도상학과 도상해석학의 도입과 발전상황을 16-18세기 고문화애호가의 입장, 19세기 에밀 말을 대표로 전개된 친(親)카톨릭 도상 연구, 20세기 파노프스키를 중심으로 문화의 징후를 읽으려는 복합적인 작업 등으로 나누어 살펴본다. 기독교 미술을 중심으로 하여 서양 중세와 르네상스 미술에서 많은 영향력을 미친 도상학이라는 방법론이 1980년대 이후 신미술사를 비롯, 기호학, 신역사주의, 포스트모더니즘 등의 새로운 정치적, 철학적 사조와 함께 어떻게 변모되어 왔는지 앞으로 나아갈 뱡향은 어떠한지, 비서양미술 연구에서는 얼마나 유용한 도구인지 모색해 본다.
Studies in iconography and iconology have been a tradition in art history since the early twentieth century. Focus on the scholarship of medieval art reveals changing approaches from the Christian iconography of Adolphe Napoleon Didron and Émile Mâle to the more scientific method of the Warburg school typified by Panofsky and Saxl. As a methodology, iconology has been criticized for its inadequate attention to the social and political conditions surrounding works of art, and can be exemplified by such Panofsky contemporaries as Henri Focillon and Meyer Schapiro who remained detached from iconographic scholarship. A group of art historians whom Schapiro dubbed the“New Vienna School”attempted to present a more sophisticated structure behind scattered works of art combining the legacies of iconology and style.
Concomitant with a study of style in art history, iconology has become an indispensable tool for the study of visual arts. Thanks to systematic iconographic databases compiled by German, French, and American academic institutes, a large corpus of artworks and supporting documents have been classified and identified, initially with prints and more recently with digital photographic files. Nonetheless, decorative artworks or anonymous works with few written documents have not been given adequate analysis.
With the rise of new art history in the 1980s, art historians began to take a more careful look at presumptions of art history in its practice and methodologies,including ideological views of the founding fathers of the discipline. Contemporary scholars of medieval art are not completely cut off from iconographic tradition. Although they do not explicitly call themselves iconologists, they practice a more intricate form of iconology in my estimation.
In the new trends of art history, one of which is most effectively represented in Michael Camille’s scholarship of medieval art, researchers attempt to interpret visual experiences of the illiterate, uneducated, underprivileged,and even those persecuted by elite members of society. They incorporate many critical perspectives stemming from, but not limited to,semiotics, reception theory, social history, identity politics, and gender studies into interpretations of medieval artworks, adding more vivid and inclusive views of those who ordered, made, learned from, at times enjoyed decorated monuments, and at times suffered from powerful languages of art in pre-modern Western Europe. In order to accomplish these goals, they have also had to absorb new findings and theories in the related disciplines of the classics, literature, hagiography, and philology in addition to newer fields such as social history, economic history, film studies,gender and sexuality studies, and linguistics, to name a few. What is still crucial in Panofsky’s iconology, in my view, is the“synthetic intuition”of a researcher capable of grasping a more copious amount of knowledge than in the 1930s and sensitive to his/her own epistemological background.
