ABSTRACT

The general science of images is what Mitchell calls critical iconology. The adjective “critical” is meant to distinguish it from “iconology” in the strict sense  – the philological study of the literary influences in painting and sculpture, and vice versa. Critical iconology, in fact, not only takes into account artistic images and literary oeuvres, but opens up the research to “the general field of images and their relation to discourse”1 – all kinds of images and discourses, woven together to create our representation of the world. But critical iconology goes beyond the sole relations between images and language, studying their migrations across all media. As a science in its own right, iconology is based on “four fundamental concepts”:  (1)  the pictorial turn; (2)  the image/ picture distinction; (3) metapicture; and (4) biopicture.2 The foundations of critical iconology, as a distinct discipline from art history, as well as the pictorial turn and the concepts of metapicture and biopicture, are discussed at length elsewhere in this volume; in this chapter, then, I will leave them in the background, focusing on point 2:  the image/picture distinction and the theoretical definition of the image.