now emblem research has alsoundergone a theoretical reorientation as wecan see in the works of John Manning, DanielRussell and others. As these authors emphasize:perception as a physical-biological process has tobe distinguished fromseeing, as a socially condi-tioned cognitive act.

Catalyzed by post-structuralism (perhapsprimarily by deconstruction), this process ofmild revisionism has also produced rather sur-prising, extreme opinions. According to these

views, meanings are limitless, semiosis is un-limited. For example by the mid-1990s StephenOrgel came to the conclusion that emblems,

which earlier had been considered to have verystable meaning, are in fact the most uid, mostephemeral texts:

Even within individual handbooks, thebreadth of interpretive possibility oftenseems both endless, and, for modern read-ers looking for a key to Renaissance sym-bolism, distressingly arbitrary. Renaissance

iconographies and mythographies arein this respect the most post-modern oftexts, in which no meaning is conceived tobe inherent, all signication is constructed

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or applied; the uidity and ambivalence ofthe image are of the essence.8

The heart of the problem is that we do not(and cannot) know how to read a Renaissancepicture:

How do we know how to read a Ren-aissance image? In the simplest cases,

we have Renaissance guides to interpre-tation, in the form of iconologies andhandbooks of symbolism. Yet such casesimmediately become less simple when weobserve that reading imagery throughthem depends on reading texts, andtherefore shares in all the interpretiveambiguity of that process: the readings oftexts is a dialectical, and sometimes even

an adversarial, procedure.Interpretationdepends, moreover, on what texts we se-lect as relevant, and even on what we are

willing to treat as text.9

Orgel mobilizes a quite magnicent appara-tus to prove his truth. He presents numerous ex-amples from Shakespeare to illustrate when thedramatist actually subverts the traditional mean-ings of symbolic images, and, what is more, whensuch complex ambiguities are developed in his

text that they generate an innite and unstoppa-ble oscillation between alternatives of meaning.His most galvanizing argument is the exegesis ofthe pelican image. As we know, in Christian ty-pology this bird is the symbol of Christs self-sac-rice, based on the pre-modern scientic notionthat the pelican mother feeds her children withher own blood (see [g. 1], a traditional pelicanimage from a Hungarian publication of 1702).

According to Orgel, this symbolic imagecarries more than one ambiguity. To begin with,the mother-bird stands for the male Christ.

The Saviour thus changes gender, the kinglymale giving way to the nurturing founder ofthe Catholic Church. Furthermore, a really un-nerving tension can be generated by consider-

THEEMBLEMATICWAYOFSEEINGANDITSPOST-MODERNRECEPTION

1. A Pelican, from Wolfgangus Frantius (transl. by Gspr Miskolczi), Egy jeles Vad-Kert, Avagy az oktalanllatoknak [...] Historiaja (Ltsn 1702)

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ing the whole context of the image. The littlepelicans, accepting the blood of their mother,thus commit cannibalistic matricide. This is the

case of interpretation when overstanding10

(asopposed to understanding) leads to such newand exciting readings which do not seek whatis said (or shown by the image), but rather whatis concealed.

Such an approach to texts and images, ofcourse, has not been the privilege of moderncritics. The moral of Orgels argument is thatany member of an interpretive community atany time could subvert the traditions and sym-bols of his/her own community, and in fact greatartists have always done so.

InRichard IIthe old John of Gaunt turns tohis cousin, the young king, with the followingbitter remark:

O, spare me not, my brother Edwards son;

That blood already, like the pelican,Hast thou tapped out and drunkenly ca-roused.(2.1.1247)

The quotation shows that Shakespeare didaccomplish the subversive step and used the im-age of the self-sacricing pelican to refer to thecannibalistic cruelty of the young generation.Orgel dryly comments: The only way to havethe topos to have it both ways.11

It seems that one has to nd the radical andsubversive meaning only once; then it continuesits life as if by itself. Shakespeare also recycledthe image of the cannibalistic young pelicans in King Lear, but he also managed to give a newtwist to it. Lear speaks about his pelicandaughters (3.4.77), and the power of the imageis that the matricide here becomes the symbol

of even more general lial ingratitude. Although as Orgel admits there is no Renaissance dic-tionary of symbols that would allow this radicalreading, it seems to be right to claim that this

fact should be no impediment to such an under-standing.12

Let us try once again to formulate the pur-

poses of iconography and iconology, taking intoconsideration the classical denitions of Pan-ofsky as well as the recent, post-structuralistconcerns. An iconographical program meansthat ideas or stories are represented by meansof visual or verbal images and the basis of theirunderstanding will be a body of knowledge, con-

ventionally shared by the interpretive commu-nity. This is the cultural code. For the classicsof iconology, such as Panofsky or Gombrich,the point of interpretation was a correct, or atleast a less wrong reading, that is acquiring the

code and using it for the sake of meaning.Post-structuralist iconology seems to step

beyond this program, and the new aims are bestrepresented by W. J. T. Mitchell. For him iconol-ogy should not be interested in the reception, the

generation of meaning only, but rather in an evenmore pragmatic way it should concentrate on theintellectual and emotional reactions triggered bythose meanings, which form power relations anda general politics of using words and images.Mitchell suggests the following coordinates inmapping and evaluating the politics of images:iconophobia, iconophilia / fetishism, iconoclasm, andidolatry. His two groundbreaking books, Iconol-ogy (1986) and Picture Theory (1994) are devotedto this program, thus creating the conceptualframework of post-structuralist iconology.

