ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we frame the history of interpretation beginning with three contrasting case examples of prehistoric, Egyptian dynastic, and Imperial Roman ways of constructing visual cultures important for their times. Our emphasis is on ideas of how contemporary observers can interpret visual arts and culture (in the anthropological sense) from multiple points of view across time. A section on visual dimensions of writing and written texts demonstrates relationships of iconicity in the development of writing systems, and how graphemes within writing itself are a form of visual signification in texts from sacred to mundane. The latter half of the chapter provides deep analysis of ideology in visual culture through a discussion of how religion in medieval Europe conditioned ideas of representation and the practice of making visual arts in service of power. The chapter closes with a discussion of cultural capital, class, and colonialism as a point of departure to examine the role of social structures in constructing visual cultures of the 19th and 20th century, which underpin much of global visual culture today.
