The language of images

Your goal in this lesson: to learn a few words that help you say what you see, and an honest way to read symbols.

The building blocks

Modern Teachers often split a picture into elements and principles. You do not need to memorize them. They are simply words that make looking sharper.

• Line: an edge or a path. Is it straight, curved, calm or nervous?
• Shape and form: flat areas and things that look solid.
• Color: hue, how bright, how strong. Warm colors seem to come forward, cool ones seem to sink back.
• Value: light and dark. Where is the brightest point? The darkest?
• Texture: how a surface feels, or looks as if it would feel.
• Space: how deep the picture seems.

The principles describe how these are arranged: balance, rhythm (things that repeat), proportion, emphasis (where your eye is pulled) and unity. Try saying “the three heads form a triangle” instead of “it looks nice”. That is analysis.

Many ways to show space

Historical Perspective is any system for showing three-dimensional space on a flat surface. There is no single correct one.

• Linear perspective makes parallel lines meet at a vanishing point. It was worked out in fifteenth-century Florence. The architect Filippo Brunelleschi is said to have demonstrated it with a painted panel and a mirror, sometime around 1413 to 1420; we know this only from a biography written decades later by Antonio Manetti.
• Atmospheric perspective makes distant things paler and bluer. Roman wall painters and Chinese landscape painters used it long before Leonardo da Vinci wrote about it.
• Hierarchical scale makes the most important figure the largest. An Egyptian king towers over his enemies; a medieval Virgin Mary towers over the kneeling donor. Size here means importance, not distance.

When a medieval picture looks “flat”, it is usually not failing. It is following different rules for a different purpose.

Three levels of meaning

Later tradition The art historian Erwin Panofsky gave the classic method for reading subjects and symbols, in Studies in Iconology (1939), reprinted in Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955). He described three levels:

1. What is visibly there. A woman, a dish, a head. You need only everyday experience.
2. The conventional subject. This woman with a head on a dish is Salome, or Judith. You need texts and stories. This is called iconography.
3. The deeper meaning. What does the work reveal about the attitudes of its culture? This is called iconology, and it is interpretation.

Levels one and two can usually be checked. Level three is argument. It can be strong or weak, but it is never simply fact.

An honest rule for symbols

Modern Here is the most important rule for anyone who loves esoteric art: a hidden meaning counts as history only if people at the time understood the symbol that way. If no source from the period supports it, it is a modern reading. Modern readings can be beautiful and useful, but label them as yours. Not every painting hides a secret. The art historian Svetlana Alpers argued in The Art of Describing (1983) that much Dutch painting is about observing the visible world, not hiding codes.

Reading a label

Historical Labels use careful words. “By” means the museum accepts the work as the artist’s. “Attributed to” means probably, with some doubt. “Workshop of” means made in the artist’s studio. “Circle of”, “follower of” and “manner of” move further away. A label is a claim, and claims can change.

Context also changes meaning. Michael Baxandall showed in Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972) that Italian patrons’ contracts often fixed how much gold and costly ultramarine blue a painter had to use. A blue robe could be a statement about money as well as faith.

Try this

Today’s exercise: choose one religious or mythological painting in a museum collection, such as Esther before Ahasuerus by Artemisia Gentileschi. Write one sentence at each of Panofsky’s three levels, and mark the third clearly as your own interpretation.

Quick recap

• Elements and principles are words for sharper looking.
• Perspective has many systems; hierarchical scale shows importance.
• Panofsky’s three levels: what is there, the subject, the deeper meaning.
• A hidden meaning is history only if the period supports it.

Keep going

Next: Ancient and medieval symbols. Need a refresher? Go back to Why art history, and how to look or see the whole course. For more, read the esoteric in art and the Early Renaissance page.

Sources

• Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), reprinted in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City: Doubleday, 1955).
• Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
• Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972).

Go deeper: the art movements timeline and art history pages on this site

Mark as done