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Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society

Abstract

The iconography of ancient art has to do with making propositions about what that art depicts. Stylistic studies, in contrast, make propositions about the sharedness of formal properties with other objects. These can be done separately. Although many iconographic analyses of ancient art proceed with little or no consideration of style, I argue that the two modes of analysis are interdependent. I offer a methodological case that stylistic analysis is logically prior to iconographic study in the domain of ancient art. This observation argues for a distinctively staged approach to the iconography of ancient objects, one in which detailed stylistic study is a necessary prerequisite to success in determining the referents of representations.

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