Iconology Research Group

Program

• 9:00 Welcome with coffee and tea
• 9:30 Introduction to the program by Barbara Baert (Leuven)
• 9:45 Introduction to the concept by Ann-Sophie Lehmann (Utrecht)

Session 1 | Why Anthropology?

Chair: Renaat Devisch (Leuven)

• 10:00 Herman Roodenburg (Amsterdam-Leuven)
  Iconology, visual studies and sensuous anthropology. Some recent developments
• 11:00 Paul Vandenbroeck (Leuven)
  Matrix marmorea
• 12:00 Coffee break

Session 2 | Aby Warburg today

Chair: Renaat Devisch (Leuven)

• 12:15 Barbara Wittmann (Berlin)
  Indian rituals and children’s drawings. Reflections on Aby Warburg’s anthropology
• 13:15 Lunchtime

Session 3 | Iconology meets Anthropology in current projects

Chair: Ann-Sophie Lehmann (Utrecht)

• 15:00 Jan Van der Stock (Leuven)
  Rogier van der Weyden and Leuven
• 15:45 Bert Watteeuw (Leuven)
  Anthropology of the portrait. practices of portraiture in seventeenth-century Flanders
• 16:30 Liesbet Kusters (Leuven)
  From ‘Noli me tangere’ to ‘Haemorrhoissa’
• 17:15 Coffee break

Session 4 | Iconology meets Anthropology in the arts

Chair: Liesbeth Decan (Leuven)

• 17:30 Jeroen Laureyns (Gent)
  ‘Bild-Anthropologie’ and contemporary art . Art critical reflexions reaching for the hand of Hans Belting
• 18:15 Wim Lambrecht (Gent)
  About soundseeing and emotioned audibility

Concept

Aby Warburg might be regarded as the initiator of the ongoing relation between iconology and anthropology at a moment in time when both fields had barely been established as disciplines. Today, as we have entered what might be called the millennium of images, iconology is taking on new areas of research and is in the process of being redefined as a discipline that could encompass the study of image making, image meaning, image perception and image distribution in the scientific, political and cultural domains of the visual world; and to make the field even wider, also beyond the visual, because as W.T.J. Mitchell and others before him have pointed out, there is no pure visuality and therefore no visual culture, because images are perceived with a much wider array of senses than sight only.

It may be because of this universal approach that iconology has a certain kinship with anthropology; a discipline that Bruno Latour described as the only one that can study how a certain culture ‘does’ science and critical theory, religion and politics, without excluding any possible outcome a priori.
An important binding element and point of departure for a discussion of the current relation between the two is certainly the body. Hans Belting has recently proposed a new approach to iconology, which he calls Bild-Anthropologie. Here, he foregrounds the perceiving and performing body as a prerequisite to understand, project, produce and remember images.
Herman Roodenburg in turn has shown how images were imprinted onto the body and transformed into physical
reality.
Paul Vandenbroeck explored and unveiled in his fascinating studies the place of the body and the image in the matrixial systems, a world that goes even beyond the classical notions of the bodily and the visual medium, and introduces epistemologies of ‘abstract’, of ‘chaos’.
If images are no longer primarily treated as texts, as was the case until very recently, and a study of images returns to initial methods proposed by iconology, taking into account the very specificity of images, how precisely can it gain from an anthropological approach and what exactly is the role of the body and even the beyond-body?

The Iconology Research Group has invited international speakers and young scholars to discuss these questions, to revisit the original and recent relations of the fields and to present examples of a fruitful collaboration between iconology and anthropology from current research projects.