‘Iconotropy: everything or nothing?’. Review of: Iconotropy and Cult Images from the Ancient to Modern World, Routledge Research in Art and Religion, edited by Jorge Tomás García and Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez, New York and London: Routledge, 2022, 212 pp., 49 b. & w. illus. $136.00 hdbk, ISBN 978-1-032-03065-4; $42.36 ebk, ISBN 978-1-003-18650-2, DOI: 10.4324/9781003186502.

Abstract

The relationship between art and religion has long been a major focus of art-historical research. The collection of essays edited by Jorge Tomás García and Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez presents a chronologically wide range of examples in Western art of changes in the appearance or interpretation of ‘cult images’ considered in the light of Robert Graves’s concept of ‘iconotropy’. The category of ‘cult image’, however, particularly as construed here, is too expansive, and the process of ‘iconotropy’ as redefined here too elastic, to contribute either to the understanding of the phenomena under study or to methodological precision.