![]() ![]() Yet while rhetography and art history seemingly converge on a unified concern for " the image, " they often employ this and other critical terms – like vision, visuality, and representation, to name only a few – in ways that reflect a specific disciplinary agenda. Similarly, biblical exegesis began with textual analysis and has only recently awakened to the power of rhetorical images evoked through parables, ekphrasis, and evocative language (enargeia). Art history began with pictures and objects and has come only recently to understand how the squishiness of the term " image " can be put to use in describing a host of non-material images that were nevertheless theorized in historical sources as though they were manufactured pictures. Both are fundamentally concerned with the problem of images, but they approach this issue from different angles. The emergence of rhetography as a mode of biblical exegesis concerned with the imagistic quality of the text offers a unique occasion to reflect upon the considerable overlap between these two distinct disciplines. Art historians pillage exegetical sources in order to crack the code of obscure biblical subjects, while exegetes invoke images as illustrations of textual praxis. Despite the numerous methodological parallels that unite art history and biblical exegesis, these two disciplines have struggled to engage one another in meaningful dialogue. These are the terms used to develop a critical explanation or interpretation of pictures and objects, to engage these objects exegetically, as it were. Image, picture, icon, medium, body, calligraphy-these terms (and many others) are part of the disciplinary jargon, and though art historians may occasionally disagree about the nuances of these terms, there is a general consensus regarding their connotations within the field. Following Michael Baxandall's analysis of how Renaissance merchants leaned on the terminology they used to describe such varied tasks as barrel gauging and dancing to discuss works of art, art historians have become increasingly aware of the fundamental tension that binds pictures to the words used to describe them. Perhaps surprisingly, these divergent modes of practicing art history have led to a rigorous application of language. In that time art historians have sought to enrich the formal analysis of their objects of study with the context provided by social history, semiotics, anthropology, post-colonial studies, or any other paradigm of inquiry that offers a fresh perspective on how people have engaged with images. Over the last hundred years or so art history has developed into an increasingly promiscuous field of inquiry.
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