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 8119526

HOLLY, MIGHEL A.'~

THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPME~l OF ERWIN PANOFSKY'S THEORIES

OF ART

Cornell University PH.D. 1981

University
Microfilms
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Copyright 1981
by
Holly, Michael Ann
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UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS
 THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF
ERWIN PANOFSKY'S THEORIES O~ ART

A Thesis

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School

of Cornell University

in Partial Fulfillment for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

by

Michael Ann Holly

May 1981
 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Michael Ann Holly was born in 1944 in Alton, Illinois. She spent

her freshman year at Muhlenberg College in 1962-63, worked at Wesleyan

University Press from 1963-1966 and the Center for Brain Research at the

University of Rochester from 1967-70. In 1970 she matriculated as a

sophomore at William Smith College and received her B.A. summa cum laude

from there in June of 1973. The author entered the Ph.D. program in art

history at Cornell University in September of 1973. While there she was

supported by Kress, Cornell University, and teaching fellowships. From

September 1976 until July 1977, she was affiliated. with the
.
Warburg

Institute in London. Since 1978, Ms. Holly has taught cultural history

and general education at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva,

New York.

u.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge several people who have helped in the

preparation of this dissertation. Robert Calkins, Esther Dotson, and

Andrew Ramage of the Department of the History of Art at Cornell have

been familiar with this project since its inception, and I very much

appreciate their attention and suggestions. I am also indebted to two

special friends from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Elena Ciletti

and Richard Reinitz, who were always willing both to discuss and chal-

lenge my approach. I benefited from the criticism of all five of these

individuals, and I have always been encouraged by their enthusiasm.

Ca~ol Humphrey typed the final version.

Much of the research for this dissertation, supported by Cornell and

the Goldring Fellowship, was carried out in London, and I wich to thank

the Warburg Institute for providing me with access to its library. I

profited from the Institute's seminars and its scholars, particularly

Ernst Gombrich) David Thomason, Alison Kettering, and Michael Padro.

Professor Padro's year-long Kunstwissenschaft_seminar at the University

of Essex provided me with many of the interpretive principles I have

brought to bear on Panofsky, and I am also grateful for his eagerness to

share translations. The History of Ideas Seminar at Johns Hopkins

University, directed by Professor Nancy Struever, gave me the opportunity

to discuss my ideas at a crucial mid-way point.

iii
 Finally, a general expression of gratitude to my colleagues and

students at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, who helped me to finish

this project in a variety of meaningful ways. Last of all, warm thanks

to my parents, for their support, to my children, Lauren, Nicholas, and

Alexander, for their cheerfulness, and to my husband, Grant, for his

commitment to critical thinking.

 TABLE OF CON'LENTS

Page

CHAP'tER I.

Introduction: Historical Background • . • . • • . • •• 1

CHAPTER II.

Panofsky and WHlfflin • • 34

CHAPTER III.

PanofskyandRiegl 64

CHAPTER IV.

Contemporary Issues • • • • • • • • • • • • 104

CHAPTER V.

Panofsky and Cassirer 131

CHAPTER VI.

Later Work: An Iconological Perspective • • • • • • • • 193

BIBLIOGRAPHY • • . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . .. .. . . ... 240

 I. Historical Background

History is the record of facts which one age finds remarkable

in another.

J. Burckhardt, Heaning in Histo;x

The facts of history never come to us "pure," since they do not

and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted
through the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take
up a work of history, our first concern should not be with the
facts it contains but with the historian who wrote it . . . .
Before you study the history, study the historians. Before you
study the historian, study his historical and social environ-
ment. The historian, being an individual, is also a product
of history and of society; and it is in this twofold light that
the student of history must learn to regard him.

E. H. Carr, t'lhat Is History"?

Art historians commonly assume that they know hO~>1 art history

"works." Consider, as an example, this sentitr.ent expressed in 1976 by

M. Roskill in What is Art Histo·cy?, a book whose title promis(~s much:

"Art history is a science, with definite principles and techniques, rather

1
than a matter of intuition or guesswork." It is easy to understand the

pressure on Roski11 to make such a remark, just as it is easy to

1 What is Art History? (New York, 1976), p. 9. A most curious re-

mark, it seems to me, when one considers that even both historians and
philosophers of science have ceased to regard the practice of science in
the positivist way that the art nistorian Roskill still does. See, for
example, Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions., 2nd ed.
(Chicago, 1970) and Gerald Iiclton, rhe Thematic Origins of Scientific
Thought (Cambridge, 1973), as well as relevant discussion in the last
chapter of this dissertation.

1
 2

appreciate the longed for sense of reassurance that his declaration must

have given many of his readers. Since the seventeenth century, rules of

judgment and evidence have been governed by the so-called Scientific

Revolution, with its supreme criterion of objectivity. Since the nine-

teenth century, and in some cases far earlier, however it has been recog-

nized that the notion of objective standards may veil the awareness of a de-

pendence on other than objective assumptions. Surely philosophers of

history have taught us that history is always something other than a

2
science. For that matter, philosophers and historians of science are

now telling us that science itself is always something other than a

science.

Vasari, sometimes called the "first" art historian, re.cognized and

tried to work both usefully and artfully with some of his assumptions.

In the "Preface to Part Two" of his Lives, he acknowledges. that a writer

2 The literature on the "fictional" aspect of history is lively and

varied. See a summary of sorts in E. H. Carr, What is History? (New York,
1961). The gist of this argument can be seen by his reference to two
brief quotations: Becker, '''The facts of history do not exist for any
historian until he creates them,' It and Collingwood, III All history is the
history of thought, and history is the re-enactment in the historian's
mind of the thought whose history he is studying. 111 It almost goes with-
out saying that every historian tries to be as true to his facts as pos-
sible if he has any professional competency. But because historians are
not content with the simple discovery of past facts, and because they
aspire to say not only what happened but why, history is also a "signifi-
cant" record of past events. Every historian seeks to write not just a
list, but a smooth and coherent discourse in which his facts can assume
an easy and natural· place. In this sense, an historical narrative is
indeed a work of literature. Recent historiographic analyses have even
gone so far as to concentrate on the "stylistics tl of historical narratives.
See, for example, Peter Gay, Style in History (1974; New York~ 1976) and
Hayden White, Metahistory (1973; Baltimore, 1975), passim. For a discus-
sion of the "fictional" aspect of science, see the last chapter.

_~ __ .J
 3

on art is necessarily a contemporary critic and theorist of style as well

as a "scientific historian." To repress his biases or theoretical commit-

ments entirely, Vasari suggests, would only eventuate in the art his-

torian's compiling mere "lists.,,3 Is it possible that we today (as one

reading of Roskill's statement might suggest) are more unwilling to ex-

amine ourselves and the history of our methods than Vasari was half a

millenium ago?

Ernst Gombrich sees the unquestioning "application of existing and

ready-made paradigms ~. g., WOlfflin' s "art history without names" or

Panofsky's "iconologyj as a threat to the health of our search and re-

search. " "~.Je cannot and must not evade," he warns, "the demand of con-

stantly probing the foundations on which the various paradigms are

based.,,4 A first step towards critical self-awareness might be to ask

such questions as, is there a recognizable historical and epistemologi-

cal context from which contemporary ideas on art history h~ve emerged?

And if there is such a recognizable context, are these ideas on art

3 The Lives of the Artists, ed. George Bull (London, 1974),

pp. 83-84.
"But I have remarked that those historians who are generally agreed to
have· produced the soundest work have not been satisfied just to give
a bald narration of the facts but have also, with great diligence and
the utmost curiousity, investigated the ways and means and methods used
by successful men in forwarding their enterprises. • • • I have tried
as far as I could to imitate the methods of the great historians. I
have endeavoured not only to record what the artists have done but also
to distinguish between the good~ the better, and the best, and to note
with some care the methods, manners, styles, behaviour, and ideas of the
painters and sculptors; I have tried as well as I know how to help
people who cannot find out for themselves to understand the sources and
origins of various styles, and the reasons for the improvement or de-
cline of the arts at various times and among different people."

4 Ernst Gombrich, "A Plea for Pluralism," The P.merican Art Journal,
3, no. 1 (Spring 1971): 86. See also Gombrich, "Art and Scholarship,"
College Art Journal, XVII, no. 4 (Summer 1958): 342-356.
 4

entailed in its program or ideology, what might in more general terms

be called its vision? In a 1974 issue of·New Literary History, David

Rosand notes in this regard, "As we come to recognize the degree to which

our activity as historians of past art is conditioned by our current as-

sumptions of value--assumptions which are for the most part tacitly held,

with hardly any critical self-awareness--we legitimately seek the founda-

tions of our particular vision of art.,,5

In a way it is ironic that this sort of self-conscious statement

has to be made at all, not only because other disciplines have been en-

gaged in similar investigations for over a decade, but also because much

of the pioneer work in historiography derives from the writings of an im-

portant group of German art historians at the turn of the century. Many

of their works (especially the early ones) are dense and untranslated,

and therefore surprisingly little is known about them. In this disserta-

tion I will specifically focus on the origin of the basic ideas of Erwin

Panofsky, arguably the most influential historian of art in the twentieth

century. I will concentrate on three of Panofsky's early untranslated

works, all written in the decade of 1915-1925 and responding to the in-

tellectual challenges offered him in turn by W8lfflin, Riegl and Cassirer.

When Erwin Panofsky began writing essays on art in the second decade

of this century, the discipline of art history was dominated by an almost

exclusive preecc· 1ation with form. The "pure visibility" trend in art
criticism and W8lfflin's stylistic approach to the history of art, both of

which tended to treat the subject matter of a work as a "mere pretext" for

the exercise of significant form~ epitomize the formalistic persuasion

5 "Art History and Criticism: The Past as Present, "New Literary

History,3 (Spring 1974): 436.
 5

6
in art theory in general. At the turn of the century, for

example, art galleries and museums frequently identified their paintings

7
only by the names of artists and pertinent dates. A concern with con-

tent or subject matter in any way was deemed irrelevant either to the

appreciation of the art work as a formal construct or as an impediment

to the proper adulation of its quality. Given this p~eoccupation with

form as the dominant aesthetic of the period, Panofsky felt obliged to

apologize for his own historical interest in subject matter in a dis-

tinctly deferential tone. In one of the first articles which he pub-

lished on the history of a theme and its transformations through the

Middle Ages and the Renaissance--an approach to the study of art which

was to characterize much of his subsequent writing--he wrote:

"Mann kann sich seIber und anderen immer wieder die Erfahrung
machen, dass eine gelungene Inhalts exegese nicht nur dem
'historischen Verstandnis' des Kunstwerks zugute kommt, sondern
auch dessen 'asthetisches Erlebnis' ich will nicht sagen:
intensiviert, wohl aber in eigentUmlicher Weise zugleich
bereichert und kllirt." ("A successful content exegesis cannot
only serve to benefit an 'historical understanding' of a work
of art, but the viewer's 'aesthetic experience' can be--I will
not go so far as to say intensified--but enriched and clari-
fied in a peculiar way. ") 8

In this chapter, I will describe and evaluate the historiographic back-

ground of Panofsky's revolutionizing sentiment.

6
Jan Bialostocki, "Iconography and Iconology," Encyclopedia of
World Art, VII (1963): 775.

7 H. van de t-Taal, "In Memoriam Erwin Panofsky, March 30, 1892-

March 14, 1968,11 Nieuwe Reeks, 35, no. 6, 231.
8
"Hercules am Scheidewege und andere ant ike Bildstoffe in der
neureren Kunst," Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, 18 (1930): 10 (quoted
in van de Waal, p. 236).
 6

Art historians at the turn of the century--and the cultural his-

torians who preceded them in originating schemata for the interpretation

of historical evidence--provide a most significant area of study for a

modern scholar interested in the theoretical bases of art historical

scholarship. Riegl, WHlfflin, Warburg, Dvo~ak, and Panofsky, to name

only the most celebrated, developed their ideas during a time mien the

still young discipline of art history was passing through an internal

crisis, a crisis to some extent precipitated by initial methodological

dilemmas in history writing at large. The theorists of this period were

especially self-conscious about the ways in which their individual

methodologies impinged on the study of the history of art. At the same

time, however, they were poJ.emically involved in debates among th,=mselves

concerning the viability of each other's choices of procedure. Out of

this early twentieth century controversy the shape 'of contemporary

thought about art and its history has emerged.

The next three chapters will analyze the specific formalist and

stylistic tendencies in art historical theory preceding Panofsky, the

ideas of Riegl and Wglfflin, among others, and Panofsky's pointed cri-
9
tiques of their works. Yet the preoccupation with form in art theory

was not the only impediment to a just appreciation of the content of a

work of art and to the development i!1 the view'er of a sense of the work

as the product of a specific cultural milieu. There were several other

9 I appropriate portions of Luigi Salerno's summary in "Hisl:orio-

graphy," in Encyclopedia of World Art, VII (1963): 526, or the mid-
nineteenth century origin in art and scholarship of the formalistic ap-
proach, for in the next chapter we will be principally concerned only
with its evolution at the tu~ of the century and beyond:
"The concept of art as pure form (or pure visibility) was
a reaction to the emphasis on content that had dominated
 7

contemporary attitudes which deflected attention away from content. To

a large extent, the development of art historical scholarship in the

nineteenth century was determined by the reorganization of museums. The

task of the connoisseurs--Morel1i and Berenson, for example--was to pro-

duce a taxonomy for the classification of works by artist, style, and

workshop. The positivistic models provided by the natural sciences a1-

lowed others, for example Semper, to produce analyses of works of art in

terms 0f ·
t h e~r . 1
mater~a
.
const~tuents.
10

the historiography of art for centuries. Since the Renaissance the

work of art had been viewed in terms both of the subject repre-
sented--content--and of a complex of visual elements (lines, volumes,
co1ors)--form. But according to the prevailing concept, based on
the theme Ut pictura poesis, the work was a sort of wordless poem
and was valued more for its literary content than for its formal
qualities. In the latter half of the 19th century, however, esthetic
theory and the antisentimenta1, antinatura1istic trend which pro-
duced and was fed by impressionism brought into focus the need to
consider form apart from its connection with the natural world.
Robert Zimmerman, a follower of Herbart--who had proposed an
anti-idealist philosophy stressing the importance of the separateness
of the arts, of the purity of each branch of art--published his
Aesthetik in 1858-1865. • •• The painter Hans von Ma=~es led Konrad
Fiedler and Adolf von Hildebrandt in the direction of formalism.
Another impulse in this direction was provided by the psychological
theory of Einffihlung (empathy) advanced by Robert Vischer in 1875.
. • . Hence arose the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century
propensity for analyzing the formal elemeuts of a work of art in
order to grasp their value as symbols of the artist's feelings.
But it was Konrad Fiedler who really created the theory of pure
form. Rejecting the concepts of Beauty and of Art, accepting the
existence only of particular arts, he founded a science of art based
on visual or formal laws--laws created by genius."
Also see Michael Podro, The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from
Kant to Hildebrand (Oxford, 1972).
10
Eugene Kleinbauer, in his brief discussion of Semper in Modern
Perspectives in Western Art History (New York, 1971), p. 20, calls atten-
tion to the distinct Darwinian strain running throughout this "scientific"
explanation: "For Semper, 'Nho read Darwin's Origin of Species as soon as
it appeared, art is a biological organism and the history of art a con-
tinuous linear proces~ of development going back into the remote, prim-
eval past. Art originates from the specific nature of the material, the
nature of the tools and methods of production, and the nature of the
 8·

The infJ.uential aesthetics of Benedetto Croce also played a part.

He pointedly disliked abstract interpretative schemata ("one should not

explain Giotto by the Trecento, but the TrecentQ by Giotto"ll), disdained

those historically-minded writers who ignored the artistic personality,

and expressed, dismay at the commonplace distinction drawn between art

history and art criticism. Instead, he testified to the inseparable unity

of form and content in works of art, and passionately affirmed that art

is the expression of feeling, not merely a vehicle for the communication

of ideas.

Perhaps the most compelling justification for the need to consider

form apart from content wa~ provided by continuing radical developments

in the practice of contemporary art. In a cautionary note relevant tq the

thesis of this essay, Arnold Hauser has pointed out how the modern art

historian is all too often cast in the ironic mode'of saying that an artist

is conditioned, historically and psychologically, by the times in which

pe creates, while the art historian himself somehow presents his position

as one of remaining "outside time." "The fact is," he says, "that the

art historian also is confined within limits set by the artistic aims of

his time; his concepts of form and categories of value are bound up with

the modes of seeing and the criteria of taste of a certain age." For this

function that the work of art serves.. Materials are the basis of
his critical perspe~tive, and changes in art are explained by the nature
of material and technical innovations."

11 Cited in Salerno, p. 528. Further relevant and brief discussion

of Croce and his 1902 Estetica come scienza del'espressione e linguistica
genera1e (Milan, 1902) can be located in Kleinbauer, p. 3 and in History
of Art Criticism (1936; New York, 1964) by Lionello Venturi (a major
Crocean disciple, along with von Sc.hlosser in Germany and Collingwood in
England), pp. 338-339, and in I. M. Bochenski, Contemporary European
Philosophy (1947; Berkeley, 1956), pp. 73-82.
 9

reason, he notes elsewhere, "the rehabilitation of late Roman art by

Riegl and Wickhoff would have been impos~ible apart from the crisis of

the classical-romantic period and the modern decadence movement with its

preference for 'silver ages.' So Wglfflin's justification of the baroque

would have been impossible without the dynamic vision of impressionism,

Dvo¥~k's re-discovery of mannerism impossible apart from the existence of

expressionism and surrealism.,,12

Repressed by this preoccupation with form in a variety of ways, a

concern for content in works of art nevertheless managed to come to the

surface through other channels--although in doing so, it was frequently

forced into an adjunct role and called upon principally to provide illus-

tration for something else. In the late nineteenth century, the content

(and here we mean the straightforward identification of subject matter)

.. 13
and been relegated to the auxiliary "science" of l.conography. However,

12
Arnold Hauser, The Philosophy of Art History (1958; Cleveland,
1963), pp. 236, 218. This theory of the connections between practicing
artists and art historians could, of course, form the basis of a book in
itself. I only mention it in passing. Another very interesting topic
along these lines would be a comparison between the criteria used by con-
temporary critics (e.g., Bell, Fry, Meyer-Graef) to assess contemporary
works of art and the criteria employed by contemporary art historians to
appraise works of art from out of the past. For a slightly later period
than we are dealing with here, Christine McCorkel, in "Sense and
Sensibility: An Epistemological Approach to the Philosophy of Art His-
tory," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism XXXIV, no. 1 (Fall, 1975):
36-37, has unearthed several interesting parallels among philosophical doc-
trines, art historical attitudes, and contemporary aesthetics. ,In dis-
cussing the "changing character of art history in the 1920's and 1930's"
as a preface to her analysis of the "empirical strain of art history in
the United States," she makes connections among Moritz Schlick's "repu-
diation of metaphysics in favor of a philosophy based on logical and
mathematical notions of truth," Sedlmayr's attempts at formulating a
positivistic Kunstwissenschaft, and the world of ~eue Sachlichkeit.
13 B·loa 1 ostock·lo, pp. 769-773.
 10

a theoretical interest in works of art as embodied ideas (as ideas made

manifest), with its attendant desire to situate works of art firmly within

their cultural milieu, had neve~ become wholly dormant. It is in this

traditio~ of historical scholarship that we must locate Panofsky first of

all. In many ways, he was a cultural historian who merely discovered a

new fie.ld for the application of his theories. As P. o. Kristeller, a

life-long friend, once remarked, "Panofsky conceived of the visual arts

as part of a larger universe of culture that also comprises the sciences,

philosophical and religious thought, literature and scholarship.,,14

Certainly since the time of Hegel, and perhaps earlier, there have

been ambitious historians who have written with the primary goal of creat-
lS
ing a unified picture of a specific historical period. In attempting to

articulate the fundamental unity of culture and cultural expressions, they

have explored connections between art and philosophy, religion and science.

Hegel, Burckhardt, and Dilthey are conspicuous examples, but the list of

nineteenth century historians who proceeded along similar epistemological

16
lines could include many others as well.

14 P. o. Kristeller, "Review of Panofsky's Renaissance and

Renascences in Western Art," Art Bulletin XLIV (1962): 67.
15
Salerno, p. 526 (cf. footnote 11).
16
Cf. Earl Rosenthal in "Changing Interpretations of the Renaissance
in the History of Art" in The Renaissance, ed. Tinsley Helton (Madison,
1961), who places the works of Taine, Symonds, Pater and MUntz in this
tradition. Michael Podro in "Hegel's Dinner Guest and the History of
Art," New Lugano Review (Spring 1977): 21, identifies three "responses"
to the ideas of Winckelmann animating nineteenth century aesthetics
at the time of Hegel:
"The first of these responses (that of Kant) says, in effect, that
aesthetic interest was simply distinct from variable religious and
cultural ideas and functions, and that they may be combined in art,
but he gives no account of any interplay between them. The second,
 11

In this chapter, I am specifically interested in the origin and

significance of these historians' ideas which seem to have been either

appropriated or challenged by early twentieth century art theoreticians.

It is important first to understand the basic tenets of these three be-

cause it is their thought which is the template of art historical scholar-

' 17
s h ~p. Understanding the nature of art history does not merely involve

reading the works of important and formative art historians. It is neces-

sary also to investigate the writings of art historians whose ideas em-

body the paradigms of their time and to read them in conjunction with the

historians and philosophers who elaborated these paradigms in their own

fields.

that of Herder, was that each culture had its own beauty, its own
ideal of personality and its art was inseparab,le from the meanings
imparted by the practices and beliefs of the culture. The third
view, that of Karl Friedrich von Rumohr (as well as that of Burckhardt
a generation later) was that the constructive power of the artist may
interact with the ideas and institutions in which he worked, without
being in any simple sense a reflection of that context. Hegel drew
heavily on Winckelmann, but also on Herder and Rumohr."

17 I have selected these three historians as representatives appro-

priate for my study of Panofsky for three principal reasons:
1) The spectre of Hegel haunted nineteenth and early twen~ieth
century historiography, and no discussion of historical methodology in
any field can fail to take account of his pervasive influence.
2) Burckhardt, as it has been remarked, was a cultural historian par
excellence (Kleinbauer, p. 90). Even though Panofsky's brand of cultural
history seems to exemplify Burckhardt's project in reverse--Pariofsky
worked outwards from the work of art to larger cultural connections--the
process of contextualization which Burckhardt construed provided him with
a meaningful pattern of interpretation. Wallace K. Ferguson in The
Renaissance in Historical Thought (Cambridge, 1948), characteriz~
Burckhardt's impact on historiography this way: " . • . historians,
daunted perhaps by the harmoniously integrated perfection of Burckhardt's
outline, were long content to illustrate it, to amplify it in detail, or
to remodel some particular f~ature of it without abandoning its guiding
pr.inciple," p. 195.
3) Wilhelm Dilthey--largely ignored today--seems in many ways closest
in historiographic sentiment to Panofsky. He was, above all, concerned
with the nature of historical thinking and the justification of its methods,
and I find direct reflections of his concerns appearing in Panofsky's early
 12

With the writing of Hegel, R. G. Collingwood has said, "history for

th~ first time steps out full-grown on the stage of philosophical

thought. ,,18 Postulating an "Infinite Spirit" or "Idea" behind history

which works itself out dialectically through time by manipulating human

actors caught in its path. Hegel characterized history as a logical,

19
rational process. The course of history becomes not the continuing

story of men, women and events, but in Hegel's words, the "biography of

the World Spirit.,,20 When the "Infinite Idea" plants one mode of action,

one way of comprehending the world in the soil of human history, it si-

multaneously sows the ·seeds of that era's destruction: the "thesis" of

one period becomes the "antithesis" of the next, with their inevitable

resolution or "synthesis" functioning as a new "thesis" for the next stage

of world events. By necessity, the spirit or idea evolves only through

struggle. It inexorably compels the actions and attitudes of men and

women to alter incessantly throughout time, throughout varying cultures.

writing. It is in the work of Dilthey that "Geistesgeschichte," a

"specifically German method of inquiry • • • attained its first positive
statement." Kleinbauer continues, "Dilthey posited that the study of
cultural sciences should not be subordinated to that of the natural
sciences, as had been held by contemporary German academic philosophers
• • •• (Yet) his own work on the history of the human mind focused on
literature, poetry, music, and philosophy but, by personal choice, ex-
cluded the visual arts," pp. 94-95. It was left up to Max Dvor~k to
bring the idea of Geistesgeschichte to work in an analysis of the visual
arts. See Hans.~ietze, Der Methode der Kunstgeschichte (Liepzig, 1913) for
a contemporary account and critique of art historical methodology.
18 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, quoted in W~. H. Dray,
Philosophy of History (Englewood Cliffs; 1964), p. 67.
19
Roland N. Stromberg, European Intellectual History Since 1789
(1966: New York, 1968), p. 65.
20
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, quoted in Dray,
p. 80.
 13

According to Hegel, the cultural explication of any age depends

upon the interpretation of all cultural phenomena in the context of their

relation to one another. In his sweeping view, every culture or civi1iza-

tion can be characterized by its specific Zeitgeist, a self-motivating

principle which variously manifests itself through both ideas and ob-
21
jects. Working and thinking in a particular historical time and place,

an artist (or artisan) by necessity makes his work conform to an essential

"idea" or, to put it more popularly, to express a certain "spirit of the

age":

"The essential category is unity, the inner nexus of all the

different configurations (of the spirit). It must be maintained
that it is only ~ spirit, ~ principle which expresses itself
in the political state just as much as in religion, art, ethics,
manners, commerce and industry. These are merely branches of a
main stem. This is the main point. The spirit is only one, it is
the substantive spirit of an epoch, of a nation, of a period which
forms itself in many ways • • • • "22

In Hegel's mind, art, along with religion and philosophy, is

"absolute spirit, and he relates all art to the idea of which it is an

expression.,,23 From this perspective, one could certainly say that the

content of a work of art is what is re~eiving the attention, but--and

this is most significant--it is a content which is spiritualized rather

than historicized. It is not an analysis of works of art as they exhibit

specific historical qualities and shed light on precise historical problems.

Hegel presupposed a cultural unity and made use of works of art only as

illustrations. The objects here lose their individual existence and are

21
See Ernst Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford, 1969).
22
Hegel, cited in Carl J. Friedrich's "Introduction" to ~
Philosophy of Hegel (New York, 1953), pp. xxx-xxxi.
23 Fr1e dOh O
°
r1C "p. 1v i 1.
 14

subsumed, artificially, under the aura of a huge metaphysical construct.

In these terms, the approach to art is still essentially formalistic:

"Art is called upon to reveal the truth in the form of a sensuous crea-

tion, and has its end in itse1f.,,24

Hegel's impact on art historical thought was dramatic, and it could

be convincingly argued that the discipline actually flourished as a re-

su1t of his work. Hauser maintains that, despite art history's apparent-

1y diverse and unsystematic codes of interpretation over the last One

hundred years, there remains something of the Hegelian epistemology of

"
h ~story "h
~n t e wor k 0 f every art h ""
~stor~an. 25 Yet it frequently happens

that both cultural historians and art historians are markedly reluctant

about recognizing not only their own but also their forebears" subtle

but profound indebtedness to Hegel.

Jacob Burckhardt is a case in point. Burckhardt consistently pro-

claimed his reservations about Hegelian cultural history and was skepti-

cal of any theoretical model for the processes of history which aspired

to be absolute and definitive:

". . • we renounce all system; ,we make no claim to 'world

historical ideas,' but are content with observation and give
cross sections through history, from, indeed, as many directions
as possible; we give above all no philosophy of history."26

Throughout his writings, Burckhardt remained uninterested in the basic

concern of Hegelian history: how to account for historical change.

24
Ibid., p. 1vii.
25
Hauser, passim.
26
Cited in Ferguson, p. 186 from Burckhardt's Gesamtausgabe, VII,l.
 15

I quote from a translated edition of the introduction to Force and

Freedom: Reflections on Historz:

"We are not • • • privy to the purposes of eternal wisdom:

they are beyond our ken. This ~egelt~ bold assumption of a
world plan leads to fallacies because it starts out from false
premises. • • • We, however, shall start out from the one
point accessible to us, the one eternal center of all things--
man suffering, striving, doing, as he is and was and ever shall
be."27

As the second half of the above quotation implies (or perhaps a better

illustration would be the heading he chose for the first part of his

magnum opus--"The State as a Work of Art"), Burckhardt located his in-

terest squarely in the middle of the historical phenomenon as such. His

constant concern was with synchronic, topical analyses. He regarded

various aspects of the Renaissance, from politics to poetry, as objective

historical facts, whose temporal and spatial boundaries were clearly de-

limited. He was not interested in what they were not, nor where they

came from and where they were tending to go. His metaphysical specula-

tions were sparse, and he had little, if anything, to say about the prob-

lem of historical causation. When he wrote at all of caus~tion--as any

student of histo~~ inevitably does--he did so in terms, it has been

28
stressed, of an "immediate" rather than a "fundamental" cause.

Burckhardt's implicit critique of Hegel is very similar to that of

Gombrich's of a hundred years later, but Gombrich, interestingly enough,

27 Cited in Benjamin Nelson's and Charles Trinkhaus' "Introduction"

to The Civilization of the Renaissance (1929; New York, 1958), I, 3.

28 Ibid., p. 9. It is also pointed out here how Burckhardt tended

to ignore economic and social factors in his essay--further evidence, it
seems to me, of his intentionally delimited synchronic program.
 16

has explicitly developed his critique in order to account for

Burc kh ar d t ' s Hege l'~an~sm.

, 29 Gombrich believes that Burckhardt's anti-

Hegelian statements are belied by his deep commitment to a way of seeing

which could only be Hegelian. He argues that although Burckhardt was

convinced that he was working only with the objective facts of the

Renaissance, what he finally found in the facts was the Zeitgeist, "the

Hegelian world spirit he had rejected as a speculative abstraction.,,30

,Hegel's project, to find in every factual detail the general principle

that underlies it, was essentially unchanged in Burckhardt, whose quest

was still in some sense after the elusive spirit of the age.

Gombrich has illustrated the continuing problem of nineteenth century

cultural history this way, and he has, in a seminar, accused Panofsky

and twentieth century cultural historians in general of abetting this

' 1
metap h ys~ca '
cr~me:
31

29
Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History, p. 14.
30
Ibid., p. 15, quoting Burckhardt:
"Every cultural epoch which presents itself not only as a complete
and artic~late whole expresses itself not only in the life of the
state, in religion, art and science, but also imparts its individual
character to social life as such."
Burckhardt's pvsition on artistic issues, however, conformed to no simple
aesthetic doctrine, as Wilhelm Waetzho1dt, has pointed out:
"Burckhardts Kunstbetrachtung ist auf die kUnst1erischen 1(lerte
gerichtet, seine Methode forma1-analytisch. Dfes a11es aber ohne
Pedanterie, ohne Orthodoxie eines Hsthetischen Bekenntnisses, ja sogar
im dem Sinne ohne Konsequen~, a1s Burckhardt nichts von einer Verach-
tung des Inha1t1ichen wissen wo11te," in Deutsche Kunsthistoriker ~
Sandrart bis Rumohr, 2 vo1s. (Berlin, 1965), pp. 188-189.

