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Images of popular demigods and minor deities are shown to dominate the decoration of early Buddhist sites to the exclusion of almost any other subject matter. In particular, an iconographic study of the remains of the monastery from Bharhut reveals a process of superimposition wherein the spirit‐deities have been moved to the periphery of the sacred space and the center is reserved for the Buddhist relic alone. When this information is coupled with new evidence demonstrating that these monasteries were largely built over locations (like cemeteries and hills) that were understood as being the abodes of specific minor deities, it becomes clear that the Buddhist community is making a potent statement of religious authority though its architecture. Significantly, this hierarchy expressed in sculpture parallels the claims of authority made in the legendary literature.

The eastern and northern walls of the baptistery feature the main artistic program, which is a procession of women. This chapter surveys and challenges the usual identification and interpretation of these female figures. While the traditional interpretation of them as the women at the tomb of Christ on Easter morning has arguments to support it, the preponderance of evidence supports our recovering an old counter-proposal, which identifies them as virgins at a wedding. When biblical, artistic, and ritual sources are read with this in mind, the singular importance of marriage motifs in early Syrian Christianity becomes clear. The closest artistic comparanda from Syria render a biblical wedding procession—that of Jesus’ Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins—with the same iconography as the figures on Dura’s walls. In addition, the motif of spiritual marriage at initiation in a “bridal chamber” was very prominent in proximate textual traditions. That being said, ritual texts and homilies from the fourth century begin to show metaphorical interference between imagery of weddings and funerals, and so polysemic interpretations of this procession are certainly warranted. The marriage motif dominates, but does not completely subordinate, the notions of death and resurrection at initiation.

The book concludes with re-evaluation of late eighteenth and nineteenth-century attitudes to provincial urbanisation and asserts that the reorganisation of the traditional urban hierarchy was mirrored by the evolution of a new visual vocabulary with which the urban scene was articulated. In the 1780s towns and cities were represented primarily through an aesthetic formula inherited from picturesque landscape painting. By the 1830s and 1840s, it was possible to present towns from myriad perspectives. However, by the 1880s this plurality was under attack from a new aesthetic archetype that privileged the scale and impact of industrial premises, pollution, and overcrowding.

The conclusion offers the following provisional definition of la Parisienne: a type of which atypicality is the dominant feature; a type whose identity is continuously displaced or deferred, simultaneously reaching back to her earliest manifestations in the nineteenth century and forward to future manifestations which will both affirm and rework the iconography of the type. The further turn of the screw for the difficulty of defining la Parisienne as a type is that this difficulty is not in spite of her iconography but is in fact built into it. This apparent contradiction is accounted for within iconography itself as a methodology, the two aspects of which are stability and mutability. Since a type is only a type because of recognisable motifs, certain motifs must be established which have both universal, and particular or historical validity. One of the ways iconography may respond to its dual imperatives of stability and mutability is by constructing a cycle of films featuring a certain type, and the conclusion reveals that this book goes some way toward constructing what might be called a cycle of Parisienne films.

This chapter explores the figure of the ghost to offer a new understanding of the status of the image in Roman art and visual culture. It shows how ancient depictions of ghosts operate recursively by depicting the conditions of depiction and even the visual event of seeing itself, and that this recursive play in turn makes visible the systems of classification that shape this relay.

This chapter employs the traditional art historical methods of formal analysis and iconography to understand head motifs engraved on Cupisnique ceramics that were made between 1200 and 200 BCE. Rather than characterizing a small social group operating in isolation, these motifs and objects serve as indicators of cultural identity, affiliation, and transmission, expressing complex interactions between neighboring cultures. In other words, the head motifs on Cupisnique ceramics display the cultural networks inside of which the Cupisnique people saw themselves. Through conscious combination of various techniques and symbols appropriated from other cultures, Cupisnique artists created innovative objects unique to their own society. In particular, the Cupisnique people combined the post-firing engraving techniques of the Chorrera and Machalilla cultures of Ecuador with head motifs appropriated from the architectural friezes of Huaca de los Reyes, a public ritual space, to create small, personal items. These objects with imagery and techniques appropriated into a new, private context become a key distinction of the Cupisnique culture against its neighbors, antecedents, and trade partners.

The Moche people of northern coastal Peru (c. 100 B.C.E–850 C.E.) left behind a great deal of visual communication in their art, which is unusual in its relative naturalism and realistic portrayal of human and animal figures. Although their stylistic choices appear to allow for a close study of artistic imagery and its relationship to Moche life, the Moche were selective in what they included in their iconography; their art is not a comprehensive catalogue of their culture. Nevertheless, by comparing the results of a iconographic analysis of human costume in Moche ceramics with the work of scholars who have studied Moche supernatural representations in the same medium, it is possible to move toward a deeper understanding of mid- to late Moche culture and status as depicted in their art. By focusing mainly on art produced in the middle to late Moche periods (AD 200–550), this essay provides an inquiry into general ideas in Moche culture about the supernatural, ideas which of course would have varied in their details over time and space.

