Resumen de Iconology and Education: Notes on the Iconographic Representation of Education and Related Terms
In spite of the educational importance of the history of imagery, the range of available images and that of ways of seeing, historians of education have not troubled themselves about the uses of imagery and the attempts to impose one image or representation rather than another upon any given area. In this paper I first comment on those characters and objects most frequently put forward by iconographic conventions and employed to represent concepts and ideas connected to education, as well as those used to stand for the word education itself. Thereby, I try to draw attention not only to the various iconographie conventions, but also to their sources, to the concepts and ideas underlying given representations and to the general use of a feminine personification in order to represent education and other related terms.
This preference for a feminine personification in different modes is analyzed starting principally from the famous Iconologia (1603) of Ripa and the Iconologia cnstiana y gentflica (1850) by Castellanos de Losada, with the Dictionnaire iconologique (1779) by Lacombe de Prezel and the Iconologie (1791) by Gravelot and Cochin as intermediary influences. Also examined are the network of interrelated terms symbolically linked to the feminine which have educational connotations and some examples taken from the imagery of different artistic periods of the Western World. At the same time, this analysis shows how these representations of education (personifications, objects, mottoes, scenes, etc.) reflect different conceptions and ideas of it