31 Ibid., p. 9. Seminars conducted during March and April, 1974

for the Department of the History of Art, Cornell University.
 17

The hub of the eight-spoked

religion
wheel is supposedly the spirit

of an age or civilization. The

art~ ______~~______-fmorality assumption of nineteenth century

historiography, which Gombrich

finds objectionable, is Lhat an

customs investigation of anyone spoke

provides the same encoded cultural information as any other. The appar-

ently different elements of culture--technology, religion, law--are re-

duced to being merely different ways of saying the same thing.

I prefer to characterize Burckhardt's work as a kind of modified

Hegelianism. He was clearly opposed to the tenuous metaphysical sub-

structure upon which the Hegelian System was based; he was not adverse

to Hegel's desire to link some of the various products of an age together.

Take Burckhardt's attitude to works of art for example. He insisted that

art, in order to understood, had to be "evaluated within the context of

the culture that produced it." But he likewise maintained, as Earl

Rosenthal has pointed out, "that the description of a cultural background

should be kept separate from art and only a loose relationship could be
32
suggested." He did, after all, intend to compose a distinct and

separate volume on the arts to accompany--not illustrate--his large work

on Die Cu1tur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch (1860).

Burckhardt made "Renaissance man" and the products of his imagina-

tion the central object of his studies, as did his successors in the

tradition, including Panofsky, who focused their attention on the culture

32
Rosenthal, p. 54.
 18

and humanism of the age. He was an Hegelian, but one who shifted priori-

ties. He attempted, a priori, to articulate the consciousness of the in-

dividual in society, and worked outwards from that point, analyzing along

the way how this particular historical consciousness expressed itself in

institutions, ideas, etc. Panofsky's much celebrated later definition of

"iconology" as being "apprehended by ascertaining those underlying prin-

ciples which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a

religious or philosophical persuasion--(as) qualified by one personality

and condensed into one work,,33 appears directly indebted to Burckhardt's

highly original historical method. Although the work of Panofsky may

represent a more critical awareness of the Hegelian program, "those who

have studied his works know that he • . • never renounced the desire to

demonstrate the organic unity of all aspects of a period.,,34

Burckhardt had set the stage. In breaking a~ay not only from the

constraints of a political history in which the narrative necessarily

proceeds from one event to the other but also from the pervasive Hegelian

notion of a world plan, Burckhardt organized his material topically and

attempted only gradually, by diligent research, to present a coherent

picture of an age based on research into one or another aspect of a

civilization. His perceptive assessment of the difference in conscious-

ness between medieval and Renaissance man had direct implications for

Panofsky and his work on Renaissance art as the concrete expression of

33
Panofsky. "Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the
Study of Renaissance Art" (1939), reprinted in Meaning in the Visual
Arts (~arden City, 1955), p. 30.

34 Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History, p. 28.

 19 .,~

philosophical ideas. The close and careful scrutiny of one aspect of a

cultural period and ~ its natural and subsequent emplotment in the

larger context of an age is an approach which even the most recent radi-

cal critic of nineteenth century historiography, Hayden White, still

35
identifies with Burckhardt.

Wilhelm Dilthey, writing at the end of the century, was similarly

engaged in a project of contextualization: "Every single expression of

life represents a common feature. . . • Every word, every sentence, every

gesture or polite formula, every work of art and every historical deed

is intelligible because the people who express themselves through them

and those who understand them have something in common; the individual

always experiences, thinks and acts in a common sphere and only there

does he understand.,,36 But, unlike Hegel and Burckhardt, the "something

in common" was not simply synonymous with the "spirit" of the age, the

controlling principle behind all historical objectifications. The so-

called father of Geistesgeschichte, Dilthey had an even more ambitious

project in mind--a method of inquiry which would relate all epochs in a

fundamental sense one to the other. In order to understand his contribu-

tion, we must see how he was concerned above all with the nature of

35 White, pp. 8, 18-21, and 230-264.

36 Wilhelm Dilthey, "The Construction of the Historical World in

the Human Studies," read to the Prussian Academy in January 1910 and
published in their proceedings in December 1910. Excerpts and transla-
tions appear in H. P. Rickman, ed., Wilhelm Dilthey; Pattern and Meanin[·
in History: Thoughts on History and Society (1961; New York, 1962), p.
123. Rickman has primarily concentrated on vol. VII of the collected
works of Dilthey, ed. in 1926 by B. Groethysen, Part II, pp. 145-148.
Dilthey's aesthetics, largely neglected by most commentators (cf.
Kleinbauer's remark in fn. 17) has become the center of a recent book
by Rudolf A. Makkree1, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies (1975).
 20

historical writing and the "epistemological justification of its meth-

od s, Pl37 for in this concern he anticipated the dilemma of modern his-

toriography.

How, he asked himself repeatedly, are we to recapture meaning in

historical evidence? And in recapturing this meaning how can we avoid

the trap of Hegelian metaphysics? A biographer and therefore astute stu-

dent of Hegel, Dilthey felt, as Croce was later to feel, that Hegel's

"metaphysical shell,,38 was the bane of good history writing, and he dog-

gedly pursued other ways of discussing the meaning he nevertheless per-

ceived in history. Yet with the rejection of this shell, he also wanted

to be most careful that his metbod tlOt degenerate into typical historicist
. 39
despa~r. He d esp~se
. d" t h e spectre 0 fre
lat~v~sm
· . ,,40 h aunt~ng
. h'~stor~ans
.

37 Rickman, p. 21. In the summary of Dilthey's work which follows, I

appropriate many of Rickman's lively comments.
38
Ibid., p. 25.
39
The term "historicism" has become ambiguous, to say the least, for
it has come to be used in two quite distinct and somewhat contradictory
senses. I quote from R. H. Nash, ed., Ideas of History, Vol. 1, Speculative
Approaches to History (New York, 1969):
" . • • the speculative philosophy of history is a result of attempts
made by not only philosophers but also by historians and sociologists
to discover the meaning of history as a whole. These speculative sys-
tems assume, for the most part, that there is some ultimate meaning in
history which can be explained in terms of some historical law. This
belief~ usually coupled with some form of historical inevitability
(either theistic or naturalistic), is often called 'historicism' • • • .
. Ther.e ~s a~other and quite different sense of historicism which (is]
associated with such thinkers as Dilthey, Croce, and Collingwood, that
all ideas are rooted in some historical context and are therefore
limited and relative. Historicists (in this second sense) also main-
tain that history must use different logical techniques from the cines
used in the physical sciences. Failure to keep these two types of his-
toricism distinct can lead to confusion, n p. 265, and fn. 1, p. 265 •.
It is faith in the first kind of historicism that Gombrich's friend and
mentor, K. R. Popper, has notCibly branded absurd in The Poverty of Histor-
icism (Boston, 1957), p. vii:" • belief in historical destiny is sheer
superstition."
40
Rickman, p. 57.
 21

at the turn of the century and feared the simple-minded antiquarians--

a breed of scholars born out of this despair·--whose observations kept

getting lost among the minutiae of the past. For the most part the genera-

tion of historians immediately succeeding Burckhardt tended toward in-

creasing specialization. The predominant inclination, in Carl Becker's

41
words, "'was to learn more and more about less and less. '"

Dilthey's doctrine of meaning in history was an attempt to circum-

vent the nihilism towards which historiography was steering. The doctrine

is paradoxically both abstract and self-evident--one commentator has been

· · · h '1t f rom common sense 42 -- b ut 1n
h ar d put to d 1st1ngu1s . 1tS
. purpose f u 1
~

vagueness remains intriguingly suggestive. An appropriately ambiguous

summary has been provided by Dilthey's first comprehensive English trans-

lator. Its implications for Panofsky's similar obsession with discovering

"meaning" in historical constructs are obvious:

It is a matter of empirical fact and not of metaphysical specu-

lation that we experience life in terms of patterns, connections
and relationships which constitute for us the meaning of our experi-
ences and indeed of our lives. . •• Step by step Di1they analysed
the temporal and historical structure of human life and the way in
which meaning arises in it, how this meaning is expressed and how it
can be understood. He then proceeded to an account of how the mean-
ing rooted in the awareness of individuals becomes embedded in the
meaning of institutions, organizations and historical processes, what
form it takes there, how it can be recaptured through historical evi-
dence and lead to historical understanding. This, together with dis-
cussions of the nature of historical evidence and the processes for
sifting it, constitutes his methodology of historiography • • • • 43

However, Dilthey's "conception of understanding and interpretation,

41
Cited in Ferguson, p. 196.
42
Patrick Gardiner, ~ries of History (Glencoe, Ill., 1959). p. 212.
43
Rickman, pp. 30, 33.
 22

through which meaning is recaptured," rests on the tenuous assumption

that human nature has been essentially unchanging throughout the ages,

despite the evident differences in outer, objectified historical attitudes

and products. Dilthey appears to think that "we can pass directly from

awareness of the expression to awareness of that which it expresses; or

rather, though we do not get aL the original experience itself, we have in

ourse1ves an exper~ence
0
prec~se
0 1y 1 ~ ke ~t.
0
. ,,44 In characterizing the pro-

cess of understanding as "the rediscovery of the I in Thou," he assumed

that his sensitive "humanness" alone was sufficient preparation for inter-
45
preting the lives of the past.

As much as this aspect of Dilthey's thought may offend modern sen-

sibilities, much that he said in elaboration of this doctrine still has

relevance for modern historiography, as well as for Panofsky writing in

the early 1920s'. The following passage from Panofsky' s early writings

will, perhaps, suffice here to reveal this dependency, as it is an unac-

knowledged paraphrase of Dilthey's urge to "rediscover the I in Thou":

In defining a work of art as a "man-made object demanding to

be experienced aesthetically It we encounter for the first time a
basic difference between the humanities and natural science. The
scientist, dealing as he does ,with natural phenomena, can at once
proceed to analyze them. The humanist, dealing as he does with
human actions and creations, has to engage in a mental process of
a synthetic and subjective character: . he has mentally to re-enact
the actions and to re-create the creations. It is in fact by this
process that the real objects of the humanities come into being. 46

44 W. H. Walsh, Philosophy of History (1951; New York, 1960), p. 50.

45 Quoted in Rickman, p. 67, from Dilthey in an essay in Vol. VII,

part III, p. 191 of the collected work, "Drafts toward a Critique of
Historical Reason."
46
Panofsky, "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline," in
Meaning In the Visual Arts, p. 14 (originally published in The Meaning
of the Humanities, T. M. Greene, ed., 1940).
 23

This passage is found in Panofsky's essay, "Art as a Humanistic

Discipline," which introduces Meaning in the Visual Arts. It also re-

flects that same preoccupation with the distinction drawn between the

methodology of the physical sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and humanistic

studies or sciences of the mind--history law, economics, literature, art

(Geisteswissenschaften) which characterizes the earlier discourses on

meaning by Dilthey. For both Dilthey and Panofsky, the difference be-

tween science and humanism lies in their conception of "meaning":

. . . the reality G?ilthe~ was concerned with was not just the world
of physical facts; it was the human world which he saw suffused
throughout with meaning arising from the consciousness, feeling, pur-
poses and valuations of human beings. He therefore contrasted his
carefully worked out theories of understanding and interpretation
tvith the procedures of the natural sciences. What man has done,
thought and created, he believed, man can understand. By extending
our understanding both to individuals who are the only real units in
history and to the man-made--and, therefore, c?mprehensible--contexts
in which they stand, we grasp the historical world as meaningful. By
thus recapturing not some metaphysical meaning but the meaning which
individuals, here and there, have perceived in and attributed to their
circumstances, the meaning which informed their actions and became
embodied in their creations, the historian can tell a meaningful
story.47

The historian must in some way play the role of the scientist. He

must collect, sift through, and organize factual evidence, but this pro-

cedure is not without its own interpretive element:

• • • we cannot first establish the facts scientifically, collect,

arrange and interpret them and afterwards exercise our historical
imagination on them. 1'here must, rather, be a pendulum movement
between the processes. Having got hold of some facts we try to
glean from them some imaginative insight; this will help us to arrange

47 R"~c km an, pp. 61-62.

 24

these facts and to discover the relevance of others. 48

Direct reflections of these meditations on the nature of historical

thought appear, only slightly altered, inPanofsky's corresponding essay

on the historical pendular process. "The real answer," says Panofsky,

to the challenge of art history

• . • lies in the fact that intuitive aesthetic recreation and

archaeological research are interconnected so as to form, again,
what we have called an "organic situation . . . . " In reality the
two processes do not succeed each other, they interpenetrate; not
only does the re-creative synthesis serve as a basis for the
archaeological investigation, the archaeological investigation in
turn serves as a basis for the re-creative process; both mutually
qualify and rectify one another. . . • archaeological research
is blind and empty without aesthetic re-creation and aesthetic re-
creation is irrational and often misguided without archaeological
research. But, "leaning against one another," these two can sup- 49
port the "system that make sense," that is, an historical synopsis.

With these two paired quotations, I move beyond this first chapter's

ambition to sketch only the historiographic background of Panofsky's

early theoretical works and rely on Panofsky's own words in this context

to show how he, as well as Dilthey, was beleaguered by the same dilemma--

one could even call it a choice of methods--confronting any serious

thinker at the turn of the century. In their attempt to resolve ~he con-

flict, Dilthey and Panofsky were bolder than most practitioners of one .or

the other approach.

Maurice Mandelbaum has written extensively on the history of thought

in the late nineteenth century, and has recently focussed his attention

48 Ibid., p. 47. These are, of course, not Dilthey's own words, but
an imaginative reconstruction of his ideas by his English translator and
critic, a scholar steeped in Dilthey'a sentiments.
49
Panofsky, "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline," pp.
16-19.
 25

on the

. • . one fact that has been too often overlooked: that

througn r)llt the period there existed only two main streams of
philosophic thought, each of which possessed a relatively high
degree of continuity, and each of which tended to deal with
similar problems, although from opposed points of view. These
dominant and continuing movements in nineteenth century phi-
losophy were metaphysical idealism and positivism. 50

Metaphysical idealism is rooted in the Hegelian tradition: it

"holds that within natural human experience one can find the clue to

an understanding of the ultimate nature of reality, and this clue is

revealed through those traits which distinguish man as a spiritual

being.,,51 Idealists--Croce, Collingwood, Dilthey, and even Hegel--have

argued that history is a special discourse, with "concepts and methods

,,52
of its own. Positivism first defined itself in opposition to this

tradition. According to Walsh, it was attractive'precisely because of

53
its avoidance of mystery-mongering:

~~rejects metaphysics on the ground that the questions with which

metaphysics is concerned presuppose a mistaken belief that we can
discover principles of explanation or interpretation which are more
ultimate than those which are directly derived from observation
and from generalizations concerning observations. For positivists,
any at tempt to pass from the realm of "phenomena" to a more ul ti-
mate reality is a hapless and unjustifiable enterprise, no matter
how deeply rooted the urge to do so may be. 54

50
Maurice ~1andelbaum, History. Man, and Reason (1971; Baltimore,
1974), p. 5. Mandelbaum mentions that H. HBffding noted this division
at the turn of the century in his History of Modern Philosophy, 2 vols.,
although, before Mandelbaum, he is the only-one who probably did.
51
Mandelbaum, p. 11.
52
Dray, p. 3.
53
Walsh, p. 46.
54
Mandelbaum, p. 10.
 26

There are no "fundamental peculiarities," positivists avowed, that would

55
"justify a separate" and special approach to historical studies.

In actuality, the distinctions between ?ositivists and idealists

were not so sharp as Mandelbaum would have us assume. The original

idealist, Hegel himself, harbored what might even be called positivist

56
inclinations, according to Herbert Marcuse. Hegel had implied that

"a1thou6h the rationality of history [was] known to him in advance, he

EfasJ content that for his readers this should be a 'hypothesis' or

7
'influenc~.' And he added: 'We mus t proceed historically-empirically.' ,,5

And certainly Dilthey, with his belief "that objective history ought to

rest on an objective study of human nature,,58 was in some ways allied

with the positivist camp. On the other hand, the original positivist,

Auguste Comte, idealistically urged historians not to remain preoccupied

with particular events, but instead '" to abandon them for higher things "'

55
Dray, p. 2.
56
Herbert Marcuse in Revolution and Reason, 1954, said that Hegel's
methods here "may appear an odd approach for an idealistic philosopher
of history," quoted in Dray, p. 77. Hegel would not have recognized his
ironic position. As Dray points out, "In combating objections to his
so-called 'a priori method,' Hegel in fact goes so far as to compare his
own procedure with that of a natural scientist, who must also '::!.nsinuate
ideas into the empirical data,'" p. 77. Stromberg comes closest to re-
conciling the idealist and positivist tendencies in Hegel himself by
paraphrasing Hegel this way: "We should study the actions, the empirical
events, but we should not stop there; we should 'think them through' to
discover their inner logic. • • • The mind of the historian, it is clear,
must supply ~ sort of structure for the facts, which by themselves are
without meaning. Hegel of course felt that there was a single objective
pattern inte which all would fit • • . ," p. 65.
57 Hegel, Lectures on the Phi10sopt:y of History, quoted ~.:, !Jray,
p. 77.
58
Walsh, p. 21.
 27

in opposition to the "empirical historians" (to whom Dilthey also ob-

jected--a description which does characterize later positivists) ,59

who asked that no sense be made of history's "'fragmentary and unconnected

fa~ts. ",60 In theory, the positivists simply tried to make the idealists
acknowledge and verify their underlying assumptions about how history

works, and in doing so, make them realize that "all branches of knowledge

which deserve their name depend on the same basic procedures of observa-
o
t~on, conceptua1 re fl ect~on an d
0
ver~
of ~cat~on. ,,61
0 0
But in practice, be-

cause of their insistent concentration on only the immediate data of ex-

perience, in many ways the positivists represent "a severe retrenchment

or cutting back, intellectually and culturally, in order to get the ad-

vantages 0 f c 1 ar~ty an d
0 0
certa~nty.
,,62

Given the intellectually ambiguous borders separating the two view-

points, it is not surprising to find Mandelbaum having to expand his

definition of positivism by "three interlocking theses": the first of

which is the rejection of metaphysics already mentioned; the second is

characterized by the "contention that science constitutes the ideal form

of knowledge," and the third by "a particular interpretation of the na-

ture and limits of scientific explanation." Later in this essay, the

author refines this third characteristic to include a tendency towards

59
Ibid., p. 46.
60
Ibid., p. 156.
61
Ibid., p. 45. History, the positivists claim, is not an autono-
mous discipline. In both history and science, "conclusions are reached
by appeal to general truths, the only difference being that the historian
usually does not, while the scientist does, make the generalizations to
which he appeals explicit."
62
Stromberg, p. 208.
 28

lI critical positivism" pronounced at the turn of the century: "The aims

of critical positivism were twofold: on the one hand to analyze the

foundations of scientific knowledge, on the other to examine the true

sources and meanings of all concepts which tended to be used in an un-

critical, metaphysically charged manner, whether those concepts were em-

.. ,,63
p1 oye d b y 1 aymen or sc~ent~sts.

But the movement did not stop there, for new developments in all the

sciences from physics to chemistry and biology challenged the basic tenets

on which it was formed. As critical positivism became increasingly ill-

disposed to the codification of the scientific method and increasingly

skeptical of any encompassing system "in ~vhich all emp:i,rical discoveries

would fit,,,64 it coincided with the revival of idealism in Germany, under

the rubric of neo-Kantianism (critical positivism and neo-Kantian idealism

here occupying basically the same philosophical position). Going back

long before Hegel to find ways of transcending science, the neo-

Kantians created their own twist to metaphysical idealism. The early

twentieth century tendency towards criticism of the positivist model and

the attempt to distinguish historical studies from scientific ones was

already present, as we have seen, in the work of Dilthey as early as

1883 in his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. However, as

Mandelbaum emphasizes, it was not until the turn of the century (despite

the efforts of Dilthey), that this doctrine really achieved momentum.

Windelbrand, Rickert, and Cassirer (and to some extent Bergson and

63 .
Mandelbaum, pp. 11, 13.

64 Ibid., p. 11.
 29

Croce)--to name only a representative few--

• • . sought to show that since sciance was limited in its methods,

and therefore in the results which it was able to attain, other
methods had an equally valid claim to consideration. • . •
Attempts were made to distinguish the method of the natural
sciences from other methods of knowledge which had an equal right
to be considered as fundamental forms of human understanding. 65

In discuss!ng the tenets of these philosophers of science, we may

seem to be ranging far from the development of art history at the turn

of the century. But this is not the case. As E. H. Carr suggested in

the headnote to this chapter, art historians do not write in a vacuum.

They are creatures of their time and are as susceptible, as are any

thinkers, to intellectual fashions and contemporary philosophical predic-

aments. History means interpretation. There are no simple facts lying

scattered about in the past like pieces of a ruined monument waiting to

be assembled by a diligent puzzler in the present. Just the idea that

the historian has to reconstruct his past facts through his own narrative

discourse in the present lends a certain "fictive" aspect to his project.

As Vasari stressed, history in large part is theory, or, to emphasize

the last part of the word, history is a story. The reality of the past is

very much a function of the historian's present point of view, and as his-

torians we can serve both the past and the present better by uncovering

and acknowledging what Gombrich calls our own methodological "founda-

tions."

Yet it is only recently that one or two writers have turned their

attention to the intellectual history of the discipline of art history

65 Ibid., p. 20.
 30

and have come to question the assumptions underlying their research,

their mental habits and methodological apparatus. And when they do

attempt to situate their discipline in a philosophical tradition, they

do so only in the vaguest and most general terms. I quote, as an example,

Wilhelm Waetzholdt on the evolution of German art history:

Drei geistige KrMfte haben in wechselseitiger Durchdringung

das Gesicht der deutschen Kunstforschung im 19. Jahrhundert
bestimmt: der historische Sinn, von Winckelmann und Herder an
lebendig wirkend, das philosophische Denken, in Kant und Hegel
verschiedenfarbig aufleuchtend, und das kunstlerische GefUhl,
das in Goethe Gestalt geworden war. Beherrscht von historischen
Sinn war die Tatsachenforschung der Kenner, Sammler und der
Positivisten des Auges. Das philosophische Denken hatte die
Kulturhistorische Richtung vertieft. Das kUnstlerische GefUhl
schliesslich erst mit Jakob Burckhardt wird es eine methodebildende
Macht. 66

Even the most ambitious project in English of the examination of the

history ·of art history--W. Eugene Kleinbauer's introduction to Modern

Perspectives in Western Art History--rarely strays out of straightfor-

ward art historical territory, and when it does, its provocative ram-

hlings are usually confined to footnote information.

It is my contention that art historians need not be so timid or

apologetic about venturing outside the confines of their discipline.

In some cases, it can be shown, art historians were in the vanguard of

contemporary thought, and the ideas they formulated while thinking about

their artifacts were applicable and relevant for thinkers from other

fields as well.

At the beginning of this century, it was commonplace for thinkers

66
Waetzholdt, pp. 189-190.
 31

from a variety of disciplines to question the accuracy and objectivity

of their analyses of past events and surviving artifacts, a position

doubtless fostered by the tension generated between the idealist and

positivist modes of thinking to which we have already referred. The

despairing historicist tendency was circumvented by Dilthey, we may re-

call, but his obsession with finding a way out of the intellectual

malaise is testimony to its pervasive presence. Writing as they self-

consciously were in a certain time and place, many thinkers worried over

the relativistic frames of reference into which they cast their studies.

Perhaps contemporary readers most readily identify this awareness of the

cultural relativity of attitudes with the now-famous Whorfian hypothesis:

" • • • the commonly held belief that the cognitive processes of

all human beings possess a common logical structure which operates
prior to and independently of communication t~rough language, is
erroneous. It is Whorf's view that the linguistic patterns them-
selves determine what the individual perceives in this world and
how he thinks about it. Since these patterns vary widely, the
modes of thinking and perceiving in groups utilizing different 67
linguistic systems will result in basically different world views."

But as Ludwig Bertalanffy points out in General System Theory,

thinking along these lines preceded Whorf by several years. In a rare

and magnaminous gesture, the philosopher Bertalanffy turns to an historian

of art for a theoretical precedent:

It appears that this development Ca general conception of

cultural relativism] started in the history of art. At the begin-
ning of this century, the Viennese art historian, Riegl, published
a very learned and tedious treatise on late-Roman artcraft. He
introduced the concept of Kunstwollen, a term which may be translated

67
Cited in Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General ~stem Theory (1968;
London, 1973), p. 235.
 32

as "artistic intention." The unnaturalistic character of primi-

tive art was conceived to be a consequence not of a lack of skill
or know-how, but rather as expression of an artistic intention
which is different from ours, being not interested in a realistic
reproduction of nature. 68

From Riegl, Bertalanffy suggests, the concern with the cultural rela-

tivity of interpretative concepts passed into Worringer and from there

into other fields: on the one extreme to Spenglerian history and its

awareness of "styles of cognition," and on the other, to von Uexkllil's

~heoretical biology and its interest in the species-specific Umwelt,

which he colorfully characterizes as an approach that "essentially

amounts to the statement that, from the great cake of reality, every

living organism cuts a slice, which it can perceive and to which it can

react o~ng
. .
to ~ts psyc h o-ph ys~ca
. 1 ..
organ~zat~on.
,,69

Bertalanffy's boldness in seeking out the st~ctural similarities

of concepts of organization throughout several fields of kn.owledge is

both striking and stimulating. The discipline of art history could serve

itself well by engaging in a similar self-conscious examination of modes

of operation which it takes for granted. Like the social sciences, it

it has been said, contemporary art history hus come to be marked by

specialization and is "empirical and specific rather than speculative

an d sweep~ng.
. " 70

68 Ibid., p. 245. Bertalanffy says TN"e can go back even before Riegl
if we consider the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, a writer who Cassirer
seriously read, since von Humboldt had already "emphasized the dependence
of our world perspective on linguistic factors and the structure of lan-
guage."

69 Ibidc~ pp. 245, 240.

70 Kl e~n
. b auer, p. 35.
 33

This dissertation is a modest attempt to bring to the study of the

history of art a bit of generalizing research by creating a more reflec-

tive and critical forum for the discussion of art history as a viable

intellectual discipline. It will follow two courses. On the one hand,

I will go back in the next few chapters to thinkers in the early twen-

tieth century and resurrect for discussion their speculations and imagin-

ative generalizations concerning the nature and meaning of art. On the

other--though I cannot actually categorize my project as "speculative

and sweeping" on its own--my dissertation will be one of the first of

its kind, in art history at least, to do a detailed and analytic study

of the nature of art historical knowledge, by focussing on the origin of

the basic ideas of arguably the most influential historian of art in the

twentieth century. By doing so, I hope to offer. a preliminary critique

of the manifold analytic principles around which the discipline has

come to be organized--a self-conscious sentiment, I believe, which returns

to the tradition of art historical speculation of the early twentieth

century and answers a specific contemporary appeal expressed recently in

Daedalus by Svetlana Alpers:

It is characteristic of art history that we teach our graduate

students the methods, the "how to do it" of the discipline (how
to date, attribute, track down a commission, analyze style and
iconography) rather than the nature of our thinking. In terms
of the intellectual history of the discipline our students are
woefully uneducated. How many have been asked to read Panofsky's
early untranslated writings, or Riegl, or WSlfflin? Supporting
this is that prejudice for the original object and against the
desk-bound scholar. To think, to write is itself somehow to for-
sake the works. At issue is not the method one uses but rather
the notion of art and its history, the notion of man and the form
that his knowledge of the world takes. 7l

71
Svetlana Alpers, "Is Art History?," Daedalus, 1, no. 3 (Summer
1977): 9.
 II. Panofsky and W8lfflin

Methods of art history, just as pictures, can

be dated. This is by no means a depreciation of
pictures or methods--justa banal historical
statement.

F. Antal

The intellectual history of modern art history must begin with a

study of Alois Riegl and Heinrich w8lfflin, for their influential essays

doublehandedly defined the parameters of art and its history in the open-

ing years of this century. As a student, Panofsky had to master Riegl's

and W8lfflin's categories of analysis, and as an aspiring theoretician

of art it was their ideas with which he had to contend upon the comple-

tion of his inaugural dissertation at Freiburg in 1914 (under the di-

.
rect10n 0 f W. Voge
" ) .1 Although the two historians can be readily dis-

tinguished from one another--by the difference in their interest in

periods, for example, or by the obvious temperamental dissimilarities

which inform their discourse--in a fundamental sense Riegl's and

W8lfflin's theories on stylistic change in art are congruent. Consider,

for example, this series of comparisons noted by Lo~enz Dittmann:

Wie Riegl verstand W~lfflin diese Entwicklung als eine kon-

tinuerliche, als stufenweises Weiterschreiten. • . .

1
K1einbauer, p. 61.

34
 35

Damit ist auch schon die Richtung dieser Entwicklung angegeben.

Sie war fUr Riegl und fUr WBlfflin im wesentlichen dieselbe; nur
die AusdrUcke und die Akzente sind verschieden. • • •
Riegl und wBlfflin stimmen Uberein, dass diese Entwicklung
nDcwendig und gesetzmlissig seL • . •
Und wie fUr Riegl was fUr WBlfflin Gesetzerkenntnis das hBchste
Ziel der Kunstg~s<;.hichtswissE!nschaft. • . .
. Die notwendige gesetzmlissige Entwicklung determiniert den
KUnstler. • • •
Trliger der Entwicklung sind Zeit und Volk.
and -- -
Schliesslich sah wBlfflin ebenso wie Riegl die Stilepoche in
Parallele zur Kulturepoche. 2

Reduced to essentials, this series of similarities exhibits a common

neo-Hegelian bias running throughout the discipline of art history in

its younger years. I quote Arnold Hauser:

vlliat happened had to happen • • • WBlfflin asserted in full agree-

mE:mt with Riegl, that "art had always been able to accomplish what it
wanted " • • . emphasizing the necessity with which the process of history
accomplishes itself. For Riegl and WBlfflin no gap could exist between
wanting and being ab1e--for their historicist'outlook any period of
artistic development must be just as essential and purposeful as any
other. • • • Although WB1ff1in, and not Rieg1, coined the slogan,
"anonymous art history" and took as his program the exposition of the
intrinsic development of styles in art, apodictic expressions like "it
follows quite simply from . . • " or "it could not have happened other-
wise" are not nearly so common in his work as in Rieg1's.3.

The next chapter will be devoted to the exposition of Riegl's ideas and

Panofsky's response to them. In this chapter, we will be principally

concerned with Panofsky's reaction to wB1f£lin's history of vision.