Ceramic texts and imagery have been critically important tools in the study of Maya iconography and epigraphy. However, how these narratives coordinate with those in other media as coherent, media-specific compositions has been little explored. This chapter presents a single case study to address issues of intertextuality. In particular, it focuses on the iconography and textual composition of the Regal Rabbit Vase (K1398) with the imagery found on Naranjo Stela 22. That the royal house of Naranjo commissioned both objects makes this a useful comparison, because it provides historical links between the vessel and the stela. Taking advantage of this fortuitous pairing of contemporaneous objects, we look to the visual rhetoric through which K’ahk Tiliw Chan Chahk’s (688–726? A.D.) military and youth rites were presented in each medium. Then, these rites are placed in conversation with the extensive iconographic and textual record at Palenque to contextualize the pan-Maya significance of youth rites involving the deity B’olon Okte’ K’uh and their mythological underpinnings. Through this example, we explore why ceramics were a preferred medium for the presentation of certain genres of imagery (e.g. mythological narratives) that are rarely presented in the monuments and how this choice is itself meaningful.

Chapter 3 compares and contrasts anxieties and concerns which surrounded the clothed and unclothed male body. Male bodies had a powerful cultural resonance after the war, in rehabilitative initiatives and emerging consumer industries. By the 1930s, the physical power of the masses, from the Bolshevik Revolution to images of crowds at play, was informing a national iconography of controlled and disciplined youth, very visible in newsreel footage from the 1930s of the Scouts, BB, boys' clubs, and totalitarian youth movements in Germany and Italy. At an individual level, young men's physical sense of self was coming under the growing influence of visual forms and commercial leisure trends, bringing working-class young men into contact with new models of personal behaviour and social interaction which made many sensitive to style, fashion and appearance. This chapter examines how working-class young men mediated the feminised connotations of consumption in negotiating these new physical images and ways of performing masculinity.

The excavation of the tomb of Karakhamun has brought to light its textual richness. It is the oldest known Late Period revival monumental mortuary building, making it a an important reference for later temple tombs of Thebes. This chapter presents the texts identified in the First Pillared Hall, which are from the Book of Going Forth By Day, the Ritual of the Hours of the Day, the Ritual of the Hours of the Night, and various offering scenes. It describes the textual decoration and explains the placement of texts, spells, and scenes, as well as highlighting iconographic novelties.

Archaism is a key factor in Late Period Theban tomb decoration, and this chapter explores this in the tombs of Karakhamun and Karabasken. It looks at the style of carving, the use of imagery and iconography, and techniques and innovations employed. This chapter concludes that the tomb was decorated in a relatively short period of time by a large number of building and artistic teams, yet was never completed.

This chapter explores the decoration of the recently discovered vestibule in the tomb of Karakhamun. It looks at eight scenes—including grape gathering, musicians, and plowing—exploring composition, iconography, imagery, artistic influences, and subject matter. It concludes by drawing attention to three key features: that New-Kingdom inspired features increases throughout the Twenty-sixth Dynasty; the ‘mistakes’ in the representation of objects, attire, or action; and the progression away from narrative and toward sacralization.

The introduction provides an overview of the origins of the Parisienne type in nineteenth-century French art and culture. It traces these origins to specific works of art and literature, including the novels of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola and Dumas fils; the paintings of Renoir, James Tissot, Toulouse-Lautrec; and the numerous physiognomies written on the type. The origin of the term la Parisienne is examined and two key features of her mythology are identified: visibility and mobility. A provisional definition of la Parisienne as ‘a figure of French modernity’ and ‘more than just a female inhabitant of Paris’ is then offered. Both the technological (railways, printing press, fashion plates, photography) and cultural (art, literature, advertising, print media) developments in nineteenth-century France which provided the basis for the emergence of la Parisienne as a dominant cultural figure are then discussed. Also introduced here is the main theoretical approach of the book: iconography.The iconography of la Parisienne can be categorised according to the following concepts: visibility and mobility (both social and spatial); style and fashionability, including self-fashioning; artist and muse; cosmopolitanism; prostitution; danger; consumption (the consumer and the consumed); and transformation.

This chapter explores death and mourning pictures within a shifting memorial culture that was rooted in historical modes of representation and theologies of redemption. Over the course of the nineteenth century, photographic portraiture emerged within this memorial culture as both the preferred iconography of mourning in nineteenth-century America and, significantly, as a relic of the departed that disclosed future glory to the bereaved. In this chapter, I explore the role of photographs as relics that illuminated the communion of shadows by mediating the body of the deceased with the grieving body of the bereaved. Here, photographs were devised not as tokens of the moldering body of the deceased but of promise of celestial reunion in glory. As memorial portraiture focused attention on the body of the deceased, another facet within the communion of shadows purported to provide evidence of the soul’s survival after death.

Emily Engel considers how the early portraits of Simón Bolívar demonstrate the activation of visual imagery as a necessary component in the independence process during a pivotal moment in American history. Portraits of the Liberator built on existing colonial viceregal traditions while deviating from the past in order to articulate a distinctive iconography of political change. This heterogeneous body of military portraits connoted broad-reaching affiliations with nascent revolutionary ideologies. Bolívar used the images to position himself as an agent of international political change, while his supporters commissioned, collected, and displayed Bolivarian portraits as visual demonstrations of loyal allegiance designed to further emphasize the inevitability of his rise to power and the subsequent demise of Spanish imperial domination. Even less ardent allies temporarily displayed Bolivarian portraits as they negotiated their social positions in the liminal space between imperialism and nationalism. Collectively, Bolivarian portraits produced during the Liberator’s lifetime articulated the foundation for the transition of the hero into an icon in the second half of the nineteenth century.