Association for Textual Scholarship in Art History

ATSAH promotes the exploration of intersections between the historical study of images and the engagement with the variety of texts that in different ways inform images. The Association currently has affiliations with the following learned societies and since 1986 has organized sessions in their conferences. Sessions and presentations have ranged widely, but have mostly addressed issues in European culture of the long Renaissance, when the relationship of text and image first became a major theoretical as well as practical concern, and which produced imagery of great complexity prompting the emergence of the method(s) of iconography.

​

​The Association welcomes scholars interested in reflecting on the current state of iconographic method and its interdisciplinary commitments, across various settings and media, whether concerned with the persistence of traditional belief systems and forms (especially in relation to culture, mythology and religion with the emergence of novel formats, such as the emblem and related symbolic practices or philosophical premises.