iconography and the body

iconography and the body ‘Icono-graphy’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a pictorial representation or description of something, a book or work in which such a representation appears, and/or the branch of knowledge which deals with such representations.

From Christian icons, through alchemical philosophy, up to the images on the British pound and the Nike ‘swoosh’, icons are supposed to evoke the presence and power of what they represent. Often, the distinction between the representation and the thing represented is ambiguous, particularly when the entity represented does not exist in corporeal form. Ancient Greek statues of gods, for example, were thought not only to represent, but actually to contain the deity. The representation of bodies in particular has been the subject of much recent scholarship. Influenced in part by studies in semiotics, art history, and cultural and women's studies, images of the body have come to be seen as one of the ways a society ‘thinks’ about those bodies and the individuals whom they represent.

Iconography as the study of representation, also called iconology, entered mainstream academia at the beginning of the twentieth century. This was when art historians began to analyse works of art in relation to the social and historical context in which they were produced, rather than discussing them purely in terms of transcendent aesthetic value. Before this time, iconographic studies, exemplified by Cesare Ripa's Iconologie (1644), consisted mainly of works listing the symbolic meaning of images from Christian and classical traditions. For instance, in early Christian art, Christ was often represented as a fish, and the Holy Spirit as a dove; in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a skull represented the idea of mortality.

Iconography has been central to some of the oldest and most bitter conflicts in world history. Islam, for instance, forbids the graphic representation of any person, especially the Prophet Mohammed, and conservative Muslims find images of any living creature unacceptable. Hinduism and Buddhism, in contrast, have extremely rich iconographies. The Hindu caste system, for example, is explained in reference to the body, and Hindu gods often appear in significantly altered human form; Shiva, for example, is blue and has four arms. Iconography has proved a source of controversy within Christianity, though the body of Christ, represented on the crucifix and invoked during the Catholic mass, is perhaps the most significant icon in the history of Western culture. During the Protestant Reformation the worship of icons, including saints and relics, was believed to be idolatrous.

From images on ancient Greek coins to Uncle Sam, iconography has a significant political dimension. Icons are not always meant to glorify their subject, as when the king is maligned in underground media as a representation of monarchy. That Roman emperors were depicted as gods, and Marie-Antoinette was portrayed as a harpy in the underground press during the French Revolution, are examples of how icons both reflect and form people's attitudes about the personae they represent.

Much recent scholarship on iconography and the body has focused in particular on the representation of women's bodies in Europe and the US during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Supporters of democratic movements in this era frequently chose to represent their guiding principles — Justice, Liberty, Equality, etc. — in the form of female icons; entire nations came to be embodied in figures such as Marianne, Germania, Britannia, and Columbia. The irony that it was during this time, when equality itself was given female form, that women were explicitly excluded from the democratic public sphere, indicates that female icons do not, and are not intended to, represent real women. The ambiguity and potentially ironic multivalence of iconographic figures has been addressed by recent feminist scholarship, particularly with regard to these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century images. Marina Warner, for example, maintains that in Western cultures, the female form, standing for both desire and chaste virtue, is perceived as generic and universal; the male form, on the other hand, is seen as an individual, even when used to express a generalized idea. Historian George Mosse proposes that these female icons stood for the eternal and immutable qualities of a nation, the static setting against which men would take political action.

In a similar vein, female icons have dominated scientific texts, personifying Truth, Reason, and Nature since at least the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. Londa Schiebinger has discussed the way in which a certain style of scholarship came to be both associated with the feminine and excluded from scientific practice, while images of Scientia continued to be female. She proposes that these female icons are part of a Neoplatonic world-view where perfection is achieved through the union of the male and female. Thus, since the philosopher is male, his counterpart, Nature or Scientia etc., must be personified as female. During the nineteenth century, however, abstract scientific icons disappeared along with the gentle (wo)man philosopher, replaced by the professional, white-coated man of science and his image.

Iconography has been useful in the analysis of the cultural meanings ascribed not only to specific icons like Lady Liberty and Hercules, but also to bodies in general. Susan Bordo and others have analyzed how the generic young, toned, hard yet flexible body idealized in popular culture, including the popular media and advertising, can be seen as an icon representing the values of contemporary US culture.

Iconology, like the icons it studies, also has political and historical dimensions. For instance, some of the oldest known icons are of female figures, one of the most famous being the Venus of Willendorf (c. 25 000 bc), a small, round limestone figure of a nude, which has traditionally been regarded as a highly sexualized, even erotic, symbol of female sexuality and fertility. Recent interpretations have proposed that the Venus is not an eroticized fertility goddess, but perhaps a form of self-portraiture, and/or the product of a culture whose understanding of gender did not correspond to our categories of male and female.

Sarah Goodfellow

Bibliography

Bordo, S (1993). Unbearable weight: feminism, Western culture and the body. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Mosse, G. L. (1985). Nationalism and sexuality: respectability and abnormal sexuality in Europe. H. Fertig, New York.
Schiebinger, L. (1989). The mind has no sex? Women in the origins of modern science. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.