Far better known to English readers than Riegl, wB1ff1in's essays

have been widely translated, and his ideas have become the organizing

2 Lorenz Dittmann, Stil, Symbol. Struktur: Studien zur Kateg~

der Kunstgeschichte (Munich, 1967), pp. 51-52.
3
Hauser, pp. 220, 187. But "even WB1ff1in," Hauser continues, "cer-
tainly cannot be accused of giving history .'the gait of a sleepwalker,'
a phrase that has been used about the impression made on us by Riegl's
work."
 36

impulse for methodological discussion in the field: "No other book in twen-

tieth century art history has received so much critical attention. .. ,

says Kleinbauer in referring to Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe; das

Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neureren Kunst (1915). wBlfflin's con-

tinuing popularity in the United States is in itself adequate evidence

for the methodological grip his theories have had on formalistic analysis

for over seventy years:

. . . it is &isJ emphasis on factuality and avoidance of value

judgments that is most helpful in explaining the dominance of
WBlfflin in America. Despite the discreditation of the cyclical
theory of history ~vBlfflin implies, despite the difficulty of
applying his concepts to recent art, the dominance of this tradi-
tion has been stronger since World ~var II than ever before. . . .
It is his objective application of a comparative method based on
descriptive data rather than on ~ priori principles, and his isola-
tion of the describable object from its accretions of feeling, mean-
ing, and value that are still recognized as valid. 5

In Europe, wBlff1in received his first scholarly attention with the

6
publication in 1888 of Renaissance und Barock. In 1893, he succeeded

his teacher Burckhardt in the chair of art history at Basle, and in 1899,

he published Die klassische Kunst. Although aspects of WBlfflin's for-

7
malism are apparent in each of these works, they do not come together to

4
Kleinbauer, p. 27.

5 McCorkel, p. 39. McCorkel sees wBlfflinian art history as being of

central formative importance in tte U,S., despite the fact that, in German
art history, two "orientations" were balanced: "formalism based on
WBlfflin . . . and Geistesgeschichte, based on Dvo~~k," p. 37. Dvo't!k's
influence on German art history will be discussed in the fourth chapter.
6
Salerno, p. 527.
7
Kleinbauer, p. 154. The tradition of formalism originating in the
theories of Fiedler, Vischer and Hildebrand has already been discussed in
fn. 9 of the first chapter. Dittmann, for example, repeatedly cites
w8lff1in's indebtedness to Hildebrand, most particul~rly in his concentra-
tion "auf das spezifisch KUnstlerishe im Kunstwerk," p. 67.
 37

form a complete methodology until 1915 in his theoretical manifesto,

Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe,8 a study which WHlfflin himself char-

acterized as "a history of form working itself out inwardly.,,9

In this work, WHlfflin elaborates a morphology of form, taking the

frames surrounding his pai~tings at literal value in what he envisioned

as a most untraditional way: "Das isolierte Kunstwerk hat fUr das

Historiker immer etwas Beunruhigendes."lO He singularly refuses to re-

gard anything outside the world of the painting (as he similarly con-

ceives of works of a~chitecture and sculpture as being hypothetically

framed, i.e., "boundaried off" from the world outside) as relevant for

an understanding of its essential, formal expression. According to

Schapiro, wHlfflin regards stylistic "development as internally deter-

mined; outer conditions l£ouldJ only retard or facilitate the process;

they fould not beJ among its causes. ,,11 Yet t-lHlfflin was still heir to

8 The ideas contained in this book first reached the public, forum
in a lecture delivered on December 7, 1911 (to which Panofsky later re-
sponded--see fn. 34). See WIn. S. Heckscher, "The Genesis of Iconology"
in Stil und Uberlieferung in der Kunst des Abendlandes (Berlin, 1967),
p. 246. wHlfflin's lecture is reprinted in Sitzungsberichte der Kgl.
Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, pp. 572-578.

9 WHlfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Develop-

ment of Style in Later Art, trans. M.D. Hottinger, 7th ed. (1932; New
~ork, 1950), p. 232. WHlfflin here uses the phrase in the context of
talking about Dehio, who, he says, similarly believed in this formulation
of periodicity in art. The original phrase is "ei.ne innerlich weiter-
arbeitende Formengeschichte" in the first edition, Kunstgeschichtliche
Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neureren Kunst
(Hunich, 1915), p. 244.
10
Dittmann, p. SO, from WHlfflin, Das Erklaren von Kunstwerken (1921).
11
Meyer Schapiro, "Style" in Anthropology Today, ed. A. L. Kroeber
(Chicago, 1953), p. 297. Schapiro's article is also reprinted in Morris
Philipson, Aesthetics Today.
 38

the grand nineteenth century historiographic programs discussed in the

last chapter. He contextualized his objects, if in a highly idiosyncrat-

ic way. He was a connoisseur with an historiographic inclination: he

rooted his perceptions in sharp observation, and then on the basis of

this keen visual analysis, sought to situate them in an historically-

generated stylistic system or formal context. This system is itself

transparently animated by an Hegelian prototype of thesis/antithesis, for

wBlfflin's study of Renaissance art was dependent on his knowledge of

Baroque and vice versa. Were it not for the existence of an opposite mode

of imagination (e.g., Baroque), a Renaissance painting could not be ana-

lyzed as exhibiting a distinct and revealing periodic form. WBlfflin's

reduction of these antithetical stylistic traits to five categories of

opposing modes of perception is well known:

Das Lineare und das Malerische (linear and painterly)

FIHche und Tiefe (plane surface form and recessional depth form)
Geschlossene Form und offene Form (closed or tectonic and open or
atectonic form)
Vielheit und Einheit (multiplicity or composite and unity or fused)
Klarheit und Unklarheit (clear and relatively unclear)12

It is certainly conceivable, considering the strong impulse towards

positivism described in the previous chapter, that WBlfflin regarded the

establishment of these polarities as a step towards making the history

of art conform to a rigorous scientific methodology--towards creating a

science of art grounded in formal laws. According to Earl Rosenthal, for

instance, WBlfflin, in performing this supposed inductive procedure of

drawing conclusions only after surveying an extensive field of empirical

evidence, "described the morphology not only of painting but of all the

12 Kleinbauer, p. 27.
 39

visua~ arts in the same way that a natural scientist describes the

evolution of the species.,,13 In doing so, once again according to

Rosenthal, WBlfflin believed that he had faithfully fulfilled an aim

suggested to him by J. Burckhardt: to discover "the living laws of

forms" and to "state them in formulas as simple and clear.as possible."

Like the metamorphosis of an exquisite butterfly which emerges from its

cocoon after having encased itself away as a caterpillar from the outside

world, a great work of art, in WBlfflin's terms, "had a life of its

14
own and a history independent from contemporary culture" --and, as

many critics of WBlfflin's ideas have added sarcastical1y--"independent

from the artist as well. ,,15

Positivistic sympathies, however, are only part of wBlfflin's

story. In his unilateral concentration on the individuality and physical

presence of the object of art per ~, wBlfflin exhibits a telling con-

cern with the question of "validity" in interpretation and in doing so

points to two prominent philosophical directions in late nineteenth/

early twentieth century thought: phenomenology and neo-Kantianism (the

legacy of nineteenth century Idealism).

13
Rosenthal, p. 27.
14 Ibid.

15 Using the case of Rembrandt as an example, Dittmann points

out, "FUr Rieg1 war Rembrandt 'in der Hauptsache bloss der--a11erdings
genia1iste und zeitweilig vo11kommenste--Execkutor des Kunstwo11ens
seines Volkes und seiner Zeit gewesen.' Ahnlich hiess es bei
WB1ff1in: 'der Sti1 Rembrandts ist nur eine besondere Abwandlung des
al1gemeinen Zeitstils.' Denn der Einze1ne untersteht 'uberpersBn1ichen
Gesetzen,' die einer 'Kunstgeschichte ohne Namen,' erkennbar sind,"
p. 52.
 40

The contested issue of "validity" has been defined by Hauser in

his Philosophy of Art History:

The theory of "aesthetic validity" as the epitome of aesthetic

values subsisting eternally in independence of the abilities and
inclinations of the artist realizing them is evidently an adapta-
tion of the logical theory of validity, according to which truth
is independent of the individual who discovers and formulates it,
and is regarded as an autonomous, unoriginated order of laws and
norms. 16

Hauser says elsewhere that the arguments over the legitimacy of this

notion were responsible for most of the significant philosophical de-

bates waging at the time, as well as being one of the major influences

on WIUff1in' s "anonymous art history":

The distinction between genesis and validity is certainly one

of the most important discoveries of modern philosophy. It finds
expression in the principle of the irrelevance of circumstances of
origin to the meaning of intellectual structures; or in the asser-
tion that no intellectual creation, no cultural achievement or in-
stitution, is to be explained in terms of motives--neither by the
personal aims of the originator nor by the needs of the social
group in which they originate. 17

16
Hauser, pp. 173-174.

17 Ibid., pp. 166, 167, 169. This notion or worry over whether or
not the "author" of a work of art was aware, at the time of its creation,
of all the possible significance his work would be found to have con-
tained in the future is as old as Plato and as new as much contemporary
literary criticism. Socrates said, for example: "I went to the poets;
tragic, dithyrambic, and all sorts. • . • I took them some of the most
elaborate passages in their own writings, and asked what was the meaning
of them . • • • Will you believe me? •• there is hardly a person pre-
sent who would not have talked better about their poetry than they did
themselves. Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by
a sort of genius and inspiration." Cited in lilm. Wimsatt and Monroe
Beardsley, liThe Intentional Fallacy" in Philosophy Looks at the Arts, ed.
J. Margolis (New York, 1962), p. 95. The notion continued to be much
debated during the 19S0 t s. ~limsatt's and Beardsley's statement t.hat
" • . . the design or intention of the author is neither available nor
desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary
 41

In wBlfflin's time, much of the impetus for concentration on things

themselves--as opposed to the conditions surrounding their existence--

came from the developing philosophy of phenomenology and the writings of

18
Edmund Husserl. Works dating from 1900 reveal that the essence of

Husserl's thought is to go directly to the objects themselves "for an

understanding of their significance,,19 by seizing them "immediately in

an act of vision":

The phenomenological method is neither deductive nor empirical,

but consists in pointing (Aufweis) to what is given and elucidating
it; it neither explains by means of laws nor deduces from any
principles, instead it fixes its gaze directly upon whatever is
presented to consciousness, that is, its object. 20

WB1fflin, it seems safe to suggest, was engaged in essentially the

same project with his objects of study, Renaissance and Baroque works

of art. We have already spoken of his polemic for adhering to the

"frame" of his wor~, refusing to look for explanations beyond the bounda-

ries which delimit the physical dimensions of his object. In this regard,

he seems to have directly appropriated Husserl's contested notion of

bracketing:

art • • . " (p. 92) was challenged by E. D. Hirsch with his faith in the
meaningfulness of authorial intention. See E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity
in Interpretation (New Haven, 1967), p. 11. On the other side once
again, much recent work in contemporary semiotics makes the role of
creator irrelevant to the almost autonomous signifying process of a work
of art.
18
Logische Untersuchungen, Husserl's major work, appeared in
1900/1901.

19 Eugen~ Kaelin, Art and Existence: A Phenomenological Aesthetics

(Lewisburg, Pa~ 1970), p. 56.
20
Boche~ski, pp. 130, 136.
 42

• . . phenomenology "brackets" certain elements of the given, and

takes no more interest in them. . . . The historical Epoche, first
of all, sets aside every philosophical doctrine, because the pheno-
menologist is not interested in other people's opinions but grasps
the things themselves (die Sachen se1bst). Once this initial elim-
ination has been carried out, the eidetic reduction, follows, by
which the individual existence of the object in question is
"bracketed," since it is essence which phenomenology is searching
for. • •• for phenomenology places itself in the presence of pure
essence and ignores all other sources of information (my ita1ics).Ll

Hauser, probably the most astute critic of WHlfflin, characterizes the

similarity in approach this way:

As for Husserl the laws of logic, so for WHlfflin the forms of

style are ideal structures that can be considered apart from the
individual personality. He may not separate them so sharply from
current reality as the phenomenologists separate logical truths
from psychological reality, but he is just as definite as the
phenomenologists are about objective2~aws realizing themselves in
particular acts of experience. • . •

Despite his preoccupation with articulating ·"a history of form

working itself out inwardly," WBlfflin, however, seems to have modified

Husserl's eidetic point of view considerably, as the above quotation

from Hauser implies: history is always the spectral presence behind

WBlfflin's categories, looming silently and discreetly behind every

characterization from which it has been "bracketed:! off. History--or

more specifically the history of the immanent process of stylistic varia-

tion as opposed to the history of cultural impingement on formal opera-

tions--is that which determines style in the first place. To quote

wB1fflin: "Every artist finds certain visual possibilities before him,

21
Ibid., pp. 137-138. Eidos (Gk): that which is seen; form, shape,
figure.
22
Hauser, pp. 177-178.
 43

to which he is bound. Not everything is possible at all times. Vision

itself has a history, and the revelation of these visual strata must be

regarded as the primary task of art history.,,23

Hauser cites a similar passage from Kunstgeschichtliche

Grundbegriffe to show how, in his words, "HBlfflin, despite his depend-

ence upon the idea of validity, does not take such an abstract view of

the superindividual principles as the philosophic authorities he recog-

nized." Says WCllfflin,

" it is an amateurish notion to imagine that any artist has

ever been able to look at nature without any preconceptions. The
concept of representation which he has taken over and the manner
in which this concept goes on working in his mind is of greater
importance than anything he may have derived from direct observa-
tion.,,24

The problem is, where do these so-called "preconceptions" come

from? Do they originate in culture-specific predispositions, or as

wBlfflin would have it, do they arise only within the hermetic confines

of artistic evolutionary development? "In the history of painting the

influence of one picture upon another is much more effective as a styl-

istic factor than anything deriving directly from the observation of

25
nature. II Cultural history in the Burckhardtian tradition is purpose-

fully shunned, while the history of artistic forms--on the biological

model of a parent form begetting its own progeny--is exalted.

23 WCllfflin, p. 11 (p. 12 in the 1915 edition).

24
Hauser, pp. 182-183.
25
Ibid. Cf. Holfflin, p. 230: "Every form lives on, begetting,
and every style calls to a new one."
 44

WBlfflin was not always so dogmatic. In his earliest book,

Renaissance und Barock, written "in the spirit of the ~.Jinckelmann-

Burckhardt tradition," he asserts, "'to explain a style cannot mean any-

thing but to fit its expressive character into the general history of

the period, to prove that its forms do not say anything in their language
26
that is not also said by other organs of the age. ,II As he later became

more concerned about establishing a "valid!: or positivistically veri-

fiable method of visual analysis, however, WBlfflin seems to have for-

saken his earlier ecumenical point of view:

For wBlfflin to circumscribe form was not so much to deny

a relationship between art and culture as to provide the means
to reject the task of interpreting that relationship. To propose
a history of form, and reject the questions of the relationships
between form and other things, was to distinguish the scientific
history of art from evocative, judgmental, and interpretive litera-
ture. 27

Obviously, wBlfflin's reservations about adopting a method of

cultural analysis, which would be structured imperfectly upon the tenta-

tive and speculative connections between style and society, indicates

his sympathy towards the positivists' charges against the grand general-

izations of idealist historians. But the source of his reticence also

seems to go beyond the easily identifiable tension between positivist

and idealist approaches in a variety of fields.

WBlfflin, as some have suggested, was intrigued by the phenomeno-

logical urge to concentrate on things themselves. For the phenomenolo-

gists, all that remains of the object is what is presented to the

26 D. Irwin, ed., Winckelmann: Writings on Art (London, 1972), p. 55.

27
McCorkel, pp. 39-40.
 45

perceiving subject. But as we have also seen, he could not rest content

with an "isolated" formal analysis, no matter how astute, of one object

only. He is a grouper almost to a fault. The formal attention given to

one painting, for example, propels his interest onto another of the same

generation, and, in the end, his system of analysis only makes sense by

reference to a large body of similar objects. He is fascinated by laws

and principles of ordering that go beyond both testable scientific pro-

positions and phenomenological efforts at pointing to what is given and

intuitively elucidating it. Despite his deliberate positivistic attempt

to make the history of art solely derived from observation, wHlfflin

remains in the idealist camp because of his continuing enchantment with

the grand historical design.

It is the inescapable beat of history which choreographs his move-

ment of stylistic change over time. But it is a history free of complex

and polyphonic connections outside itself; it dances only to its own

rarefied monotone of the inevitable effect of one visual form upon an-

other.

With his interest in discovering how these formal la~s work them-

selves out through time, wHlfflin's work antedates or at least parallels

several fundamental neo-Kantian propositions, although the similarities

should neither be forced nor overemphasized. It is not the purpose of

this essay to label ~·mlfflin a "phenomenologist," a "positivist, If a "neo-

Kantian" or anything else. I simply want to suggest how his work seems

to resonate with many of the significant philosophical issues being dis-

cussed at the time.

Neo-Kantianism, the route German idealism took at the beginning of

the twentieth century (and a topic we will discuss in greater detail when
 46

we discuss Panofsky's work specifically), deemphasized the importance

of essences and the role of intuition in apprehension and instead con-

28
centrated on manifestly formal laws of thinking. By a minor expansion

of this latter phrase into "formal laws of thinking and creating," we

can easily implicate w8lfflin in the larger neo-Kantian plot. In a

sense, both w8lfflin and the neo-Kantians took epistemology as their

point of departure, asking simultaneously, "how do we know what we

29
know?" and "why do we only look for what we can see?"

Locating his ideas of the sources of stylistic change in this neo-

Kantian context, we can suggest that WBlfflin's epistemology is directed

not so much towards styles of seeing ("modes of vision" in ~is terms) but

instead towards changes in intellectual perception ("modes of imagina-

tion,,).30 The "changing eye" functions as a metaphor for a continually

metamorphosing view of the world: "Just as we can hear all kinds of

words into the ringing of bells, so we can arrange the visible world in

very different ways for ourselves, and nobody can say that one way is

28 BocheJski, p. 91. The work of Husserl as well indicates a

"certain neo-Kantian strain," for he later "developed a theory closely
akin to neo-Kantianism," especially in his reworking of the concept of
transcendental idealism to account for the supposition that reality is
only what appears, a content of consciousness," p. 132. According to
Boche~ski, the only remaining "vital difference between • • • {jiusserjJ
and the neo-Kantians (the Marburg School) is that he will not allow the
object to be dissolved into formal laws," p. 140.

29 W8lfflin, p. 230. "Es ist war, man sieht nur, was man sucht, aber
man sucht auch nur, was man sehen kann. Zweifellos sind gewisse Formen
der Anschauung als M8glichkeiten vorgebildet: ob und wie sie zur
Entfaltung kommen, hHngt von Husseren UmstHnden ab" (p. 2l~·1 in the 1915
edition).

30 Ibid. Preface to the sixth edition (1922). We will soon see

how far Panofsky is willing to go in refusing to acknowledge this subtle
distinction.
 47

31
truer than the other." Imagination and vision and art are indissolubly

linked. They are the indivisible stuff of which the changing history

of human perception is composed. Goethe once said, "The simplest obser-

vation is already a theory. ,,32 ~.Jo1fflin, at his most eloquent, was a

thinker after the great German poet's own heart: "Beholding is not just

a mirror which always remains the same, but a living power of apprehen-

sion which has its own inward history and has passed through many
stages.,,33

* * * * * *
Erwin Panofsky challenged what he considered to be the most unten-

able of WOlfflin's ideas immediately upon the completion of his in-

augural dissertation. In 1915, the same year that Wl::Ilfflin's

Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe first appeared in printed form, Panofsky

published "Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden'Kunst, 1f 34 an article

written in response to a lecture on the problem of style in the visual

31 WBlfflin, p. 29 (p. 33 in the 1915 edition).

32
Quoted in,Gay, p. 195.

33 vlBlfflin, p. 226 (p. 237 in the 1915 edition), ". . . die

Anschauung ist eben nicht ein Spiegel, der immer derselbe bleibt, sondern
eine lebendige Auffassungskraft, die ihre eigene innere Geschichte hat
und durch viele Stufen durchgegangen ist."

34 Egon Verheyen and H. Oberer have published, in German, a selected

collection of Panofsky's essays, and this essay "Das Problem des Stils
in der bildenden Kunst" is contained in lihat anthology. The essay was
originally published in Zeitschrift fUr Asthetik und Allgemeine
Kunstwissenschaft, X (1915): 460-467, but the pages cited here in paren-
theses after the quotations are from the Verheyen edition. A "rough"
and "partial" English translation of this article, produced by M. Podro
for a Kunstwissenschaft seminar at the University of Essex, 1976-1977,
has been often and gratefully referred to. However, most of the trans-
lated passages are my own, and where I paraphrase rather than directly
translate Panofsky's words, I usually cite no exact page reference. The
German original will appear, for the most part, in the footnotes.
 48

arts (an abbreviated prelude to the 1915 work) which WBlfflin delivered
35
before the Prussian Academy of Sciences on December 7, 1911. According

to Panofsky, his own reasons for writing the critique are obvious, and

he remarks on his astonishment that neither a philosopher of art nor an

art historian has yet taken up the challenge which ~'JBlfflin' s ideas pro-

vokingly proffer:

[Eilist von so hoher methodischen Bedeutung, dass es un-

erklarlich und ungcrechtfertigt erscheinen muss, wenn weder die
Kunstgeschichte noch die Kunstphilosophie bis jetzt zu den darin
ausgesprochenen Ansichten Stellung genommen hat (19). (WBlffin's
article is so important methodologically that it is unexplainable
and unjustifiable that neither art history nor the philosophy of
art has yet taken a position on its outspoken views.)

Panofsky begins his own reaction by sketching out what he sees as

the larger implications of ~·1tIlfflin' s commentary: "Every style has no

doubt a certain expressive content; the Gothic style or the style of

the Italian Renaissance mirrors a certain mood of the times or conception

of life.,,36 But taking his cue from WBlfflin, Panofsky quickly narrows

his field of concern to what he regards as the single most important

issue in WBlfflin's aesthetic, "the double root of style." "But all of

this is first of all only one side of what constitutes the essence of a

style: not only what is said, but also how i t is said is for t-j'Hlfflin

characteristic: the means of which it makes use in order to fulfill its

35
See Heckscher, p. 246.
36
"Jeder Stil • . . habe zweifellos einen bestimmten Ausdrucksge-
halt; im Stil der Gotik oder im Stil der italienischen Renaissance
spiegel sich eine Zeitstimmung und eine Lebensauffassung . . . . " (19)
 49

expressive function.,,37

And thus easily introduced is the problematic notion of periodicity

in art historical styles. liThe fact that Raphael, for example, forms

his lines in such and such a way can be explained to a certain degree

by his talent; but what becomes most significant for HBlfflin is the

degree to which every artist in the sixteenth century--Raphael or DUrer,

for instance---is compelled to use line as an essential expressive

technique rather than the brush stroke" (19). And most significantly,

this fact cannot be explained by reference to nebulous categories such

as mind, spirit, temperament or mood, but can only be justifiably ex-

plained by " • . • reference to a common or general form of seeing and

representation which has nothing whatsoever to do with any inner demand

towards expression and whose historical

,. , .
transformations, uninfluenced by

mutations in the soul, can only be comprehended as a result of changes

38
in the eye." An historical change in style, in other words, cannot be

interpreted by mutations of the spirit; it must rather be accounted for

by alterations in the optical perception of the world.

This deliberately doctrinaire position forces WBlfflin, as Panofsky

sees it, into distinguishing between two principal roots of style in the

visual arts: 1) a psychologically meaningless form of perception, and

37 "Aber alles das sei erst die eine Seite dessen, was das vTesen
eine Stiles ausmache: nicht nur was er sage, sondern auch wie es sage,
sei fUr ihn charakterisch: die Mittel, deren er sich bediene, um die
Funktion des Ausdrucks zu erfUllen" (19).

38 "Einer allegemeinen Form des Sehens und Darstellens • • • , die

mit irgendwelchen nach 'Ausdruck' verlangenden Innerlichkeiten gar nichts
zu tun habe. und deren historische Wandlungen, unbeeinflusst von den
< "
Mutationen des Seelischen, nur als Anderungen des Auges aufzufassen
seien" (19).
 50

2) an expressive and interpretable content or feeling. In order to

develop his five pairs of polar concepts for characterizing the process

of purely formal development from the High Renaissance to the Baroque,

Panofsky implies, Wtllfflin unfortunately concentrated only on the first

source of style for describing the. "optical, representational possibili-

ties" (20),39 and deliberately ignored, for the time being, the imposing

significance of the second. In deference to w8lfflin's insight and keen

analytical eye, Panofsky stresses that, for the purposes of his own

polemic, he has to ignore the empirical and historical accuracy of these

ten categories in order to concentrate on their methodological and phil-

osophical significance. He asks not, he says, whether it is correct to

characterize the evolution from the Cinguecento to the Seicento as a

development from linear to painterly, from planimetric to recessional--

and by not doing so, implies that visually the ten categories are legi.t-

imate--but instead inquires whether it is correct to describe the devel-

opment from linear to painterly, from planimetric to recessional, as

merely formal:

We are not asking if WBlfflin's categories--which in regard to

their clarity and heuristic 1.!sefulness are above both praise and
doubt--correctly define tbe general stylistic tendencies of
Renaissance and Baroque art; rather we are asking, if these
stylistic stages which they define can be accepted as mere modes
of representation, which as such have no expression, but rather
are "in themselves colorless, only gaining color and a dimension
of feeling when a certain expressive will makes use of them!'40

39
"die optisch-darstellerischen Grundlagen."
40 " . wir fragen nicht, ob WBlfflins Kategorien--die hinsicht-
lich ihrer Klarheit und ihrer heuristischen Zweckmassigkeit ilber Lob und
Zweifel erhaben sind--die generellen Stilmomente, die sich bestimmen,
wirklich als blosse Darstellung--modalitHten hinzenehmen sind, die als
 51

Most of Panofsky's article is intent on confronting what he sees

as the central most probl ematic notion in H'8lfflin' s scheme: the singu-

lar explanation of "variations in the eye" (19) resulting in different

stylistic periods. He is troubled by "the decidedly strange separation"

(20) between contentful, expressive instances and formal, representation-

al cases which he sees wBlfflin havin3 to make in order to keep his

theory going, because in the latter only a certain optical, "colorless"

factor appears, i.e., a certain--to quote wBlfflin directly '~erhHltnis

des Auges zur Welt" (2l)--that is perplexingly independent of the psy-

chology of the period. How can this possibly be?

Panofsky responds to the concept of the independent eye with a

number of pointed questions. Can we really accept this idea, he asks,

without countering it with an argument? Must we really conclude that it

is only the changed adjustment of the eye which generates changes in

style, so that works of art are now linear, now painterly, now subordin-

ating, now co-ordinating? Can we consider this so-called "eye" as so

completely organic, so much an unpsychological instrument that its rela-

tion to the world can be separated from the relation of the mind to the

world?

The posing of these questions, Panofsky suggests, appropriately in-

dicates where a critique of WBlfflin's teaching should begin. The trouble

with l.]Blfflin' s eye is that it is both unrelentingly historicist and emin-

ently passive at the same time, merely recording, in computer-fashion, what

it picks up in its stylisticaliy trained line of sight. Panofsky, on the

solche keinen Ausdruck haben, sondern an sich farblos, Farbe, GefUhlston

erst gewinnen, wenn ein bestimmter Ausdruckswille sie in seinen Dienst
nim:nt" (20).
 52

other hand, remains secure in the knowledge that there is no such thing

as the passive eye. Seeming to rely on Kant for theoretical support

(although it is interesting to note that at this early date in his

scholarship he makes no explicit reference to Kantian hypotheses, as he

was to do later on), Panofsky insists that although our eye receives some

sort of rudimentary information from the world as it directs its gaze,

or is directed, onto an object, the data it picks up only become intelli-

gible and meaningful when placed by the mind in temporal and spatial con-

structs. The eye itself is only "form-receiving, not form-constructing"

in his terms (21). The mind must still perform most of the labor:

" that one epoch 'sees' in a linear way, while the other sees in a

painterly way, is neither the root nor the cause of style, but is rather a

stylistic phenomenon--not the explanation itself, but something which

permits the explanation. ,,41

Now Panofsky does go to some lengths to suggest that WHlfflin is

himself a long way from saying that the artists of the seventeenth century

had a differently constructed retina or a differently formed lens than

artists in the sixteenth century. So what can wBlfflin mean, Panofsky

ponders. What does it mean to say the eye "brings something to a certain

form?" Who does the bringing? WHlfflin would have responded with "repre-

sentational possibilities." In Panofsky's terms, there can be only one

answer: the mind. But of course, Panofsky continues, "the perception of

the appearance of something can only obtain a linear or a painterly form

through the active intervention of the mind; so that the 'optical-focus'

41" . . dass die eine Epoche linear, die andere malerisch 'sieht,'
ist nicht Stil-WUrzel oder Stil-Ursache, sondern ein Stil-PhHnomenon,
das nicht ErklHrung ist, sondern der ErklHrung bedarf" (25).
 53

should be interpreted as a mental or spiritual focus towards the optical,

and consequently, the 'Verhliltnis des Auges zur Vlelt' [Eo quote WBlfflin

agai~ is in truth a connection of the mind to the world of the eye" (22).

Judging from the haughty tone in which this passage is written,

Panofsky seems in this youthful article to pride himself on dragging

the rat's nest of wBlfflin's thought out into the light of day. He ac-

complishes this feat, he says, by simply investigating how wBlfflin's

ideas "rest basically upon an unconscious play of two distinct meanings

of the concept of seeing" (22). Considering that only a few paragraphs

earlier, Panofsky intimated that WBlfflin had to "divide the concepts,

through which he sets out to define the essence of style into two fun-

damentally distinct groups"--the formal and the contentful, i.e., "a

psychologically meaningless form of perception and an expressive inter-

pretable content of feeling," it seems-odd that he would dub as "uncon-

scious play &Blfflin'il two distinct meanings of the concept of seeing."

After all, when one talks about two different ways in which the eye can

be interpreted as registering or making sense of what it sees in the

· 42,~t ~s
wor l a, , h ar dl y a 1 ong step to t h e rea l'~zat~on
. t h at t h'~s perceptua1

model can be used to characterize two different possible sources of visual

stylization. I translate Panofsky directly:

• • • to say of an art that interprets the thing seen in the sense

of a linear or painterly manner, that is, that it sees it in a
linear or painterly way, is for wBlfflin to hold onto the word by
virtue of not taking cognizance that, so used, the concept no longer
indicates the distinctively optical, but the mental process. In
fact, he has assigned to artistic-productive seeing the role which
belongs to natural-receptive seeing, which lies outside the faculties
of expression·--(22).

