Decoding iconography in paintings
- Tuesday, 12 November 2024
- Tuesday, 19 November 2024
- Tuesday, 26 November 2024
- Tuesday, 3 December 2024
- Tuesday, 10 December 2024
About
The history of art is full of unsolved mysteries. Art historians have spent centuries trying to understand paintings whose exact meanings have been lost over time. The images and ideas in many Western artworks come from just a handful of sources, including the Bible and Greco-Roman mythology.
This five-week course will provide an introduction to iconography, the study of symbols in art, using works from our Collection as examples. Once armed with a grounding in this forgotten visual vocabulary, we will consider and decode several ‘puzzle pictures', famously enigmatic artworks that have stumped scholars for centuries (and perhaps still do).
Participants will come away with a strong foundation in this lost vocabulary of symbols, which can appear in the present as coded messages with hidden meanings.
Week 1: Intro to iconography
In the first session, we will consider how audiences once looked at art, particularly when the public was largely illiterate, but would have been familiar with an array of stories. From the Bible and its related writings, to Greco-Roman myths and 'Metamorphosis' by Ovid, a small number of literary sources can help you to interpret many paintings hanging on the walls of the Gallery and other institutions.
But this is not difficult to do, as we will see in this session. By focusing on a handful of key, most frequently referenced works, and images emerging from them, we can unlock the majority of symbolic works encountered in the Western art tradition. To illustrate this, we will consider Van Eyck’s 'The Arnolfini Portrait' and the concept of ’disguised symbolism'.
Week 2: Whodunit detective work
Can an artwork function like an Agatha Christie mystery? In the case of Caravaggio’s three-painting ‘Saint Matthew Cycle’, it certainly does. This session will look at paintings meant to engage the viewer in an unpuzzling process, drawing them in, leading them on a false trail to force them to engage further, and then ultimately allow them to ’solve‘ the puzzle.
To illustrate this, we will consider Carpaccio’s ‘Portrait of a Young Knight’ (the whodunnit being “who is the young knight?”) and the Gallery’s ‘Supper at Emmaus’ by Caravaggio (“Why does Jesus look so unlike we expect him to?”), as well as his first important public work, the ‘Saint Matthew Cycle’ (‘The Calling of Saint Matthew’ makes us ask “Which character is Saint Matthew?” and ‘The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew’ forces us to figure out who killed the saint). We will wear their detective hats to solve these mysteries
Week 3: Allegory
When a figure represents an idea, we have an allegorical personification. Allegories were a common way to convey complex concepts and develop philosophies without words. Until Cesare Ripa’s 17th-century guide to allegories, 'Iconologia', artists often came up with their own systems, and they can be tricky to wrestle with. We will explore this through two of the Gallery’s treasures, Titian’s relatively straightforward ‘Allegory of Prudence’ and the wickedly complex ‘An Allegory with Venus and Cupid’ by Bronzino, your tutor’s favourite artwork and the subject of one of his Master's theses.
Week 4: Hagiography or saint-spotting 101
Much of iconography revolves around the study of saints, or ‘hagiography’. Since no one knows what saints or other Biblical figures looked like, and most viewers of religious artworks could not read, characters had to be identified in a non-textual manner. The solution was to show these figures with some attribute linked to their lives or deaths, such as Saint Catherine of Alexandria with a spiked wheel (with which she was tortured) or Saint Lucy carrying her own eyes on a platter (you can probably guess why). By recognizing a few dozen saints, we can unlock a great deal of Western religious painting in one go.
Our focal work will be the Crivelli painting, ‘The Demidoff Altarpiece’, which leads to another question: why does Crivelli feature a cucumber in all of his paintings? And what happens when one of our “whodunnit” pictures meets hagiographic iconography?
Week 5: Keeper of secrets
In our final session, we will look at paintings that are meant to keep secrets and reveal them only to a select few. We will explore the covert, subversive political commentary in Hans Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’ and the covert, embarrassing dynamic between the couple placed by Gainsborough in ‘Mr and Mrs Andrews’. Then we’ll conclude by applying what we’ve learned to some famous unsolved puzzle pictures, like Bellini’s ‘Sacred Allegory’ to see if, together, we can make some headway.
Your Tutor
Dr Noah Charney is the internationally best-selling author of more than a dozen books, translated into fourteen languages, including The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art, which was nominated for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and Museum of Lost Art, which was the finalist for the 2018 Digital Book World Award. He is a professor of art history specializing in art crime, and has taught for Yale University, Brown University, American University of Rome and University of Ljubljana. He is founder of ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, a ground-breaking research group (www.artcrimeresearch.org) and teaches on their annual summer-long Postgraduate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection. He writes regularly for dozens of major magazines and newspapers, including The Guardian, the Washington Post, the Observer and The Art Newspaper. His recent books on art include The Devil in the Gallery: How Scandal, Shock and Rivalry Shaped the Art World, and Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art, and The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: The Complete Story of the World’s Most Famous Artwork.A he teaches online for Atlas Obscura, Yale University, and the Smithsonian, among others.
Watch again
Can't make Tuesday afternoons but don't want to miss out? No problem, you can watch again.
Each session is recorded and made available to you for the duration of the course, up until 2 weeks after the final session.
A video of the week's lecture will be uploaded and available for you to watch via your National Gallery account on Thursday afternoons, in time for the weekend.
Format
Each session lasts for 2 hours and includes a lecture delivered by the course lecturer followed by a short break and further discussion.
Time will be allowed for questions and discussion via Q&A.
Handouts will be available via your National Gallery account on Monday afternoon.
Booking information
This is an online ticketed course hosted on Zoom. Please book a ticket to access the course. Only one ticket can be booked per account.
You will be emailed an E-ticket with instructions on how to access the course via your National Gallery account. All course information including your Zoom link, weekly handouts, and recordings will be available here.
Your link will be valid for the duration of the course.
Booking after the course has started
You are welcome to join the module at any point during its five-week run. You will gain access to all the recordings until two weeks after the final session.
The secret history of art
Decoding iconography in paintings
- Tuesday, 12 November 2024
- Tuesday, 19 November 2024
- Tuesday, 26 November 2024
- Tuesday, 3 December 2024
- Tuesday, 10 December 2024
Enrol
Standard: £75
Concessions: £71.25
Please book a ticket to access the event. You will receive an E-ticket with instructions on how to access your online events, films and resources via your National Gallery account.
Please note, only one ticket can be booked per account. Bookings close ten minutes before the event.
Concessions are for full-time students, jobseekers, and disabled adults.