http://en.wikipedia.

org/wiki/Erwin_Panofsky

Three strata of subject matter or meaning[edit]

Panofsky made important contributions to the study of iconography, including his interpretation of Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait (1434, pictured).

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/33/Van_Eyck__Arnolfini_Portrait.jpg/330px-Van_Eyck_-_Arnolfini_Portrait.jpg

In Studies in Iconology Panofsky details his idea of three levels of art-historical understanding:[1]

Primary or natural subject matter: The most basic level of understanding, this stratum consists of perception of the works pure form. Take, for example, a painting of the Last Supper. If we stopped at this first stratum, such a picture could only be perceived as a painting of 13 men seated at a table. This first level is the most basic understanding of a work, devoid of any added cultural knowledge.

Secondary or conventional subject matter (iconography): This stratum goes a step further and brings to the equation cultural and iconographic knowledge. For example, a Western viewer would understand that the painting of 13 men around a table would represent the Last Supper. Similarly, a representation of a haloed man with a lion could be interpreted as a depiction ofSt. Mark.

Tertiary or intrinsic meaning or content (iconology): This level takes into account personal, technical, and cultural history into the understanding of a work. It looks at art not as an isolated incident, but as the product of a historical environment. Working in this stratum, the art historian can ask questions like why did the artist choose to represent The Last Supper in this way? or Why was St. Mark such an important saint to the patron of this work? Essentially, this last stratum is a synthesis; it is the art historian asking "what does it all mean?"

For Panofsky, it was important to consider all three strata as one examines Renaissance art. Irving Lavin says, "it was this insistence on, and search for, meaningespecially in places where no one suspected there was anythat led Panofsky to understand art, as no previous historian had, as an intellectual endeavor on a par with the traditional liberal arts."[2]

http://w3.gril.univ-tlse2.fr/Proimago/LogiCoursimage/panofsky.htm

In a dictionary definition you will find iconography described as the study of traditional images or
symbols and iconology with a similar definition as the study of icons or artistic symbolism. This might suggest they are synonyms and they are commonly used as such in describing the study of art images. However, iconography can be a confusing term. Its original meaning as a study of icons, panel pictures of Christ or a Saint, is still retained in some contemporary religious contexts, Greek Orthodox for example. Furthermore, from about the seventeenth century iconography was used in a secular context as a noun to describe a collection of portraits. Art historians today accept the term iconography as referring to the description and classification of images. Importantly, due to the influence of Erwin Panofsky (1892 - 1968), there is often a distinction made between the two terms with iconology referring specifically to the interpretation of images. At this stage you should read the generally accepted definition of iconography in Paul Duro & Michael Greenhalgh's Essential Art History. (iconology is not listed separately) and in Robert Belton's Words on Art. Pioneering art historians of this century such as Aby Warburg (1866 - 1929), Fritz Saxl (1890 - 1948) and Ernst Gombrich used the term iconology in the broad sense of an interpretative study of images with the implication that such a study included an iconographic collation of sources. Aby Warburg was the first to describe "the science of art history" as iconology, in 1912, but Panofsky attempted to explain a distinction between the terms iconography and iconology. [I have intentionally overlooked here a recent attempt by William Mitchell to reinvent the term iconology - Mitchell, W. J. T., Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986.] Erwin Panofsky's explanation of Iconography and Iconology. For Panofsky the study of art objects and images could be systematized into three levels. The first was simple identification through familiarity. Looking at a painting of an historical battle scene, for example, we can only identify and name weapons such as crossbows with which we are familiar, although we can readily understand the expressions of pain and anguish on the faces of wounded soldiers. Panofsky explained such divisions as factual and expressional. Factual and expressional apprehension will vary greatly, depending on experience. Obviously, an expert on ancient weaponry will identify a great variety of motifs; just as viewer with experience of battle might react very differently to those without such experience. The second dealt with the domain of iconography. That is: the linking of artistic motifs with themes, concepts or conventional meaning. For example, at this level a Renaissance image of a man struck in the eye with an arrow from a crossbow might be apprehended beyond its horrific expressional value as representational of, or an allegory for, the power of linear perspective. Such recognition would be made possible because of a knowledge of Renaissance treatises on perspective and similar or related images. The third, most contentious level of interpretation was iconological. At this deepest level, the intrinsic meaning or content of the work was apprehended. It is worth quoting Panofsky directly here as he explains this intrinsic meaning. It is apprehended by ascertaining those underlying principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion - qualified by one personality and condensed into one work. (p.30) This privileging of individual personality may no longer read like a red cape to a bull in the postMarxist world of art history but it remains problematic, if only for its distinct scent of popular psychology. Importantly, Panofsky understood iconology to be more than a search for symptoms, but an exhaustive interpretation from technical knowledge of art production, through comprehensive iconographical knowledge to a final underlying principle or conclusion. Afterall, the symbolic