42
See page 49 of this chapter. Panofsky, we may remember, had
wBlfflin making this explicit distinction on the first page of his text.
 54

Indeed matters "are here becoming "confused" as Panofsky would have

it, but not so much for WBlfflin as for Panofsky himself. He suddenly

turns round and attacks WBlfflin for precisely the opposite reason, say-

ing that with this "dialectical" distinction (only a moment ago he said

wHlfflin was "unconscious" and "confused" about how he was using the

term "seeing,,)43 between "ausdrucksbedeutsam" (expressively significant)

and "nichts ausdrucksbedeutsam" (expressively insignificant) stylistic

variations, wHlfflin has resurrected the age-old battling ghosts of con-

tent and forril: "on the one side, intention, on the other, the optical;

on the one. side, feeling, on the other, the eye" (22).

And here is where the going gets more difficult, for Panofsky seems

to play around deliberately with reversing both HBlfflin's terms and his

status as a formalist. Before we speculate about why he does it, let us

see how he accomplishes it. Content for WBlfflin~ according to Panofsky,

"is something which has expression, while form is something which merely

serves this content." Content is no one thing in isolation; it is the

"sum" of all that which is not form (which is to say almost everything,

for as Panofsky is correct in saying, WHlfflin's formal properties, e.g.,

"formation of lines," IIdisposition of planes,1I etc., are acknowledged by

the formalist as "expressively significant") (23).44 Panofsky continues

43 It is especially curious and "confusing" here for Panofsky to

take deliberate note of "distinctions" in wHlfflin, for he just finished
saying (see previous paragraph) that WHlfflin was unaware of a dialecti-
cal model, although we have also pointed out how earlier in his essay,
Panofsky says wHlfflin was fully congnizant of two ways of talking about
style in art (see my page 49) .
44
See Panofsky's earlier summary of wHlfflin. The question be-
comes, can they. be "expressively significant" at the same time as they
are "accepted as mere modes of representation?"
 55

by pOinting out how then--if we are to take WBlfflin's categories

seriously--"infinitely far we must go in the application of the concept

of content" (24). Form is itself colorlass; once it is seized by the

jaws of an expressive impulse, then it becomes content. Content is all,

if we "subsume under this concept everything with an expressive signifi-

cance." As Michael Podro says, "if all form is expressive," then "no
45
form-content distinction is possible." That Raphael and DUrer, for

example, could paint portraits with a "similar form" indicates, in the

last analysis, "that they had certain intersubjective content, transcend-

ing, as it were, their individual consciousnesses" (23). With this ter-

minological hlaneuver, Panofsky has the formalist wBlfflin denying the

. d ~v~
~n
. . dua 1 .
s~gn~
. f ~cance
. 0 f f orm. 46

Because of this morass of mutually-annihilating terminology which

he finds in WBlfflin, Panofsky suggests that we abandon altogether "the

distinction of form and content proposed by l-1Blfflin," and "withdraw

into the more work-a-day distinction between form and object" (24). If

we do 90, he continues, we can "justifiably ignore the concept of expres-

sive significance and by form simply refer to the aesthetic factor which

is not the object" (24). By doing so, qualities such as "the feeling of

line" or the "articulation of brushstrokes" can be easily gathered togeth-

·er under the .concept ofform--and "then and only then could WBlfflin's

formalistic criteria be justified" (24). Not only justified, but

45
Padro, 1976 translation of "Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden
Kunst," fn. to p. 10. See fn. 34 here.
46
But, as Podro also points out, "if any formal distinction can
influence content--limit it--it does not follow that. it is iu itself to
be counted as a matter of content" (fn. to p. 11).
 56

necessitated. Having eliminated the most troubling aspect of WHlfflin's

theory--the curious nondistinction between form and content--Panofsky

seems ~n one of his concluding passages to be thinking as a strict

WHlfflinian disciple:

• . • that an artist chooses the linear, as opposed to the

painterly mode, means that he is confined to a certain possi-
bility of (optical) presentation. . • • that he deploys his
line in such and such a way, places his paint mark just so,
signifies that from the infinite multiplicity of these possi-
bilities, he extracts and realizes just one (24-25).

A close reading of the earlier scholar would make any sensitive

reader (Panofsky included) aware, however, that WHlfflin himself never

fails to notice the difference between content and form. Regard, as an

example, these two passages from Principles:

Here we encounter the great problem--is the change in the

forms of apprehension the result of an inward development, of
a development of the apparatus of apprehension fulfilling itself
to a certain extent of itself, or is it an impulse from outside,
the other interest, the other attitude to the world, which de-
termines the change. . .? Both ways of regarding the problem
are admissible, i.e., each regarded for itself alone. Certainly
we must not imagine that an internal mechanism runs automati-
cally and produces, in any conditions, the said series of fo~~s
of apprehension. For that to happen, life must be experienced
in a certain way.

But we will not forget that our categories are only forms--forms
of apprehension and representation--and that they therefore can
have no expressional content, within themselves. 47

47 WBlfflin, pp. 229-230, 227:

'~ir stossen hier an das grosse Problem, ob die VerHnderung der
Aufassungsformen Folge einer inneren Entwicklung ist, einer
gewissermassen von seIber sich vollziehenden Entwicklung im
Auffassungsapparat, oder ub ein Anstoss von aussen ist, das andere
Interesse, die andere Stellung zur Welt, was die Wandlung bedingt • .
Beide Betrachtungsweisen scheinen zulHssig d.h. jede fUr sich
 57

And Panofsky generously acknowledges in a footnote that WBlfflin did

indeed understand the dynamics of the dialectical situation perfectly

well (27, fn. #6):

WBlfflin himself never failed to notice (the distinction) . • .

that is shown by the concluding passage of his article, "On the
Idea of the Painterly." With the sentence "with each new optical
form a new ideal of beauty is bound up" (and therefore a new con-
tent) he still, however, fails to draw the necessary conclusion,
that is, that this optical form is no longer optical but consti-
tutes with content a specific view of the world, extending far
beyond the limits of the merely formal.

Consequently, Panofsky feels that he is left with something "far

beyond the formal" to discuss. vlbat has happened to meaning, content,

cultural significance of any sort in Panofsky's revisionist scheme of

wBlfflin? The answer is an obvious one for Panofsky and conforms as well

to what we have already characterized W8lfflin as. wanting to accomplish.

It is there but hidden, awaiting a later explorer who is already scan-

ning the panorama. In this early article, Panofsky has rather painless-

ly extracted worries over "meaning" from Wl:Jlfflin's body of concern.

Holding "content" securely in his own hand, he feels comfortable with

making use of wBlfflin in a complementary fashion: "it should never be

forgotten that an art that decides in favor of one of these optical pos-

sibilities (e.g., linear or painterly) and r.ejects the other, does not

rest onJy upon a specific view of the world, but upon a particular world

allein einseitig. Gewiss hat man sich nicht zu denken, dass ein
innerer Mechanisimus automatisch abschnurrt und die genannte Folge
von Auffassungsformen unter allen UmstMnden erzeugt. Damit das
geschehen kann, muss das Leben in einer bestimmten Art erlebt seine .
Aber wir wollen nicht vergessen, dass unsere Kategorien nur
Formen sind, Auffassungs- und Da4stellungsformen und dass sie darum
an sich ausdrucklos sein mUssen" (pp. 241,239 in the 1915 edition).
 58

view" (25, my italics).

One real question remains, however. Has Panofsky's surgical proce-

dure been mandated by WBlfflin's own symptoms? Not exactly. Let us re-

turn just briefly to our earlier discussion of WBlfflin. How far was

wBlfflin able to go in eliminating concerns of cultural significance from

his "history of form working itself out inwardly?" Hauser, as one com-

mentator, says he effectively exorcised it completely:

• • • with his doctrine of the immanence of artistic evolution and

the autonomy of artistic vision, lJvBlfflinJ avoids all genetic
explanations, that is, all derivation of his "visual forms If from
anything extrinsic to the aesthetic sphere, and • . . he maintains
that the "basic concepts of art history" are formal principles,
changing indeed in the course of history, but entirely intrinsic
to art. 48

But how much is this polemical and rather doctrinaire position a

result of WBlfflin's desire to achieve some form of validity in inter-

.
pretat~on.
?49 As we mentioned earlier, wBlfflin was intent on "bracketing

off lt circumstances of origin from the perceptiot:. of the visual order re-

vealed in objects of art. He took them at their immediate visual value,

and categorized them accordingly. He pursued a "science of art" grounded

50
in formal laws.

His visual grammar is not ahistorical as such. Rather, for the pur-

poses of logical and valid argumentation, rules of operation are dependent

upon artistic history alone:

48
Hauser, p. 257.
49
See earlier pages here.
50
Panofsky compliments wBlfflin on the basic neo-Kantian legitimacy
of this notion: "And one might even agree with WHlfflin that it must be
the first task of art history to discover and formulate such categories."
 59

"In the history of painting, the influence of one picture upon

another is much more effective as a stylistic factor than any-
thing deriving directly from the observation of nature."5l

Despite the way Panofsky would have us read WHlfflin, clearly there

is no such thing, in l-IBlfflin as well as Panofsky, as the "innocent eye."

The myth of its existence is, rather, challenged by each of them in a

different way. Panofsky would say that what makes the eye experienced

is the mind and its culturally-conditioned idea of how to perceive the

world; wHlfflin would say, on the other hand (as is evident from the pas-

sage just quoted), that the artistic eye gains its experience from looking

at other objects of art--that life, in effect, mirrors art: "Every artist

finds certain visual possibilities before him, to which he is bound. Not

,,52
everything is possible at all times. Vision itself has a history.

In an apt phrase that only at first looks redunda~t, Kleinbauer

says for WHlfflin "the history of art is the history of visualizati'on. ,,53

Much of WHlfflin's interest for me, on the other hand, lies in what

he necessarily represses as much as what he makes manifest. Panofsky does

not seem to be sensitive to this subtle issue, perhaps because his arti-

cle is only responding to the condensed version of the lecture, rather

than reviewing the whole 1915 book, or perhaps because of his own emerging

stake in the .controversy. Because wHlfflin is unilaterally interested in

establishing a valid form of interpretation, he concentrates only on

51
Hauser, p. 182.
52
WHlfflin, p. 11. "Jede KUnstler findet bestimmte 'optische'
MHglichkeiten vor, an die er gebunden ist. Nicht alles ist zu allen
Zeiten ml3glich" (p. 11 in the 1915 edition).
53 Kl e~n
. b auer, p. 29 •
 60

establishing a morphology of visual forms; rather than on the complex

and logically unverifiable problem of what an artist himself--or as a

spokeman for his culture--"means." But that is not to say that he

thoroughly denies all cultural, personal and intellectual factors.

Phrases such as some of the following press their way through the struc-

ture of the morphology to the surface of his history of form:

It goes without saying that the mode of imaginative beholding is

no outward thing; but is also of decisive importance for the content
of the imagination, and so far the history of these concepts also
belongs to the history of the mind. 54

Different times give birth to different art. Epoch and race

interact. 55

• • . it remains no mean problem to discover the conditions which,

as material element--call it temperament, Zeitgeist, or racial
character--determine the style of individuals, periods, and
peoples. 56

So a certain cultural and intellectual determination lurks somewhere

in the shadowy recesses of w8lfflin's architectonic. It is not brought

out into the open, because wHlfflin had other things in mind. Neverthe-

less, its presence is fleetingly perceivable. Despite this evidence,

successive critics throughout the twentieth century have characterized

wHlfflin as remaining dogmatically impervious to cultural factors.

Kleinbauer says ~.]Hlfflin "ignored" criticism of his visual grammar until

54 wHlfflin, p. vii (from the Preface to the 1922 sixth edition).

55 Ibid., p. 9. "Verschiedne Zeiten bringen verschiedne Kunst

hervor, Zeitcharakter kreuzt sich mit Volkscharakter" (p. 8 in the 1915
edition).

56 Ibid., p. 11. " •• und es bleibt ein unverHchtliches Problem,

die Bedingungen aufzudecken, die als stofflicher Einschlag--man nenne es
Temperament oder Zeitg2ist oder Rassencharakter--den Stil von Individuen,
Epochen und VHlkern formen" (p. 11 in the 1915 edition).
 61

1933, when in an article written for Logos, he seemed more sympathetic

to the position of his critics who demanded a certain recognition of the

57
role mind and culture play in the creation of works of art. Panofsky

and Frankl were simultaneously the first;58 Timmling levied a second

59
attack in 1923. Still, on the basis of the passages quoted above, I

doubt whether the 1933 revision is as radical as some contemporary com-

mentators (Heckscher, Rosenthal, Kleinbauer) would contend. WBlfflin,

to say it for the last time, was intent on positivistically constructing

formal laws of stylistic change, and he could abide no accommodation of

unverifiable propositions in his system, although he readily acknowledged

them outside of it. Panofsky, for neo-Kantian reasons which we will ex-

plore later, applauds WBlfflin for his attempt to construct actual cate-

gories of perception, but he remains troubled by what he sees as

WBlfflin's denial of the role of the mind in the formation of the visual
60
arts.

57 Kleinbauer, p. 154. wBlfflin's rev~s~on appeared in Logos XXII

(1933): 210-214. It is reprinted in wBlfflin, Gedanken zur
Kunstgeschichte (1941): 18-24.

58 Ibid., p. 28. See P. Frankl, Die Entwicklungsphasen der neureren

Baukunst (Leipzig, 1914).

59 Rosenthal, p. 64. See tv. Timmling, Kunstgeschichte und Kunst-

wissenschaft, Kleine LiteraturfUhrer, VI (Leipzig, 1923).
60
In a sixtieth birthday tribute to wBlfflin almost a decade later
(1924), Panofsky sounds far more lenient towards the ~TBlfflinian cate-
gories:
"WBlfflin '. . . enthUllt das Unbedingte am einzelnen PHa:lOmen, am
einzelnen Werk, am Wirken des einzelnen KUnstlers, am Schaffen der
einselnen Stilperiode . . • er mUht sich aber auch nicht, sie
(Wirklichkeit) die ErfUllung normativer, vermeintlich fUr die
kllnstlerische THtigkeit also solche massgebender Postulate begrie-
flich zu machen; sondern er sucht die in ihr verwirklichten beson-
deren Formprinzipien aufzudecken, die Anordnung der Massen im Raum,
 62

What remains frustrating about Panofsky's early essay is its vague-

ness about what the mind/culture/content connection in art is--i.e., how

the artistic mind organizes its formal perception of objects into mean-

ingful works of art. Is the mind the artist's own, or is he only its

caretaker, ~ployed by his culture, his period, his nationality? Panofsky

is articulate about what content is and is not in 'vBlfflin, but he is re-

grettably hesitant to specify what it might be in his own developing

thought.

Much more clearly presented is the position he is beginning to take

on how to analyze works of art meaningfully. Already evident here is the

eagerness with which Panofsky as a young scholar justifies analyses of

works of art by reference to other modes of thought. This is the begin-

ning of an intellectual trend which we will repeatedly encounter in his

later work. WB1ff1in's ambitious attempt to reduce artistic vision to a

fundamental ordering is not the problem for Panofsky; the trouble lies

in his lack of a certain ecumenical point of view--which is to say

wBlff1in treats visual arts as art and not as phYSical embodiments of

certain intellectual constructs. Art as idea is ignored. Panofsky, just

having completed a dissertation on how DUrer's theoretical ideas about

Italian art affected his own work,61 could not let the matter stop there.

A work of art is a work of art, and it needs to be appreciated both

visually and stylistically; but for Panofsky it is a1so--and this is most

significant--an historically revealing intellectual document.

die G1iederung der Bildform in der F1Hche, die Auseinandersetzung

zwischen KBrper und Licht: er will die Dinge sehen und zu sehen
1ehren, 'wie sie gesehen werden wollen '"
in "Heinrich W8lfflin (zu seinem 60 Geburtstage am 21 Juni 1924),"
Hamburger Fremdenblatt, 21 (June 1924), reprinted in Verheyen.
 63

" 61 Panofsky, Die theoretische Kunst1ehre Albrecht Dllrers (Durers

Asthetik) (Berlin, 1914) (Inaugural Dissertation, Freiburg). See also
Dilrers Kunsttheorie, vornehm1ich in ihrem VerhH1tnis zur Kunsttheor5.e
der Ita1iener (Berlin, 1915).
 III. Panofsky and Rieg1

What you call the spirit of the age is really no more

than the spirit of the worthy historian in which the
age is reflected.

Goethe

wBlff1in shares the legacy of nineteenth century "historicism" in

the history of art, Arnold Hauser has pointed out, with another equally

important scholar, A10is Rieg1. For both theorists the existence of

varied styles in works of art is physical evidence of meta-artistic or

guiding principles at work in history:

With his doctrine of the artistic intention . . . maintaining

the absolute uniqueness and incomparability of artistic achieve-
ments., Alois Rieg1 represents the oue pole, whereas Heinrich
WB1ff1in, with his thesis of "an art history without names" and
his depreciation of the artist's individuality as a factor in
history, represents the other. As two of the last great e~pon­
ents of the ideas of the Historical School, they belong together
and have much in common in spite of the fundamental contrast
between their doctrines. 1

In this sense, both scholars may indeed represent a culmination of nine-

teenth century thought, but this characterization should not be allowed

to detract from their significance for thinkers in the twentieth century.

1 Hauser, The Philosophy of Art History, p. 120. Cf. Hauser, p.

221: Both Rieg1 and r7Blfflin see the "same impersonal, ineluctably se1f-
realizing principle" at work in history. See definition of "historicism"
in fn. 39, Chapter 1 and discussion on Hegelian bias in historical
studies on pp. 1-2 of Chapter 2.

64
 65

Berta1anffy credited Rieg1 in particular with initiating a trend towards

a "general conception of cultural re1ativism,,2 which sent philosophical

reverberations spreading throughout the twentieth century.

Despite his role as harbinger, Rieg1 did not deliberately start out

to reform contemporary modes of thought. A philologist by training, he

worked as a curator of textiles for eight years in the Osterreichisches

.
Museum ~n v·
~enna.
3 It was, however, his determined self-conscious re-

1uctance to be judgmental about the past which altered not only the course

of history writing in general, but also reformed the tenor and direction

of art historical studies in particular. He was a relativist, an his-

toricist--but one whose "nihilistic" views (as his contemporary, Di1they,

might have labeled them) indisputably animated the whole discipline.

In the words of one of his most recent appraisers, "he completely re-

opened the field of art history" by countering mos't of the fundamental

convictions of the discipline at the end of the nineteenth century, for

example:

• • . factual positivistic history which archeologists practice and

which represented his own training; an iconographic point of view
that stresses the subject matter of a work of art; biographical
criticism, which interprets the work in light of the artist's life;
the primacy of the individual artist's consciousness and will; the
"materialistic" or mechanistic explanation of stylistic evolution;
any aesthetic theory that severs art from history; any normative
system that attempts to reach a definitive interpretation or judg-
ment; the hierarchical distinction between the applied or decora-
tive arts, on the one hand, and the higher arts (painting, sculpture
and architecture) on the other, where the latter alone are considered
to be art in the strict sense of the word. 4

2
See Chapter 1, p.
3
Kleinbauer, p. 124.
4
Henri Zerner, "A1ois Rieg1: Art, Value, and Historicism," Daedalus
 66

Riegl's curatorial interests and his research into the development of

antique plant ornament resulted in the publication in 1893 of Stilfragen,

5
a most influential essay in Germany and Austria because of its theoreti-

cal underpinnings. Concentrating only on the decorative arts, Riegl here

postulates the existence of an autonomous evolutionary process which com-

pels styles of plant ornament to change gradually but perceptibly one

into the other. He traces their development--from early near Eastern

No.1 (Winter 1976): 179. See also Otto P~cht, "Art Historians and Art
Critics--VI, Alois Riegl," Burlington Magazin~., (May 1963): 188. Riegl' s
"distinctive approach," says Plicht, "conditioned the frame of mind in
which much subsequent research has been undertaken."
In his devotion to the minor arts as a productive field of study,
Riegl also opposed Dilthey who believed that to get to know a civiliza-
tion, one must study only its supreme produ~ts. Benedetto Croce and his
German disciple, Julius von Schlosser, thought likewise. As P~cht points
out on p. 193,
"Croce-Schlosser draw the line immediately be~ow the highest peaks.
Questionable as the Croce-Schlosser propositions may be, as practical
alternatives, they have their relevance and special significance as
an implicit protest against Riegl's alleged non-discrimination be-
tween art and artefact and his apparent indifference to the whole
problem of quality and value in art. It is precisely here that other
Riegl critics likewise see the most vulnerable point of his argument."
(J. von Schlosser, "Stilgeschichte und Sprachgeschichte der bildenden
Kunst," Sitzungsberichte d. bayrischen Akademie d. Wissenschaft, 1935).
One of the most articulate of Riegl's critics is Gombrich in Art and
Illusion, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 1961), p. 77, who criticizes Riegl without
naming him:
"The student of art is generally discouraged from asking • • . the
question (of whether or not an artist could have 'done otherwise'
than he did). He is supposed to look for explanations of style in
the artist's will rather than in his skill. Moreover, the historian
has little use for questions of might-have-been. But is not this
reluctance to ask about the degree of freedom that exists for artists
to change and modify their idiom one of the reasons why we have made
so little progress in the explanation of style?"
5
Riegl, Stilfragen (1893; Berlin, 1923). Zerner calls him "the
most influential art historian of the beginning of this century." How-
ever, "outside the German-speaking countries, . • . Riegl did not make
much of a mark (the exception was Italy, where Bianchi-Bandinelli and
Raghianti were particularly aware of his importance)," p. 177. His writ-
ings have never been translated into English (with the one exception of
 67

sources through Greek, Roman, and Byzantine examples--as though the forms

merely evolved as aesthetic solutions to formal problems posed by their

6
stylistic predecessors, irrespective of the environmental, social, tech-

nical and cultural milieu of which they ~l7ere a part. In advancing this

idea, Rieg1 opposed the popular mechanistic explanation of the minor arts

associated with the name of Gottfried Semper,7 according to which all

decorative form was a result of technique and material. The gist' of

Riegl's critique is advanced in Chapter I, where he says he hopes to

show that there is no convincing reason for looking at the oldest geo-

metric ornament as resulting from a particular technique--especial1y in

textile arts--for the oldest artistic examples contradict this obsession

with textiles:

In this chapter, which as the title announces, is about the

essence and origins of the geometric style, I 'hope to demonstrate
that no compelling reason has been submitted which would make us
regard the oldest geometric decoration as result.ing from a certain
technique, especially in the textile arts, but rather that the
oldest historical artistic monuments much more likely contradict
this assumption. So it appears we have to overthrow art teachings
of the last twenty-five years which simply identify textile orna-
ments with surface (body) ornamentation and decoration. And as
soon as it is placed in doubt that the oldest surface ornaments
were carried out in textile materials and textile techniques, the
identification of the two ceases to be valid. Surface ornamentation

his essay on Dutch group portraiture in the Kleinbauer anthology).

Consequently, my interpretation of Stilfragen is based on a rough trans-
lation I did for a seminar in the Society for the Humanities at Cornell
on the "Semiotics of the Visual Arts" taught by Jean-Claude Bonne in the
spring of 1975.
6
Note how similar this idea of intrinsic art evolution is to
wBlfflin's. See Chapter 2 here.

7 Kleinbauer says Riegl's position was directed specifically against

Semper (p. 21), but according to Zerner (p. 178) and my translation of
Rieg1 (p. vii), it was really Semper's unnamed disciples who bore the
brunt of his criticism.
 68

is the higher or larger unit; textile ornamentation is subordinate

to it, and of the same value as all other kinds of decoration. The
restriction of textile ornament to the deserved limit of its im- 8
portance is one of the most important points of this entire book.

In the same introduction, Riegl provides the reader with intriguing,

although somewhat perplexing, hints of his theoretical substructure:

"Bleibt es doch in solchem FaIle ewig zweifelhaft, wo der Bereich jener

spontanen Kunstzeugung aufhBrt und das historische Gesetz vor Vererbung

und Erwerbung in Kraft zu treten . beginnt,,9 (it is perplexing where

the development of every spontaneous art movement stops and historical

laws of inheritance and acquisition in ability begin to enter.) What gives

8 "In diesem Kapital, dass die ErBrterung des Wesens und Ursprungs
des geometrischen Stils in der Uberschrift anhundigt, hoffe ich
darge1egt zu haben, dass nicht bloss kein zwingender Anlass vorliegt,
der uns nBthigen wUrde ~~~ die Mltesten ~eometrischen Verzierungen
in einer bestimmten Technik, insbesondere der textilen KUnste,
ausgefUhrt zu vermuthen, sondern, dass die H1testen wirk1ich his tori-
schen KunstdenkmH1er den bezUch1ichen Annahmen vie1 eher wider-
sprechen. • • • Damit erschient ein Grundsatz hinweggerMumt, der die
gesammte Kunst1ehre seit 25 Jahren souverMn beherrschte die Identi-
fizierung der Texti10rnamentik mit F1Mchenverzierung oder FlMchen-
ornamentik sch1ectrag. Soba1d es in Zweifel geste11t erschient, dass
die M1testen F1Mchenverzierungen in textilem Material und texti1er
Technik ausgefUhrt waren, hBrt auch die IdentitHt der beiden zu gel ten
auf. Die F1Hchenverzierung wird zur h8heren Einheit, die Texti1-
verzierung zur subordinierten Thei1einheit, gleichwertig anderen
f1Hchenverzierenden KUnsten. • • . Die EinschrHnku~g der Texti10rna-
mentik auf das ihr zukommende Maass an Bedeutung bi1det Uberhaupt
einen de:.: 1eitenden Gesichtspunkte dieses Ganzen Buches."
Rieg1, Sti1fragen, pp. viii-ix. ~~ter passages of this length, I feel
compelled to reiterate the sentiments of Rieg1's one English translator,
Stephen S. Kayser: "Sentences of nearly 150 words can be found in the
original text. Their rendering into English, with its preference for
brevity, precision, and clarity, can only call for the excuse that every
translation must by necessity become an interpretation. Furthermore, as
indicated, Rieg1's terminology is by no means consistent, and even if it
were, at times there are almost insurmountable difficulties in the nomen-
clature of both German and English," K1einbauer> p. 125.

9 Rieg1, p. vii.
 69

this passage its disturbing lack of theoretical cogency is its tone of a

curious and irresolvable tension between historicist and formalist ·explan-

at ions of why art looks different in different times. Things change, but

why and how? Is their alteration a manifestation of a grand historical

design working itself out through history, or is the impetus for this

change tightly woven into the nature of an inexorable law of artistic

evolution? The differences between explanations may be subtle, but with-

out holding on to one or the other of them, Riegl steps onto some slippery

territory. What, for instance, is he going to do with cultural factors

in either case? Or, even more to the point, just how is the reader to

make sense of phrases such as the tendril ornament attained a "goal lt which
10
"sie seit Jahrhunderten beharrlich zugestrebt hatte?" Does he mean a

goal which centuries of artistic development have intrinsically striven

for, or is this goal one which looms on the distant horizon like an

Hegelian star, beckoning historical progress ever onward, irrespective of

the exigencies of the artistic developmental situation? "Essentially,"

Ernst Gombrich says in an historiographic survey for Das Atlantisbuch

der Kunst, Riegl's scheme is a "translation" of Hegel's "spiritual his.-

tory" deliberately set up in opposition to Semper's "materialism": "Die

Wandlung der Motive, etwa die Verbindung von Palmetten zu Ranken, erkl~rt

sich Riegl nicht aus technischen Notwendigkeiten noch aus einem

'geistlosen Abschreiben der Natur,' sondern aus den 'Zielen' des

10 My translation of Gombrich, "Kunstwissenschaft" in Das Atlantis

Buch der Kunst (ZUrich, 1952), p. 658: "a goal which centuries have
persistently striven for."
 70

- 11
'Kunstgeistes' oder den 'Tendenz' des 'Kunstwollens.'"

This, according to one writer, is clearly "a notion of artistic pur-

u12
pose almost teleological in conception. One senses here that Riegl

avoids some precise definition of these terms and complex issues because

he is trying to make his history of ornament conform to some other,

established epistemological order. What this system might be has recently

been advanced by M. Iversen, who emphasizes Riegl's interest in and in-

debtedness to contemporary linguistic theory. She says, for example, that

Stilfragen is "arguably" "neo-Grannnarian" in 1)oth its method and approach

to subject matter. "In this buok, the evolution of ornamental plant

motifs from Egyptian to Hellenistic times is explained in terms of uni-

versal laws governing design--synnnetry, rhythm and gap-filling.

The famed catchword explanation for the evolution of these plant

forms, which in its almost deliberate vagueness attempts to gather his-

toricist and formalist, and perhaps also cultural explanations under its

name, the Kunstwollen, was a late scholarly development, not having been

fully expounded until the publication of SpHtromische Kunstindustrie in

11 Ibid., p. 658: "The change of motifs, concerning the connection

of palmettes to their tendrils, Riegl explains, is not one of'cechnical
neceSSity,' or a 'spiritless copy of nature/--but rather comes out of the
'goals' of the "art spirit" or the 'tendency of the Kunstwollen~'"
-12
Ernest K. Mundt, "Three Aspects of German Aesthetic Theory,"
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism XVII, no. 3 (March 1959): 303.
13
M. Iversen, "Style as Structure: Alois Riegl's Historiography,"
in Art History 2, no. 3 (March 1979): 66. After Stilfragen, "Riegl
seems to have followed a path taken by the linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure." See later fn. 25, and refer as well to Riegl, Historische
Grannnatik des bildenden KUnste for lecture notes in 1899, eds. Pacht and
Swoboda (Graz-Koe1n, 1966) which established a "visual grannnar."
 71

1901. 14 This book itself is basically an effort to interpret "the whole

course of art history in terms of changing modes of perception,,15 from a

"haptic" to an "optic" orientation. In Meyer Schapiro's succinct summary:

The history of art is, for Riegl, an endless necessary movement

from representation based on vision of the object and its parts as
proximate, tangible, discrete, and self-sufficient, to the repre-
sentation of the whole perceptual field as a directly given, but more
distant, continuum with merging parts, with an increasing role of the
spatial voids and with a more evident reference to the knowing sub-
ject as a constituting factor in perception. 16

One of the most significant and ambiguous aspects of the Kunstwollen,

however, is not revealed in this paraphrase. That aspect has to do with

the role of artistic genius in questions of the development of style.

The Kunstwollen itself-:-that which Gombrich calls a "will-to-form" and

P~cht refers to as "that which wills art"lZ-has both a collective and an

individual side to it. On the one hand, the Kunstwollen is the immovable

mover, a kind of inescapable historical compulsion, forcing styles of art

to change one into the other--in Gombrich's memorable wor.ds, "a ghost in

the machine, driving the wheels of artistic developments according to

14 O. pHcht, "Alois Riegl," p. 189. Riegl does, however, use the

term in Stilfragen. On p. 3, he refers to the "frei .sch3pferischen
Kunstwollen." Riegl, Sp~tromische Kunstindustrie (Vienna, 1901).

15 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 18. See also Hauser, p. 195.

