iconography

iconography.
The aspect of art history dealing with the identification, description, classification, and interpretation of the subject matter of the figurative arts. In his book Studies in Iconology (1939) Erwin Panofsky proposed that the term ‘iconology’ should be used to distinguish a broader approach towards subject matter in which the scholar attempts to understand the total meaning of the work of art in its historical context. However, in practice an exact distinction between the two terms is rarely made, and ‘iconography’ is much the more commonly used of the two. The term ‘iconography’ can also be applied to collections (or the classification) of portraits. Van Dyck, for example, made a series of etchings of famous contemporaries entitled Iconography, and the detailed catalogues of the National Portrait Gallery in London have a section called ‘iconography’ in the entry for each sitter, in which other portraits of the person represented are listed and discussed. Thus it is possible to speak of ‘the iconography of Shakespeare’ or ‘the iconography of Queen Victoria’.