Practice question · Put in order
Arrange these steps of a disciplined iconological reading in order.
- Gather any surviving documentary evidence
- Propose an interpretation of what its choice reveals
- Identify what the image represents
- State the evidence the interpretation rests on and where it runs out
- Fix what kind of image this is and what it was for
Hints
- Identification comes before any interpretation.
- Naming the limits is the last step, not an optional one.
Show the answer
- Identify what the image represents
- Fix what kind of image this is and what it was for
- Gather any surviving documentary evidence
- Propose an interpretation of what its choice reveals
- State the evidence the interpretation rests on and where it runs out
Why
The last step is Gombrich's demand in practical form. An interpretation that names its evidence and says where the evidence stops can be argued with; one that does not is limited only by the ingenuity of whoever wrote it.
Practise Critiques and Revisions of the Method
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Art History I is free to start.
More questions on Critiques and Revisions of the Method
- Gombrich argued that iconology is insufficiently constrained. Why does that objection bite?
- Sort each question by the movement that brought it into the discipline.
- Iconology is often revised rather than replaced by later critical frameworks. Why must a revisionist analysis…
- Which are among Gombrich's proposed restraints on iconological interpretation?
- Pollock argued that adding women to the existing canon is sufficient to correct art history's exclusions.
- Complete the account of the critiques.
- Of Panofsky's three levels, how many have proved most durable under the later critiques?
- Gombrich rejected iconology and proposed abandoning the third level.