Riegl called the "sort of universal history which brings together such
widely separated phenomena 'the culminating point of art-historical re-
search'" in "Kunstgeschichte als Universalgeschichte" (1898) in Gesannnelte
AufsHtze (1929), p. 7~
16
Heyer Schapiro, "Style," p. 302.

17 P~cht, p. 190. pHcht says he refined Gombrich's definition

because Riegl said "Kunstwollen" not "Kunstwille."
 72

'inexorable laws. ,,,18 Yet on the other, it seemingly refers to the

"desire or impulse on the part of an artist to solve specific artistic

19
problems" --a burst of creative energy emanating from one artist who
20
singlehandedly alters the course of stylistic development.

The modern difficulty in fixing the terms of the concept can be

directly related to the interaction or contradiction between these two

poles of the definition. The resolution between them might have taken

the turn that Dilthey's subtle thinking on the same subject came to only

a year before, when he was the first to claim "'to understand the artist

better than he understood himself, ,,,21 or (to what more than likely

would have been to the detriment of the original theory) to the point

that Riegl's student, Hermann Tietze, came to a decade later: "The in-

dividual artist can fail, but the artistic intention of the age is bound

to be fulfilled.,,22 Riegl's solution, however, followed both a more

moderate and a more imaginative course.

18
Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 19.
19
Kleinbauer, p. 21.
20
See also Sheldon Nodelman, "Structural Analysis in Art and
Anthropology," Yale French Studies 36 & 37 (October 1966): 96-97:
"Contemporary empirical psychology was in the process of discovering
that ordinary visual experience is in fact a complex synthesis, built
up out of the experience of the full gamut of the senses under widely
varying conditicns of perception, depending on different character-
istic life-situations. Riegl proposed to analyze works of art in
terms of how they were articulated with respect to certain basic
categories of visual perception."

21 "Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik," Philosophische Abhandlungen

Chr. Sigwart gewidmet (1900), p. 202. Quoted in Hauser, p. 238.

22 Die Methode der Kunstgeschichte (1913), p. 42.

 73

Otto pHcht has atterr'ted, somewhat successfully, to use Riegl's own

words to mediate between the two extremes of his central concept. In

questioning what is "the connexion . . . between the artistic intentions

of the individual artis~ and the stylistic tendencies transcendent over

individuals,,,23 PHcht finds Riegl already prepared with an "unequivocal"

answer: "Geniuses do not stand outside their national tradition, they

are an integral part of it. In Riegl's own words: 'the great

artist, even the genius, is nothing but the executor, though the most per-

fect executor, the supreme fulfillment of the Kunstwollen of his nation

24
and age. '" History is here figuring very differently than it did in

Stilfragen, to be sure. Note, for example, the impulse to map out the

texture of the synchronic situation or milieu of the artist, rather than

his position in a diachronic formal development working itself out in time.

It is the artist's role as microcosm, exhibiting within his work all the

aims and tensions of his "nation and age" at large which is interesting

Riegl here.

M. Iversen vlould attribute this change in focus to new linguistic

influences on Riegl, specifically coming from the work of Ferdinand de

Saussure:

Saussure disagreed that the primary object of linguistics LS the

evolution of forms. Instead he understood language as a system
of interrelated signs founded on convention and shared by a com-
munity. This system is available to synchronic analysis which
determines the relationship of co-existing elements in a single
language state. The exclusively diachronic perspective of the
neo-Grammarians neglected the study of these functional

23
pHcht, p. 191-
24 Ibid.
 74

25
relationships and failed to explain how language produces meaning.

Whether or not he was influenced by linguistic analysis, Riegl is

becoming a far more sophisticated theoretician here than many recognize.

Through. this kind of maneuver--effectively juxtaposing synchronic and

diachronic axes of historical description--Riegl remains a Hegelian of

sorts, but one who translates all that is workable in Hegel into psycho-

logical terms. This is the point at which most Riegl critics come to

blows, for in their attempt at schematizing the scholar's credo, i.e.,

in providing it with a philosophical ba'.:kground, they accept only one or

the other aspect (individual or metahistorical characterization) of this

26
compound definition.

To my mind, this concept of motivation for stylistic change is par-

ticularly Riegl's own, having been born out of no definitive philosophical

persuasion. Most likely, he was simultaneously influenced to some degree

in his thinking by developments in art and aesthf.~tics as well as lin-

guistic theory. Zerner has mentioned the possible emotional effect of

Hildebrand's Das Problem der Form--published in the same year, 1893, as

Stilfragen--on Riegl' s first major work. 27 Gombri,:h gives exemplary

25
Iversen, p. 66. See F. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
(1974) •
26
On the one hand, Salerno in "Historiography" in the Encylopedia
of World Art, p. 526: "Riegl, recognizing the importance of the .:
creative personality, took a position opposed both to romantic historio-
graphy"and positivism"; and, on the other, Zerner, p. 179: "Ri~gl's
effort to overthrow the supremacy of the individual creator as central
to the Significance of the work in favor of a higher communal point of
view reflects a decidedly subversive Hegelian inheritance • • • . "
27
Zerner, p. 178.
 75

· kh0 ff' s work·~n 1895 on t h e

status to W~c w~ener
T.T· Genes~s.
. 28 Iversen cites

the influence of the modification of the Hegelian system by Karl Schnaase

"whose historiography provided art with a sense of autonomous development

which was denied by Hegel's own aesthetics.,,29 And K1einbauer, in a

single sentence (like Gombrich before him) intriguingly points out how

Rieg1's art historical concerns antedate revolutionary happenings in the

practice of contemporary art: " • • • attention was shifted from a few

external factors to the creative activity of the artist himse1f--a 1and-

mark in the historiography of art and a sort of scholarly prelude to

Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907.,,30

For the most part, however, Rieg1 seems to have guided by his own

particular faith in a modified Hegelianism, which we have referred to as

a translation of Hegel into psychological concerns: in Ackerman's words,

"He promoted a principle that typifies art history in this century, that

the best solution to an artistic problem is the one that best fulfills

the artist's aim.,,31 Yet as Hauser has suggested, the Viennese curator

was an evolutionist at heart, "still under the romantic philosophy of or-

ganism.,,32 To continue the quotation from Ackerman: "But this re1ativ-

ism in the sphere of values was accompanied by determinism in explaining

the dynamics of style: in place of the biological metaphor, Rieg1 put

28
Gombrich, IIKunstwissenschaft," pp. 658-659.
29
Iversen, p. 63.
30
Kleinbaue;.:-, p. 21. Cf. Gombrich, F. 659: "Der Einf1uss des
Impressionismus auf diese Geschichtsdeutung ist offenkundig."
31. J ames Ack erman,
. "w - Art H~story"
. estern . .. i n Art an d Arch ae 1 08Y
(Englewood Cliffs, 1963), pp. 170-171.
32
Hauser, p. 215.
 76

33
cycles of evolution from an early 'haptic' to a later 'optic' phase. 1i

In the end, there is no way around the fact that Riegl's views "are an

obvious case of historical determinism,,,34 and for this reason they grate

uncomfortably against the grain of modern historiographic theory. Nothing,

in Riegl's master plan, "escapes history.,,35

But Riegl, it seems to me, was sensitive to this issue, and Zerner

has ac~ordingly characterized his position as one borne of "radical his-

toricism.,,36 To go back to Bertalanffy's laudatory remarks at the begin-

ning of our discussion of Riegl, his value lies in his rejection of nor-

mative standards. Riegl's careful and methodical mapping out of the his-

torical inevitability of stylistic ev~lution which he perceived in the

minor arts was generated out of his historicist situation. Without it,

he would have been unable to reform the course of art historical studies •
.
With it, he was able to combine ingeniously a sense of positivistic,

scientific procedure with a basically theoretical inclination:

33
Ackerman, p. 171.
34
plicht, p. 192.
35
Zerner, p. 180. Gombrich, as a disciple of Karl Popper, has
finally laid the ghost of nineteenth century historicism to rest (Art and
Scholarship, 1957, and Art and Illusion). But plicht, for one (p. 192),
is after resurrection:
"What astonishes me most in all this is the categorical assertion
that historicism and kindred views have been finally refuted and are
now a thing of the past. From the literature on the subject, which
admittedly I know only very slightly, I see little evidence that would
justify this formidable claim. Evan books as hostile to the deter-
ministic school of thought as Berlin's indictment of the idea of his-
torical inevitability (Historical Inevitability, 1954) take a much
more cautious line and do not pretend that the end of the old contro-
versy is in sight."
36
Zerner, p. 185.
 77

To grasp the Kunstwollen of a past epoch whose taste may be

completely alien to our own there is no other way open to the
historian than to view the stylistic phenomena genetically, to
reconstruct their genealogical tree, and to find out their ances·-
tors as well as their offspring. For, once we can see a work of
art as a halt on the road between past and future, its own artis-
tic intention becomes clearer. We need the historical approach to
get the specific aesthetic ~roperlY into focus, to reveal the in-
herent stylistic tendency.3

Yet perhaps Riegl attempted more than anyone late nineteenth

century thinker could constructively handle. In terms of our earlier

discussion on the two conflicting strains interlacing nineteenth century

thought, it seems uncertain where to situate Riegl. In principle, he

was a positivist. "There is no doubt," it has been said, lI t hat Riegl

38
wanted to establish art history as a science and to define its autonomy"

as such. And because of his avowed opposition to Hegelian metaphysics--

"'as for what determines the aesthetic urge to see, natural objects repre-

sented in works of art by stressing or repressing the features that iso-

late them or conversely unify them, one can only indulge in metaphysical

conjectures that an art historian must absolutely refuse to make ",39 --it

seems natural to associate him with the "scientific" strain of thought.

But Riegl's writings resist facile categorization, for there is always

37
PHcht, P6 190 •
.. 38
Zerner, p. 181.

39 "Naturwerk und Kunstwerk" in Gesammelte AufsHtze, p. 63. Quoted

in Zerner, p. 181. Zerner also points out in a footnote, p. 188, how-
ever, that in SpHtromische Kunstindustri~, Riegl makes no effort to hide
.~a teleol.ogical point of view." '" In opposition to this mechanistic
conception'of 'the nature of a work of art, H' Riegl says here, r"I have--
for the first time, I believe-~proposed a teleological one in the
Stilfragen, whex:e I· perceived in the !'lork of art .. the result of a definite
Kuns two lIen' conscious of~ its ends, which comes through in a fight against
purpose,. mat ter and technique,'" p. 9.
 78

40
another side to the story. Certainly more than any art historian who

preceded him, Rieg1 sought the grand scope, the big picture so-to-speak,

where the course of art history could be interpreted for theory's sake

as a positing and solving of large formalistic problems, irrespective of

historical exigencies. Despite his tentative synchronic ambition, on the

one hand, to look at works of art for what they can say about themselves

(to treat them as "halts on the road between past and future"), and on

the other, to align or juxtapose the internal history of art with cultural

history in general, Rieg1's Single-minded ambition was to interpret the

course of art history diachronically through all epochs in terms of one

" .
un~tary . . 1 e, ,,41 wh·~c h rea1·~zes ~tse
pr~nc~p . 1f·~n ch ·
ang~ng an d evo 1·
v~ng

modes of perception throughout time.

We can accept Berta1anffy's justifiable praise of Rieg1 for his

self-conscious realization of the cultural relativity of interpretive

concepts as long as we acknowledge the somewhat ironic posture into which

this position casts the Viennese art historian. While Rieg1 stresses the

formative power of each artist and the sir.gu1arity of each work of art

and emphasizes individual, historically-conditioned roles in formulating

cultural values, he nevertheless "depreciates the individual in favor of

40 Zerner finds that Rieg1 is able, "in a bizarre and apparently

willful intellectual act" to reconcile "his empirical conviction and
the German idealist tradition by accepting as data not, as one would
expect, the results of sensual perception, but our global comprehension
of the work of art. . . . Rieg1. . • probably felt it was justified
insofar as the Kunstwo11en is strictly a formal principle: it only
exists as • 'Umriss und Farbe' (color and outline, on the plane or
in space) 'so und nicht anders' . • . only in the domain of the visual,"
p. 182.
41
Gombrich, p. 19.
 79

a 'superindividual creative principle. ",42 In this way, Riegl exemplifies

the particular bind historicism found itself in at the turn of the century.

Hauser has interpreted the predicament this way:

(Th~ Historical School] . • • adopts the mystifying method of refer-

ring every historical event to some superindividual--ideal, divine.
or primeval--origin, but combines with this an individualizing treat-
ment that asserts not simply the uniqueness, but also the absolute
incomparability of historical structures, and so concludes that every
historical achievement, and thus every art-st~le, must be measured
only against its own acknowledged standards. 4

Viewed from this angle, Riegl's writings represent the logical and

thorough culmination of nineteenth century thought, rather than a new and

exciting innovation in histo~iographic theory, although their placem~nt

here is intended in no way to detract from their proven significance for

future historiographic theory--the immensely influential position

Bertalanffy had them occupying in his historical series at the beginning

of our essay.

* * * * * * *
44
In a.1920 essay entitled, "Der Begriff des Kunstwollens," Panofsky

issued a long critique and analysis of the most cogent and influential

of Riegl's ideas. As in his earlier essay written in response to

42
Hauser, p. 137.
43
Ibid., p. 120.

44 Panofsky, "Der Begriff des Kunstwollens," Zeitschrift fUr ~sthetik

und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft XIV (1920): 321-339. Reprinted in H.
Oberer's and E. Verheyen's collection of Panofsky's essays. The pages
cited in parentheses after the quotations are from the Oberer/Verheyen
edition. M. Podre translated into English the major part of this article
for his graduate seminar on Kunstwissenschaft at the University of Essex
in 1976/77. While this translation has been frequently referred to, most
of the translated passages are my own, and where I paraphrase rather than
directly translate Panofsky's argument, I usually cite no page reference.
 80

W81ff1in, he is here again obviously concerned about how to distinguish

his own thoughts on the nature and meaning of art from those of previous

art theorists, and it is the intellectual ability of A10is Riegl which is

especially challenging to him. But in this essay Panofsky's point of de-

parture is not what is erroneous or ill-considered, or even interesting,

in Riegl alone, but in the theory and practice of art h~story in general.

Contrary to what one might expect from Panofsky's earlier criticism of

W8lfflin's visual grammar, the problem here (apart from Riegl) lies not

in the fact that works of art are being one-sidedly described in formal

terms, neglecting' questions of meaning and content, but rather that both

(formal and contextual) approaches, when called upon, remain haphazard in

their concerns and organization.Panofsky would like to see the premises

on which either kind of art history is based tested out phi1osophical1y--

indebted systematically to some careful epistemological principles:

A purely historical consideration, whether it goes straight to con-

tent or formal histcrj--explains the phenomenon of the work of art
always by reference to other phenomena, not from a source of know-
ledge of a higher order: to trace back a certain iconographic tradi-
tion, to derive a certain formal complex from a typological history
or other specific influences, to explain the artistic achievement of
a certain master within the setting of his epoch or as a sub specie
of his individual artistic character, is to remain inside of the
whole complex of investigating actual interconnecting appearances in-
stead of first determining a fixed Archimedian pOint outside of the
art work's own sphere of being, with its own situation and meaning:
even the longest "developmental series" must always represent only
the lines which have their beginning and ending points within the
purely historical comp1ex. 45

45 "Eine rein historische Betrachtung, gehe sie nun inha1ts--oder

formgeschichtlich vor, erK1~rt das PhHnomen Kunstwerk stets nur aus
irgendwelchen anderen PhHnomenen, nicht aus einer Erkenntnisquelle
hBherer Ordnung: eine bestimmte Darstel1ung ikonographische zurHck-
verfo1gen, einen bestimmten Formkomplex typengeschichtlich oder aus
irgendwe1chen besonderen Einf1Hssen ab1eiten, die kUnstlerische
 81

Panosky.is not quibbling here with the project of historical dis-

course per~. Instead, he asks that both the history of cultural con-

ditions surrounding the work of art and the history of its situation in

a formal, developmental sequence be rightfully deemed secondary and

tertiary considerations. Before an historical investigation of any sort

gets under way, Panofsky would like to see some understanding of the art

work as a single, intelligible phenomenon in itself--not as it exists as

part of a series or as an example of something else. It is not suffi-

cient, he suggests, to elucidate one work of art by other works or events

of the same order: as philosophers first of all, we need to establish

some epistemological principles which will enable us to regard the work

through its own intrinsic value, and by doing so we thereby, as a side

benefit, also escape the trap·of relativism.

Why do we need to do this as historians of art? Why do we have this

extra, difficult task given to us before we can even begin discussing the

work's historical significance? Other historians have an easier job of

it. Take political histories, for example. A political history, "as the

history of men's acts" (29) can be satisfied by a purely historical

Leistung eines bestimmten Meisters in Rahmen seiner Epoche oder sub

specie seines individuellen Kunstcharakters erkl~ren, heisst inner-
halb des grossen Gesamtkomplexes der zu erforschenden realen Erschein-
ungen die eine auf die andere zuruckbeziehen, nicht von einem ausser-
halb des Seins-Kreises fixierten archimedischen Punkte aus ihre ab-
solute Lage und B~deutsamkeit bestimmen: auch die l~ngsten
'Entwicklungsreihen' stellen immer nur Linien dar, die ihre Anfangs-
und Endpunkte innerhalb jenes rein historischen Komplexes haben
milssen" (29).
How this term, "Archimedian viewpoint,""became...;a phrase at issue is· not
known: but one can find Worringer using it as early as 1907 in
Abstraction and Empathy, trans. M. Bullock (1907; New York, 1953), p. 4.
The philosopher who looks for some principle of certaity which he can-
not derive from his own perceptions can be traced directly back to
Descartes.
 82

analysis of cause and effect, because a political event, unlike a work

of art" is not a "forming accomplishment of the content of reality"

("formende Bewa1tigung dar Wirk,lichkeitsinha1te"); a political event is

"exhaustible through purely historical inquiry and even resists nonhis-

torica1 interpretations" (29). On the 0ther hand, artistic activity pre-

sents not just a potentially random manifestation of the activity of

certain subjects, but the enduring physical forms of its material as

we11--not, to use Schopenhauer's terminology, effects or events alone

(Begebenheiten) but products or results (Ergebnisse):

And with this emerges for the consideration of art the demand--
which is satisfied in philosophical realms by a theory of know-
1edge--to find a principle of explanation, on the ground of which
the artistic phenomenon not only is comprehended through ever more
extensive references to other phenomena in its existence, but also
can be known through reflection plunging below the sphere of its
empirical being into the conditions of its ex~stence.46

So far, the "most important representative," according to Panofsky,

of this "serious philosophy of art lt has been A10is Riegl. His notion of

"Kunstwo11en," in fact, has been "the most acute (aktue11ste) in modern

art historical inquiry," for it attempts to free works of art from

"theories of dependence" and gives in turn an untraditiona11y "recognized

46 "Und damit erhebt sich vor der Kunstbetrachtung die Forderung--

die auf phi10sophischem Gebiete durch die Erkenntnistheorie .
befriedigt wird--, ein Erk1~rungsprinzip zu finden, auf Grund
dessen das kUnst1erische PhHnomen nicht nur durch immer weitere
Verweisungen an andere PhHnomene in seiner Existenz begriffen,
sondern auch durch eine unter die Sph~re des empirischen Daseins
hinaubtauchende Besinnung in den Bedingungen seiner Existenz erkannt
werden kann" (29).
This metaphor of layers of interpretation would later be central to
Panofsky's levels of interpretation in Studies in Icono10gy. Cf. also
the Freudian metaphor of the stratification of levels of meaning in the
unconscious.
 83

autonomy" (30)47 to their existence. Knowing as we do what Panofsky had

earlier felt was wrong with WH1ff1in, we can see how appreciative he is

of Rieg1's concept of the Kunstwo11en from his remark that it at least

potentially encompasses content as well as form ("es formal wie inha1t1ich

von inner heraus organisierended schHpferischen Kdifte bezeichnen sollte")

(30) in its circumscription of factors responsible for determining the

existence of works of art.

Nevertheless, much needed as such a concept is, Rieg1's Kunstwo11en,

according to Panofsky, is "not without its dangers lt ("nicht ungef!ihr1ich")

(30) because it hovers around or "pivots" on troublesome questions of

psychology and will (ndas psycho1ogisch Wi11ensm!issige") (30),48 notions

which bring an element of "intention" or "purpose" into works of art, the

role of which must be e1ucidated. 49 At times, the Kunstwo11en seems a1-

most synonymous with the vexing issue of "artisti~ intention" ("kunst1eri-

schen Absicht") (30), and in its proximity relinquishes much of its theo-

retica1 potency. To get us back on tile right track, Panofsky advises uS

to adhere to the conventional usage of both terms. Let the Kunstwo11en

"cover the total artistic phenomena, e.g., the work of a period, a race

or a whole personality" (30) and reserve the phrase "artistic intention"

for characterizing individual works. 50

47
This translation comes in part from Mundt, p. 304.
48
Podro translates this term as "psychological will-likeness."
49
Panofsky sees this as a deliberately polemical move on Rieg1's
part to combat the late nineteenth century "Theorien des MUssens" to
explain the motivation for historical change (30).
SO
The confusion between the individual and metahistorica1 origins
of the artistic phenomenon is very evident in Rieg1. See earlier pages
in this chapter.
 84

Now obviously Panofsky is about to encounter several obstacles

here if he keeps on pursuing this same line of argument. He claims to

have been searching, with Riegl as his guide, for an llArchimedian point"

outside the usual web of references in order to be objective about what

he sees as he looks down on individual works. We can picture him trans-

fixed by the crystal ball of art history. He stares at it long and hard

until an object suddenly appears b~low the glass, begging for interpre-

tation. In its immediate presentation, it is bright and crystal-clear,

but it has emerged from the dark and murky waters of history (both formal

and contextual) to which he wants to pay no heed. So what can he say

about it? If he wants to avoid judgments of quality, and he refuses to

locate it historically, what is left--a description ala Riegl of how its

51
figures are articulated in relation to the ground on which they appear?

Riegl will not co-operate in this proj ect for' several reasons, a

fact which Panofsky does not immediately recognize. On the one hand,

Riegl's Kunstwollen has been defined (in opposition to artistic intention)

as a concept which derives its sustenance from the group (lithe period,

the race, the whole artistic personality"), while Panofsky wants to use

it to comprehend "individual works" in their purity.52 And secondly,

Riegl's groups of objects are framed and forged by an historical con-

sciousness, which is perpetually sensitive to periodicity in art his tori-

cal styles ("ancient Greek," "Near Eastern," etc.). And thirdly, as any

51 See earlier Schapiro characterization of "haptic" and "optic"

in this chapter. Panofsky undoubtedly found more workable con-
cepts of spatia.l ordering in Riegl than he did in 1ill:1lfflin during this
time when be was working on the problem of Renaissance perspective.
52 0nce aga~n,
' see ear l'~er pages h ere on t he t ens~on
' b e t ween '
~n d'~-
vidual and superindividual factors in Riegl's system.
 85

one acquainted with his meticulous drawings in Stilfragen can attest to,

Riegl grounds his theories in a careful survey of the existing empirical

evidence. Because Riegl's procedure is patently inductive, it seems odd

for Panofsky to claim that Riegl's is a viewpoint which arises independ-

ently from or outside the purview of the materials. Granted, the

~nstwollen even in Riegl is a vague and problematic thing to work with,

but is not Panofsky making it even vaguer and more elastic here, stretch-

ing it almost beyond the point where it can have any meaningful useful-

ness? Ernest Mundt, briefly conmLenting on this essay, agrees with

Sedlmayr before him that "Panofsky' s definition [2f the KunstwollenJ is

not only as vague as Riegl's, it also misses the dynamic quality of

Riegl's conception, the insight that what Riegl had in mind here was a
53
real force."

Essentially, I think, F"anoisky' s argument in "this introductory

section of his essay has not much to do with Riegl at all. He is only

using the authority and position of the earlier theorist to legitimize

his own project of making the analysis of works of art dependent, ~

priori, on some theory of knowledge (by 1920, certainly, he was already

sympathetic to this Kantian task, as we will see in the fifth chaPter).S4

Panofsky urges scholars concerned with art to rely neither on documents

nor on internal, artistic evidence in their analysis, because both pro-

cedures imply that there already exists an established mode of interpre-

tation. It is philosophically invalid, he warns, to get an interpreta-

tive viewpoint from inside the materials, the objects one is supposedly

S3
Mundt, p. 304.
54
See Chapter 5, passim.
 86

investigating. Scholars must possess some standards of analysis before

they ever get to the individual work, or else they will never really

grasp "the fundamental sense residing in the artistic phenomenon.,,55

We may notice that at this stage in the essay Panofsky has not yet

informed us what these standards of analysis might be. And he is not

going to for a while, if at all. As we saw in his critique of WBlfflin,

he often is very articulate about what something is not, but hesitant to

say what it might specifically be. The middle part of this essay is no

exception to this pattern, for here he spends much time trying to find

out the variety of ways the concept of the Kunstwollen can fail us. To

begin with, he divides the usage of the term into three groups, all of

which he labels "psychologistic": 1) the straightforward identification

of the Kunstwollen with the will of the artist, and his psychological

and historical situation; 2) the more complex identification of the

Kunstwollen with the collective historical situation, which would judge

the "will" in a work of art as it was comprehended consciously or uncon-

sciously by men of the same period; and 3) the identification of the

Kunstwollen in a work of art as it affects contemporary observers who

believe they can derive it from the "declarative tendency" ("aussprechende

Tendenz") of the "aesthetic experience," that is by way of aesthetic pro-

cesses played through in their own minds as spectators who enjoy art

("der Psyche des kunstgeniessenden Beschauers") (31).

Even though it is the first definition which we would expect to

find Panofsky dismissing most quickly because of his desire to avoid any

55
Mundt's translation, p. 304.
 87

"psychologistic" explanation, it is this category to which he devotes

most of his critical energies. Having become familiar with Panofsky's

strategy in these early essays, I find the reasons for this attention ob-

vious. Certainly the tone of both this critique of Riegl and the earlier

article on w8lfflin is on the one hand haughty and self-assured; but a

definite hint of insecurity comes stealing through as Panofsky traces and

retraces his tracks over the issue of what is wrong with every other ex-

planation in art theory. One cannot help but wish he would come more

directly to his own point. Yet in these two essays, the point is pushed

further and further back with frustrating frequency, making the reader

ever-suspenseful about its final dramatic appearance. When it does come

into sight, one cannot help but wonder what the long drum roll was all

about.

Panofsky spends a long time on definition 1, in other words, because

this was where the contemporary action for everybody else was taking place.

We have already discussed one angle of the general controversy about how

to achieve validity in interpretation in any sort of text, which worried

W8lfflin among others. 56 In specific art historical circles, this ques~

tion frequently centered on the puzzle of why the Greek painter Polygnotus

did not paint "naturalistic" landscapes. Rodenwaldt was the first to

bring up the riddle in a well-known statement in the leading journal,

57
Zeitschrift fUr Rsthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft: II, . eine

Frage des K8nnens gibt es in der Kunstgeschichte nicht, sondern nur die

des Wollens. • . . Polyklet hHtte einen borghesischen Fechter bilden,

56
See Chapter 2, pp~ 3~-40.

57
G. Rodenwaldt, "Zur begrifflichen und geschichtlicher Bedeuburg
des KlassischeR in der bildenden Kunst, II XI (1916): 123. .
 88

Polygnot eine naturalistische Landschaft malen kHnnen, aber sie taten

es nicht, weil sie nicht schan gefunden Mitten '" (32). ("There is no

question of 'can' in art history, only a question. of 'will'. . • •

Polykleitos would have sculpted a Borghese fencer, Polygnotus could have

painted a naturalistic landscape, but they did not do these things, be-

cause they did not find them beautiful.") Claiming his indebtedness to

Riegl and his notion of "artistic intention," Rodenwaldt said, "Polygno-

tus did not paint naturalistic landscapes because he did not want to,

not at all because he could not."S8

Panofsky is eager to revile--and takes much time to do so--this

"inappropriate" pseudo-psychological explanation. Even if one is to con-

centrate on the artist's "will" as a vehicle for analysis (and he is al-

ways anxious to stress how invalid that would be), this position is

logically untenable because a

• • • will. can only direct. itself towards something known; it is back-

wards and makes no sense to talk about a "not-willing" to do something
in the psychological sense of disinclination ("Nolle" as opposed to
"non-velle"), where for the subject concerned the possibility which
differed from the "wished for one" was not present to the mind:
Polygnotus did not paint a naturalistic landscape not because as it
"appeared to him to be not beautiful," he was not interested in doing
it, but because it never occurred to him to do so--because 0~9the
power of a predetermined necessity of his psychological will --he

58 See Hauser, p. 219. Kleinbauer has accused Riegl of operating

under this same sort of "dated psychology" in assuming that "artists al-
ways represent what they see"--a statement which "implies that a master
could paint whatever he wanted, regardless of ability or environmental
conditions," p. 21. This whole controversy is obviously one borne out of
the general historical skepticism of the time which we characterized in
the first chapter. The Greeks painted for themselves, not for the Chinese
or the twentieth century European. So how do we dare evaluate it by our
own standards?

59 Note here how Panofsky, in his great determination to avoid a psy-

chological account, ends up giving an even grander one.
 89

could not have wanted anything other than an unnaturalistic landscape;

for this reason it makes no sense to say he had freely neglected
painting another kind (32}60.

Embroiled in this discussion of the "can" vs. the :'will" of personal

artisti~ intention, Panofsky seems to forget that it is not the individual

artist in any sense with which he initially wanted to associate the

Kunstwollen. As he stated earlier, it is foolhardy and purposeless to

consider the Kunstwollen as a "psychological act of any historically in-

dividuable subject" (i.e., the artist) (31). Although it might be inter-

esting, for example, to "deduce the state of the sensibility of the

artist" (31) from what we think we see in the works, such an act serves

no real interpretative purpose. And even if surviving documents were to

reveal 'authentic statements by the artist about his own art, we would still

be gaining our information only from the objects themselves or documents

"parallel to the artistic phenomenon" (32). All this sort of research does

is lock us into the phenomenon we are supposed to be investigating from

our external "Archimedian point of view."

The second and third definitions of Kunstwollen also involve Panofsky

in contemporary issues, but he treats them more cursorily than the first.

"Period psychology" is regarded as merely a more complex and less verifi-

able version of "personal psychology." Worringer's "Gothic man," for

example, is a characterization deduced from the visual evidence of a

"striving quality" in Gothic art--"the hypostazing of an impression" (33).

Once again there exists the same problem of inference which we encountered

60 Podro, in his seminar in the fall of 1976, par.aphrased Panofsky's

retort this way: "0ne may opt for B with no cognizance of A. A just
doesn't enter into it, because B comes so naturally."
 90

in deciding what to do with personal statements by the artist. The

period intention is "inferred" from "the same artistic phenomenon which

it is being asked to elucidate" (32). vIhat vlorringer saw as a virtue

in 1907--"an attempt will now be made to arrive at an understanding of

Gothic art on the basis of its own presuppositions,,61_-panofsky regarded

as the source of epistemological confusion in 1920. As· much as

Worringer's sort of interpretation makes for an "extraordinarily inter-

esting . • • geisteswissenschaft1ichen" (33) investigation, it still

runs counter to Panofsky's desire for postulating a "methodologically

graspable Kunstwo11en" (33) whose existence remains distinct from the

objects it interprets.

And lastly, he dismisses contemporary aesthetic theory, specifically

of the sort originating in the popular work of Theodor Lipps.62 With

his doctrine of "empathy" in art, Lipps,· in the words of his disciple,

Worringer, took "the decisive step from aesthetic objectivism to aesthetic

subj ectivism, .i. e., that which no longer takes the aesthetic as the start-

ing-point of its investigations, but proceeds from the behavior of the con-

temp1ating subject, culminates in a doctrine that may be characterized by

the broad general name of the theory of empathy.,,63 Panofsky finds the real

subject of aesthetics far removed from art, for it is not concerned with the

historical work of art or even the artist who created it, but only in the

61
Worringer, Form in Gothic (1910; London, 1964), p. 7.
62
Here Panofsky cites the work of Theodor Lipps' Asthetik,
1903-~906.

63 Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, p. 4. Note that Worringer

did not completely adhere to Lipps' ideas; the most notable difference
between the two being Worringer's refinement of the theory of empathy not
to include "negative-empathy" but the positive urge to abstraction.
 91

impression it makes, in the present, on the mind of the contemporary

observer (33).

To Panofsky's mind, all three of these applications of the

Kunstwollen lead us far afield. They are viable approaches only if one

is after specific and limited information, but they certainly are not

the source of real knowledge. They do nothing to enable us to comprehend

the total artistic intention manifest in a work of art; its internal

coherence goes unrecognized. As Panofsky is quick to admit, Riegl was

initially concerned with these problems. But the trouble was that he and

his successors "overpsychologized" their solutions. Like Riegl, Banofsky

is intent on finding a typology into which all works of art would fit.

He is determined to find a principle of interpretation that i~ no sense

is subjective, that in no way arises from within the artistic phenomenon

itself or our perceptions of it, either through its impact on the viewer

or through the postulating of historical causality in its origins (formal,

cultural, or individual). So far in this essay, however, the impreci-

sion of Panofsky's key phrases--terms such as "internal coherence" and

a "forming accomplishment of the content of reality"--are matched in

vagueness only by his lack of theoretical guidance. We know what we

should not do in analysis of works of art, but what can we do? The rest

of the essay aims to be more direct.

On the basis of the arguments in this essay, we have to conclude

that the "Kunstwollen as the subject of a possible Kunstwissenschaft-

licher knowledge is not a psychological reality" (34). And because of

the evidence mustered against wBlfflin's ideas in the previous essay,

we have also seen that the Kunstwollen can have nothing. to do with ab-

stract generalizations. w8lfflin's general stylistic characteristics

 92

1I1 ead directly into a phenomenal classification of particular styles ll (34)

and have nothing to do with characteristics IIseen ll from inside. If we

are to accomplish anything worthwhile in our analysis, we must have in-

stead some comprehension of the way the art work forms itself or brings

all its elements together in its own terms--some way of "discovering a

principle of stylistic rules which underlies all its characteristics and

would elucidate the content and formal characteristics from below ll (34).64

This method must, above all else, respect the integrity of the individual

work of art. A stylistic synthesis, in the manner of WBlfflin, depends

upon large numbers of works for comparison's sake. And Riegl's work,

despite its several virtues, is also basically a grand and imaginative

synthesis of changing styles of art over time. Riegl is very informative,

Panofsky says--working from the general towards the more specific--about

IIBaroque art" or IIDutch Baroque works" or the oeuvre of Rembrandt in

general~ but he tells us little or nothing about one single work of

'Rembrandt (34).65

The Kunstwollen, it follows, can in no way be based on a synthesis

of any sort. It must reveal itself or rather its Itinunanent sense"

("immanenten Sinn")--an inunediate sense, enclosed within its own physical

presentation--in isolation: the Kunstwollen must be directed towards or

synonymous with the "fundamental sense (or meaning) residing in the

artistic phenomenon, not just for you and me, but objectively" (35)66.

64 The metaphor for the art theorist's perspective on all this has
changed. Whereas before he was to do his elucidating from an "Archime-
dian" viewpoint above his objects, now he is "belowll looking up.

65 Cf. earlier pp. 82-83, where Panofsky tries to use Riegl to elu-
cidate individual works.
66
11undt, p. 304.
 93

To return to the Rodenwaldt example again, Panofsky says in a footnote,

we wOl11d in this way have to say that "Polygnotus could neither have

wished nor have been capable of representing a naturalistic landscape

because this kind of representation would have contradicted the immanen-

ten Sinn of fifth century Greek art" (fn. on p. 46).6?

With these words, occurring more than halfway through the essay,

we meet with the first attempt at an actual definition of Panofsky's own

desired use of Riegl's term, Kunstwollen. Unfortunately, as a scrutiny

of these two excerpted quotations demonstrates, it is a new definition

quickly aged by old problems. First of all, there is implicit herein a

strong PQsitivist faith in the ability of an anaylst to be "objective"

about the material with which he is dealing (". • • das Kunstwollen

kann • • • nichts anderes sein, als das, was ~icht fUr uns, sondern

objectiy] als endgultiger letzer Sinn im kunstlerischen PhHnomene

'liegt''') (35)--a valid interpretation not just for the present <-"not

just for us, but objectively"), but for all times. As we spent much time

67
Cf. Hauser, p. 219-220. Hauser, however, disagrees with this in-
terpretation:
"Now perhaps in that particular case both ability and will were lack-
ing, but there certainly are other cases. in which, for example, an
artist cannot cope with the naturalistic intention that inspires him,
and others in which a naturalistic type of skill persists and sets a
standard of skill, although an anti-naturalistic style is already
making itself felt. ~ld why adduce such a difficult and vague con-
ception as 'the immanent intention of fifth century Greek art' when
it is simply a case of conditions in which both the tradition of skill
necessary for 'being able' and the conventional basis for 'wanting'
to produce a naturalistic landscape were lacking. There may well have
been some isolated personal attempts of the most various kinds then,
as there always are; but for the information of a style there must be
some general practice of art to which the individual can attach him-
self or a consensus of taste upon which he can rely. Only in this
sense can we accept the term 'immanent intention' in art history."
 94

discussing in the first chapter, this is a sentiment generated out of--

or perhaps in contradiction to--a general relativist despair. Theorists

at the beginning of this century from a variety of fields hoped to make

their scholarship free of value judgments and cultural preconceptions:

aimed, in other words, to make their studies conform to the established

principles of scientific discourse. Here, certainly, Panofsky is prov-

ing to be no exception. Still, despite this climate of opinion, we would

expect to find Panofsky being more subtle in his use of the notion of

objectivity for several reasons, primarily because it was an issue that

he had been addressing himself to publicly off and on for almost a decade.

The WBlfflin essay nine years earlier is a case in point. Here, we may

remember, Panofsky's whole argument against WBlffliu was based on the

conviction that works of art are products of the mind, culturally-

crystallized precipitates of the intellect's transactions with the world.

However, he fails to take the next logical step and acknowledge that the

art historian's perceptions of the objects the artist creates are simi-

larly conditioned. In Panofsky's ideal scheme, art history would be

characterized, from the art historian's Archimedian viewpoint, as remain-

ing distinctly outside time ("not just for you and me, but objectively")

at the same time as it is admitted (without the slightest irony even at

this point in the essay) that the objects he discusses remainsd locked

within it.

At first, especially on the basis of his, statements in this essay,

this last thought may seem an incorrect aasessment of Panofsky's ideas

in this early stage of his career. The inconsistency, however, belongs

to Panofsky. Here indeed he keeps referring to the necessity of examining

 95

art works in isolation: the "single artistic phenomenon" is always

uppermost in his mind. But a second perusal of his words reveals,

despite his pr.otestations to the ~ontrary, to what degree he is still

writing under the theme of the primacy of a periodical ordering of art

historical styles. The second part of his definition can demonstrate

this point: "Polygnotus could neither have wished nor have been capable

of representing a naturalistic landscape because this kind of represen-

tation would have contradicted the immanenten Sinn of fifth century

Greek art" (42). On the basis of all else that he has said, it is clear

that Panofsky wants to achieve a sensibility towards the workts immanent

sense in its own terms, but at the same time ~ve find him pointing here

to how the individual work is a microcosm of fifth century Greek art in

general. The problem becomes one of sequence. How far can an analyst

go in discussing one without the other? The relationship between the

universal and the particular was an especially vexing one to neo-

Kantians,68 and we can se~ Panofsky's work unconsciously exhibiting

similar methodological quandaries. Should the interpretative procedure

progress from the single to the general, or might we contextualize the

single object in isolation because of what we already know about its

stylistic and cultural aetiology as a whole? Or, do we only understand

the general trends because of our precise ordering of individual objects?

The point on which to challenge Panofsky here becomes an obvious one:

how can we be certain from the examination of only one example (as he is

advocating with this Polygnotus reference) what the "immanent sense" of

68
See Chapter S.
 96

fifth century Greek art is? Perhaps Polygnotus' themes and formal

components were only aberrations, imperfect realizations or even revolu-

tionary alterations.

Otner problems proliferate. If we could somehow arrive at this

"immanent sense," this realization of the Kunstwollen, we would find,

according to Panofsky, the highly artificial distinction between form

and content to be untenable. They are not "double roots of style," as

WBlfflin would have it, but both "externalizations of a common basic

tendency" (35). "Tendency" towards what? Who does the tending towards--

the mind, the culture, other works of art? "To circumscribe" these

tendencies, he suggests, "is precisely the work of a real Grundbegriffe

der Kunstgeschichte" (35), but clearly these tendencies are only made

manifest by comparison over the course of time. In attempting to be more

reductive and unpsychological than Riegl, Panofsky leaves us either with

nothing or else (depending on how one views the situation) far too much

to discuss.

Yet these kinds of inconsistencies and vague notions about how art

"works" are far from being sorted out here. More to the point, their

own contradictions and ambiguities turn "circumscription" into a process

of mere labyriuthine meandering. Panofsky has a center in mind some-

where, but it eludes his circuitous and indirect methods of getting to

it. So he makes the end his beginning and assertively reveals the con-

clusion to which he had orig.inally hoped these routes would naturally

lead us: he wants to make art theory correspond to a fixed theory of

knowledge. As an example, he takes the statement from Kant's Prolegomena

that "the sky is elastic" (35).

 97

Following Kant, Panofsky pOints out that we can regard this sentence

historically, psychologically or grammatically. So too can we view works

o.f\.art. Given either a verbal or visual "statement," we can adapt a

string of attitudes towards it. We could situate it in its historical

context, or we might focus on the subjective predispositions of the

person who created it, or we could examine its "grammatical lf construc-

tion (35) •. For works ~f art, the first two c~nsiderations obviously

dispense with questions of meaning and content, while the third takes

care of formalistic analysis. No theory of art--with the possible ex-

ception of some implications deriving from Riegl's work--has managed to

go beyond this tripartite orientation.

Nonetheless, says Panofsky (heeding Kant), we must struggle to

overcome these habitual modes of analytic behavior. We should sever all

threads that connect the work to these three kinds of concerns, and in-

stead fixedly concentrate on the Ifpure knowledge" (35) contained within

it. So far, so clear. But what is there left to discuss? In Panofsky's

69
words, the intrinsic "causal" truth of the work; we must find a way of

comprehending the phenomenon in the way that Kant had suggested we

acknowledge how the ideas of sky and elasticity can be conjoined in the

69
In a.November 17, 1976 seminar, M. Podro attempted to define what
Panofsky meant by "cause" here, and he concluded that it refers to an
"exhibition of a kind of unity which is distinctive of the causal proper-
ties of science; i.e., the way in which a scientific proposition shows
itself as belonging legitimately to knowledge is by the structure it
possesses. The causal force in a proposition is what we are concerned
with if we are concerned with the utterance from the ,oint of view of
knowledge" (loosely paraphrased). Cassirer IS Kant Commenta..!1. of 1916 is
an obvious theoret~cal source for some of. the issues Panofsky discusses
here. See later Chapter 5 for the way in which Cassi~er follows Kant in
finding an equivalent in the field of art for the concept of causality
in·science.
 98

mind of the "judging self" (36). The language is abstruse and wordy

here, but in other words, I believe Panofsky is saying that a primary or

proper response should grasp the work of art's internal order or validity

--the way it coheres (or fails to cohere). That is, does it make sense?

What makes it a work of art 'is its connectiveness, like the idea

of causality in science. We should be able to "test" its internal

"causal" truth as definitively as we can verify Kantts sentence by ex-

panding it to an "if . . • then" proposition. A causal hypothesis

should be testable; its logic should hold it together internally, irre-

spective of what it ultimately "means." Although he offers no ap~logies

or qualifications for drawing the analogy between propositions and p.ic-

tures, and although he offers no guidelines for the metaphorical applica-

tion of this procedure to works of visual art, Panofsky is adamant in

stressing that we need to possess some viable means to discover the

work's validity without going outside it for confirmation. Exclusively

and in isolation it demands our near-sighted vision. A work of art,

like a sentence uttered within the domain of scientific discourse,

possesses a certain.identifiable ontological nature; it posits a speci-

fic "argument" about the nature of being and representation which can

be "uncovered" by being considered from the point of view of the con-

cept of cause (36).70 '

Here is the point where art theoreticians can effectively employ

Riegl's concept of Kunstwollen. The Kunstwollen should reveal an inner

70 "The concept of "cause" here is being employed in a very speci-

fic way, and refers only to the internal dynamics structuring the in-
dividual work of art, as opposed to being "caused" by something extrin-
sic, e.g., cultural factors. See also fn. 69.
 99

"necessity" to the work: a necessity which resides within, which has

nothing to do with individual aspects "sequentially" or "causally"

ordered,7l but instead testifies to the presence of an ideal unity in the

total artistic phenomenon (a sinnesgeschichtliche viewpoint). Keep hold,

Panofsky advises, of the notion of artistic intention, but define the

terms cautiously. Remember that by "artistic" one should not mean "of

the artist,-" but instead "of the living work of art." The work of art

needs to be considered from the point of view of its own measure--its

own "coordinates"--the "conditions of its own being" (36). Lest this

sounds like an analysis that is verging on being formalist, Panofsky says

he has something far more primary in mind. After the work's "immanent

sense" is made manifest, then and only then can it be related to larger

comparative notions like "linear" or 'tpainterly" (36). An analyst should

never try, before his initial trenchant observation, to bring these

categories or their attendant vocabulary to bear on his own interpreta-

tion. The work must come into focus under its own propulsion, and

create its own conditions of existence in "the mind of judging viewer"

(36). It should be "the task of Kunstwissenschaft to create!!. priori

valid categories which • • • can be applied to the artistic

phenomenon under investigation as the measure of the definition of its

'immanent sense '" (37).

Rieg1 had tried to fulfill this obligation, but he was a visionary

limited by his own choice of categories. "Optic lt and "haptic't are terms

based on "empirical • • • psychological" data, and any "psychological

consideration" inevitably "confuse~ art and the artist, subject and

71 See dual definition of "cause" in previous two footnotes.

 100

object, reality and idea" (38).72 Clearly, Rieg1's concepts "work" to

a certain degree, but they are not yet reducti_ve enough, because in no

way do they "exhaustively" characterize all artistic phenomena. For

example, the art of the Middle Ages, or works by Rembrandt and

Michelangelo still need to be "classified outside of this objective/

subjective axis" (38).73

At least, however, the "sense" of Rieg1' s categories is no lon.ger

directed to achieving a generic elucidation or generalization over phenan-

ena (37) (as are WH1ff1in's concepts of "linear" and IIpainterly," for
74
example ), but instead aims at a "classification of the work§ immanent

sense." Rieg1, far more than any art theoretician who preceded him,

put art history on a sound philosophical or epistemological footing:

A method as Rieg1 initiated it deals--proper1y understood--with

the purely historical knowledge and analysis of the individual
phenomena and the description of their connection in art history
just as little as the theory of knowledge deals with the history
of philosophy . . . . 75

72
The terms do work, however, Panofsky says, as expressions for the
possible mental (geistige) attitude of the artistic self to the object.
But "the effective artistic intention in a work of art must be strictly
separated off from the sensibility of the artist." "Haptic" and "optic"
are over-psychologized. But remember Panofsky's earlier disagreement
with wHlff1in: the eye:s relation to the world is not just "organic,1I
it is "psychological."

73 Heidrich, as Panofsky points out, was wrong in assuming that

sinnesgeschicht1iche Kunstwissenschaft leads only to "problem-solution
art history." See Beitr~ge zur Geschichte und Methode der Kunstgeschichte
(Hi1desheim, 1917), p. 87.

74 See B. Schweitzer's criticism of WH1fflin for this reason in

Chapter 4. Zeitschrift fUr ~sthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft
XIII (1918), 259 ff.

75 Eine Methode, wie Riegl sie inauguriert hat tritt--richtig ver-

standen--der rein historischen, auf die Erkenntnis und Analyse
 101

Discussing Riegl summarily once again, we are led towards the con-

clusion of Panofsky's essay, without having been informed of the type

of categories with which one might replace Riegl's. Panofsky has writ-

ten many pages pointing to the need, as he sees it, for the development

of new "transcendental Kunstwissenschaft" (.38) categories of description,

but he unfortunately leaves us with no suggestions of the directions they

might t.s.ke. The end cif the essay is written in the same conciliatory

tone which we found in the W8lfflin critique. It turns out, allover

again, that the state of art historical affairs is not really as bad as

he first intimated might be the case; what we require, after all, is

just a more refined procedure.

The concluding paragraphs, in fact, summarize and even exalt more

traditional types of analysis in an effort to demonstrate how they can

complement the new sort, with Panofsky here seeming to forget he has not

yet said what the new sort is to be in specific terms. A "transcenden-

tal Kunstwissenschaft," for example, in no way "usurps the place of a

pure art historical description," and it even requires "historical"

information in order to provide a complete picture: one must "use docu-

ments to establish with certainty the purely phenomenal understanding of

the given artistic appearance" (38). Documents, for example, cannot

only "verify" but also actually "correct reconstructively" or "exegeti-

cally" certain presuppositions of the Kunstwollen, but they never "spare

us the struggle for the knowledge of the Kunstwollen itself, penetrating

wertwoller EinzelphHnomene und ihrer zusammenh~nge gerichteten

Kunstgeschichtsschreibung ebensowenig zu nahe, wire etwa die
Erkenntnistheorie der Philosophiegeschichte. . . . (38)
 102

below the sphere of appearances" (40).

Panofsky, like many of his fellows, has recognized that there is a

special problem about the nature of historical inquiry. This whole

essay, titularly devoted to Riegl, has been in actuality a long and

somewhat vague plea for the development of a militantly objective ap-

proach to works of art, which will free the objects from the burden of

having to bear up under certain patently historical critiques. Without

saying specifically what it might be, Panofsky has here advocated the

construction of an ~ priori system of intellectual procedure in art his-

torical interpretation: "universal categories of art," in Hauser's crit-

ical words, "which are to be independent of all concrete experience,

all psychological actuality and all historical time.,,76 He has suggested

that we need to discover a single, permanent "Archimedian viewpoint"

from which to interpret various cultural artifacts, for the artifacts and

the cultural complexes they embody only themselves offer intrinsic prin-

ciples of interpretation. The residue of cultural variations which sur-

vive from, out of the past need to be penetrated, so that the diversities

can be viewed from this distant point and not just with reference to

themselves. It is incumbent upon the conscientious analyst to elevate

himself to a transcendental position (the position of epistemology) in

order to recognize 'and discuss f1 coherence" and "cause" in works of art.

Although we can certainly fault him for his lack of specificity

and feel frustrated by the absence of procedural guidelines, Panofsky

has here demonstrated an ambition and scope worthy of Alberti. In the

76
Hauser, p. 147.
 103

tradition of the Italian art theorist, Panofsky has argued in this essay

that the crucial question to be addressed in art historical commentary

is still one of what creates internal coherence in an isolated work of

art. What can we learn from its singular presentation? It is true that

much of this essay can be understood as an effort at finding how "works

of art are like special kinds of discursive thought."n But we can also

view this assessment from the other way around. In the final analysis

this essay on Rieg1 has been a tortuous and exhaustive "struggle" (to

use Panofsky's word) to begin to suggest ways in which words might be

capable of matching in impact the potency of a single, ordered visual

representation.

77 Podro, 1976 seminar.

 IV. Contemporary Issues

The significance of a writer, whether poet or philosopher or

historian • • • does not reside principally in the conscious
intention behind his work, but rather in the precise nature,
as we can now see it, of the conflicts and imaginative incon-
sistencies in his work • • • any form of civilized life is
sustained at the cost of some denial, or reversal, of feeling,
and at the cost of fabricating myths and speculative hypothe-
ses, which will seem, to an entirely detached and scientific
eye at some later date, a kind of madness, or at least an in-
dulgence in illusion. It is generally only in retro-
spect that we can see why a concern that might at the time
have seemed marginal, scholastic, academic in the abusive sense
of the word, was in fact a working out in apparently alien, or
even trivial, material of an exemplary conflict of values,
which had a much wider relevance.

Stuart Hampshire, The Mora1,ity of Scholarship

Panofsky's concern for providing art historical commentary with

a sound epistemological basis was a far from idiosyncratic one during

the second and third decades of this century. As Arnold Hauser once

said, "W81fflin's generation was eminently a generation of phi1osophers.,,1

In the leading journals of the day, many essayists actively pursued work-

able principles of interpretation, philosophical "systems" which would

not leave the analyst having neither to rely on subjective accounts nor

having to admit that tb2re exist different principles of interpretation for

different works of art. "The und~rlying problem confronting the generation

of interpreters was how to be articulate about the origins of painting

1
Arnold Hauser, The Philosophy of Art History, p. 204.

104
 105

and how to register properly the autonomy of painting as opposed to

any message conveyed by it.,,2 Both practicing art historians and

speculating art theorists were caught up in these contested issues.

Pano£sky responded directly to v18l£flin, Riegl, Worringer and Rodenwaldt,

as we have seen, but he obviously repeated issues found in others' works

as well. Therefore, before we leave art historical territory and venture

more deeply into the realm of neo-Kantian philosophy and the highly

significant influence of the work of Ernst Cassirer on Panofsky, it would

seem appropriate here to sketch briefly the trends of this system-theo-

rizing in art, as well as survey cursorily several directions that new

work in both formalism and art as cultural history were taking in the

1920s.

During his biographical research for "Kunstgeschichte American

Style," Colin Eisler discovered in his interviews'of older scholars that

the authors of these "endless disputes in the realm of theory over which

so many pages of ink were spilled in lengthy articles in the Zeitschrift

fUr Kunstwissenschaft and other journals . today claim . upon

re-reading them that they are less than entirely sure what they

meant when they were written.,,3 To trace the lines of this apparently

now forgotten controversy in any detail'would be an immense and thankless

task; however, a sampling of several of the more frequently quoted articles

4
can be very in£ormative.

2 Michael Podro, Kunstwissenschaft seminar, University of Essex,

1976-1977 .

3 Colin Eisler, "Kunstgeschichte American Style" in The Intellectual

Migration, ed. Fleming and Bailyn (Cambridge, Mass., 1969)J p. 605.
4
Arnold Hauser's survey of several of these notable examples has
been most helpful. I have relied on his summary in several cases; but I
 106

In 1913, Hans Tietze published Die Methode der Kunstgeschichte, a

weighty book which surveyed the variegated panorama of contemporary

5
methodological biases. At the same time it attempted to turn the course

of art historical studies in a new direction which it optimistically sug-

gested could resolve several long-standing conflicts. Tietze was as

eager as Panofsky was half a decade later to proffer reasons why art
6
history must be distinguished from other types of historical narrative.

No doubt, he says, "a work of art is a sensually perceivable fact,"

which can be aligned with other sorts of historical documents, but, to

his Hegelian sensibility, there is much more to it than that. Every art

work is in some fundamental way "isolated" and subject to its own internal
. 7
1 og~c.

Tietze goes on to provide traditional reasons, however, for the

have, for the most part, in addition to looking up some of Hauser's refer-
ences, also combed the periodical stacks of the Harburg Library in London,
excerpting here and there relevant articles from German art journals of
the teens and twenties.

5 ~ Methode der Kunstgeschichte (Leipzig, 1913). See also Tietze's

1925 Lebendig Kunstwissenschaft (Wien). For other contemporary "surveys"
whose titles reveal the pervasive concern with theory, see A. Schmarsow,
"Kunstwissenschaft und Kulturphilosophie mit gemeinsamen Grundbegriffen,"
"
Zeitschrift fUr Asthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft XIII, no. 1 & 2
(19l8~19l9): 165-190, 225-258; Georg Dehio, Kunsthistorische AufsHtze
(Munich-Berlin, 1914); Max Eisler, "Die Sprache der Kunstwissenschaft,"
Zeitschrift fUr Asthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft XIII (1918-1919):
309-316; Emil Utitz, Grundlegung der allgemeinen Kunstwissenschaft, 2 vols.
(Stuttgart, 1914); and Max Dessoir, "Kunstgeschichte und Kunstsystematik,"
Zeitschrift fUr Xsthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft XXI (1927): 131-
142.
6
See Chapter 3, pp. 81-82, for Panofsky's remarks which almost
amount to a paraphrase of this position.
7
Tietze, p. 2.
 107

necessity of ITgrouping" works of art for "scientific" analysis. 8 ~.]ith

this decision arises the problem of what kinds of groups to employ. The

feud, as he perceives it, between Gesetzwissenschaft (aesthetics) and

Tatsachenwissenschaft (factual art history) is the source of most of the

9
contemporary methodological bewilderment. Quoting voluminously from

contemporary aestheticians, Tietze tries to bridge the gap in a new

Kunstwissenschaft by making aesthetics and the historical perspective

"mutually tolerant" of one another-or better yet, so interdependent that

10
they even serve as "handymen" to one another. Commenting on the state

of art history proper, he sees the predominant formalistic method as only

a "necessary transition to a new iconography,,,ll an evaluation reified

twenty years later by Panofsky's Studies in Iconology.

In the wake of Tietze's "manual," smaller essays tended to circle

around two principal categor~es: those that elected to confront the

ideas of Riegl and WBlfflin, and those which chose to address themselves

8 Ibid.," • . die irgendwie gruppiert werden mUssen, urn wissen-

schaftliche fassbar zu werden."

9 Ibid., p. 3. Since the Romantics, he says, every scientific treat-

ment of art appears to be a "horror and a sacrilege." Many commentators
of the day voiced mottoes such as "art for the artists, and art history
for the art historians.!! See, for example, Karl Frey, Wissenschaftliche
Behandlung und Kunstlerische Betrachtung (Zurich, 1906) and Cornelius
Gurlitt, "Die Kunstgeschichte fU.r die Kuns this toriker ," Berliner
Architekturwelt (April 1911).

10 Ibid. Vossler, for example, said in Positivisimus und Idealismus

in der Sprachwissenschaft (Heidelberg, 1904), that if philologists cringe
at the word "aesthetic," then they only think of the old aesthetics [art
appreciation) not the new.

11 J. Bialostocki, "Iconography and Iconology," Encyclopedia of World

Art (1963), p. 774. Riegl is dealt with extensively in Tietze's book;
wBlfflin, writing Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe at apuroximately the same
time as Tietze's book was published, is more cursorily surveyed--for exam-
ple in a passing critique of Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Archi-
tektur (1886).
 108

to the limits and uses of a so-called "scientific" study of art. But:in

fact this is in itself a rather arbitrary split, made only for the purposes

of characterization, because both issues overlapped in their fundamental

concerns (as they obviously did in Panofsky's essay), especially when the

essayist evoked the distinctions between idealist and positivist modes of

interpretation which we discussed in the first chapter.

The writers who articulated their own ideas by attacking those of

Riegl and W8lfflin were often vitriolic. In 1917, Ernst Heidrich called

the work of any evolutionist history of art, from Vasari through Riegl,

one "'gigantic fiction'" because of its overtly facile connections between

periods, which almost always proceed from antiquity to the Renaissance

12
without taking account of the Middle Ages. Adolph Goldschmidt, on

many occasions, "disavowed" the "metaphorical speculation" of Riegl and

v18lfflin, and turned instead to the "science" of classifying groups of

works "analytically, formally, and historica1ly.II13 B. Schweitzer and

Edgar Wind chose w8lfflin as their target, rebuking his history of form

for reasons similar to Panofsky's indictment of Riegl. They worried, on

the one hand, over the fact that W8lff1in's antithetical categories were

not yet "basic" or reductive enough. Having not been established accord-

ing to ~ priori principles, the forced contrasts between Renaissance and

Baroque, in their view, went beyond "mere fi;cientific] registration and

c1assification.,,14 Moreover, Wind, in an argument similar to Panofsky's

12 Heidrich, BeitrHge ~ Geschichte und Methodologie der Kunst-

geschichte a9l7~ cited in Hauser, p. 159. 'Warburg, of course, was one
of the first to treat the Middle Ages seriously.
13
Kleinbauer, Modern Perspectives in Western Art History, p. 46.

14 B. Schweitzer, "Der Begriff des Plastischen," Zeitschrift fUr

 109

in the W81fflin critique, testified that a mere classificatory descrip-

tion, apt as it is for some art historical "problems," could never fail

to trespass on larger issues of '''meaning. HIS Wilhelm Pinder wanted to

ignore the work of both W81fflin and Riegl altogether and develop anew

the concept of stylistic periodicity, because he found the earlier

16
theorists' work too 'If simple '" to be of use. Anticipating the work of
17
Kubler forty years later, Pinder objected to the notion of "'one style

for one period,'" "'which assumes the predominance of one single trend.

within each branch of art.'" "Contemporary artistic achievements are

obviously not all on the same level of stylistic development. Not only

in the different arts, but also within the same species of art, we find

more or less 'contemporary,' more or less 'advanced' works, as if some

had run on ahead of their time and others were lagging behind .,,18 As·ide

from attacking Rieg1 and W81fflin, theorists also' challenged each other's

interpretations of these two "systems" with unreserved rancour. Alexander

Dorner, for example, says Panofsky made t:he "confusing" mistake of

Asthetik und Allegemeine Kunstwissenschaft XIII (1918-1919): 259 ff.

Cited in Hauser, p. 148. E. ~oJ'ind, "Kritik der Geistesgeschichte," Das
Symbol Kulturwissenschaft Bibliogra~hie zum Nachleben der Antike I (1934):
vii-ix.

15 Wind, "Zur Systematik der ldinstlerischen Problemp-," Zeitschrift

fUr Asthetik und Al1egemeine Kunstwissenschaft XVIII (1924-1925): 438.'
16
Wilhelm Pinder, Das Problem der Generationen U926). Cited in
Hauser, pp. 244-251.
17
George Kubler, The Shape of Time (New Haven, 1962). See later
discussion in Chapter 5 here.

