vienna

that the seasonal sale is a visual phenomenon with roots in the
past is examined only by means of text and not a historiography
of images. Since this book deals with the nature of the seasonal
sale and not with its visual history, historical examples of seasonal
sale windows were only taken into account as long as they
were textual. 217 It is further assumed that the images seen today
are related to older generations of images dating back to ancient
times. Panovsky termed the transformation of ancient prototypes
“pseudomorphosis”. 218 He explains this term through the example
of the ancient mythological figure “Chronos”, who figures
as logo for the Bowery Savings Bank. 219 Warburg provides yet
another example of mythical figures “resurrected” in consumer
culture through an advertisement for soaps. 220 He uses a collection
of images of art works to develop his arguments on the
conscious and unconscious use of ancient themes in art. 221 While
the above two examples illustrate the idea of the resurrection of
images, a different discourse will replace the arguments based on
art history. Mitchell describes the “rethoric of images” with what
is said about images as well as what these pictures say. 222 This
rethoric of images will be developed in the following chapters with
reference to a methodology introduced by Panovsky, who called
this methodology “iconographic-iconological interpretation”. The
method social sciences use for discussing images is built on this
model and its expansion by Imdahl, 223 who also extended the discussion
to compositional aspects of the image. Social sciences
today use a model called the documentary method based on the
arguments by Mannheim, who transferred the model from the
arts to the social sciences. 224 While the interpretation of images
according to this qualitative method is based on a multi-layered
eight-step model, 225 the discursive interpretation of the working
images draws on Panovsky’s simpler original model, 226 and the
analysis is based on a three-step model. 227 The first step is the
pre-iconographic description. This is a description of what can be
seen on the photo, but without any social or mythological inter-
217 Sturken/Cartwright (2001) draw the timeline of visual phenomena by using historic images. But the argument referring to
ancient rites goes far beyond the area of documentary photographic images. All questions concerning the nature of the
seasonal sale should be examined by what is seen today.
218 Panovsky (1962:70).
219 Ibid., p 69-94.
220 See, for example, board number 77 in Warnke (2003:128).
221 Warburg started his scientific project on the “MNEMOSYNE atlas” in 1924.
222 Mitchell (1987:1). See as well the different categories of images, ibid. p 10.
223 Imdahl (1996) termed this expansion of the discourse “Ikonik”.
224 See Bohnsack (2003a:87).
225 See Bohnsack (2003b:237).
226 Because it is sufficient to work out relations to ancient motifs.
227 See Panovsky (1955:40)
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