Practice question · Multiple choice
An attribute functions as an identifier rather than a portrait likeness. What follows from this distinction when examining an unfamiliar saint across different regional workshops?
Hints
- What visual information remained constant when facial realism was absent?
- How did viewers across linguistic boundaries recognise a figure without reading a label?
Show the answer
A. Identification depends on codified props rather than facial traits
Why
Conflating narrative props with portraiture overlooks how workshop conventions operated. Because early figures lacked distinctive facial traits, viewers relied entirely on established emblems; novel or purely idiosyncratic additions would break the shared visual code.
Practise Attributes, and How Identification Works
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More questions on Attributes, and How Identification Works
- Arrange these developments in the codification of images in order.
- A figure carries only a palm. Roughly how many individual saints does that identify?
- Why does Ripa's Iconologia count as evidence about intended meaning rather than modern reconstruction? Select…
- Complete the account of attributes.
- In what year was Ripa's Iconologia first published?
- Arrange the steps of identifying a figure by attribute, in order.
- Sort each attribute by what it refers to.
- A dog in a fifteenth-century painting always signifies fidelity.