Semiotics, Iconography, and Reading Meaning

Beyond describing how a work looks, critical analysis asks what it means and how that meaning is constructed. Two related approaches help us do this systematically: iconography, which studies the subjects and symbols in images, and semiotics, which studies how signs of all kinds carry meaning. This lesson introduces both and shows how to use them without over-reaching.

Iconography and iconology

Iconography is the identification and description of the subject matter and symbols in a work: recognizing a figure, a scene, or a symbolic object and knowing what it conventionally represents. Iconology goes a step further, interpreting the deeper cultural meaning of that imagery within its historical context. A useful three-level model distinguishes: the pre-iconographic level (simply what we see