From Iconology to Semiotics

The present paper does not aim at the history of the 20th Century art history in general. Its ambition is more modest: To reconstruct one of the main streams of the modern art historical writing that conceives of art as a language. It starts with Aby Warburg's rejection of the "border police" in art historical research. His interdisciplinary project of the cultural history of art can be regarded as a parallel to the Avant-garde conception of art as a social communication. Panofsky transformed Warburg's sociological model not only into a metaphysical one but also canonized iconology into a generally valid method. He tried to synthesize Hegelian concept of art as an impersonal expression (document) of the age with neo-Kantian notion of art as a symbolic construction of human world. His combining the rational approach (analysis of conventional subject matters) with the irrational one ("synthetic intuition") as well as prefering the theme in the work of art (identifying the meaning with the subject matter and conceiving of art as a means of the discursive message) resembles to the retrospective tendencies in art of the 30ies (Surrealism, Socialist Realism).

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