Editing Iconology (section)

==Nuances==
In 1952, [[Creighton Gilbert]] added another suggestion for a useful meaning of the word "iconology". According to his view, iconology was not the actual investigation of the work of art but rather the result of this investigation. The Austrian art historian [[Hans Sedlmayr]] differentiated between "sachliche" and "methodische" iconology. "Sachliche" iconology refers to the "general meaning of an individual painting or of an artistic complex (church, palace, monument) as seen and explained with reference to the ideas which take shape in them." In contrast, "methodische" iconology is the "integral iconography which accounts for the changes and development in the representations".<ref>[http://www.encyclopedia.com/article-1G2-3407705539/iconology-and-iconography.html Encyclopedia.com: Iconology and Iconography]</ref> In ''Iconology: Images, Text, Ideology'' (1986), [[W.J.T. Mitchell]] writes that iconology is a study of "what to say about images", concerned with the description and interpretation of visual art, and also a study of "what images say" – the ways in which they seem to speak for themselves by persuading, telling stories, or describing.<ref>[http://iconictheory.blogspot.de/2010/05/iconology.html Karen Hope, The Iconic Image: Iconology]</ref> He pleads for a postlinguistic, postsemiotic "iconic turn", emphasizing the role of "non-linguistic symbol systems".<ref>W.J.T. Mitchell, ''Iconology: Images, Text, Ideology''. University of Chicago Press, 1986.</ref><ref>[http://d-sites.net/english/mitchell.htm w.j.t. mitchell and the image (review)]</ref><ref>W.J.T. Mitchell, "Iconology and Ideology: Panofsky, Althusser, and the Scene of Recognition". In David B. Downing and Susan Bazargan, eds., ''Image and Ideology in Modern/Postmodern Discourse''. New York 1991, pp.321-329.</ref> Instead of just pointing out the difference between the material (pictorial or artistic) images, "he pays attention to the dialectic relationship between material images and mental images".<ref>[https://ksangmin.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/w-j-t-mitchell-iconology-and-picture-theory/ W. J. T. Mitchell's Iconology and Picture Theory]</ref> According to Dennise Bartelo and Robert Morton, the term "iconology" can also be used for characterizing "a movement toward seeing connections across all the language processes" and the idea about "multiple levels and forms used to communicate meaning" in order to get "the total picture” of learning. "Being both literate in the traditional sense and visually literate are the true mark of a well-educated human."<ref>[http://wac.colostate.edu/journal/vol8/bartelo_morton.pdf Dennise Bartelo and Robert Morton, "Iconology: An Alternate Form of Writing"]</ref>

For several years, new approaches to iconology have developed in the theory of images. This is the case of what [[Jean-Michel Durafour]], French philosopher and theorist of cinema, proposed to call "econology", a biological approach to images as forms of life, crossing iconology, ecology and sciences of nature. In an econological regime, the image (''eikon'') self-speciates, that is to say, it self-iconicizes with others and eco-iconicizes with them its iconic habitat (''oikos''). The iconology, mainly Warburghian iconology, is thus merged with a conception of the relations between the beings of the nature inherited, among others ([[Arne Næss]], etc.) from the writings of [[Kinji Imanishi]]. For Imanishi, living beings are subjects. Or, more precisely, the environment and the living being are just one. One of the main consequences is that the "specity", the living individual, "self-eco-speciates its place of life" (''Freedom in Evolution''). As far as the images are concerned: "If the living species self-specify, the images self-iconicize. This is not a tautology. The images update some of their iconic virtualities. They live in the midst of other images, past or present, but also future (those are only human classifications), which they have relations with. They self-iconicize in an iconic environment which they interact with, and which in particular makes them the images they are. Or more precisely, insofar as images have an active part: ''the images self-eco-iconicize their iconic environment''.<ref>Jean-Michel Durafour, ''"L'Étrange Créature du lac noir" de Jack Arnold. Aubades pour une zoologie des images'', Aix-en-Provence, Rouge profond, 2017, 200 p. ({{ISBN|978-2915083910}}), p. 13</ref>"