Erwin Panofsky tries to classify the different modes of art historical research and analysis in a system that is loosely based on the way in which we perceive art, and successive stages we take in thinking about it. The goal is to define, as concretely as possible, the point at which formal analysis ends and intellectual analysis begins. “Let us, then,” Panofsky begins, “try to define the distinction between subject matter or meaning on the one hand, and form on the other” (26).
The basic unit of art historical analysis is the icon. Panofsky does not explicitly define the icon here, but he seems to use it in the wide sense of a visual sign of any kind. His analysis is not confined only to renaissance painting and sculpture, but also to the realm of gestures (as in the example of a man lifting his hat) and other forms of visual expression.
Panofsky divides the way we receive visual information into three categories. First, there is the realm of primary or natural meanings, which is limited to 1) factual content: that which we understand by matching certain “visible forms” with real world objects we know from our own memories and experience and 2) expressional content: that which we understand using our empathic faculties (27). Panofsky refers to the secondary category of meaning as just that, secondary or conventional meaning. He defines it as that which we understand through our cultural understanding. Unlike the information we glean from our experience (primary meanings) secondary meaning is concerned with the intent of the signer insofar as the sign enacts some cultural practice or ritual. Finally, there is the realm of instrinsic meaning, which is that which we understand by intellectualizing the sign and interpreting it through the lenses of “period, nationality, class, intellectual traditions and so forth.” (28). This information, requiring as it does a synthesizing analysis, subsumes the intent of the signer, unlike the first two categories which are in one way or another dependent on intent.
Thus, iconography is divided from iconology by which categories of visual response it deals with. Iconography is concerned with primary and secondary meanings, but not intrinsic. Its mission is a cataloguing mission; it is interested in development of artistic motifs over periods of history. Iconology is an analytic process. It takes everything in its purview (history, culture, philosophy and iconography itself) in order to describe signs and artistic motifs as symptoms of something else.
Iconographically speaking, we can catalogue many artistic motifs that are present in various representations of the bodhisattva Guanyin. Guanyin is represented as male at times, and at other times as female. Often, the figure is shown with female hair and clothing, as in the many images of Guanyin wearing a veil. The chest, it seems, never appear particularly feminized. Thus, the sense of gender is consistently androgynized. Often the bodhisattva is shown in a typical, meditative pose with one foot on one knee. Also, the motif of a water vase consistently appears.
In the article, “Fire Down Below and Watering, That’s Life: A Buddhist Reader’s Response to Marcel Duchamp,” Tosi Lee makes many iconological arguments. Still, most of it is indeed an iconographical analysis. It is an iconographical move to argue, as Lee does, that many of the motifs in Duchamp’s work (androgyny being the main one) are similar to the motifs in various depictions of Guanyin. From this, Lee can iconographically argue that the figure of Rrose Sélavy represents Guanyin. But to argue that Duchamp and the group he was associated with, the Dadaists, had an artistic philosophy which enacted Buddhist concepts is using (in an inverted manner) an iconological argument to bolster an iconographical analysis.
