Practice question · Multiple choice
Gombrich argued that iconology is insufficiently constrained. Why does that objection bite?
Hints
- Ask what stops an iconological reading from going anywhere it likes.
- A method with no check produces conclusions limited only by cleverness.
Show the answer
A. With enough ingenuity almost any image can be shown to encode almost any meaning
Why
That a method with no check produces conclusions limited only by the interpreter's cleverness. Gombrich was not rejecting iconology, he wrote Warburg's biography, but demanding the discipline its ambition requires: establish the genre, cite the documents, and treat esoteric readings as needing strong evidence.
Practise Critiques and Revisions of the Method
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More questions on Critiques and Revisions of the Method
- 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?
- Arrange these steps of a disciplined iconological reading in order.
- Gombrich rejected iconology and proposed abandoning the third level.