Iconography literally means "description of images," but it also refers to a research program in art history that exposes the different meanings of images vis-à-vis the beholder.

Words and Images

Religious iconography defines a relationship between word and pictorial scheme, each of which follows its own logic. Visual forms are not discursive: they do not represent their message sequentially but simultaneously. While the meanings given through verbal language are understood successively, those given through visual forms are understood only by perceiving the whole at once. Susanne Langer, who argues for such a distinction in her Philosophy in a New Key (1951, pp. 79–102), calls this kind of semantics "presentational symbolism," indicating that we grasp it not by reasoning but by feeling. From this basic difference it follows that word and image sometimes compete against each other and sometimes supplement...