International Summer School “Iconography of the Ancient World” 14.-18. September 2026
Since the 1970s, iconography has become a focus of Biblical Studies, especially through the work of OthmarKeel and his circle of students. While in the early works of the “Fribourg School,” the pictorial evidence of the southern Levant, as well as of the cultures on the Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris, which alternately dominated this region, were used as illustrations of biblical texts, their value as a historical source and data for critically reconstructing various facets of the ancient world was gradually recognized and established, thus creating an independent field of research within biblical scholarship.
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 (Drucker, 2014) 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:
This course is targeted for Graduate Students and PhD Students in Hebrew Bible, New Testament or similar fields.
Course aim:
Students will learn the basics of image analysis and be able to apply them to objects and artefacts. On the basis of continuous methodological reflection, they will be trained to evaluate their observations in relation to their respective research questions.
Participants will have the opportunity to present and discuss research projects.
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 leader:
Dr. Thomas Wagner (Wuppertal) and Prof. Dr. Silas Klein Cardoso (Vitória)
Credits info
2 EC
Contact hours: 20
Please send in your application until August, 10th, 2026 to Silas Klein Cardoso (silas[at]fuv.edu.br) or to Thomas Wagner (twagner[at]uni-wuppertal.de). We will accept a maximum of 20 participants.
