Iconology: Word to Image
by Pier Pietro Brunelli (translated by Meri Lantto)
The discipline that mainly studies the ‘sense’ of images is semiotics, but within there are multiple theories and points of view, at times nonconforming. For certain aspects studying the meaning of words is simpler, even machines with enough ‘artificial intelligence’ to have a more or less deep conversation with have been created. However, it is far from creating a robot that can read and interpret complex images.
The effect an image has on senses or how it is communicated can be a very subjective process, where as a word gives more room for objectivity.
From a psychological point of view, the simple house drawn by a four-year-old boy, with the windows like eyes and the door that resembles a mouth, can indicate the face of the mother. A twirl of color surrounding a deformed creature with a black hole as a mouth, that is ‘Scream’ by Munch, evokes an abyssal desperation. The ‘language of images’, therefore, presents psychological and cultural evocations that are based on ‘non discreet’ codes, namely analogical, that then make sense according to ways, not fully translatable through words.
On the other hand, words can express texts that images cannot; Umberto Eco, in his Trattato di semiotica generale, makes an example: ‘the sun will rise again’ that cannot be expressed as an image while ‘the sun rises’ can be. However, the power of the image is in the possibility to express the sunrise in infinite ways, maybe in more than the sun actually does every dawn.
In my courses of ‘psychology and semiotics of advertising’ I like to say that the copywriter should preoccupy of the ‘word’. At the first glance I get a confused reaction, but after explaining the reasons for my believes, everyone agrees. In fact for the copywriter and the art director to work together well they have to have a mutual understanding of one another, the copywriter has to create words, but he has to do it in symbiosis with the images and the art director has to create images in tune with the words. Besides, in the creative process, the inspiration can begin from the image, as of the word, whichever; it is necessary to have a ‘verbal-visual’ sensibility. The idea that the painting can be considered ‘mute poetry’ and the poetry ‘speaking painting’ has a long artistic, literary tradition with origins in Orazio and Plutarco. In the
Classic, as well as in Renaissance and in Baroque, masterpieces of painting and sculpture have represented legendary, epic and religious figures and stories, but at the same time poets and writers have been strongly influenced by visual arts.
The first systematic scholar of the relations between words and images, therefore of image seen as a ‘narrating text’, was Cesare Ripa (born around 1560 - died before 1625). He wrote a work, rich in illustrated references that was called Iconology. The Ripa collected the allegorical images established in the course of centuries on the basis of the great pagan and Christian stories, commentating on them with subtitles that reveal the hidden meanings and secrets. In particular it was about the ‘allegorical images’ and therefore, of images with meanings that are not immediately referenced to the denotative sense of the image, since this has a symbolism that is constructed on the base of narrations and traditional knowledge. Therefore, ‘allegorical image’ is an image particularly communicating; in semiotic terms it could be said that it is about ‘a visual text’ that Tran codifies ‘a verbal text’ in virtue of an arbitrary code, of a convention. For example; a lion, kept on a leash by a woman, could represent an interior aspect of the human nature that has to be tamed in order for the balanced evolution of ethics. So that such representation can be understood it is necessary to know the represented concept and its correlation with the image, other wise the image as it is cannot be interpreted in allegorical terms. At times the allegory is the result of literary inventions, like for example, in the case of allegoric cleverness of Dante. Therefore, certain allegoric images, to be read, presuppose the knowledge of codes, texts that can be more or less encrypted, secrets or sophisticated. The allegorical images can be full of ‘occult meanings’, at times very complex; for example those that are derived from knowledge of Alchimia and of Cabala. However, it is said that some allegorical images have been diffused into the popular culture giving room for playful interpretations.
Returning to Ripa’s Iconology we have to say that he had a particular luck in the 16th century because most of the printed images aimed to be pedagogical and informing to the illiterate masses, through emblematic depiction and easy interpretability. During the Enlightenment Swiss J.C. Sulzer, in an article of 1776, titled “Beaux-Arts”, published as a supplement to the Encyclopédie hoped that the social function of arts could have penetrated “the humblest of the barns of the most miserable of the citizens”. Regarding the ‘vulgar allegories’ they had their precise sociocultural function asserting the mass culture. However, the favored image during the enlightenment should not have been allegoric, but captioned, that is clear and evident in its denotative meaning. Despite the ideal “enlightened”, the allegorical image has continued to spread wider in the 17th century through the heraldry, therefore, in the political signs, in the public administrations and in the remaining aristocrats. To evolve with the consumer society in the 18th century, the allegorical images live on in the advertising in the form of logos and posters. Leonetto Cappiello can be considered the first allegorical commercial artist. In the same period, the ‘speaking’ power of the ‘allegorical images’ has been widely used by totalitarians in the 20th century. These considerations make us understand that the allegorical image was strongly depended on the textual content, and the evolving of modern art freed art and visual communication from this strict dependency. A key factor in this process of liberating the image has been the expression of artistic subjectivity, with the accomplishment and the crisis of representations dependent for textual contents in the culture. The allegories have therefore become ‘catacresizzate representations’, stale, too obedient of one ‘rhetoric of image’ that in its evidence results ingenuine or little credible. Nevertheless, in the work of an art director and a copywriter it is inevitable to account the ‘rhetoric of images’ and with its different forms, because in it you find the infinite repertoire of connections and visualizations that can turn out to be very efficient in the communication in advertising.
