Sachgebiete

Beschreibung:

296 Pg. Ill. 17,8 x 1,9 x 24,1 cm. Softcover

Bemerkung:

Good copy. - For nearly half a century, the most expansive area within the discipline of art history has been the study of iconography and iconology, the meaning of representations. In the field of early Netherlandish art, Erwin Panofsky's notion of'disguised symbolism' has become the standard tool of interpretation. For the study of meaning in Dutch painting of the seventeenth century, this concept, enriched by the study of emblems, has been elaborated by Eddy de Jongh into a full- fledged hermeneutic program. The present book offers a fundamental critique of the school of thought inspired by Panofskv and de Jongh. Key examples of their method - including Panofsky's famous article on Jan van Eyck's Amolfini Portrait - are subjected to minute analysis, and are found to be defective. Bedaux argues that no presumption of disguised symbolism should be credited until more obvious interpretations have been eliminated. This he finds not to be the case in the studies he examines. Bedaux brings the discussion of meaning in northern painting back to the basics: the depiction of real objects, the evocation of everyday associations, the employment of standard visual metaphors, symbols and allegories. With the first publication of an eighteenth- century iconographical program drawn up by the Hague painter Mattheus Verheyden, he demonstrates the continued importance of allegory, that stepchild of iconography. By challenging the critical art historians of the past two generations, Bedaux initiates a fresh new round in the discussion of meaning in art. ISBN 9789061790952