Image reading: another way to practice culture

Abstract

The main issue contained in that thought is – today the validity of reading applied to image – still maintains its vigor, and in the last decade the number of researches on the boundaries and overlapping existing between what’s readable and what’s visible has been extended. Concerning the aforementioned aspect, the interruption in the “written documents imperialism” as Jacques Le Goff called the exclusive use of written sources, is an evident sign of the inclusion of other materials in researches, mainly iconographic material. So, investigations started using new sources, mainly Works of art, and it turned out to be natural “to throw ourselves into iconography as if it was a new bone to be gnawed”, as ironized Yve-Alain Bois. But, going beyond the simple irony, the teacher’s role is to overcome the dichotomy between formal discourse versus sociopolitical discourse and start using the iconographic sources carefully, since connections between works of art and contexts are frequently extremely simplistic. Seeing that, within the thoughts we intend to develop, reading or interpretation applied to iconography requires investigation of the image discourse specificity, since such “record” add to others, as historical ones, but never blend with them and are frequently discrepant.