Summer School "Iconography of the Ancient World"

About the Event

Since the 1970s, iconography has become a focus of Old Testament research, primarily through the work of Othmar Keel and his circle of students. While the early works of the emerging Fribourg School initially used the pictorial evidence of the southern Levant and the major cultures that alternately dominated this region on the Nile, Euphrates and Tigris as illustrations of biblical texts, their independent value as sources gradually came to the attention of observers and thus became the subject of a branch of Old Testament scholarship. Today, visual studies represent a third field alongside textual studies and biblical archaeology that is constitutive for the reconstruction of the religious history of the southern Levant.

The international summer school is a great opportunity to combine theoretical insights into iconography with practical experience in image analysis, while coming into contact with students and lecturers from different academic contexts. The 2026 summer school will focus on the topic of Ancestral Visual Epistemologies. Through their imagery, ancient cultures reveal aspects of the world that lie beyond everyday experiences. This corresponds to the modern concept of an Augmented Reality. In the summer school, we will turn our attention to the phenomena of Visual Thinking and Graphesis in order to explore, in the sense of a Historical Epistemology, the “reflection on the historical conditions under which, and the means by which, things are made into objects of knowledge, setting in motion and sustaining the process of scientific knowledge acquisition” (Rheinberger, 2007). By comparing different ancestral cultures and their visual epistemologies, we will search for the specifics that enable a deeper insight into knowledge constructions (episteme) and the underlying patterns and thinking structures.

Target group: The summer school is aimed at graduates and doctoral students in the fields of Hebrew Bible, New Testament, religious studies and related disciplines.

Course objective: Participants will learn the basics of image analysis and will be able to apply them to objects and artefacts. Through continuous reflection on methodology, they will be trained to evaluate their observations in relation to their respective research questions.

Participants will have the opportunity to present and discuss their own research work.

The following topics will be covered in the course:

Methodological approaches to image analysis
Fundamentals of historical epistemology
“Thick description” of ancient cultures
Reconstruction of culturally determined image programmes
Course leaders: Dr Thomas Wagner (Wuppertal) and Prof. Dr Silas Klein Cardoso (Vitória)

Practical information:

Credit points: 2 ECTS
Contact hours: 20