Iconology and Semiotics – with some Examples from Schapiro and Thürlemann

Debates on the relationship between Iconology and Semiotics resurface constantly, but recent developments in the fields of Visual semiotics and Cognitive semiotics are seldom referred to. Instead, the use of Semiotics in art history is often reduced to the anglophone reception of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist theory in the field. The aim of the present article is to expand the debate and to show that Visual semiotics has long abandoned the dependence on Linguistics and Structuralism that originally limited both its applicability to the study of non-verbal communication, and its validity in terms of historical hermeneutics. This is done by reconsidering a series of scholarly contributions of formative importance for the development of Visual semiotics in the twentieth century: Meyer Schapiro’s early studies of Romanesque art, Felix Thürlemann’s combination of semiotics and historical methodology, and the Belgian Groupe µ’s proposal for a unified analytical framework of visual semiotics and rhetoric. Drawing on Göran Sonesson’s distinction between iconic signs and iconicity in his interpretation of the semiotic legacy of Peirce, it is shown that the category of secondary iconicity may be operative at all the three levels of meaning defined by Erwin Panofsky: pre-iconographic, iconographic, and iconological. Conceived in these terms, the methodological dialogue between semiotics and art history provides a common ground of inquiry that is very different from the alternative presented by Mieke Bal, Norman Bryson and other art historians more than 30 years ago.