Iconotropy: symbolic and material alterations of the ancient and

medieval cult image

4-5 April
Autonomous University, Madrid

Iconotropy is a Greek word that literally means “movement/change of the image”.

According to William J. Hamblin (2007), the iconotropy is the cultural phenomenon by
which there is a “misinterpretation, accidental or deliberate, on the part of one culture, of
the images or myths of another, especially to put them in agreement with the first culture”.
Thus, both in the classical culture of antiquity and in medieval culture we can identify
numerous testimonies of how -at a symbolic and material level- cult images were involved
in processes of misinterpretation produced by another culture. In pagan cultures it was
defined as a deliberate misrepresentation technique. Iconotropy is, moreover, an
unavoidable concept in studies of religious history, particularly in historical contexts and
cultural horizons in which religious and often turbulent changes have taken place. This
iconotropic process was one of the processes of appropriation of cult images that brought
with them an alteration in the materiality of those images.

The first approach to the concept was made by Robert Graves, The Greek Myths
(1955), to justify his own ideas about the origins of many of the Greek myths, claiming
that classical Greek culture had essentially misinterpreted images of the Bronze Age. In
some cases, Graves conjectures a process of iconotropy by which a hypothetical cult
image of the matriarchal period had been misinterpreted by Greek culture itself. In a
broader sense, cultural anthropologist Leopold Kretzenbacher has published a large
number of meticulous studies - since the 1970s- on European religious iconography where
he found such reinterpretations (religious and secular) of religious representations whose
original meaning was lost or even ignored on purpose. For Kretzenbacher, iconotrophy
refers to the conversion of religious iconography from one mode of spiritual organization
to another. From the contribution of Graves, recent historiography - until the mentioned
work of Hamblin (2007) - has not paid enough attention to a concept that is fundamental
to articulate an integral discourse on visual culture and the anthropology of the image of
ancient cult and medieval.

Taking as a starting point the History of Art, its various methodological

approaches and related sciences, proposals within the framework of ancient and medieval
ages will be considered:

- Changes in the symbolism and materiality of the image of the religious work
- Iconotropy and rituality
- Reinterpretation of non-Western cult images
- Mythology and cult image in Antiquity
- Symbolic and material appropriation of pagan images in the Middle Ages