One of the thirty interviews that should enable art historians to compare their distinctive ways of understanding images

We would like to celebrate the first twenty years of our journal, in 2022, by organizing a virtual brainstorming that should enable art historians to compare their distinctive ways of understanding images. In these two last decades, we have welcomed texts focusing on multifarious materials and investigated from different perspectives, with no geographical, historical, or methodological limitations. We now believe that this is the right moment to offer some thoughts on both the theoretical approaches and common practices that affect our multiple ways of investigating images, while laying emphasis on the latter’s limits and advantages. Even if we have experienced so many "turns" in the last three decades and although we went many steps further in our understanding of what images are expected to be and do, we still lack an updated, and unbiased rethinking of our methods and objectives. We opted for an interview-like concept for our Iconographica Twenty Years volume, to be issued in 2022. It will include a collection of texts by thirty scholars belonging to different generations, scientific approaches, academic systems and world regions, who are being invited to answer the questions listed in the attached questionnaire. Our aim is to provide a comparative view of the manifold methodologies that, depending on many different factors, underlay our 21st century understanding of images. We would be delighted if you could accept to participate in this enterprise. Your distinctive approach to the function, perception, materiality, symbolic efficacy, and agency of figurative objects will add an extra-dimension to our book. If you are willing, as we hope, to participate, you are kindly invited to send us the filled questionnaire by December 31st, 2021. Each answer should not exceed 200 words. Quotations should be reduced to the minimum, or thoroughly avoided. I do hope that you may contribute from your perspective, which would be extremely valuable for us. Please let me know your decision and feel free to contact me for any additional information.