Published in Mirabilia Journal 31 (2020/2)  

Keywords: Keywords: Epistolary, Figure, Flemish painting, Iconology.

Some exegetes of the Late Antiquity used a system of allegorical and figurative relationships to extract Christian meanings from texts, and in this way, writing a historical memory. Later, in the 20th century, historians such as Erwin Panofsky, established the principles of the iconological method through a ‘scientific’ interpretation of figurative arts, that subjected those texts to the historical context, the iconographic code, and the technical medium of each work, in order to ‘reconstruct’ its meaning and, therefore, the history of art. In this essay, based on examples from Jerónimo’s Epistolary, Panof-sky’s theoretical texts, and Flemish painting, we try to observe how –underneath historical contexts and technical mediums– these disciplines can share processes of construction and communication of historical reality content, by means of figures and images.