Die Provokation der Bildwissenschaft

Gerhard Regn zum 75. GeburtstagAbstractThe emergence of the so called Bildwissenschaft in recent humanities constitutes a major challenge to philology, as this newly established branch of art studies claims that images have a potential of generating meaning that is equivalent to, yet independent from, any linguistic means of producing semantics. Linguistics as well as literary studies have hardly reacted to this challenge until now. Therefore, the first part of this article proposes a comparative analysis of the procedures of generating meaning in images and in language, exploring their differences as well as their intersections. The second part is dedicated to a case study and comparison between the medieval hymn Stabat mater and Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece as an illustration and simultaneously a test of the theoretical assumptions developed in the first part of the paper.