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READING
Meaning
To recognize or identify something does not necessarily mean that you understand it.
To understand something is to grasp what it means.
Meaning exists on two levels. On the one hand, meaning is what the artist intended the image to signify (essential meaning).
However, an image can also have meaning apart from whatever the artist intended (extraneous meaning).
Both types of meaning exist within a cultural context. In other words, an image’s meaning is primarily the product of various culturally established conventions about what constitutes knowledge and understanding.
A work of art exists simultaneously in two cultural moments in history: the time when it was first created, and the present.
The primary desire is to understand the image’s original meaning, what it meant when it was created. However, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to isolate or separate this original meaning from conventions of understanding and cultural biases that exist today.
Your understanding of the past is always and unavoidably colored by your understanding of the present.
But this need not be a problem. To recover the past as it was then is impossible.
We study art not simply to understand an image’s original meaning, but also as a way of understanding the present. In this respect, it is perhaps useful to explain how you respond to images.
ESSENTIAL MEANING
Essential meaning is meaning that is inherent in or original to the image. It is comprised of three types: Intended Meaning, Conventional Meaning, and Contextual Meaning.
- Intended Meaning, or the Artist’s Meaning, is what the artist meant or wanted to convey, say, or express in the image.
It is the artist’s initial intentions that determine the form and content of an image.
In almost every instance, the meaning conveyed in a work of art is intended. Intended meaning is deliberate.
It is the result of deliberate choices made in the process of composing an image.
Each choice — this line, this color, this shape, this spatial configuration, this texture, this object — is governed by a set of considerations the goal of which is to express meaning of one kind or another.
The choices made by the artist are influenced and guided by many factors, a number of which, because they are rooted in the artist’s own contemporary culture, he or she may not be consciously aware.
Intended meaning should not be confused with indicated meaning. Most naturally occurring phenomena convey indicated meaning.
The appearance of dark billowing clouds in the sky, for example, means that a storm is brewing or it is about to rain.
The appearance of blossoms on trees means that winter is over and spring has begun.
These days, we tend to regard such things as naturally occurring events and that any meaning associated with them is merely indicative of a state in Nature.
(In earlier times, however, and among various tribal peoples today, events such as storms, or the appearance of spring flowers, were often understood to be the result of actions by divine beings or cosmic forces, and so possessed intended meaning.)
Works of art may include objects or phenomena that convey indicated meaning.
For example, the dark clouds in Rembrandt’s painting of The Mill convey the indicated meaning that a storm is brewing or it is about to rain.
Rembrandt, The Mill, 1645–1648 (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC)
However, Rembrandt deliberately chose to paint storm clouds in this picture, so they must be regarded as also carrying additional intended meaning.
The distinction is also one between conventional meaning (the indicated meaning of stormy clouds) and contextual meaning (what the storm clouds mean in this painting).
All art, even the most abstract, is rich in intended meaning.
Indeed, the range and quality of intended meaning in a visual image are factors that determine whether or not it is a work of art.
- Conventional Meaning is what the elements in the image mean in and of themselves, or what the story or narrative represented was originally understood to mean.
Conventional meaning is discovered through the recognition or identification of what the image literally represents.
It involves identifying the various significant features and symbols in the image in order to determine its subject matter (see below).
The study of subject matter in order to discover what is represented is called iconography.
Artists often draw ideas from, or illustrate directly, stories or events in history or religion, or that are referred to or described in literature.
In order to identify conventional meaning, it is therefore essential to have a wide knowledge of history, literature, and religion.
To represent ideas that are not easily depicted, artists frequently resort to the use of symbols.
A knowledge of symbols is therefore also essential to anyone studying iconography.
In order to identify the conventional meaning it is necessary to search the image for clues.
For example, in the fresco painted in Florence in the 1420s by the painter Masaccio are several figures of men with foreshortened dull gold disks behind the heads.
Masaccio, The Tribute Money, c. 1427 (Brancacci Chapel, S. Maria del Carmine, Florence)
These can be identified as haloes, which are a conventional symbol used to indicate holiness.
Their presence permits you to identify Masaccio’s fresco as a religious painting.
Acting on the suspicion that the central group of thirteen haloed figures shows Jesus Christ and the twelve apostles, a process of matching the actions of all seventeen figures with recorded Christian stories involving Christ and the twelve apostles enables you to identify the scene as an episode related in the Gospel of St. Matthew (17: 24–27), namely the Tribute Money.
This “match” between text and image enables you to confirm the identity the central group and to identify the figure without a halo (who appears twice in the painting) as a tax collector.
The story tells of St. Peter being approached by a tax collector and Christ telling St. Peter to catch a fish in the mouth of which will be a coin with which he should then pay the tax collector.
Masaccio has placed all three episodes in the same panel.
The confrontation between St. Peter and the taxman and Christ’s direction to St. Peter occur in the center.
To the left, St. Peter is seen again retrieving the coin from the mouth of a fish and on the right he is seen a third time paying the tax collector.
This Biblical story, in which Christ, despite his claim to exemption as the Son of God, submits to the Law and pays his taxes to avoid scandal, is the conventional meaning of the painting.
However, this is not the fresco’s only meaning. It also has a contextual meaning.