interpretation of perspective as an arrow in the eye by Renaissance artists almost demands a conclusion about the attitudes to science in that age. Such an interpretation of the "symbolical" values of the Renaissance would make a perfect example of an iconological study as Panofsky conceived of the term. Iconological interpretation was not related to study of intentionality (or what the artist intended to express). He claimed "symbolical" values might, in fact, radically differ from the conscious intention of the artist. The first two levels of meaning, the natural and iconographical, were phenomenal, while the third, intrinsic meaning, was beyond the sphere of conscious volition. Panofsky summarised the three levels in a chart, shown below. Iconography and Iconology -Synoptical table from Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, 1974 ,pp. 40, 41 (originally published in 1939 in Studies in Iconology) ACT OF INTERPRETAT ION Preiconographical description (and pseudo-formal analysis) CORRECTIVE PRINCIPLE OF INTERPRETATION (Hist. of Tradition) History of style (insight into the manner in which, under varying historical conditions,objects and event s were expressed by forms). History of types (insight into the manner in which, under varying historical conditions specific themes or concepts were expressed by objects and events). History of cultural symptoms or "symbols" in general (insight into the manner in which, under varying historical conditions, essential tendencies of the human mind were expressed by specific themes

OBJECT OF INTERPRETATION I Primary or natural subject matter - (A) factual, (B) expressional - constituting the world of artistic motifs

EQUIPMENT FOR INTERPRETATION Practical experience (familiarity with objects and events).

II Secondary or conventional Iconographical subject matter, constituting the world of images, analysis stories andallegories.

Knowledge of literary sources (familiarity with specific themesand conc epts).

III Intrinsic meaning or Iconological content, constituting the interpretation world of "symbolical" values.

Synthetic intuition (familiarity with the essential tendencies of the human mind), conditioned by personal psychology and "Weltanschauung"

This separation of levels was only intended as an explanation of a process which he understood would be fully integrated and ultimately shot through with intuition or specifically "synthetic intuition" as he termed it. The pre-iconographic description and iconographical levels are important correctives or controls since every interpretation will be subjective and to more or less degrees irrational, (for every intuitive approach will be conditioned by the interpreter's psychology and "Weltanschauung" p.38). Nevertheless, iconographic knowledge was the core of Panofsky's method and probably the only feature left untarnished by modern scholars. Even the first stage of factual or natural apprehension has been made to seem a naive concept. In a recent critique of Panofsky's methodology, Stephen Bann quotes Jonathan Crary's theories on the changing role of the observer to dismiss Panofsky's idea of an "innocent eye", although he fails to acknowledge the inevitable fragility of any theory when tested against time. A test which Crary's theories have yet to pass. [See: Stephen Bann Meaning/Interpretation (Chapter Seven) in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff eds. Critical Terms for Art History, 1996 pp. 87-100] -copy in Short Loans in Huxley Library, University of Newcastle. For the sake of balance, you might read a short essay by Rudolf Wittkower (1901 - 1971), a friend of Panofsky and enthusiastic follower of his iconological approach. The essay Interpretation of Visual Symbols extends Panofsky's three levels of interpretation to four: "literal representational, the literal thematic, multiple and expressive meaning." [See: Rudolf Wittkower Allegory and the Migration of Symbols, T&H, 1977 Chapter 14 pp.174 -