As for the politics of images, Mitchells ini-tial thesis is that in European culture words andimages have always been opposed to each other.Western thought has basically been logocen-tric, and has tried to distinguish between wordsand images by asserting a fundamental dier-

ence, always emphasizing the superiority of theformer. In such a context comparisons betweenthe two media or their identication have al-

ways been considered subversive, as one can

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see from the various debates relating to the utpictura poesis principle, or the question of ek-phrasis. These deliberations considered images

as the centre of some particular (and dangerous)power that has to be curbed, controlled, and atthe same time exploited.13 According to thissituation, European philosophers, aestheticiansand theorists of art and literature have alwaysfelt compelled to take side in these debates andbecome iconophiles or iconophobes. Positionsin these debates have also meant power-rela-tions wrapped in value-judgements.14 Mitchellsees the more or less hidden agenda of thisstrife as follows:

The dialectic of word and image seemsto be constant in the fabric of signs thata culture weaves around itself. What var-ies is the precise nature of the weave, therelation of warp and woof. The history ofculture is in part the story of a protractedstruggle for dominance between picto-rial and linguistic signs, each claimingfor itself certain proprietary rights ona nature to which only it has access.

At some moments this struggle seems tosettle into a relationship of free exchangealong open borders; at other times (as inLessings Laocoon) the borders are closedand a separate peace is declared. Amongthe most interesting and complex ver-sions of this struggle is what might becalled the relationship of subversion, in

which language or imagery looks intoits own heart and nds lurking there itsopposite number. One version of thisrelation has haunted the philosophy oflanguage since the rise of empiricism, the

suspicion that beneath words, beneathideas, the ultimate reference in the mindis the image, the impression of outwardexperience printed, painted, or reected

in the surface of consciousness. It wasthis subversive image that Wittgensteinsought to expel from language, which

the behaviourists sought to purge frompsychology, and which contemporary art-theorists have sought to cast out of pic-torial representation itself. The modernpictorial image, like the ancient notionof likeness, is at least revealed to belinguistic in its inner workings.15

Why is it, Mitchell asks, that the relationshipbetween words and images is experienced so in-tensely and politicized by theorists and artistsalike? Each chapter of his second book, Picture

Theory, examines one aspect of this conict, re-search into which he divides into the followingareas: 1/ the study of those esthetical and criticalsystems that have been trying to maintain thedemarcation line between the branches of art,especially between verbal and visual expression;2/ the study of those artistic practices that, inspite of the above theoretical eorts, subvertedand transgressed the articially created barriersbetween space and time, eye and ear, naturaland conventional, iconic and symbolic (witha special reference to Gesamtkunstwerke, suchas emblems, cartoons, theatre, lm, and televi-sion); and nally 3/ the study of pragmatics, thatis the use of images as opposed to the study ofmeaning or theory of images. He summarizeshis polemical program as follows:

One claim ofPicture Theory is thatthe interaction of pictures and textsis constitutive of representation assuch: all media are mixed media,and all representations are hetero-

geneous; there are no purely visualor verbal arts, though the impulseto purify media is one of the centralutopian gestures of modernism.16


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Relying on revisionist theory as well as onhis own practical observations, Mitchell assertsthat the dierences between images and lan-

guage are not merely formal matters, but theyare linked to fundamental ideological divisions.In practice, they are linked to things like thedierence between the (speaking) self and the(seen) other; between telling and showing; be-tween hearsay and eyewitness testimony; be-tween words (heard, quoted, inscribed) and ob-jects or actions (seen, depicted, described), etc.He borrows Michel de Certeaus terminology todescribe these dierences: a heterology of rep-resentation.17 Mitchells post-modern concerns,of course, are not limited to the examination of

modern art and the problems of modernism. Hetries to embrace the whole history of iconopho-bia, iconoclasm and iconophilia, reaching backto the ancient practice of ekphrasis, the Renais-sance emblems, or the multimedial program of(pre)Romanticism, as we know from his excel-lent studies of Blakes composite art.18

