iconography
eye-kon-OG-ruh-fee
ˌaɪkəˈnɒɡrəfiListen
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Dictionary meaning
the branch of art history concerned with the identification, classification, and interpretation of the subjects, symbols, and conventional imagery in visual art, examining what is depicted and what those depictions mean within specific cultural, religious, and historical contexts; iconography analyses the symbolic vocabulary of images — the attributes that identify saints, the allegorical figures that personify virtues, the mythological scenes drawn from literary sources — and traces how these conventions develop, migrate, and change meaning across time and cultures; Erwin Panofsky's three-level framework of iconography and iconology — pre-iconographic description, iconographic analysis, and iconological interpretation — remains foundational to the discipline's methodology
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