Apply an Iconographical Approach to one or more Artwork of your choice
Apply an Iconographical Approach to one or more Artwork of your choice
For this essay there will be an investigation into a piece of artwork through an Iconographical approach. The artwork that has been chosen is Van Gogh’s ‘The Night Café at Arles’ (1888). In order to do this, an exploration into Iconography will be done and then it will be applied to the image itself. The outcome of this exercise should show how this theory works and its effectiveness.
The Iconographical method in art allows the viewer to read the painting, like a story. The point of this enables a focus on the content, what’s happening in the image instead of the formal qualities of how the image has been executed. It wasn’t until the 19th century when it became defined as a method; even so people such as Vasari were examining art work in this particular process. Scholars during 19th Century were studying Christian religious artwork and from needing a way to categorize the work, they found the approach of Iconography to be helpful.
Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), an Art Historian wrote a book called ‘Studies in Iconology’ which was first published in 1939. Based upon six of Mary Flexner’s Lectures it develops Iconology further. Panofsky found there to be three different ways to do this. The first level, is taking the image at its most basic form, for instance if you look at Masaccio’s ‘The Trinity’ (1425) in this way it’s a man on a cross with five other figures. The secondary level is understanding that the man on the cross is Jesus being crucified and the Trinity is all about the three aspects of God, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The third level is the intrinsic meaning where the understanding of environment, culture, style of the artist is being applied to the image for further comprehension. So with this, it is known that painting was done during the Early Renaissance when application of depth and preportions were starting to arise. Biblical images were generally the only painted subject and that ‘The Trinity’ was in a church in order to commute to the congregation. Following the same three levels that Panofsky uses it shall now be implemented onto ‘The Night Café at Arles’ (1888) by Vincent Van Gogh.