Thinking over once again the issues and ap-proaches I have reviewed in this essay, we canconclude that iconography and iconology are

going to nd their place even among the mostradical critical trends which deliberately try toemphasize their detachment from the history ofideas as well as from traditional semiotics. The

variety of opinions concerning early modernemblematics also make us realise that no syn-thesis in this research eld has been achieved sofar, in fact we should not expect anything like

that even in the future. Such a synthesis is notactually needed, as the study of images has beenand remains more a methodology and a special

area of investigation than an independent criti-cal theory having its own philosophy.As we have seen, various approaches such as

source-studies, history of ideas, art history, aes-thetics, literary interpretation, post-structural-ist cultural theory and many more can protfrom iconological considerations, but they willinterpret the results according to their specicconvictions and assumptions. One thing is cer-tain: the complex study of early modern culture

will not live without this methodology, no mat-ter in what conceptual frame it will utilize the

results and elaborate on them. Future studies inemblematics certainly should not end in thedeconstruction of the artistic texts or images,nor in the naive eort to reconstruct the au-thors intention, but rather in a construction ofcreated worlds, artistic universes, for ourselves,interpretive communities. The mechanism ofsuch a construction may very well be similar tothe procedure Shakespeare suggests in the caseof Richard II:

King Richard: My brain Ill prove thefemale to my soul,My soul the father, and those two beget

A generation of still-breeding thoughts;And these same thoughts people this lit-tle world,In humours like the people of this world.(5.5.610)

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1 Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, London1993, p. 61.

2 Panofsky (see note 1), p. 57.

3 Cf. Peter M. Daly, Teaching Shakespeare and the Em-

blem. A Lecture and Bibliography, Wolfville 1993, pas-sim.

4 Cf. Peter M. Daly,Literature in the Light of the Emblem.Structural Parallels between the Emblem and Literature inthe Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Toronto 1998[1979].

5 Daly (note 3), p. 20.

6 Ernst H. Gombrich, Icones Symbolicae: Philoso-

phies of Symbolism and Their Bearing on Art (1948),

in: idem, Symbolic Images (Studies on RenaissanceIconology, 19481972), London 1978, p. 125.

7 Gombrich (note 6), p. 179.

8 Stephen Orgel, Gendering the Crown, in: Margareta

de Grazia et al. (ed.), Subject and Object in RenaissanceCulture, Cambridge 1996, p. 136.

9 Orgel (note 8), p. 133.

10 Jonathan Cullers term, see Umberto Eco, Interpreta-tion and Overinterpretation. Umberto Eco with RichardRorty, Jonathan Culler, Christine BrookeRose, ed. StefanCollini, Cambridge New York 1992, pp. 114115.

11 Orgel (note 8), p. 134.

12 Orgel is actually wrong in restricting the original

traditional meaning to only one interpretation.

A quick survey of sources and dictionaries of sym-

bols brings to light that from the very beginnings the

pelican image had rather diverting interpretations.

Physiologus suggested that the young pelicans, when

growing up, hit their parents, who because of this

killed their young out of anger. Later they bitterly

regretted their rage and oered their own blood to

bring them back to life. According to another ver-

sion, it was the mother pelican that killed the small

ones and the father, returning, pierced his chest to

give blood to revive the children. Yet another tra-

dition asserts that it was the snake which sneaked

into the nest and killed the chickens, after which

the returning parents together gave blood to bring

back their children to life. The continuation of this

story (told by Wolfgang Franzius and reinterpreted

by the Hungarian Gspr Miskolczi) is that some of

the reviving young pelicans, noticing their mother

had completely exhausted herself, would in turn giveblood to the dying mother, while others would not

do so. The conclusion is: There are good and bad

children. The good ones take care of their mother

while the bad ones will not... (quoted from Henrik

Farkas, Legendk llatvilga [Mythical beasts], Buda-

pest 1982, p. 125). See also James Hall, Dictionary ofSubjects and Symbols in Art, New York 1974, pp. 86,238 and George Ferguson, Signs & Symbols in ChristianArt, London 1961, p. 23.

13 A Hungarian scholar, Mnika Medvegy, compares

this attitude to double bind, a term used in psy-

choanalysis. It is an attraction and aversion at the

same time that longs for the beautiful representationof images, but still remains distrustful of them. See

Mnika Medvegy, Egy festmny narrativlsnak

mdjai s poetolgiai dimenzii. E. T. A. Homann:

Doge s dogaressa, in: Attila Kiss Gyrgy E.

Sznyi (ed.), Sz s kp. A mvszi kifejezs szemiotikjas ikonogrja [Word and Image. The semiotics andiconography of artistic expression] (Ikonolgia s

mrtelmezs 9), Szeged 2002, pp. 285299.

14 W. J. Thomas Mitchell,Iconology. Image, Text, Ideolog y,Chicago 1986, pp. 4246. An excellent and complex

analysis of the politics of images in the pre-aestheti-

cal (i.e. pre-Renaissance) age can be found in Hans

Belting,Bild und Kult. Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor demZeitalter der Kunst, Mnchen 1990.

15 Mitchell (see note 13), p. 43.

16 W. J. Thomas Mitchell,Picture Theory , Chicago 1994,p. 5.

17 Michel de Certeau,Heterologies: Discourse on the Other,Minneapolis 1986, quoted by Mitchell (note 15), p. 5.

18 His rst monograph was devoted to Blakes CompositeArt, Princeton 1978 but he has revisited this artist inPicture Theory : Visible Language: Blakes Art of Writing,

1994, pp. 111 151.


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