- Contextual Meaning is what the elements, story, or narrative mean within the image at the time it was made.
In order to identify contextual meaning in Masaccio’s Tribute Money, it must be asked why this particular story was chosen for the painting.
To answer this question, it is necessary to reconstruct as accurately and as specifically as possible everything that might have had an impact on or influenced in some way this choice.
The method of research involves a series of “circles of inquiry”.
In the first circle is gathered information about the painter, Masaccio, and the person who commissioned him to paint the fresco. The circle of inquiry is then enlarged to include what was happening in the visual culture at this time that may have affected or guided both the choices of both Masaccio and the patron.
Eventually, the circle expands to include research on the various social, political, religious, and economic events that might have had an impact on the ideas of Masaccio and those of his patron.
It is assumed that the contextual meaning of Masaccio’s fresco was clearly understood at the time it was painted.
It is the art historian’s task to try and find out what this understanding was.
It involves trying to recover as much as possible the prevailing ideas and attitudes and the nature and causes of contemporary events in order to see the fresco with the eyes and mind of someone living in the 1420s in Florence.
However, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct the full set of circumstances that impinged upon the creation of an image made nearly six hundred years ago.
One art historian has suggested that the inclusion of the sea on the left indicates that the contextual meaning of the fresco had to do with economic and political motives in connection with patron’s interests in overseas trade with the Orient.
Enlarging the circle of inquiry, another art historian has suggested that the contextual meaning of the Tribute Money was a new tax, the catasto, legislated in 1427.
In effect, the fresco, through the example of Christ, exhorted Florentines to submit to the new law and pay the tax.
Expanding the contextual circle further, yet another art historian has suggested that through the connection of taxes with St. Peter, who is a symbol of the Catholic Church, the fresco serves to legitimize papal claims to secular authority.
None, or only one, or perhaps all of these suggestions might be correct.
The study of what an image means in its original cultural context is called iconology.
As this example shows, iconological interpretation is fraught with difficulties due to lack of pertinent information and the impossibility of making direct connections between an image and its cultural context.
Besides the subject matter, the way in which Masaccio has conceived and painted the fresco — his use of linear perspective, selection of figure types, treatment of poses, use of color, etc. — also contribute to the contextual or iconological meaning.
EXTRANEOUS MEANING
Extraneous meaning is meaning brought to the image from outside. Three types of extraneous meaning can be identified.
- Historical Meaning refers to the significance that is subsequently attached to an image in later historical periods.
It is the way we, today, may understand an image, but which was not necessarily the way it was understood when it was first created.
Rembrandt’s painting of The Mill is today a prized possession of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.
In Rembrandt’s day, however, the painting may not have been so highly regarded.
It has acquired its current status over time and also because of its location (see Situational Meaning below).
Massacio’s fresco of the Tribute Money is today regarded as major work of the Early Italian Renaissance.
It has acquired thereby a historical significance that distorts, or at least makes it more difficult to recover, the painting’s original contextual meaning.
- Situational Meaning refers to the influence of an image’s location or physical situation on its perceived meaning.
When an image is seen in its original intended location, whatever meaning is suggested by that location is appropriate to understanding the work.
For example, the meaning of a religious painting is enhanced and made more significant when viewed in its original location in a church (referred to as in situ).
When objects are removed from their original location, however, they lose their original situational meaning and acquire a different situational meaning.
This new situational meaning may be quite alien to the work’s original context.
A religious painting that once existed in the religious context of a church, for example, today may be viewed in the secular context of a museum.
Moreover, in numerous cases, your visual experience of an image is artificially enhanced when it is seen in a new situation.
Images when viewed in a book, or shown projected in a classroom, also lose their original situational context (not to mention their correct dimensions and color) and acquire another.
- Personal Meaning refers to what the elements in the image, or the image as a whole, means to you personally.
Personal meaning may derive from identification with some feature or person in an image.
Advertisements in magazines and on television frequently try to establish meaning at a personal level for the viewer so that you will be more readily disposed towards the product being promoted.
Or you may like the colors used in an image.
In other instances, you may be fond of a particular painting because a reproduction of it hung in the house where you grew up.
Or maybe a special friend gave you a poster of a picture and you associate the image with him or her.
Or you remember seeing a piece of sculpture or a building while on holiday in Europe.
Or maybe you simply remember the pleasure and excitement you felt upon seeing a particular work for the first time.
These personal responses are part of your visual experience and constitute part of what an image means to you.
Essential meaning and Extraneous meaning overlap in subtle and complicated ways that can confound the educated desire to understand the artist’s original intentions and what the image meant at the time it was first created.
Ideally, with the exception of situational meaning when an image is in it original location, all forms of extraneous meaning should be suppressed because they can distort or conceal essential meaning.
However, both essential meaning and extraneous meaning influence how we respond to and understand an image and need to be taken into account.
Both are very much part of your visual experience.
Understanding occurs when your mind begins to make sense of what your eyes see.
To do this, your mind draws upon whatever knowledge it has that might enable you to grasp the meaning of the image before you.
Some parts of an image may be understood using general knowledge that is readily at hand.
Other parts of an image, however, may require more specialized knowledge that you may not possess.
This specialized knowledge can be acquired through research.
The goal is to gather enough information to understand the image’s essential meanings.
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