Quotes About Iconography

The majority of exposed penises in major museums belong to the Baby Jesus.

Although Perm is one of the biggest cities in Russia it felt like a different kind of Russia. In Moscow, you have the Kremlin, St. Basil's, a lot of Soviet iconography everywhere. In Perm, it was a different side of Russia. A little more folksy. If Moscow is an iron statue of an eagle, Perm is a matryoshka nesting doll.

The most ancient pictures and statues in Italy and other parts of Europe, of what are supposed to be representations of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus, are black. The infant god, in the arms of his black mother, his eyes and drapery white, is himself perfectly black. [335:8]

One cannot set out to make a work that's spiritual. What is a contemporary iconography for the spiritual? Is it some fuzzy space?

He had spent years writing about the Masons' rich tradition of metaphorical iconography and symbols, and knew that Masons had always been one of the most unfairly maligned and misunderstood organizations in the world. Regularly accused of everything from devil worship to plotting a one-world government, the Masons also had a policy of never responding to their critics, which made them an easy target.

Except in a few well-publicized instances (enough to lend credence to the iconography painted on the walls of the media), the rigorous practice of rugged individualism usually leads to poverty, ostracism and disgrace. The rugged individualist is too often mistaken for the misfit, the maverick, the spoilsport, the sore thumb.

I think that for a lot of us gay people, we do feel that pop is our music. We identify with it and its iconography, and that's been a tradition.

Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

Pop is about speaking everybody's language. The imagery and iconography we instantly recognize. When you can rely on things that the public already knows, you're dealing with Pop.

You see pictures of Buddha and he's sitting, reclining, at peace. The Hindus have their twelve-armed elephant god, who also seems so content but not powerless. But leave it to Christians to have a dead and bloody man nailed to a cross.

In reality, genuine epiphanies are extremely rare. In contemporary adult life maturation & acquiescence to reality are gradual processes. Modern usage usually deploys epiphany as a metaphor. It is usually only in dramatic representations, religious iconography, and the 'magical thinking' of children that insight is compressed to a sudden blinding flash.

The Bible never tells us what Jesus looked like, and in the earliest surviving paintings of him, he is sometimes depicted as short-haired, sometimes as beardless, with no authoritative version winning out over the others. Yet around 400 A.D., all of the other competing images were replaced by the long-haired, bearded Jesus we know today.

In a 1975 Playboy interview, David Bowie caused a furore when he opined that 'Hitler was the first rock star. He staged a whole country.' Oddly, Bryan Ferry would get into similar hot water in a 2007 interview with a German newspaper Welt Am Sonntag, in which he praised Nazi iconography as 'just amazing' and 'really beautiful' and was later forced to make a public statement of apology.

I would say that 'Schindler's List,' as powerful as it was, seemed to have continued with a particular iconography of victimization and passivity. That was the iconography with which I had grown up and to which I had grown accustomed.

If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.

According to Dionysius, the Divine Darkness appears dark only because it is so dazzlingly bright-- a paradox I have attempted to understand by looking directly at the sun and noticing the dark spot that flowers at its center. But as compelling as this paradox, or this experiment, may be, I am not as interested in it as I am the fact that in Christian iconography, this "dazzling darkness" appears with startling regularity as blue.

I am interested in circulating past iconography in the present in order to get to the future.

History — the product, not the raw material — is a bottle with a label. For many years now, the emphasis of historical discussion has been laid upon the label (its iconography, its target-group of customers) and upon the interesting problems of manufacturing bottle-glass. The contents, on the other hand, are tasted in a knowing, perfunctory way and then spat out again. Only amateurs swallow them.

The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture.