ABSTRACT
W.J.T. Mitchell belongs to the generation of scholars who once and for all deconstructed the optimistic belief in the possibility to the authorial intention and the ultimate meaning of artworks.1 Areas where such optimism was particularly strong included iconography and iconology as forged by eminent art historians – Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, Ernst Gombrich and other members of the so-called Warburg School – and it was soon adopted by other areas of artistic creation, such as literature. Classical iconology prevailed between late Antiquity and the Baroque, and it was especially during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that symbolic expression, mythological imagery and Christian allusions were dominating artistic expressions. Already, contemporaries felt the need to give the audience guidance – in the form of dictionaries and handbooks of figurative meanings – on the hidden and sometimes obscure cultural symbols. The most famous such endeavor was Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593, 1603).2 As Jan Białostocki remarked: “With Ripa in hand art historians – initially Émile Mâle (in 1932) – were able to decipher hundreds of allegorical statements in paint and stone, guided by this alphabet of personifications”.3
