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 word names both that visual code and the work of the art historians who decipher it.
The word comes from the Greek eikon, "image," and graphein, "to write," and it reached English in the 1670s through the Medieval Latin iconographia. In that sense, a painter who put keys in a saint's hand was writing a name that churchgoers of his time could read without a label.
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That reading works only as long as the painter and the viewer share the same code, and the painting most often used to teach iconography shows what happens when they do not. In 1934 the art historian Erwin Panofsky read Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, dated 1434, as a wedding recorded in paint. The joined hands were a vow, the lit candle belonged to the oath, and the little dog stood for fidelity.
Van Eyck had written on the back wall of the room "Johannes de Eyck fuit hic," "Jan van Eyck was here," and Panofsky took the words as the signature of a witness. For decades, that was how the picture was explained, in classrooms and in books.
The problem is a date. Giovanni di Arrigo Arnolfini, the merchant Panofsky had in mind, did not marry Jeanne de Cename until 1447, thirteen years after the panel was painted. The National Gallery in London, which owns the picture, now names another merchant, Giovanni di Nicolao di Arnolfini, as the probable sitter, and writes that the painting was long understood as a marriage ceremony, "though not anymore."
The candle, the dog and the joined hands are all still there. The art historian Margaret Koster started from the other Giovanni, whose wife, Costanza Trenta, had died in 1433, the year before the date on the wall.
In the chandelier, the one lit candle burns above the man, and above the woman there is only an empty holder with dripping wax. Koster reads them as life and death, and the picture as a memorial. A wedding and a memorial use the same objects, and the debate between them is still open.
What You'll Discover
The saint who holds a dish.
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.