The Iconography of Knowledge

Here we invite the reader to take a walk through one of the most productive periods in the construction of human knowledge - the Enlightenment period - through a study of the organisation of knowledge and its iconography within an Encyclopaedic vision. It calls for an investigation into how the composition and above all the conception of what knowledge was for the 18th century gave rise to one of its greatest literary productions: L’Encyclopédie, or Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, and how this compilation of knowledge, with its systematised division of the Arts and Sciences, was able to create its own iconography. The iconographic approach is based on an analysis of the illustration that made up the title page of the ’Great Work’: Frontispiece of the Encyclopédie, an image made up of figures from classical antiquity, revealing not only a complete admiration for the Hellenic past, but also used as an artifice to convince people of his ideas and ideals. Knowledge is presented in the Système figure des connaissances humaines, where we see not only the beauty of the systematisation of knowledge, but the very constitution of knowledge for the time.