187] - copy in Short Loans in Huxley Library, University of Newcastle. In a collection of essays published as a Centennial Commemoration of Erwin Panofsky, Wendy Steiner makes the telling observation that in the contemporary world of photographic images it is virtually impossible to remove an image from its particular social context. Put another way: our interpretation of the photograph is so intertwined with its "expressional" (to use Panofsky's term) relationships that we can never abandon our emotional attachment to penetrate below the first level of analysis. [See: "The Vast Disorder of Objects: Photography and the Demise of Formalist Aesthetics", in Irving Lavin ed.,Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside , Princeton, 1995 pp.195 - 205] For an intelligent brief summary of Panofsky's general art historical methodology, see: Eric Fernie Art History and its Methods: a critical anthology , (Phaidon Press) London, 1995 pp.181 - 183. Also relevant, if you have a particular interest in the development of art historical methodology, is Christopher Wood's introduction to his translation of Panofsky's 1927 essay on Perspective as Symbolic Form. [see: Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, (Zone Books) New York, 1991 pp.7 - 24] As Stephen Bann acknowledged, in the essay quoted above, the sustaining power of Panofsky's writing was based on his skill and diligence in digging out the iconographic and literary sources that would unearth the meaning of a picture. This is a skill that every student must develop and it is built on the acquisition of a comprehensive knowledge of the history of pictorial representation. Speculative fantasies about the meaning of a painting might seem more poetic or interesting than a reasoned analysis based on iconographic and literary sources but such is not the case. This is best illustrated by reading an extract from Dora and Erwin Panofsky's study of the mythical symbol of Pandora's Box in which they analyze a drawing by Rosso Fiorentino. Before, you start I will put the extract in context since it is written as the opening to chapter nd five of their book Pandora's Box (2 ed. 1961) and therefore makes reference to material from earlier chapters. There is a reference to "the Erasmian pyxis" that relates to their chapter two in which they explain the"Origin of the Box" since in the original classical version of the Pandora story she opened a pithos or large vessel or storage vase, not a box. Only in Italy, does the phrase "vaso di Pandora" exist today as it is now taken for granted that Pandora opened a small box. The origin of the box version, it was shown, was the publication by Erasmus of Rotterdam of Adagiorum chiliades tres (1508) "one of the world's most popular and influential books" [ p15]. Erasmus replaced the pithos with a pyxis or small container in his now accepted version of the story. In all versions of the story, when Pandora, or sometimes her husband Epimetheus, opens the box or vessel to release upon humanity all forms of Vice, the Virtues evaporate to the heavens and only Hope is caught by the lid and remains. After reading this extract you may wish to read more on the myth of Pandora by visiting the the Perseus site. Not so much to keep the integrity of the original, but to fully indicate the level of scholarship involved in the process, I have included the original footnotes; although I have changed the figure numbering. Figures 1, 2 and 3 were numbered respectively in the original as 16, 17 and 18. The file will take a little time to load as it opens with the image under discussion. After reading this extract from Pandora's Box, which describes a single image, we will look at an extract by Fritz Saxl, who worked with Panofsky in their formative years as art historians. Copyright 1999, Ross Woodrow and The University of Newcastle --All Rights Reserved

http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/panofskye.htm

Panofsky, Erwin, known as "Pan" Date born: March 30, 1892 Place Born: Hanover, Germany Date died: March 14, 1968 Place died: Princeton, New Jersey

Warburg Institute and Institute for Advanced Study art historian; major exponent of iconography to American scholars. Panofsky was the son of Arnold Panofsky (d. 1914) and Caecilie Solling (Panofsky), wealthy Jews whose fortune came from Silesian mining. He was raised in Berlin, receiving his Abitur in 1910 at the Joachimsthalsche Gymnasium. He spent the years 1910-1914 studying philosophy, philology and art history in Jura, Berlin (where he heard lectures of the art historian Margarete Bieber, who was filling in for Georg Loeschcke), and in Munich. While taking courses at Freiburg Universitt, a slightly older student, Kurt Badt, took Panofsky to hear a lecture by the founder of the art history department, Wilhelm Vge. Panofsky was at once enamored and wrote his dissertation under Vge in 1914. His topic, Drer's artistic theory (Drers Kunsttheorie: vornehmlich in ihrem Verhaltnis zur Kunsttheorie der Italiener) was published the following year in Berlin as Die Theoretische Kunstlehre Albrecht Drers. Because of horse-riding accident, he was exempt from military service during World War I. Instead, he attended the seminars of the medievalist Adolph Goldschmidt in Berlin. He married Dorothea "Dora" Mosse (1885-1965), also an art historian from a wealthy family, in 1916. In 1920 his habilitation was accepted in Hamburg on the topic of Michelangelo, the manuscript only rediscovered in 2012. His habilitation in hand, Panofsky was called to chair the art history department of the newly established University of Hamburg in 1920. His first graduate student was Edgar Wind. The decade of the 1920s was one of brilliant writing. In Hamburg, Panofsky formed part of a group of cultural intellectuals. He developed an intimate intellectual circle with Fritz Saxl with whom he published a 1923 monograph on Drer's Melencholia I, Aby Warburg, and the philosopher and art theorist Ernst Cassier, centered around Warburg's Institute (see Warburg entry). Panofsky, a "young, witty, acerbic, conceited genius" according to one student, William Hecksher, developed an immediate student following. Two early papers, Der Begriff des Kunstwollens, (1920) and ber das Verhaltnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie, (1925) demonstrate Panofsky's theoretical heritage to Cassirer and Alos Riegl. In 1924, his book Idea was published, a discussion of the ideas of the intellect vis-vis the imitations of the world of perception. His overt intelligence won him the first full professor of art history at Hamburg (ordentlicher Professor) in 1926. In 1927 he published Perspektive als symbolische Form, a dazzling blend of personal theoretics and wide-ranging knowledge of Renaissance art and thought, built around Cassirer's neo-Kantian theories of "symbolic forms." In the academic year 1931-1932, Panofsky paid a visit to the United States representing Warburg's think tank, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg and teaching at New York University. The Nazis' assumption of power in Germany forced Jews out of academic positions; Panofsky returned to Germany in the summer of 1933 to supervise oral examinations and dissertations for his remaining students before permanently emigrated to the United States in 1934. He published his most famous article, an analysis of the Arnolfini portrait by Jan van Eyck, in the Burlington Magazine

the same year. After a year teacing at New York University, Panofsky became the first permanent professor of the School of Historical Studies of the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, a private research center near Princeton University created so that Jewish scholars (primarily) could work near the University, but not as faculty. Panofsky's move from Hamburg to the United States coincided with a methodological transformation. In Panofsky's early career, he experimented with various approaches to his subject. By the time he had settled in Princeton, he had arrived at the "conviction that the methodological problems with which he had once grappled had been successfully resolved." (Moxey, p. 93). In 1939 Panofsky published Studies in Iconology: Humanist Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, book which, among other essays, argued for the distinction between iconology and iconography. His 1943 book on Albrecht Drer, combined many of his published ideas on the artist together with a sharp intuitive eye to Drers prints. Panofsky next issued a primary-source document and commentary on the Abbot Suger and the founding of the Gothic style, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis, in 1946. Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism appeared in 1951, a book about Parisian architectural relationships with the principles of a scholastic summa. His 1947-1948 Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard appeared as the 2volume monograph on northern Renaissance art, Early Netherlandish Painting, in 1953. It was a detailed iconographical study demonstrating how works of visual realism could incorporate elaborate Christian symbolism convincingly. Among the book's many revelations was the discovery that the famous Arnolfini double portrait by Jan van Eyck was a wedding document. Rensselaer Lee, chair of the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University from 1956, convinced Panofsky to begin teaching regularly at the University as well. Panofsky's work at the Institute for Advanced Study attracted other art historians to study with him. These included Heckscher in 1936, Louis Grodecki in 1951, Jan van Gelder, 1953, and Lon "Bob" Delaiss in 1959. He presented Gottesman lectures at Uppsala University which appeared in 1960 as the book Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art. The lectures posed the (now) generally accepted notion that smaller "renaissances" (re-births) of the classical happened periodically in medieval art and literature before the major one in Italy. He retired from the Institute emeritus in 1963 and was succeeded by Millard Meiss. Panofsky was immediately appointed Samuel Morse Professor of Fine Arts at New York University. His lectures there resulted in the 1964 book Tomb Sculpture. His wife, Dora, died in 1965 and the 73-year-old Panofsky married the 36-year-old art historian Gerda Soergel [Srgel] (b.1929) the following year. Two years later he suffered a series of heart attacks and died. Panofsky's posthumous literary output continued for twenty years. Gerda Panofsky-Soergel continued to update his Abbot Suger book. The six Wrightsman lectures he delivered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art were issued as Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic in 1969. His collected essays appeared in 1995. A son, Wolfgang Panofsky (1919-2007), was a Manhattan-Project physicist and Nobel-Prize winner. Panofskys many students, in addition to Heckscher and Wind, included Hugo Buchthal, Edgar Breitenbach, Ingeborg Fraenckel Auerbach, H. W. Janson, Lotte Brand Philip Foerster, Ursula Hoff, Robert A. Koch, and Walter W. Horn. His papers are housed at the Archives of American Art, Washington, DC. In 2012, his habilitation, thought to have been lost was discoverd at the Zentralinstitut fr Kunstgeschichte in files of the founding director, Ludwig H. Heydenreich

Though Panofsky is considered the "ur-iconologist," his methodology was diverse and is difficult to summarize. Primarily a scholar of medieval and northern Renaissance art, he is most frequently

associated with the concept of iconography, matching the subject-matter of works of art to a symbolic syntax of meaning drawn from literature and other art works. His work broadened into a theory of iconology; what Germain Bazin characterized as the work of art as a symptom (Bazin 217). However, Panofsky was a broad thinker (in the tradition of Cassirer) whose work evolved over a period of time. Another acknowledged debt was to Riegl, the Austrian art historian who espoused the notion of Kunstwollen. Panofskys notion of perspective as a metaphor in Renaissance art occupied his thinking for an extended period (and resulted in at least one full book). He contended that theories of proportion were generally too elaborate to be applied uniformly to actual works of art. Panofsky's iconology did not preclude a sensitivity for formal considerations or style. The conceptual framework of any period, he wrote, is always subservient to the underlying the style of the art. His use of iconology as the principle tool of art analysis brought him critics. In 1946, van Gelder criticized Panofskys iconology as putting too much emphasis on the symbolic content of the work of art, neglecting its formal aspects and the work as a unity of form and content. Otto Pcht, the Vienna art historian, pointed out in a celebrated book review in 1956 using the case of the van Eyck Arnolfini and his Wife painting, that iconology would elucidate this important work very little. Indeed, Panofsky's conclusions on this double portrait were essentially overturned in 1998 by Lorne Campbell. Panofsky himself had mixed feelings about the success of his method (Cassidy). A scholar who rejoiced in learning and his own mastery, he wrote at times to his medievalist colleagues in Latin (Hourihan). LS

Home Country: Germany/ United States

Sources: [the literature on Panofsky is legion. In particular, see:] [review of Panofsky book] Pcht, Otto. "Panofsky's 'Early Netherlandish Painting'-I." The Burlington Magazine 98, no. 637 (April 1956): 110-116; [regarding Panofsky's years with Vge:] Panofsky, Erwin. "Vorwort." in, Bildhauer des Mittelalters: Gesammelte Studien von Wilhelm Vge. Berlin: Gebrder Mann, 1958. pp. ix-xxxii, English, Hassold, Ernest. "Wilhelm Vge: A Biographical Memoir." Art Journal 28 no. 1 (Fall 1968): 27-37; A Commerative Gathering for Erwin Panofsky at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in Association with the Institute for Advanced Study, March 21, 1968; Heckscher, William. Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 28 (1969): 8; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, pp. 4, 18, 55-6, 61-2, 70 cited, 100-101, 51 n. 104, 62 n. 142; Dilly, Heinrich. Kunstgeschichte als Institution: Studien zur Geschichte einer Diziplin. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979, pp. 13-19; Podro, Michael. The Critical Historians of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982, pp. 178-208; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, pp. 66-7, 73; Holly, Michael Ann. Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984; Wlfflin, Heinrich. Heinrich Wlfflin, 1864-1945: Autobiographie, Tagebcher und Briefe. Joseph Ganter, ed. 2nd ed. Basel: Schwabe & Co., 1984, p. 493, 501; Heckscher, William S. "Reminiscences of Lotte Brand Philip." Tribute to Lotte Brand Philip: Art Historian and Detective. New York: Abaris Books, 1985, p. 9, mentioned; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l'histoire de l'art; de Vasari nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 216-225, 540;

German Essays on Art History. Gert Schiff, ed. New York: Continuum, 1988, pp. lxi-lxv, 280; Cassierer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art and History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989; Cassady, Brenden, ed. Iconography at the Crossroads: Papers from the Colloquium Sponsored by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 23-24 March 1990. Princeton, NJ: Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 1993; Landauer, Carl. "Erwin Panofsky and the Renascence of the Renaissance." Renaissance Quarterly 47 (Summer 1994): 255-281; Heckscher, William. "A Memoir of Erwin Panofsky," in Panofsky, Erwin. Three Essays on Style. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995; Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 2, pp. 484-497; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Portrts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 294-99; Moxey, Keith. "Perspective, Panofsky and the Philosophy of History." Chapter IV of The Practice of Persuasion: Paradox and Power in Art History. Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000, pp. 90-102; Wuttke, Dieter. "Einleitung: Erwin Panofskys Leben und Werke (1892 bis 1968)." Erwin Panofsky Korrespondez. vol. 1 Wiesband: Harrassowitz, 2001, pp. ix-xxxi; Hourihan, Colum. "They Stand on His Shoulders: Morey, Iconography and the Index of Christian Art." in Hourihan, Colum, ed. Insights and Interpretations: Studies in Celebration of the Eighty-fifth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art. Princeton, NJ: Index of Christian Art/Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 11; [obituaries:] "Erwin Panofsky, Versatile Art Historian and Princeton Institute Scholar, Dies." New York Times March 16, 1968, p. 32; Wormald, Francis. "Prof Erwin Panofsky, Historian of art." Times (London) April 2, 1968, p. 10.

Bibliography: [correspondence:] Wuttke, Dieter, ed. Erwin Panofsky: Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1968, eine kommentierte Auswahl in fnf Bnden. 5 vols. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001- ; [dissertation:] Drers Kunsttheorie: vornehmlich in ihrem Verhaltnis zur Kunsttheorie der Italiener. Freiburg, 1914; [habilitation:] Die Gestaltungsprincipien Michelangelos, besonders in ihrem Verhltnis zu denen Raffaels. Hamburg, 1920, published, De Gruyter, 2014; "Der Begriff der Kunstwollens." Zeitschrift fr sthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 14 (1920): 321-29; and Saxl, Fritz. Drer's "Melancholia I": Eine quellen- und typengeschichtliche Untersuchungen. Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1923; Die deutsche Plastik des elften bis dreizehnten Jahrhunderts. 2 vols. Munich: K. Wolff, 1924; Idea: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der alteren Kunsttheorie Leipzig/Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1924; "Die Perspektive als symbolische Form." Vortrge der Bibliothek Warburg, 1925/25: 258-330, published separately, Die Perspektive als symbolische Form. Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1927, English, Perspective as Symbolic Form. New York: Zone Books, 1991; Hercules am Scheidewege und andere antike Bildstoffe in der neueren Kunst. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1930 [his first iconographical study]; and Saxl, Fritz. "Classical Mythology in Medieval Art." Metropolitan Museum Studies 4 (1932-33): 228-80; "Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait." Burlington Magazine 64 (1934): 117-27; Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1939; [abstract of a paper delivered] "Traffic Accidents in the Relation between Texts and Pictures." College Art Journal 1 (1942): 69; Albrecht Drer. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943; "Renaissance and Renascences." Kenyon Review 6 (1944): 201-36; Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and its Art Treasures. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946; Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. Latrobe, PA: Archabbey Press, 1951; Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953; Meaning in the Visual Arts. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955; The Iconography of Correggio's Camera di San Paolo.

London, 1961; Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art. 2 vols. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1960; "The Ideological Antecedents of the Rolls-Royce Radiator." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 107 (1963): 273-88; Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini. Edited by Horst W. Janson. New York: Abrams, 1964; and Saxl, Fritz. Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art. Edited for publication by Raymond Klibansky. London: Nelson, 1964; Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic. New York: New York University Press, 1969.

Subject's name: Erwin Panofsky

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Erwin Panofsky's Work

Although his interests were wideranging, Panofsky devoted much of his career to the study of the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Drer (1471-1528). His doctoral dissertation dealt with Drers Kunsttheorie (Berlin, 1915), and his monumental twovolume monographAlbrecht Drer (Princeton University Press, 1943) is, according to Victor Cassidy of artnet magazine, the result of a lifetime of looking, thinking, reading, and making connections. The work has been republished many times, minus the Handlist, under the title The Life and Art of Albrecht Drer. Panofsky's two-volume Early Netherlandish Painting (Harvard University Press, 1953) was, according to Keith P.F. Moxey Working on "Ovide moralis" in verse in Stockholm Photo courtesy of Gerda Panofsky in The Practice of Persuasion: Politics and Paradox in Art History, "a work that effectively transformed scholarly thinking about this period and place of artistic production." The book was taken from Panofsky's 1947-48 Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, and was a detailed iconographical study demonstrating how the realism in fifteenth century Northern paintings could be called Christian symbolism in disguise. Panofsky also focused on the secular iconography of the Renaissance, early Dutch and Flemish book illumination, German sculpture and painting of the eleventh through fifteenth centuries, and many other subjects, both in the visual arts and beyond. In Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 1939ff. and Perseus Books/Westview Press, 1972ff.), Panofsky explained his concept of three levels of understanding in art. First, was the pure form of a work, the primary (or natural) subject matter; then came the secondary or conventional subject matter, the iconography; finally, there was the intrinsic meaning of the work, or its iconology. One of his most enduring books was Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Doubleday, 1955ff.), a collection of his most significant articles and essays on a variety of subjects. According to Irving Lavin, "...it was this insistence on, and search for, meaning especially in places where no one suspected there was any that led Panofsky to understand art, as no previous historian had, as an intellectual endeavor on a par with the traditional liberal arts." A man known for his remarkable memory, Panofsky was diligent about answering all of his correspondence. In his later years, he drove from his home on Battle Road to his office at the Institute each morning to answer his business mail and dictate to his secretary whatever manuscript he was currently working on. In the afternoons at home, he would reply by hand to any personal correspondence. "You have to write when written to," he would always say.

Erwin Panofsky Following his death in 1968, one of a number of commemorative gatherings was Photo courtesy of Gerda Panofsky held at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts, with prominent scholars in the field of art history in attendance. Former Institute Professor (1958-75) Millard Meiss was among them. "Through a mad, comical coincidence, a new era in our discipline in the United States was initiated by a scholar, outlawed in Germany because of his Jewish family tradition," said Meiss that day. "It is good to recall, especially in our present troubled time, that in an earlier crisis two American institutions were sufficiently perceptive, and, I must add, sufficiently bold (because America is not entirely cosmopolitan) to bring this man to us and to offer him a life appropriate to his gifts."