Obviously the creative of advertising should not suggest too shabby and usual rhetorical formulas, if not making them disappear within creative and innovative ways, or also using diverging logics, for example through the transgression of form and of the content of an allegory or by other conventional figure. And therefore it is evident that the commercial artist has to have a great competence of verbo-visual formulas in the rhetoric, mythological and symbolic culture. Still today, with the growing spreading of visual images for advertising, but also for the usefulness of interfaces in the automated and digital world there is a great use of signs that have their narrative origin. Animals, vegetables, working tools and other symbolic objects, parts of human body, are still today widely used in the graphic and illustrative creativity, but not always with the conscience of their original meaning.
Works by Erwin are recommended to those who wish to develop a more sophisticated critic-interpretative capacity and to deepen their knowledge on the theory of iconology.
Iconology: Panofsky and the Last Supper
Giotto
The Last Supper
David Lachapelle
The Last Supper
Tintoretto
The Last Supper
Panofsky re-elaborates the term ‘iconology’ originating from Ripa. Panofsky says: “... I try to bring back to life the old and beautiful term of ‘iconology’ every time iconography is deduced to its isolatedness and integrated with every other historic, psychological or critic method that could be used to try to resolve the enigma of sphinx. In reality as the suffix ‘grafia’ indicates something descriptive, the suffix ‘logia’ – derived from logos, thought o reason – indicates something interpretative”
Panofsky has three levels of analysis for an image: the first level is to characterize the figurative motives, or more precisely the forms that carry denotative meanings; the second level is that of iconographic analysis, or rather of the themes and captured and narrative content of an image; and last, the third level, that of iconology that consists of characterization of the sense of the reference in a cultural and social context at a place in time, and therefore also of the reference to the psychological subjectivity of the author, and also of the creative exegesis that goes from imagination to the image. And most of all, in this third level of analysis the ‘concept design’ – which is the creative, that independently from his function as art director, graphic designer or copy writer, he has to create and express concepts in verbo-visual terms – finds its progettual proprium.
An example selected by Panofsky to explain his three levels of analysis of an image is the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, where in the figurative level only the thirteen men are registered wearing old fashioned clothes and sitting around a table. At the iconographic level the image evokes the Christian ethos as a representation of a precise evangelic story. In the third level, that of iconology, the ‘subconscious‘ meanings of the image are found; the phenomenology of Leonardo’s subjectivity, but also the image as a expression of the world view in the Italian Renaissance, the zeitgeist: the ‘spirit of the time’.
Therefore, with Panofsky the iconologic reading of the image starts to interact with transdiciplinary knowledge and with visual productions that express the subjectivity of the visual language, according to creative theories and practices that go way beyond the ‘allegoric iconology’ of Ripa.
The ‘concept design’, even if in his professionalism should not attempt to analyze and ideate the artistic masterpieces, he should be able to count on one proper iconological ability. One should integrate the intuitive ability with knowledge and methods in different interpretative levels hid in an image. Through this interaction with creative and cultural vocations of an image that a good copywriter or a good art director can interrogate the images, to make them speak, and therefore they can create verbo-visual communications that are able to ‘talk’ to the public with success. Thus when art director and copywriter work together on a research for an idea they think in verbo-visual terms and make a complex work together, that could be called as ‘concept design’ or ‘iconologist of advertising’. But the problem is not that of filling the professionalism with academic and bright terminology, than of fully valuing a piece of work and a performance towards the clients and the public. Therefore we continue to call us art and copy (the undersigned at times works as a copy), but let’s gather every formative and reflective occasion in order to qualify the abilities and the cultural contents of our profession in the best ways.
Pier Pietro Brunelli