Iconography is the reading of what a picture shows: who the figures are, which story is being told, and what the objects around them stand for.
A bearded old man holding keys is Saint Peter, and a young woman beside a wheel is Saint Catherine. The term covers both that visual code and the work of the art historians who decipher it.
Iconography joins two Greek words, eikon, "image," and graphein, "to write." It reached English in the 1670s through iconographia, the Latin of medieval scholars. A painter who put keys in a saint's hand was writing a name that churchgoers of his time could read without a label.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (140+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
A painter could count on that only while his viewers had learned the same visual language. Once it is forgotten, even an expert can read a picture wrong, and one famous painting shows how.
The painting is the Arnolfini Portrait, which Jan van Eyck dated 1434. A man and a woman stand side by side in a furnished room, his hand holding hers. A small dog waits at their feet, and a chandelier hangs above their heads.
In 1934 the German art historian Erwin Panofsky read the panel as a wedding recorded in paint. For him, the joined hands were a vow, the single candle burning in daylight belonged to the oath, and the little dog stood for fidelity.
Above a mirror on the back wall, Van Eyck had written "Johannes de Eyck fuit hic," "Jan van Eyck was here." Panofsky took the words as the signature of a witness, and for decades classrooms and books explained the picture his way.
The problem is a date. Giovanni di Arrigo Arnolfini, the Italian merchant Panofsky had in mind, did not marry Jeanne de Cename until 1447, thirteen years after the panel was painted.
Historians now name a different man of the same name, Giovanni di Nicolao di Arnolfini, another merchant. With him, the wedding Panofsky described falls apart, but the hands, the candle and the dog are still in the picture, waiting for an explanation.
Decades after Panofsky, the art historian Margaret Koster offered one. She started from that second Giovanni, whose wife, Costanza Trenta, had died in 1433, the year before the date on the wall. A wife already dead could not be marrying him in 1434.
Koster looked at the chandelier again. Its one lit candle burns on the man's side, and above the woman there is only an empty holder with dripping wax. She reads the pair as the living husband and the dead wife, and the panel as a memorial.
Not every historian accepts that reading, and some still see a marriage of some kind in the joined hands. The objects stay the same in both readings. Only the story behind them changes.
The saint with the dish
Most pictures were far easier to decode than the Arnolfini Portrait, because their language was taught in every church…
What You'll Discover
The Italian handbook Vermeer used to dress his model.
What a man lifting his hat explains.
Where iconography stops being any help.
The artists who invented symbols of their own.