Iconotropy: everything or nothing?

Abstract

The relationship between art and religion has long been a major focus of art-historical research. The collection of essays edited by Jorge Tomás García and Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez presents a chronologically wide range of examples in Western art of changes in the appearance or interpretation of ‘cult images’ considered in the light of Robert Graves’s concept of ‘iconotropy’. The category of ‘cult image’, however, particularly as construed here, is too expansive, and the process of ‘iconotropy’ as redefined here too elastic, to contribute either to the understanding of the phenomena under study or to methodological precision.

Keywords

• iconotropy
• iconography
• religious images
• cult images
• robert graves
• leopold kretzenbacher