ABSTRACT
The Neoplatonism in the books by Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola became widely acknowledged for its lasting influence on art. It thus became common knowledge that Renaissance artists were not exclusively concerned with problems intrinsic to their work but that their artifacts rather encompassed a much larger intellectual and cultural horizon. The mid-twentieth century saw a change in paradigms of art history: iconology. Even though iconology undeniably had its greatest impact on the study of European Renaissance art, in principle this approach can be applied to any work of art: or at least this was believed by the proponents of this tradition. Iconology was also motivated by the wish to supplant a merely ‘aestheticizing’ practice of art history with a new form of highly erudite research into the intellectual backgrounds of individual works of art. The chapter also presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book.