18 Pinder, quoted in Hauser, pp. 248, 250.

 110

"blending" the methods of art history and art theory in his call for a

"knowledge of the Kunstwollen through.!!. priori deduced Grundbegriffe.,,19

The second group of writers attempted to articulate ways in which

art history could be more "scientific" or, in Panofsk~Tts terms, at least

epistemologically verifiable. Richard Hamann and Karl Mannheim, in essays

20
separated by over a decade, are two notable examples. Hamann claimed

that an analyst has the obligation to correct even written documentary

sources if they seem to conflict with the results of purely empirical

(:visual) information. Mannheim, caught up in contemporary historicist

issues, doubted whether a history of any sort could ever have what one

could call '" scientific fit value, but if one wished to give it some, he

might at least make his investigation conform to two criteria: "'an

explanation of a work must, on the one hand, be free from contradiction

and must fit every perceptible feature of the work in the interpretation;

and on the other • • . , it must be compatible with the historical cir-

cumstances of origin insofar as these can be ascertained from documents

or by other objective methods. 11,21 In Vienna, Julius von Schlosser com-

piled a history and theoretical survey of writings on art, from the

ancient Greeks up to the nineteenth century. Die Kunstliteratur (1924)

19 Alexander Dorner, "Die Erkenntnis des Kunstwollens durch die

Kunstgeschichte," Zeitschrift.fUrAsthetik und_Allgemeine Kunstwissen-
schaft XVI (1921-1922): 21b.

20 Richard Hamann, "Die Methode der Kunstgeschichte," Monatshefte

fUr Kunstwissenschaft IX (1916), trans. in Hauser, pp. 244-245, and Karl
Mannheim, BeitrMge zur TheBrie.der Weltanschauungsinterpretation (1923),
cited in Hauser, p. 243. P. Frankl, likewise, i~ Die Entwicklunsphasen
der neureren Baukunst 0.914), said an analyst has a right" t to criticize
even documentary sources by certain qualitative standards,'" Hauser, p.254.
21 Mannne1m,
.. trans. i n Hauser, p. 243 •
 III

became a frequently consulted bibliographic reference work for a wide

22
variety of scholars. The well-known sociologist Max Weber entered the

arena with several pertinent cotmIlents on the concept of "style." In

his estimation, "style" should be regarded merely as an "ideal limiting

23
concept" against which specific examples can be discussed and judged.

The practice of iconography, even though it lacks an. overt theoretical

position, needs to be mentioned in this cont.ext as well. Entrenched in.

their archival researches for over half a century ("the general upsurge,"

Bialostocki points out, "of historical science in the latter part of the

nineteenth century exercised a powerful influence over the development

of iconographic studies,,24), iconographers signify a reaction against the

purely aesthetic approach to works of art so typical of late nineteenth

century writings. In their attempt to develop a descriptive classifica-

tion of the "subject matter represented" in images, they practiced rigor-

ous objectivity and "scientific exactitude" in their creation of what

seems to have become almost a sub-discipline of art history.25

22
Cited in Kleinbauer, p. 4.
23
Max Weber, "Die 'Objektivitat' sozialwissenschafr.er und sozial
politischer Erkenntnis," Gesammelte AufsHtze zur lvissenschaftslehre (1922),
cited in Hauser, p. 213.
24
Bialostocki, p. 770.
25
Bialostocki provides an extensive listing of iconographic research
from several countries, even going back in some cases to as far as the
seventeenth century. Contemporary German scholarship includes J. Wilpert
as the primary example in Die Malereien der Katakomben Roms U903),Die
rHmischen Mosaiken und Maler;ien der kirchlichen Bauten vom IV, bis-xIII
Jahrhllr,dert 60916), aild I sarcofagi cristiani antichi (1929-1936), but he
also mentions K. KUnstle's Ikonographie der christlichen Kunst (1926-l92~,
J. Sauer's Symbolik des KirchengebHudes und seiner Ausstattung in der
Auffassung des Mittela1ters U902; 1924) and J. Braun's Tracht und
Attribute der Heiligen in der deutschen Kunst U943),p. 772.
 112

Theoretical neo-positivist sentiments culminated, a decade later, in

Sedlmayrts creation of an actual Kunstwissenschaft in Vienna. His "in-

sistence on beginning with the observation and description of primary

data~ works of art; his emphasis on historical facts; and his focus of

analysis on structural composition signal a move away from idealistic

history toward an empirical concern with facts.,,26 But his methodolo-

gical arrows aime0.· at a traditional target. His idealist "second science,"

concerning itself more with. "understanding" and being based on the obser-

vations of the first, strove "to analyze and evaluate the principles of

their structural composition.,,27 This so-called "rigorous scientific

method," it may be recalled, led ultimately to the discovery of some

rather absurd "facts." In his 1948 Verlust der Mitte, Sedlmayr condemned

modern art on the grounds that it lacked a conception of the "di"~ine";

like Spengler before him, Sedlmayr dismissed the works of the Impression-

ists and their followers by characterizing them as works of a mere

.'26
" . Mc Cork e ...1 , "<,.,ense an d Sensib ility: An Epistemological Approach
to the·Philosophy of Art History," p. 37.

27 Kleinbauer, p. 33. Meyer Schapiro points· to the correspondence

of these two "sciences" with positivist and idealist modes of interpre-
tation in his review of Kunstwissenschaft Forschungen, II (1933) in "The
New Viennese School," Art Bulletin XVIII (.1936): 258:
"The distinction made between the merely des·criptive and classifying
nature of the first science and the higher tunderstanding' of the
second is not so much a distinction between the values of observation
and theory, such as agitates some phYSicists and philosophers of
science, but corresponds rather to the distinction made by many German
writers between the natural sciences, which 'describe' or classify
atomistically the inorganic and lower organic worlds, and their own
sciences of the spirit (Geisteswissenschaften) which claim to pene-
trate and 'understand' totalities like art, spirit, human life and
culture. The great works of the latter depend on depth of insight, of
the first, on ingenuity and exactness. Such a distinction, often di-
rected against the plebeian manipulation and matter-of-fact, material-
istic spirit of the best in natural science, puts a premium on wishful
 113

28
"civilization," not the supreme products of a great "culture."

Theorists and their eccentricities aside, other scholars, more ob-

viously concerned with the practical application of speculation, embedded

their theoretical biases in a more traditional notion of research: the

discussion of specific works of art. Periods and styles were still viable

subjects of investigation, but equally important for them was the simul-

taneous impulse to describe and interpret the significance of actual

physical objects. The world of past art, of course, varied according to

whether it was being perceived through a formalist or contextualist lens.

Yet Panofsky more than most--if we juxtapose the principal themes of his

arguments in both the Riegl and wBlfflin essays--would seem to have pre-

pared himself to be sympathetic to the eventual development of both

kinds of art history, which, for the purposes of summary, we will identi-
. 29
fy with the Strukturforschung school on the one hand, and the work of

l-1arburg and Dvorak on the other (although Dvor~k .in many ways better re-

presents a bridge between the two).

The Strukturforschung school, which developed "from the ideas of

intuitiveness aad vague, intangible profundity in the sciences that

concern man."

28 J. P. Rodin, "German Criticism of Modern Art Since the ~-Jar,"

College Art Journal XVII, no. 4 (Summer 1958): 374.

29 One could, of course, affix the label·-"formalist" to a wide

variety of enterprises--for example, at the other end of the spectrum
from structuralist analysis, we could discuss Walter FriedlHnder's stylis-
tic studies of the "anticlassical" style of Mannerism, first published in
1925, but delivered as an inaugural address at' the University of Freiburg
in 1914. See "Die Enstehung des antiklassischen Stiles in der italienis-
chen Malerei um 1520" in Repertorium fUr Kunstwissenschaft, 46 (1925):
49 ff. Cited in Rosand, "Art History and Criticism: The Past as Present,"
p. 436 •.
 114

~..l.ois Riegl" was active in Germany and Austria, especially Vienna, during

the 19209. 30 Its leading exponent, Guido von Kaschnitz-Weinberg, held

many ideas similar to Panrifsky's. He searched, for example, for "funda-

mental categories of structural analysis" which would be capable of coming

t o terms ~. th th e war k 0f .
art as an un1que 1y 1S0
. 1ated statement. '31 By

formulating a system of analytical categories fundamental to existence

(e.g., the connection between empty space and solid objects), and then

by showing how civilizations choose or mediate between these categories

. or der to pro d uce a work

1n 0 f art, 32 Kasc h·
n1tz h ope d t h at h e " would b e

able to deduce from the form of the work • • • the whole range of asser-

tions about being, knowledge and value posited by it.,,33 He specif.ically

applied these ideas to studies of-Egyptian sculpture and Roman architec-

34
ture. By noting in a preliminary description of the interior structure

30
Sheldon Nodelman, in an October 1966 Yale French Studies, provides
an interesting summary of this movement in an article entitled, "Structural
Analysis in Art and Anthropology." All of my quotations are drawn from
this essay.

31 Kaschnitz, like B. Schweitzer (another structuralist, see fn. 14

and also "Strukturforschung in ArchHlogie und Vorgeschichte," Neue
JahrbUcher, 1938), objected to the Ilprevailing terminology and methods of
art history, most especially to those of WBlfflin, and to 'style-criticism'
in general, [because) these are concerned solely with the effect of the
work of art upon the beholder, with the 'impression,' rather than with the
interior structure of the work itself."

32 Cf. this "structural" method to that of Levi-Strauss. Nodelman

says that the methods developed independently, although they share many
fundame~tal precepts--e.g., Kaschnitz notes how a culture apprehends space
through binary oppositions in the same way Levi-Strauss regards how it
apprehends nature. .
33
NodeIinan, p: 100.

34 For the study 0 f Egypt i an scu1 pure,

t see Kunstwissenschafttliche
Forschungen, II (1933) (see Schapiro's review in fn. 27 as well). See also
Mittelmeerische Grundlagen der antiken Kunst (Frankfurt, 1944) and
AusgewHhlte Schriften (Berlin, 1965).
 115

of a work how a certain civilization Itapprehends" space, he was able to

infer what he considered to be crucial data about the mechanism of think-

35
ing at work in that culture. With this move> form became content, and

his essentially positivistic account opened up into wider questions of

meaning: ItThe work of art appears as a complex metaphoric structure, in

which references to a wide range of human experiences (by no means exclu-

cively, or even mainly, those given in acts of immediate sense-perception)

are interwoven both hierarchically and at the same level.,,36

Trained in techniques of visual analysis by Riegl and Wickhoff in

Vienna3~.twQ decades before the development of the ideas of the Struktur-

forschung school, Max Dvo~~k, in his first published work in 1904, at-

tempted to discriminate between the van Eyck brothers' roles in the

creation of the Ghent altarpiece. But in addition to this essential task

of connoisseurship, he also situated the work of the brothers in the

wider context of fifteenth century Netherlandish art and culture, a pro-

ject which Panofsky was to emulate forty-nine years later in Early

Netherlandish Painting (1953).38 Still, Dvo~ak, like Riegl, was a strict

35 For example, through a grid of vertical, horizontal, and depth

directions meeting at right angles, which he applies to a piece of Egyptian
sculpture, he is able to say that it is the vertical and right angles alone
which give the work its quality of authority. The work excludes the "force
of animal energy" to an extreme; it gains its impressiveness from the
"force of gravity which inheres in its masses." From this description, he
concludes, that the "entire function of Egyptian monumental art is to ex-
clude death, to conserve existence at the cost of petrifaction, by a pro-
cess parallel to that of the mUlID1lification of the dead," Nodelman, p. 99.
36
Ibid., p. 97.
37
Bialostocki, p. 774.
38
Kleinbauer, p. 397.
 116

evolutionist. "By placing the art of the van Eycks within a larger con-

text, Dvor~k conceived of a continuous evolutionary development from the

early Renaissance to Impressionism, in which greater naturalism was

achieved, he maintained, due to both ev~r increasing technical skill and

the assimilation of the formal values of Italian Trecento art into

~,
Northern manuscript illumination about 1400.,,39 Dvorak, however, was not

only a student of Riegl's. Inspired by Dilthey's Geistesgeschichte and

idealist history writing in the tradition of Hegel, he came increasingly

40
to stress, during lectures known throughout Europe, the necessity of

sketching a total Weltanschauung for the work or period in question. In

Idealism and Naturalism in Gothic Art (1918), he "interpreted the visual

arts as the expression and spiritual manifestation of a unified totality

41
of thought underlying all aspects·of cultural and other human phenomena,"

and traced thematic analogies or parallels between one aspect of a culture

and another, as Panofsky was to do thirty-three years later (1951) in

Gothic Art and Scholasticism. oJ" however, in only suggesting con-

Dvorak,

nections between an artistic form and the religious and philosophical

context out of which it arose, removed his studies from the conceptual

framework of cause and effect. He saw art, in his words, as only a re-

flection of a '''loJ'eltanschauung . which had set a priori a specific

limitation to each form of imitation of nature.

39_-Ibid ., p •. 397. Salerno, p. 526, says Dvor~k always "tied up the

evolution of art with the evolution of the human spirit" (my italics).
40
Ibid., p. 96.
41
Ibid., p. 95. See also footnote 43.

42 Dvo~ak, Idealism and Naturalism in Gothic Art, reprinted in part

in Kleinbauer, trans. R~ J. Klawiter, pp. 398-412.
 117

But, at heart, Dvo~~k was essen~ially a Viennese scholar who pur-

posefully limited himself to' questions of style and form as Riegl had
43
done. His sole reason for calling upon extrinsic examples was to create

a background against which to view the evolutionary progress of stylistic

OJ,'
forms. In the tradition of the Vienna school (from Riegl to Dvorak to

Strzygowski to the Strukturforschung school and eventually even to

Sedlmayr) which Heckscher has characterized as "the most powerful fortress·

of art historical knowledge of that day,,,44 the "references to meanings

and to the causes of historical change," according to Meyer Schapiro,

. 45'
"are usually marginal or are highly formalistic and abstract." For

Dvo¥ak, a "stylistic analysis and the intensive study of the development

of style were the essential tasks of art history as a science.,,46 Despite

his identification with Kunstgeschichte ~ Geistesgeschichte, he repeated-

ly called for a return to the "'Erforschung des erforschbaren.Tatbestandes

43 Yet Antal notes a concern even with Weltanschauung in Riegl's

late work: "Continuing Riegl, who, in his late phase, regarded his notion
of the art will as. dependent on the outlook of the period in question,
Dvorak, in his latter years, dealt with art history as part of the history
of ideas, of the development of the human spirit," "Remarks in the Method
of Art History, I" Burlington Magazine 91 (1949): 49. But as Salerno
points out, the "Vienna school" always adhered to a science of art based
on visual or formal laws," p. 526. N.B.: J. Strzygowski held the other
chair of art history at Vienna and "tried to establish 'the facts of evo-
lution' by detailed stylistic analysis and comparison of specific works,"
Kleinbauer, p. 23. Ernst Heidrich's criticism of Rieg1:s strict evolu-
tionary principles, in BeitrHge zur Geschichte und Methodologie der Kunst-
wissenschaft, however, as pOinted out by Arnold Hauser, led Dvorak to have
a "reaction" against so "one-sided a view" and to become more interested,
later, in the history of ideas. See Hauser, p. 221 and earlier fn. 12.
44
Wm. S. Heckscher, "The Genesis of Iconology," p. 247.
45 M. Schapiro, "The New Viennese School," p. 258.
46
Reckscher, p. 247.
 118

der Kunstgeschichte'" (an investigation of the investigatable "facts"

of art history) and "warned" of the dangers of "cultural-historical tres-

47
passing perpetrated by some of his unnamed colleagues."

"Naming" one of these colleagues is an easy task. Aby Warburg was

a cultural trespasser of the first order. In the conclusion to his lec-

ture given before the Tenth International Congress of Art History in Rome

in October, 19l2--the "month," according to Heckscher, in which "icono-

48
logy was born" --Warburg spoke of his studies of cosmology in the zodi-

acal representations of the S~hifanoia palace as "tan iconological analysis

which does not allow itself to be hemmed in by the restrictions of border

police.,,,49 He crossed borders with impunity, trespassing on any terri-

tory, from family diaries to astrological symbolism to anthropological

field reports, which could help in his explication of the "historical

dialectic,,50 of ancient, medieval and Renaissance' images.

The life, work, and imagination of Warburg has been comprehensively

47
Ibid.: p. 247.
48
Ibid., p. 240. The word "iconology, II of course, has a long and
impressive lineage beginning with Cesare Ripa's Iconologia of 1593, before
it was appropriated by Warburg. G. J. Hoogewerff, "L'iconolgie et son
importance pour l'etude systematique de l'art chretien, RACr VIII (1931):
53-82, gave the term a more precise definition: "'After the systematic
examination of the development of themes has been accomplished (icono-
graphy], iconology then poses the question of their interpretation. Con-
cerned more with the continuity than with the material of a work of art,
it seeks to understand the symbolic, dogmatic, or mystical sense (even
i f hidden) in figural forms, '" see Bialostocki, p. 774.
49
Heckscher, p. 246.
50
K. W. Forster, "Aby Warburg's Historyuf Art: Collective Memory
and the Social Mediation of Images," Daedalus No.1 (Winter 1976j: 169.
 119

treated in Sir Ernst Gombrich's biography.5l Certainly his most enduring

legacy to scholarship is his private Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek

Warburg, with its eccentric and diverse collection of books. An idio-

syncratic library, still reflecting in London today the myriad facets of

Warburg's interests in Hamburg seventy years ago, it was conceived as

early as 1900 and assembled with family financial assistance ove~ the next
52
fifteen years. Originally inspired by his teacher Lamprecht's Universal-

geschichte,53 Warburg grouped his expanding holdings according to what

Saxl remembers as the "law of the good neighbour": "The overriding idea

was that the books together--each containing its larger or smaller Qit of

information and being supplemented by its neighbours--should by their

titles guide the student to perceive t~e essential forces of the human

mind and its history.,,54 And certainly there was much to organize. With

his " form of collecting that bordered on an obsession,

. ,,55 Warburg was ever

on the· lookout for new material. Books on theology were placed next to

those with relevant art historical information; anthropological studies

stood side by side with family records and alchemical handbooks. Where

51 E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography. Gombrich

traces, in particular, the role of Warburg's teachers and theoretical pre-
decessors from Lessing through Lamprecht and discusses as well his in-
debtedness to late nineteenth century psychological theories, in parti-
cular the "associationism" of Rerbart.
52
Forster, p. 170.
53 Gombrich, p. 204: In "Lamprecht's terminology," Universalgeschi-
chte "meant history without a one-sided political bias." See Lamprecht's
model for his library, Das Kgl. SHchsische rnst. fUr Kultur--und Univer-
salgeschichte bei der Univ·. Leipzig (1909),

54 Fritz Saxl, "The History of Warburg's Library (1886-1944),"

emended by Gombrich, after being unfinished in 1943, p. 327.
55
Forster, p. 170.
 120

Warburg perceived a similarity, the catalogue listings followed suit.

He understood both his own role as an historian and his library's place

in human studies, in Gombrich's memorable characterization, to be one

of a "'seismograph' responding to the tremors of distant earthquakes, or

the antenna picking up the waves from distant cultures. His equipment,

his liqrary, is a receiving station, set up to register these influences

56
and in so doing keep them under control."

As exceptional as the personal project of the library looks in

retrospect, Peter Gay reminds us in an essay on the Weimar Republic, the

founding of Institutes--for example, the Psychoanalytische Institut in

Berlin, the Deutsche Hochschule fUr Politik, the Institut fUr Sozia1-
57 .
forschung in Frankfurt --and the pursuit of humanistic knowledge in

general in the face of the growing military state was not so unusual for

the time. Heckscher similarly has become "convinced that it is not just

sensible but absolutely necessary to speak of the achievements made at

this time in fields as divergent from one another, and from art history,

as those of Einstein's Theory, Freud's Method of Psychoanalysis, of a

number of technical and social advances, of the Motion Pictures and of

.
Mot10n Ph otograp h y an,
d 1ast, b ut aot 1east, 0 f t h e f ··
19urat1ve arts. ,,58

Generated out of a paradoxical cultural situation--Gay refers to it as

the lttwo Germanies: the Germany of military swagger, abject submission

to authority, aggressive foreign adventure, obsessive preoccupation with

56
Gombrich, p. 254.
57
Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York,
1968), pp. 30-34.
58
Heckscher, p. 240.
 121

form, and the Germany of lyrical poetry, humanist philosophy, and pacific

cosmopolitanism,,59_-the intellectual energy expended in these projects

signifies that the "Weimar style was older than the Weimar Republic,,60

which was finally declared at the end of Horld Har I on November 9, 1918.
61
Although Warburg's published work is slight and, therefore, not
•
nearly so concrete an example as is his library of his intellectual sig-

nificance, his influence on art historical studies was considerable,

having "opened" in Gombrich's evaluation, "a new era in the study of

pictorial traditions.,,62 Most who write on the complexity of the

Warburgian method first characterize his work by what it is not. Gombrich,

for example, says those who are only acquainted with the name of Warburg

and his work with "symbols'· tend to identify his work with iconography.

Calling it a "travesty" to connect Warburg with this "branch" of art

history, Gombrich says Warburg only relied on iconographic research, the

"field" most of his colleagues were "cultivating" at the turn of the

century, as a "preliminary first step," a "marginal" activity which aided

him in his identification of the symbols which were so central to his

63
iconological analysis.

It is similarly erroneous to connect him with any sort of stylistic

analysis or notions of Geistesgeshichte. Although some commentators

59
Gay, p. 12.
60
Ib id., P • 15.
61
Forster, p. 169, points out that it "fits easily into 438 pages
of the Italian edition, index and all"-see A. Warburg, La rinascita del
paganesimo antico? ed. Gertrud Bing, Florence (1966).
62
Gombrich, p. 309.
63
Gombrich, pp. 144, 312. See earlier fn. 25 for iconography.
 122

(such as Kleinbauer
64
) frequently compare the ideas of Dvo~~k and Warburg

because both men were concerned with analogies between the visual arts

and other expressions of thought, Heckscher believes the "discrepancy"

to be extensive and speaks of the "widening grap" ~ic] between the two
" camps I t ·~n German art h'~story. 65 Instead of concentrating on styles or

periods in the manner of the Vienna school, Warburg saw individuals

. 66
"involved in situations of choice and conflict." In place of generali-

ties, he strove to illuminate the concrete and the specific. Gombrich,

reiterating the evaluation of Wind thirty-five years earlier, character-

izes Warburg's polemical position this way:

In rejecting or rather ignoring, the stylistic approach to the

history of art he bypassed the main preoccupation of theoretical
art history which ste1IDlled ultimately from ~Vinckelmann and Hegel,
the problem of a uniform style being seen as an expression of an
"age." What all these systems had in connnon was the conception
of the Zeitgeist expressing itself in parallel manifestations,
art and Weltanschauung being the ones most frequently discussed
in conjunction. 57 .

Having discussed what Warburg's method was unlike, we must now turn

to the complex question of exactly what it was. Many have characterized

it loosely as a Kulturwissenschaft (as opposed to a.Kunstwissenschaft),

born out of an lI anti-art for art's sake,,68 conviction, and "rescuing,"

64
Kleinbauer, p. 29.
65
Heckscher, p. 247.
66
Gombrich, p. 314.
67
Gombrich, p. 313. See also Wind, Bibliographie zum Nachleben
der Antike and earlier fn. 14.
68
F. Antal, p. 50.
 123

in the words of his associate Gertrud Bing, '!'the work of art from the

isolation with which it was threatened. ",69 In numerous lectures and

a few essays on the artistic taste of Florentine patrons during the life

of Lorenzo de Medici, Warburg found traceable and specific threads that

connect works of art to the society of which they were a part: for

example, the relationship between artists and their patrons, the practical

purposes for which objects were designed, and their connections with
70
the social milieu out of which theY,arose. Ever-sensitive to an
7l
artist's "choice of images,n Warburg conceived of these images from

the past as important for revealing the trpsychological fabric,,72 of their

period. In K. li. Forster's summary:

Art historical analysis, as Warburg envisaged it, would

restore to the frozen and isolated images of the past the
dynamics of the very process that generated them. • • . The
driving question of why a work of art resulted in a particular
form and quality demanded an answer. Memory, as the abstract
sum total of human history, ga~e an ever-changing response to
different situations. 73

But certainly Warburg did not come to these studies in the guise of an

antiquarian. Considering it almost a matter of life and death, he was

concerned with works of art as "human documents,,74 which can tell us,

69
G. Bing, Introd. to Rinascita, see fn. 61, quoted in Antal, p. 50.
70 Ibid.
71
Gombrich, p. 320.
72
Ibid., p. 127.
73
Forster, pp. 172, 173.
74
Gombrich, p. 127. Warburg considered this to be "scientific":
"The. way man yields to impulse in art and in life must somehow be the
'scientific' key to the images of his imagination and, therefore, to those
of his art."
 124

historically, about the human psyche in all its contradictory and po-

tentially threatening aspects.

Contradiction is the key word here. Warburg was obsessed, at the

same time as Freud, with the self-contradictory nature of the human mind.

Thinking the concept of "polarities" to be his own invention till he

75 Warburg regarded
found it in Goethe (and in Nietzsche and Freud),

Italian Renaissance art with the eye of one who wishes to uncover psycho-

analytic "symptoms." More often than not, his work revolved around the

discovery of revealing polarities. He studied the appropriation of an-

tique images in Lorenzo's Florence, in particular, because this cultural

situation exposed the eternal clash of forces between the "new" and the

"01d,,,76 as well as the "Apollonian" and "Dionysian ft aspects of man. One

series of examples deals with Leonardo as the genius who was able to

bring into harmony contradictory impulses which he confronted:

In a period when Italian art was already threatened with the danger,
on the one hand of falling victim to sentimental mannerism through
an excessive leaning towards calm states of the soul, and on the
other hand of being driven by a preference for excessive movement
towards an ornamental mannerism of ragged outlines, Leonardo did not
allow himself to be deflectec or deterred and found a new pictorial
manner for the rendering of psychological states.. 77

75
Ibid., p. 184.
76
Ibid., p. 168.
77
Ibid., p. 100:.
"In einer Zeit, wo die italienische Kunstentwicklung schon vor der
Gefahr stand, durch dell zu grossen Sinn fHr die' ruhigen ZustHnde der
Seele clem sentimentalen Manierismus einerseits und anderseits (durch
str.: dem barocken) durch Vorliebe fUr Husserliche Ubergrosse
Beweglichkeit dem ornamentalen Manierismus der zerflatternden Linie
zugetreben zu werden, findet er unbekUmmert fUr die Darstellung des
seelich bewegten Menschen eine neue Vortragsweise."
 125

Another lecture analyzed stylistic contradictions in Ghirlandaio's Santa

Maria Novella frescoes, dealing specifically with the anomalous Nympha

rushing in from the right in the Birth of St. John, who symbolizes, to

Warburg's mind, "the eruption of primitive emotion through the crust of

Christian self-control and bourgeois idealism.,,78

Perhaps the most famous of these "conflicting examples" and the one

that most clearly dem0nstrates how Warburg regarded tradition is his

discussion of DUrer's Melencolia. DUrer, like Leonardo, was a "genius"

who sublimated the "dangerous impulses of the past" and brought them under

control by "harnessing them to the creation of serenity and beauty." The

result is a "humanization,t of the dark fear of Saturn, accomplished by

turning his image into a representation of "deep thought" or "medita-

tion,,:79

The pose of his "Melencolia" reminds Warburg of the type of

recumbent classical river-god which is represented in astrological
imagery by the constellation of Eridanus. Nevertheless, this trans-
formation still retains the traces of its former enslavement by
Hellenistic-Arabic demonology.
The cosmic conflict is reflected as a process in the soul of
man himself. The menacing demons have vanished, the dark gloom of
Saturn has been spiritualized in the human picture of medita-
tion. • . • We are witnessing a chapter in modern man's struggle
for intellectual and religious emancipation. But what we see is
only the beginning of the struggle, not its victorious consummation.
Just as Luther is still filled with the fear of the cosmic monstra
and portents • . . so Melencolia, too, does not yet feel free from
the fear of the ancient demons. 80

The struggles which War burg obsessively described in his scholarship

78
Ibid. , p. 125.
79
Ibid. , p. 249.
80
Ibid. , p. 213.
 126

between the forces of truth and beauty and those of evil and ignorance

that try to vanquish them, had obvious associations with problems in his

own lift!. Troubled all his life by psycI-dcal afflictions, he was brought

to a breaking point by World War I. As the fighting began, Warburg de-

voted all of his considerable energies to monitoring the political and

military struggles of the hour. With his passion for collecting, he

gathered scores of newspaper clippings daily, according to his student

c. G. Heise,8l in an effort to comprehend the enormity of the events.

"Like Freud, It Gombrich has said, Warburg ~'was not an optimist. He was

not sure that reason would ever win a permanent victory over unreason.

But he conce~ved it as his task--sometimes perhaps nHively overrating his

own resources--to assist the struggle for enlightenment precisely because

he knew the strength of the opjosing camp.,,82 Suffering nervous break-

downs repeatedly, and in and outof asylums throughout his career, Warburg
83
was finally confined, in 1918, to a closed ward in a mental institution.

Fortunately, his institute did not suffer in Warburg's absence.

Fritz Saxl, his assistant, took charge, and in consultation with the

Warburg family, affiliated the private library with the newly-founded

University of Hamburg (l9l9).84 Saxl organized a well-received lecture

series, inviting experts from a variety of fields, and published many of

85
the talks as monographs. As a scholar, he continued the Warburg

81 Anecdote found in Forster, p. 174.

82
Gombrich, p. 321.
83
Ibid., p. 215.
84
David Farrer, The Warburgs: The Story of a Family (New York,
1975), p. 129.

85 Gombrich, p. 228.
 127

investigation of Kulturwissenschaft, concentrating on collecting books

for the library ~"hich suggested or explicated links between ancient and

Renaissance imagery. Temperamentally unlike Warburg, however, Saxl

studied these images with 'tthe detached sympathy of the intellectual

historian who looks with understanding and compassion at astrology as

fulfilling the religious needs of the uneducated.,,86 He also chose a

very able staff to assist him, among whom the most notable were Gertrud

Bing, who would aid Warburg for many years upon his return in 1924, and
87
Erwj.n Panofsky.

Panofsky had recently been appointed as a Privatdozent at the

University of Hamburg and visited the Warburg library shortly after his

arrival, around the time he was thinking about and writing the essay on

RiegI. He had met~.]arburg as early as 1912, after the famous "iconology"

88
lecture at the Congress in Rome, but had since gone his own way, writ-

ing his dissertation on DUrer's theory of art. Karl Giehlow, a Viennese

art historian, never completed his own work on DUrerts,Melencolia, and

his editors had turned to Warburg before his illness with the invitation

to finish it. Saxl, then in place of Warburg, asked Panofsky to aid him
.
~n t h.~s proJect.
. 89 According to Gombrich, they fulfilled this assignment

together according to Warburg's model:

86
F. Saxl, A Heritage of Images: A Selection of Lectures by F. Saxl,
ed. Hugh Honour and John Fleming; iutrod. E. Gombrich (1957; London, 1970),
p. 11, remark by Gombrich.
87
Gombrich, p. 228.

