In this companion volume to "Iconology", the author extends his investigation to pictures - the concrete, representational objects in which images appear. Although we have many words about pictures, Mitchell notes that we do not yet have a satisfactory theory of them. What we have is a variety of disciplines - semiotics, philosophical inquiries into representation, new departures in art history, studies in mass media - that attempt to converge on the problem of pictorial representation and visual culture. Identifying the problems inherent in the attempt to master visual representation with verbal discourse, Mitchell proposes instead to "picture theory." He looks at the way pictures function in theories about culture, consciousness, and representation, and at theory itself as a form of picturing. What precisely, he asks, are pictures (and theories about pictures) doing now , in the late 20th century, when the power of the visual is said to be greater than ever before, and the "pictorial turn" supplants the "linguistic turn" in the study of culture? Focusing on Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing", Oliver Stone's "JFK", and television coverage of the Gulf War, he examines the capacity of visual images to awaken or stifle public debate, collective emotion, and political violence. An "applied iconology," this volume by one of America's leading theorists of visual representation offers an account of the interplay between the visible and the readable across the culture, from literature to visual art to the mass media.

In this collection of essays, five previously published and three new in this volume, a western historian of Chinese art examines the received ideas of art history from the vantage point of another culture. On the premise that what we feel a need to explain and how we explain it alike depend on what we assume to be normal, the essays all adopt a comparative approach. Whatever body of material is taken as case study-Gothic churches, Egyptian reliefs, Chinese bronzes, insular gospel manuscripts-the problems addressed are of broad general relevance to the discipline. They include the nature of art history's styles and periods, iconography as explanation, the rationale for art historical description, technical studies and the artistic imagination, and histories of representation. Clear and accessible, this book will interest anyone concerned with the conduct of art historical scholarship and the origins and consequences of its practices.
"Since the late 1970s, the field of art history has been characterized by self-scrutiny that has, ironically, too often encouraged methodological self-satisfaction; these essays, in contrast, permit no intellectual complacency. The author does not hesitate to challenge fundamental concepts, principles, and practices, both those that have been explicitly articulated and those that have gone unquestioned. The criticisms he offers are neither trivial nor self-serving; they are often blunt, but they are justified. His book will engage all historians of art-professionals and advanced students-who are interested in the intellectual foundations of our discipline as well as scholars whose work involves more general intellectual history."
-A. A. Donohue, Rhys Carpenter Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology, Bryn Mawr College