Iconongraphy

Pic is the poet Robert Graves from site mentioned.



On the news last night was bit with a general talking in Iraq. Behind him were the American flag and the Iraqi flag, and some shields...it was all an iconograph.

Old Egypt didn't have radio and TV, and to communicate they used iconographs, and the hieroglyphs. These things weren't limited to two dimesional graphics, but three dimensions too..the pyramids and temples and such. All of the clutter of things in King Tut's tomb represented a hieroglyph, or illustrated an iconograph.

Robert Graves explains in the introduction to his two volume Greek Myths that the ancients saw the myths as iconographs, that in fact many of them are stories made from graphics, like a story made from a painting.

What we have that is something like it, is the politcial cartoon. Uncle Sam, the Elephant, the Donkey. What's been lost is the sense the ancients knew for their iconographs. Graves tries to restore them in his books.

Maybe I can find what he wrote....brb...searched Robert Graves Greek Myths Political Cartoon...and found

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Robert Graves noted that the myths were no more than political cartoons and what the myths represent is a very cloudy, but nonetheless very interesting, history of a world of markedly differing values from that of the classical world.
http://www.islomane.com/thebookreview.htm
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He also explains that all expressions of art were tied in with worship, and heavily charged with magic and superstition. There was no notion of ornamentation just for ornament, or personal decoration.

This gets at my notion of a hieroglyphic fabric, where everything is mention of a central, I don't know, deity. All the Egyptian hieroglyphs were mention of Pharoah and the mystery religion surrounding the king.

Everything in St. Peter's Cathedral is tied in with Catholic Christianity, as our the rituals that go on there, and I would suppose all of the Vatican.

Now, when the general stood there doing his CNN interview there was something of all this!! The media has created an iconographic fabric. And it's all ritualized.
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Dale Fuchs in MadridSaturday July 1, 2006The Guardian
The Spanish holiday island of Mallorca is to honour its most illustrious British expatriate resident, the novelist, poet and scholar Robert Graves.
The hilltop stone country home where the novelist lived on and off from 1931 until his death in 1985 will open as a museum tomorrow. During his self-imposed exile in the once bucolic town of Deya, he wrote many of his most famous works, including I, Claudius, The White Goddess and The Greek Myths.

unquote

That's cool.

DavidDavid
Tree in the Door
August 9, 2007