Topic Proposal

Ship of Fools (or the Satire of the Debauched Revelers)
Jheronimus Bosch
(ca. 1500)
Musée du Louvre, Paris
Acc. No. R.F. 2218

Iconology is an interdisciplinary method and approach to studying the content and meanings of images (Müller, 2012; Rampley, 2001). It asks two fundamental about images: the question of representation (what to say about images?) and the question of the ‘hidden meanings’ of images (What images say?)(Mitchel, 1987; Van Leeuwen, 2011). Such ideas of iconology to some extent can be traced back to the 16th century, where a number “iconological manuals” to identify allegorical and symbolic figures or emblems were produced. The most famous perhaps is Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia published in Italian 1593. Another example would be the Ragionamenti by historiographer and artist Giorgio Vasari in 1567, to decipher and describe the decorations of Palazzo Vecchio by providing explanations and interpretations of “multiple levels of meanings” and significance of the works with text (Baxter, 1988; Draper, 1973).

The term “iconology” continues to developed and used over the centuries, interchangeably with iconography (Rampley, 2001). German art historian Aby Moritz Warburg modernised the term (Diers, 1995; Rampley, 2001; Schmidt, 1993; Woodfield, 2011), but it was through the works of his students, followers and collaborators who popularised the term from the 1930s as a canonical art-historical method of interpretation. They include Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich. (Mitchel, 1987; Müller, 2012; Rampley, 2001). Panofsky’s Studies in Iconology, published in 1939, provided three-step humanistic strata of interpreting images starting with natural descriptive analysis and leading to the aim of unravelling the “intrinsic meaning” of the image (Panofsky, 1939, 1967). Using case studies from the Renaissance, Gombrich’s Symbolic Images provided a more naturalistic approach to explore the representations of symbols in images and relationship between painted images and literary texts, as in “what was said was also represented” in the images (Gombrich, 1972a; Mitchel, 1987; Paulson, 1977).

From Vasari, Ripa and Leonardo in the 16th century to the likes of Warburg, Müntz, Panofsky, Gombrich and Mitchell in the 19-20th century, the relationship between text and image in iconology was argued, discussed and demonstrated for centuries in many different ways. They include definitions, functions and roles (reference, representation, denotation, or meaning) and linguistic dialogue (e.g. André Malraux’s Arts of Mankind)(Eco, 1976; Gombrich, 1958, 1972b, 1972a, 2000; Goodman, 1976; Mitchel, 1987; Woodfield, 2011).

The question of (or questions related to) what is an image was also explored (Davis, 2017; Mitchel, 1987; Rancière, 2007). Images are a wide variety of different things: “pictures, statues, optical illusions, maps, diagrams, dreams, hallucinations, spectacles, projections, patterns, memories, and even ideas”, as indicated by Mitchel (1987), who dedicated an entire chapter on “What is an image” in his book. The development of computing brought in the rise of digital technology making digitalisation of different artefacts and information processing possible (Helms, 1990). The creation of new digital formats, interpretations and facsimiles of images further intensify the question of “what is an image”.

Back to the 1930s and 1950s, papers by German critic Benjamin Walters and novelist and French statesman André Malraux deeply questioned about the effects of technology on the transformation of images (or actual objects), and how meaning deviates altering the way of seeing, intellectualising art and presenting works from the original context (Sum, 2015). What such images (including digital forms) mean is strongly dependent on the previous experience and knowledge of the viewer (or priori), where they are “not just mere representation of ‘reality’ but a symbolic system”, where Gombrich (1967) referred to expression, arousal and description from Karl Bühler’s Organonmodell der Sprache (model of language). Davis (2017) explored the multiplicity of images through bivisibility, the visibility (visual space), of the image to beholders outside the visuality (visual culture).

Today, the multiplicity of images also suggest the multiplication in access, searching, discovery, learning, research, publication, and dissemination of knowledge (Nowotny, 2015; Schnapp, 2011). Other scholars have also discussed this phenomenon through the ideas of ways of seeing (Berger, 1972), ways of telling (Rose, 2011) and ways of knowing (van de Lagemaat, 2011) and ways of working (Pearce, Weller, Scanlon, & Kinsley, 2010). As discussed above, iconology as a method has its origins with disciplinary crossovers among art, art history, social sciences, and humanities. It was further developed with computer engineers, mathematicians and information scientists today or otherwise new opportunities, to develop theories, methods and algorithms in aggregation, communication, interactions and visualisations. As a result, this led to new ideas of imagery or successions of images in the forms of interfaces or visual interval as to Rampley (2001), “infosphere” (Salles Correia & Zandonade, 2015), “intraface” (Galloway, 2008).

Using the painting, Ship of Fools, by Jheronimus Bosch (c. 1450 – 1516) as the central object of study, my PhD Research will centre around two key questions relating to aggregating of the scholarship of a painting as an image in the digital era: (1) How effects of digitalisation led to the scholarship of a painting as an image? (2) How paintings can be understood and what the understanding of paintings means then and now? An interdisciplinary approach from the fields of art history, information science, computer science and psychology (of art and aesthetics) will be adopted:

  • Art history: Iconological analysis of the painting
  • Information Science: Development of ontology and metadata framework for aggregating scholarship on the painting
  • Computer Science: Exploration of digital forms (or models) of access, searching, discovery, learning, research, publication, and dissemination of aggregated knowledge relating to the painting
  • Psychology (of art and aesthetics): Examination of visual perceptions and evaluation of aesthetical experience (such as mediators and stimuli) on the digital forms of aggregated knowledge on the painting

Notes

Besides my curiosity on the works by the artist, I have chosen to work on Bosch because of the ambiguities that existed of him as an artist and his works. Unlike his contemporaries, Albrecht Durer and Leonardo da Vinci who documented their lives and works through letters and writings, Bosch left nothing in his own words, and little was known about him. However, lots of scholarship were published about him and his works across different perspectives, indicative from a bibliography compiled by Dixon (2013) and a book by Hitchins (2014). A brief search on his name (“Jheronimus Bosch”,” Hieronymus Bosch”) on Google Books Ngram Viewer also indicated an upward trend on him from the 1920s onwards. Preliminary readings have shown that Bosch’s paintings were often linked to linguistics or literary texts, such as Nordic proverbs and allegories, and Ship of Fools is one clear example. The painting itself is complex enough to be studied from different perspectives: the subject matter of gluttony, technical studies on colour and treatment, relations to Sebastian Brant’s allegory of the same title published in 1494, the contemporary life then during his time, and astrological associations. His paintings were also often compared, juxtaposed and quoted among his paintings or paintings attributed to him, to others from Bruegel in the 16th century to 17th-century Japanese gothic paintings, 20th century Salvador Dali, other genres of art in music, dance and film, and cross-disciplinary into the humanities (Baltrušaitis, 1955; Dixon, 2013; Hitchins, 2014). For these reasons mentioned, I decided on my research using Jheronimus Bosch and his Ship of Fools.

References

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