Epigraph
Like all kinds of historical detective work the solution of iconographic puzzles needs luck as well as a certain amount of background knowledge. But given this luck the results of iconography can sometimes meet exacting standards of proof. If a complex illustration can be matched by a text which accounts for all its principal features the iconographer can be said to have made his case. If there is a whole sequence of such illustrations which fits a similar sequence in a text the possibility of the fit being due to accident is very remote indeed.
Ernst H. Gombrich. Symbolic Images, 1972
…
Historians of art and architecture have paid remarkably little attention to the architectural use of emblematics. In many instances it has been the literary historian turned emblem scholar who has studied some of these visual programmes in their architectural settings as examples of “applied emblematics” [angewandte Emblematik], and the concern has frequently been to establish sources. Adequate understanding requires that the architectural emblem be contextualized, i.e. interpreted within its societal, political and religious context as an expression of the intentions of the builder or designer.
Peter M. Daly. The Emblem and Architecture, 1999
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