The author of dozens of books in both German and English, Panofsky was a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a number of other national and international academies and societies. In 1962, he received the Haskins Medal of The Medieval Academy of America, and in 1967, the German government presented him with the Orden Pour le Mrite fr Wissenschaften und Knste, created in 1842 by Friedrich Wilhelm IV to honor prominent artists and scientists. His wife Gerda accompanied him to the presentation ceremonies in Munich, and Panofsky spoke in German on German soil for the first time since he had emigrated. The art historical tradition begun at the Institute with Panofsky was continued with the faculty appointment in 1958 of Meiss, a specialist on Late Medieval manuscript painting in Burgundy; in 1973 with the appointment of Lavin, a specialist in Renaissance and Baroque art; in 2002 with the appointment of Kirk Varnedoe, a specialist in Modern art; and, most recently, with Yve-Alain Bois, a specialist in twentieth-century European and American art, who joined the Faculty in 2005.
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Erwin Panofsky's Legacy

Photo from the Lotte Jacobi Archives Courtesy of the University of New Hampshire The founder of the modern academic subject of iconology, Panofsky left a legacy both through his writings and through the work of those who learned from him. Through his writings and teachings, Panofsky inspired generations of art historians, countless numbers of whom studied with him. Many of them went on to occupy distinguished positions in the field.

Among the significant figures who studied with Panofsky was H. W. Janson, who wrote the influential textbook History of Art, familiar to most college students who have taken an introductory art history course. Others who worked with Panofsky held leading positions in the field, including James Henry Breasted, Jr., Director of the Los Angeles County Museum; John P. Coolidge, Director of the Fogg Art Museum; Richard Ettinghausen, Chief Curator of the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution and Consultative Chairman of the Islamic Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Ludwig Heydenreich, Director of the Zentralinstitut fr Kunstgeschichte in Munich; Carl Nordenfalk, Director of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm; Hanns Swarzenski, Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and Francis Wormald, Director of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London.

Panofsky instilled a love of diverse subjects in those who knew him. His passions were music, especially that of Mozart, on whose compositions he was a connoisseur, and belletristic literature. He loved above all the novels of Jean Paul, Honor de Balzac, and Theodor Fontane, as well as the poetry of Eduard Mrike and the nonsensical verses of Christian Morgenstern. He knew many lines of Dante, Shakespeare, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe by heart. For relaxation at bedtime, he indulged in the detective stories of Georges Simenon (in French, of course), since besides his native German and English, Panofsky was fluent in Latin, French, and Italian.

He examined motion pictures in an entirely new way. Of the cinema, he said, "It was not an artistic urge that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new technique; it was a technical invention that gave rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new art."

Panofsky by Philip Pearlstein Institute for Advanced Study

He had a prominent role in helping to gain support for the establishment of a film department at the Museum of Modern Art in 1934. Two years later, Panofsky delivered a lecture on film at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it was covered by the New York Herald Tribune for its "seemingly unprecedented and rather astonishing cultural legitimation of the cinema" as art. The lecture was published as an essay, "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures," which originally appeared in the Princeton University, Department of Art and Archaeology, Bulletin (1936). This was the earliest treatment of the subject by a serious scholar in art history, and probably Panofsky's most reprinted work.

"The death at 75 of Erwin Panofsky . . . marks not only the passing of one of the greatest art historians, but also that of probably the last humanist," said art historian Henri Van De Waal. "He possessed an admirable quality, rare among great men: he could listen. It is probably to this quality that can be attributed the remarkable fact that after his death each of his friends thought he had known the real Panofsky."

Not only have almost all of Panofsky's pre-emigration works in German by now been translated into English, but also, conversely, most of his later English writings appeared in German. In addition, numerous books and articles by Panofsky have been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Greek, Czech, Hungarian, Slovenian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Danish, Finnish, Swedish, Hebrew, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. As of 2008, his known editions, reprints, and foreign translations number well more than 300, of which more than half were published posthumously, with requests continuing to come in from throughout the world. Panofsky's range of influence has been felt in the areas of film, social history, and many other areas beyond art history.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Panofsky's birth and celebrate the breadth of his influence, Irving Lavin organized a symposium and publication, Meaning in the Visual Arts: View from the Outside. For the frontispiece, he persuaded painter Philip Pearlstein, a fellow student at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts, to paint a portrait of their teacher. Pearlstein and Lavin were present in the audience at New York University when Panofsky presented Early Netherlandish Painting, its Origins and Character in its final draft in a series of 15 lectures. Working from a photograph that happened to show Panofsky in an appropriately Early Netherlandish pose, Pearlstein produced the painting that now hangs in the Historical Studies/Social Science Library at the Institute.

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