The Phenomenology of Seeing: Guardini’s Welt-Anschauung. Seeing the Sense, Spirit and Being of Iconography

Venturi’s claims that there is an inherent danger in the iconographic method is responsible for the prejudice that developed against the iconographic method in art history. In phenomenology, Husserl called the knowledge of art (Kunsterkenntnis) epoché and Belting examines the limits of iconography in a short excerpt “The End of Art History”. The iconographic discourses are often detached from the concrete way of life and thought of the artist and from the time because they only abstractly examine the history of iconographic symbols through the centuries and do not inquire into the deeper sense, being and spirit of the respective iconography. On one hand, it means, that iconography alone cannot fully explain the meaning of artworks and that a phenomenology can offer a complementary way of understanding the work of art. However, the phenomenology of seeing, with Romano Guardini’s Welt-Anschauung (contemplative seeing of the world), could reveal the sense and spirit of iconography. Here we go one step further and open up a thought-provoking reflection on the understanding of iconography with a phenomenological argument grounded in an Anschauung. The main contribution of this text lies in the attempt to move beyond conventional iconographic analysis and explore the ‘spirit’ and ‘being’ of iconography. This is an approach that brings together contemporary debates in art history, phenomenology, theology, and aesthetics and provides a rich interdisciplinary foundation, but it also asks for a new kind of knowledge