88 See earlier fn. 44.

89
Gombrich, pp. 316, 317. See also Saxl, "Die Bibliothek Warburg
und ihr Ziel," VortrHge der BibI. Harburg I (1921-1922) •
 128

What dis tinguishes their monograph [DUrer' s '~1elencolia I':

Eine uellen-und t eschichtliche Untersuchun , 1923, Studien
der Bibl. Warburg, II from earlier attempts at iconographic inter-
pretations of the print is precisely the attention devoted to the
traditions of certain images, the rendering of Geometry, the render-
ing of the children of Saturn, and the illustrations of the
melancholic complexion. In showing how DUrer contended with those
traditions to express a new conception of that mental state, the
authors demonstrated a new method in action. 90

Panofsky was to continue this methodology, which studies the history of a

theme and its transformations through time for what they can reveal about

the outlook of a particular age or a particular artist, in his later

9l
monograph on Hercules am Scheidewege. In 1930, nine years before his

well-known exposition of the "iconological method" in Studies in Iconology,

Panofsky was already refining Warburg's ideas by reference to categories

of content:

IIThere are doubtless historical epochs . . . which limited themselves

to the illustrations of the primary level of meaning and in which,
therefore, an exegetic interpretation of its meaning would be neither
necessary nor apt. . • . There are likewise, however, artistic
periods which delved more or less deeply into the realm of secondary
levels of meaning. In the interpretation of evidence from these
latter periods, it would constitute an unhistorical blurring of cate-
gories • . . and it would amount to unhistorical arbitrariness to
presume to differentiate between the essential and nonessential con-
tent on the basis of a modern preconception. What we sense to be the
difference between essential and nonessential content is generally
only the difference between those representational motifs which
fortuitously still appear generally comprehensible to us, and those
which are only comprehensible through the aid of texts. Under no
circumstances have we the right to pass over those sources which, to
us only, appear buried: on the contrary, it is our duty to expose
them as fully as possible.,,92

90
Gombrich, p. 317.
91
Hercules am Scheidewege und andere antike Bildstoffe in der
neueren Kunst, 1930.
92
Bialostocki, p. 775.
 129

Panofsky was not the only University of Hamburg scholar to be

captivated by the Warburg method and the Warburg library. Ernst Cassirer,

a chaired professor of philosophy at the University of Hamburg and

Panofsky's senior by eighteen years, came to the institute in 1920 to

have a look around. Here are Saxl's recollections of that day:

Being in charge of the library, I showed Cassirer around. He was

a gracious visitor, who listened attentively as I explained to him
Warburg's intentions in placing books on philosophy next to books
on astrology, magic, and folklore, and in linking the sections on
art with those on literature, religion, and philosophy. The study
of philosophy was for War burg insep~rable from that of the so-called
primitive mind: neither could be isolated from the study of imagery
in religion, literature, and art. These ideas had found expression
in the unorthodox a~rangement of the books on the shelves.
Cassirer understood at once. Yet, when he was ready to leave,
he said, in the kind and clear manner so typical of him: IIThis
library is dangerous. I shall either have to avoid it altogether or
imprison myself here for years. The philosophical problems involved
are close to my own. but the concrete historical material which
Warburg has collected is overwhelming." Thus he left me bewildered.
In one hour this man had understood more of the essential ideas em-
bodied in that library than anybody I had met b~fore.93

Later Cassirer "became our most assiduous reader. And the first book

evel: published by the Institute was from Cassirer's pen lt94 (Die Begriffs-

form im mythischen Denken). Cassirer acknowledged his sympathies with

Warburg publicly during the 1920s by dedicating his most important work,
95
the three volumes of Symbolischen Formen, to the ailing scholar.

Panofsky, having failed to be satisfied completely, as we have seen,

by any existing theory of art for several reasons--either because the

93 Fritz Saxl, "Ernst Cassirer," The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer,

ed. P. A. Schilpp (1949; New Haven, 1973), pp. 47-49 ..
94
Ibid., p. 49.
9-5
Gay·, p. 38.
 130

theorists lacked an epistemological point of view, or were too "psycho-

logical" or "stylistic" in their accounts, or else blindly ignored the

intellectual and cultural aspects of works of art--was, he later acknowl-

edged, 96 ready to tryout new and imaginative ways of thinking in his

study of past works of art. During the early 1920s, it was only natural

for him to read and listen with great expectations to the exciting and

philosophically cogent work of his senior colleague, Ernst Cassirer. It

is to Cassirer's work that we now must turn.

96'Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, p. 8.

 V. Panofsky and Cassirer

For it is the same thing that can be thought and can be.

Pannenides

What we call nature . • . is a poem hidden behind a wonderful

secret writing; if we could decipher the puzzle, we should
recognize in it the odyssey of the human spirit, which in
astonishing delusion flees from itself while seeking itself.

Cassirer

In a lecture delivered to Columbia's department of philosophy in

April 1925, the respected art historian and philosopher, Edgar !'1ind,

characterized the state of contemporary philosophical thought in Germany

for his American audience by referring to the influential work of the

. 1
neo-Kant~ans. The task of the neo-Kantians, according to Herman Cohen,

the founder of the "Marburger Schu1e," was to do for Kant what Kant him-

self had remarked was necessary to do for Plato: to "understand him

better than he understood himse1f.,,2 The basic supposition of both The

1 Edgar Wind, "Contemporary German Philosophy," in The Journal of

Philosophy XXII, no. 13 (August 27, 1925): 477-493 and XXII, no. 19 (Sept.
10, 1925): 516-530. Wind characterizes the neo-Kantians by their "ten-
dency to eliminate the metaphysical elements in Kant and to develop the
methodical parts of his philosophy," p. 487.

2 H. Cohen, "Preface" to first edition of Logik der reinen Erkenntnis,

1902, pp. xi, xiii. Cited by Seymour W. Itzkoff in Ernst Cassirer:
Scientific Knowledge and the Concept of Man (Notre Dame, 1971.), p. 28 •.
Cf. Arthur Buchenau, "Zur methodischen Grund1egung der Cohenschen Asthetik"
in Zeitschrift fUr Xsthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft VIII (1913):

131
 132

Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Thp. Critique of Judgement (1790)

that philosophers must study the knowing before they can ever claim (if

indeed they ever can) a knowledge of something beyond it called reality

was essentially unaltered by the neo-Kantians. The principal figure

Wind chose as embodying the central concerns of this late nineteenth!

3
early twentieth century school of thought was Ernst Cassirer.

In the Problem of Knowledge, Cassirer substantiates Kant's own

assessment of his project as creating a "Copernican revolution" in

philosophy in general and attributes its influence in particular to one

· f ormat~ve
spec if ~c . .
not~cn:
4

Kant does not stand merely in a position of dependence on the

factual stuff of knowledge, the material offered by the various
sciences. Kant's basic conviction and presupposition consists
rather of this, that there is a universal and essential form of
knowledge and that philosophy is calJ.ed upon and qualified to
discover this form and establish it with certainty. The critique
of reason achieves this by reflective thought upon the function
of knowledge instead of upon its contents. • • • What had formerly
been accepted as the real basis for truth is now recognized as
questionable and attacked with critical arguments. 5

615-623. See Kant's full quotation in Cassirer's Essay on Man (1944;

New Haven, 1962). Essay ~~ is a considerably condensed English trans-
lation of The PhilosophY of Symbolic Forms. Feeling as did Lessing that
"'a big book is a big evilj'''Cassirer made a fresh start here and con-
centrated only on The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms "points. • • of
special philosophical importance," p~ vii.

3 The school was "founded" as early as 1870 by R. Cohen, who believed

that "only by returning to Kant, could philosophy regain the precision of
methods which it had lost during the romantic epoch," Wind, p. 479.

4 Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy) Science and History

since Hegel (1941; New Haven, 1950), p. 2 and Cassirer, Language and Myth
(1923; New York, 1946), p. 8. Cf. Hendel's summary of this revolution in
his "Introduction" to Cassirer's, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923-
29; New Haven, 1955), pp. 5-6, 9-10. Also see o. B. Hardison, The Quest
for the Imagination (Cleveland, 1971), p. vii and Itzkoff, p. 25.
5
Problem of Knowledge, pp. 14 & 2.
The conservation appellation, "neo-Kantian," however, belies the nature

of Cassirer's originality and deprives his work of much of its actual

impact. Despite his fundamental commitment to Kant, Cassirer had, by

1925, according to Wind, entered into a completely new era of thought:

No matter whether religion, mythos, or language is concerned, it

appears to him as a universal that in the search for definite
determinants, the idea of independently existing things or quali-
ties more and more vanishes before the primacy of the methods of
determination; until, finally, all that is thought, said or believed,
all the laws of science, all the messages of religion, all the
expressions of language, appear to be only symbols created by the
mind in producing a world of understanding. 6

In the end, Cassirer's program created a world of experience considerably

less stable than Kant's. He relinquished all hope of comprehending the

efficacy of the thing itself (Ding-~-sich) out there in the world--as

Kant had always implied would be impossible (huma~ knowledge is re-

stricted by the "scope" of our "sensible perceptions"; apart from ex-

perience the "categories are empty," according to Kant)7_-and looked in:'

stead oIlly into concepts of interpretation, concepts which change ac-

"
cord ~ng to t h e system 0f " "8
~nterpretat~on. Kant had based his modes of

constructive thinking on Newtonian physics and declared that the inter-

pretation of the empirical world was directed by a limited number of con-

9
cepts. Cassirer found this limitation to a specific number of categories

-6
Wind, p. 486
7
I. M. Boche~ski, Contemporary European Philosophy: Philosophies of
Matter, The Idea. Life, Essence, Existence and Being, p. 4.
8
Hendel. passim.
9
See Wind, p. 483 and Ingrid Stadler, "Perception and Perfection
in Kant's Aesthetics," in Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R.
P. Wolff (1967; London, 1968), pp. 353-354.
 134

too restrictive and, in response, scanned far more constructs in his

panorama of experien~e--language, myth, art, religion, mathematics,

history, science, etc.

Cassirerts fascination with Kant began during his undergraduate

olO
e ducatl.on. Having become interested in the eighteenth century idealist

during a seminar given at the University of Berlin by Georg Simmel, in

1896 Cassirer journeyed to the University of Marburg, "one of the most

renowned and hated schools in Germanyltll in order to continue his study

of Kant under the expert directio~ of Herman Cohen. Cohen's primary aim

as a scholar, says Cassirer's friend and biographer, Dmitri Gawronsky,

was to purify Kant's philosophy of the "contradictions" with which it

was rife and to find a productive way of concentrating anew on his funda-

mental precepts.
12 In the central chapter, "The Transcendental Deduction

of the Pure Concept of Reason" of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had

evaluated the power of the intellect and

• • • the part it played in the cognition of the external world.

The result Kant reached was the following: the human intellect not
only classifies and combines our sensations and perceptions, but
does much more besides; it forms them from the outset and makes
them possible, so that even the simplest sensation exists in the
human mind owing to the analytical and synthetical power of the human

10 Dmitri Gawronsky, "Cassirer: 'His LifE:a.nd His Work" in The .

Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (1949; La Salle,
Ill., 1973), pp. 5-6. Henceforth referred to as Schilpp.
11 Gawronsky, p. 15. On page 10, Gawronsky suggests one of the pos-
sible reasons for this hatred: " • • • Kant decisively broke with the
n~ive and shallow belief of thp German Enlightenment in the miraculous
power of the intellect, with its tendency to solve with the help of trite
and schematic reasonings all mysteries of the cosmos; he put the greatest
stress upon the necessity of clear insight into the basic limitations
which characterize the creative work of human reason."
12 IbOd
l. ., p. 9 •
 135

13
intellect which carries in itself visible marks of this power . . .

Having discerned that the meaning and "coherence" of human experience is

grounded upon "premises" which are in no way "derived from experience

itself," Kant concluded that the "order of the objects of knowledge was

a product of the activity of the mind.,,14

Cassirer, in "conforming to the Marburg pattern," stretched his

conception of the premises beyond the limits presented in Kant. The

"objects of experience" to which Kant had adhered, considering them sac-

rosanct, are forsaken in Cassirer's mind as objects in themselves, and

function, instead, as mere "appearances,,15 only. Trained in neo-Kantian

methods by Cohen, Cassirer divested the object existing in the external

world of its substantiality and thereby eliminated the restrictive notion

of the Ding-!!!.-sich.

Like Kant's, Cassirer's thought as a serious student began with the

.
negat~ve conc l '
us~ons 0f s k ept~c~sm.
.. 16 The belief that "things" have an

essential nature, a knowledge of which increases one's knowledge of the

world, has traditionally been the object of the skeptic's dispute. The

challenge to that assumption had culminated, historically, in the work

of Hume, who saw that even cause and effect relationships were imposed

by the perceiving mind rather than embodied in the objects perceived.

In the work of Hume, which Kant said in his Preface to the Prolegomena

13 Ibid.

14 Wind, p. 481.

15 Helmut Kuhn, "Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Culture," in Schilpp,

p. 553.

16 Problem of Knowledge, p. 2.
 136

(1783) "'roused him from his dogmatic slumbers, It, "all that we could

demonstrate as being ultimately real was the reception of sensations.

The creation of knowledge becomes something other than the partaking of

ultimate rea1ity.,,17

Cassirer completed his doctoral dissertation on Leibniz in two years

18
at Marburg. Seeking a teaching post as a Privatdozent, he returned to

Berlin and presented a controversial lecture on Kant. "Time and again

Cassirer tried to explain the true meaning of the Kantian criticism, that

human reason creates our knowledge of things, but not the things them-

selves; yet without avail." Responses to his ideas were predictably

demonstrative and incomprehending: "'You deny the existence of real

things surrounding us,,1t said the empiricist philosopher Riehl. "'Look

at that oven there in the corner: to me it is a real thing, which gives

us heat and can burn our skin; but to you it is just a mental image, a

fiction. ,II Only Wilhelm Di1they, an aged scholar by this time, is re-'

ported to have supported the young scho1ar t s candidacy with the decisive

statement (for the group), "'I would not like to be a man of whom pos-

terity will say that he rejected Cassirer. ",19

At Berlin, Cassirer read widely, particularly in linguistic research

and mathematical theory. To his mind, Heinrich Hertz's Die Prinzipien

der Mechanik (1894) posed a "new ideal of knowledge" by discrediting the

"n~Hve ~ theory of knowledge. I! In his own words, "the fundamental

17
Itzkoff, p. 22.
18
"Leibniz System in seinen wissenschaft1ichen Grundlagen,"
Problem of Knowledge, viii. See his more recent discussion on Leibniz on
p. 14-15. Cf. Itzkoff, p. 10.
19
Gawronsky, p. 17.
 137

concepts of each science, the instruments with which it propounds its

questions and formulates its solutions, are regarded jj,y Hertz] no

longer as passive images of something given but as symbols created by

the intellect itself.,,20 Cassirer's concern with the role of symbols in

scientific thinking convinced him that all thought is inextricably

bound to specifiable modes of ex~ression-. In repeatedly asking himself,

according to his most famous student, Susanne Langer, '~y what process
21
and what means does the human spirit construct its physical world?,"

he was led to the speculation that all the "forms of expression" which

determine how and what we think can aptly be regarded as "symbolic forms."

From there, it was only a short but significant theoretical step to the

central problem which would occupy him for the rest of his life: "the

diversity of symbolic forms and their interrelation in the edifice of

human culture.,,22·

All of Cassirer's early works, which lead up to his magnum opus,

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923-29), testify to this preoccupation,

inherited from his neo-Kantian teachers, for affirming how the "philo-

sophical understanding [Pf anyone symbolic fo~ begins with the insight

that is does not move in a purely invented or made-up world but has its

own mode of necessity and therefore, in accordance with the idealist

concept of the object, its own mode of reality. ,,23 Beginni~g with the

20 Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. I, Language, p. 75. Hence-

forth referred to as Lang~age.
21
Susanne K. Langer, "On Cassirer's Theory of Language and Myth"
in Schilpp, p. 385.
22
Ibid., p. 387.
23
Fritz Kaufmann, "Cassirer, neo-Kantianism, and Phenomenology"
in Schilpp, p. 834.
 138

first two volumes of ~ Erkenntnisproblem (~906 and 1908)24 and Substanz-

begriff und Funktionsbegriff (1910) on through his 1916-1918 Kants Leben

und Lehre (one chapter of which we will discuss in detail with reference

to Panofsky's work) and his 1921 interpretation of both Einsteinian

physics (Zur Einsteinschen RelativitHtstheorie) and nineteenth century

poetry (Idee und Gestalt), as well as his early publications under the

auspices of Saxl and the Warburg Institut ("Die Begriffsform im Mythi-

schen Denken," 1922 and "Der Begriff der Symbolischen Form im Aufbau der

Geisteswissenschaften," 1923),25 Cassirer investigated the "conditions

of possibility"--both historical and epistemological--which exist for

the realization of various branches of knowledge.

The notion of a full-fledged philosophy of symbolic forms incongru-

ously appeared to Cassirer in a vision on a streetcar one evening in 1917.

Suddenly the solitary inhibiting notion of cognition which the neo-

Kantians had derived from Kant became apparent to him: "It is not true

that only the human reason opens the door which leads to the understand-

ing of reality, it is rather the whole of the human mind, with all its

functions and impulses, all its potencies of imagination, feeling, voli-

tion, and logical thinking which builds the bridge between man's soul and

reality, which determines and moulds our conception of reality.,,26 The

24
Gawronsky, p. 14. In 1923 he added a third volume on post-Kantian
phenomenology, and in 1941 he finished the fourth, now published as The
Problem of Knowledge.

25 Hendel in his Introduction to The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,

Vol. II, Mythical Thinking, pp. ix-x. Henceforth referred to as Myth.
For Cassirer's own assessment of his indebtedness to the Warburg Library
and its scholars, see his "Preface" to Myth, p. xviii. Consult the bib-
liography for further information about these works.
26
Gawronsky, p. 25. Kaufmann, however, on p. 834 in his article,
 139

"constitutive character 0:: symbolic renderings'! in a variety of f:i.elds--

art, language, myth, religion, science, history--demanded philosophical

. "
~nvest~gat~on:
27

. Philosophical thought confronts all these directions--not just

in order to follow each one of them separately or to survey them
as a whole, but under the assumption that it must be possible to
relate them. • • • With all their inner diversity, the various
products of culture--language, scientific knowledge, myth, art,
religion--become parts of a single great problem-complex: they
become multiple efforts, all directed toward the one goal of trans-
forming the passive world of mere impressions, in which the spirit
seems at first imprisoned, into a world that is pure expression of
the human spirit. 28

By 1940 when he wrote his fourth and final volume of Die Erkenntnis-

problem, Cassirer's faith in the ability of philosophy to synthesize

and evaluate the efficacy of the various symbolic systems had waned.

But his recognition of the need for a humanistic survey of man's symbol-

izing activity, in the midst of one of the gravest periods of European

civilization, endured:

The era of the great constructive programs, in which philosophy

might hope to systematize and organize all knowledge, is past and

'N eo-Kant ianism, " contradicts Gawronsky by saying that another Marburg
scholar also had this idea:
Natorp in Allgemeine Psychologie attempts a "'description of the for-
mations of consciousness . • • which must not be restricted to the
pure forms of knowledge, volition, and art, and furthermore, to the
pure foundations of religious consciousness, but may be extended to
the • • • imperfect objectifications of opinion, belief, and imagina-
tion--regardless of, and unlimited by, their inner relation to truth
and the realm of laws. . , • Even the most irresponsible opinion, the
darkest superstition, the most boundless imagination make use of the
categories of objective knowledge; they are still ways of objectifi-
cation, however poor the means and impure the performance of this
process mc:.y prove to be.'"
27
Langer, p. 387.
28
Cassirer, Language, pp. 80-81.
 140

gone. But the demand for synthesis and synopsis, for survey and
comprehensive view, continues as before, and only by this sort
of systematic review can a true historical understanding of the
individual developments of knowledge be obtained. 29

Throughout his many and varied writings, Cassirer's entire philo-

sophical "system" is grounded in the conviction that there must be a

"radical distinction" drawn between man and beast, and that this dis-

tinction can be identified by studying the physical manifestations of

the exclusively human power to symbolize. 30 He had always presupposed

3l
that the nature of man is defined in his work. All the variety of

human cultural manifestations function as a kind of symbolic language

through which men 'and women disclose meanings to each other at the same

time as they try to impose order on the chaos of experience:

Man cannot escape his own achievement. • . • No longer in a

merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe.
Language, myth, art and religion are parts of !:his uni'Terse.
They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the
tangled web of human experience. • • • No longer can man con-
front reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face
to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as
man's symbolic activity increases. 32

His concern with the variety of these symbols--taken not as "indications"

but as tlorgans c·f. reality" animated his long scholarly career, both in

Germany and the United States, a career devoted to proving that no

"reality" as such can be meaningfully understood " • • • except under the

29
Problem of Knowledge, p. 19.
30
Walter F. Eggers, "From Language to the Art of Language: Cassirer's
Aesthetic" in The Quest for the Imagination, p. 91-
31
Cassirer, An Essay on Man, p. 68.
32
Ibid., p. 2S.
 141

implicit presupposition of the symbolic (constitutive) 'forms' of space,

time, cause, number, etc. and the symbolic (cultural) 'forms' of myth,

common sense (language), art, and science, which furnish the relationships

of meaning (SinnzusammenhHnge) within which alone 'reality' is both en-

. 33
counterab1e and accountable."

This central Cassirerian notion can perhaps be more clearly explained

by a diagram, the simplicity of which in no way is intended to belittle

or reduce the subtlety of Cassirer's thought.

Art, Language,
The World Myth, Science, The Mind
History, Religion

On one side of my illustration, I have drawn the world with its givenness

of objects, the stuff of which the raw material world is created; on the

other I have sketched the human mind with its compulsion to make these

givens intelligible. The mind, according to Cassirer, never just pas-

sive1y reacts to this world of objects (remember here Panofsky's dispute

with W81ff1in); instead it becomes very active in the construction of its

34
"universe of perception." Cassirer repeatedly emphasizes the creating

and "synthetic" powers of the mind in distinction to the "passive recep-

tivity of sense-perception. The mind exercises its intellectual functions

33
Carl H. Hamburg, "Cassirer and Metaphysics" in Schi1pp, p. 94.
34
Hamburg, p. 88.
 142

35
and in this consists its a priori character."

Like Kant, however, Cassirer is concerned with neither the one side

nor the other, but the mediating territory (in my diagram represented as

a grid) which exists between the world and the mind. As in Kant, the

"schema" is the "uniting representation, the synthetic 'medium' in which

the forms of understanding and the sensuous intuitions are assimilated

. . ,,36
so t h at t h ey const~tute exper~ence. All Cassirer's work presumes that

no experience comes to us unmediated; it is always interfered with by

the machinery of symbolizing. The world becomes "constituted" for man

according to the forms of both his reason (Kant) and his imagination

(Cassirer). This middle realm is the realm of knowledge. It is the

"medium," in Cassirer's descriptive phrase, "through which all the con-

figurations effected in the separate branches of cultural life must

37
pass." From one side of the territory, we receive the record of the

existence of events and objects in the world; from the other we see

evidence of systems of order generated by the observer. Symbols, in this

38
sense, "bring about" rather than merely "indicate" objects. A symbolic

form in general--whether it be a work of art, a spoken word, a mathemat-

ical proposition, etc.--"is an active interpreter, binding an intellectual

35 w. C. Swabey, "Cassirer and Metaphysics" in Schilpp, p. 136.

36
Hendel, Language, p. 13. See Cassirer's sununary of Kant's "schema"
in Language, p. 200: "For Kant the concepts of the pure understanding
can be applied to sensory intuitions only through the medium of a third
term, in which the two, although totally dissimilar, must come together--
and he finds this mediation in the 'trariscendental schema,' which is both
intellectual and sensory." Hendel on p. 15 declares that if Cassirer had
not been so original, he might well have entitled The Philosophy of Sym-
bolic Forms, "Schema."
37
Language, p. 8l~ •

38
Hamburg, p. 85.
 143

39
content to a sensuous. show."

Cassirer's emphasis, Susanne Langer says, on "the constitutive

character of symbolic renderings in the making of experience is the

40
masterstroke." The symbolic form is neither the world nor the source

of thinking about the world, but represents, instead, "the process of

creation itself.,,4l In Cassirer's summarizing words,

In science and language, in art and myth, this formative process

proceeds in different ways and according to different principles,
but all these spheres have this in common: that the product of
their actility in no way resembles the mere material with which
they began. It is in the basic symbolic function and its various
directions that the spiritual consciousness and the sensory con-
sciousness ar~ first truly differentiated. It is here that we pass
beyond passive receptivity to an indeterminate outward material,
and begin to place upon it our independent imprint which articu-
lates it for us into diverse spheres and forms of reality. Myth
and art, language and science, a~e in this sense configurations

39
Katharine Gilbert, "Cassirerts Placement of Art," in Schilpp,
p. 609.
40
S. Langer, p. 393.

41 Cf. Cassirer's closing passage in the Language volume:

" • • • the characteristic meaning of language is not contained in
the opposition between the two extremes of the sensuous and the in-
tellectual, because in all its achievements and in every particular
phase of its progress, language shows itself to be at ~ a sen-
suous and an intellectual form of expression."
Also cf. Hartman's quoting of a passage in Vol. II. of Philosophy of
Symbolic Forms:
"'The characteristic and peculiar achievement of each symbolic
form--the form of language as well as that of myth or of theoreti-
cal cognition--is not simply to receive a given material of impres-
sions possessing already a certain determination, quality and
structure, in order to graft on it, from the outside, so to speak,
another form out of the energy of consciousness itself. The char-
acteristic action of the spirit begins much earlier. Also, the ap-
parently 'given' is seen, on closer analysis, to be already pro-
cessed by certain acts of either the linguistic, the mythical, or
the logico-theoretical 'apperception.' It 'is' only that which it
has been made into by those acts. Already in its apparently simple
and immediate states it shows itself conditioned and determined by
some primary function which gives it significance. In this primary
 144

towards being: they are not simple copies of our existing reality
but represent the main directions of the spiritual movement, of
the ideal process by which reality is constituted for us as one
and.many--as"a diversit~ of forms which are ultimately held together
by a unity of meaning. 4

From 1923-1929, Cassirer published three volumes, all dedicated to

Aby Warburg, of his Phi1osophie der symbo1ischen Formen, each of which

addresses itself to a particular cultural "configuration": Language

(Vol. I, 1923), 1-1ythica1" Thought (Vol. II, 1925) and Phenomenologl of

Knowledge (Vol. III, 1929). He encouraged other scholars to continue to

add volumes under this rubric, addressing other fields of knowledge as

"symbolic forms," as he himself planned to expand the series in later

43
years. Clearly based on extensive research, all three volumes from

the 1920s are rich in concrete details and original ideas. Collectively,

they address themselves to what Cassirer defines ~n the second volume as

the essential task of critical philosophy:

The Phi1osophl of Symbolic Forms takes up this • • • fundamental

principle of Kant's "Copernican revolution," and strives to broaden
it. It seeks the categories of the consciousness of objects in the
theoretical, intellectual sphere, and starts from the assumption
that such categories must be at work wherever a cosmos, a character-
istic and typical world view, takes form out of the chaos of impres-
sions. All such world views are made possible only by specific acts
of objectivization, in which mere impressions are reworked into spe-
cific, formed representations. 44

formation, and not in the se~ondary one, lies the peculiar secret
of each symbolic form,'"
p. 293 in Robert S. Hartman, "The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms" in Schilpp.
42
Language, p. 107.
43
Hendel, Mlthica1 Thinking (Vol. II, of Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms), p. viii.
44
Myth, p. 29.
 145

In the first volume, Language, Cassirer acknowledges that he has

taken to heart Berkeley's words on the subject from A Treatise Concerning

the Principles of Human Knowledge:

"In vain do we extend our view into the heavens and pry into the
entrails of the earth, in vain do we consult the writings of
learned men and trace the dark footsteps of antiquity. We need
only dra~ the curtain of words to behold the fairest tree of
knowledge, whose fruit is excellent, and within the reach of our
hand. ,,45

Because of its primacy, the subject of language becomes the first course

of study in the cultural sciences. It is the basic "'artifice' to which

a'll other cultural forms may be related.,,46 Like the ancient philosopher

Heraclitus, Cassirer repeatedly asks if there is a natural connection

between the world and verbal accounts of it, or if the connection is only

"mediate and conventional." In devoting its inquiries to that "middle

region of words that is situated between man and ~hingS,,,47 the first

volume reflects upon language's intermediary capacities. On one level,

words obviously connect individuals to one another. Perhaps more signif-

icantly, however, language serves to connect the human mind and the world

of objects. As a symbolic form, it "presupposes," in the words of one

recent critic of Cassirer, "a fundamental identity between the objective

and subjective spheres"

48 and concludes, in the words of one older liter-

ary critic, that "verbal meaning arises from the 'reciprocal determination'

45
Language, p. 137.
46
Hendel, p. 54.
47
Language, p. 122.
48 Eggers, p. 98.
 146

of public linguistic possibilities and subjective specifications of

t h ese POSS1"b"l" "

1 1t1es. ,,49 As one primary determinant of the middle grid

in our earlier diagram, language, Cassirer says, "is a magic mirror which

falsifies and distorts the form of reality in its own characteristic

way. ,,50

It is not only language, however, which is interposed between the

perceiver and the perceived, as Humboldt had earlier stressed. Myth,

the subject of the second volume, performs an analogous distortion:

In the very first, one might say the most primitive, manifesta-
tions of myth it becomes clear that we have to do not with a
mere reflection of reality but with a characteristic creative
elaboration. Here again we see how an initial tension between
subject and object, between "inside" and "outside" is gradually
resolved, as a new intermediary realm, growing constantly more
rich and varied, is placed between the two worlds. 5l

Yet writing about myth presented difficulties. Anthropological data,

unlike linguistic studies, were sparse in the mid-1920s. A "pioneer"

in the field, Cassirer often used the resources of the Warburg library

(Warburg himself, it may be recalled, was interested in the subject as

well and even traveled to the American southwest to study the Pueblo
52
Indians) to supplement his own research. One of the original "armchair

anthropologists," Cassirer was primarily interested in understanding myth

philosophically, an "insight" which begins with the idea that myth

49 E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, p. 225.

50
Language, p. 137.

51 Ibid., p. 23.
52
E. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, pp. 87-89.
 147

"does not move in a purely invented or made-up world but has its own
. ,,53
mo d e 0 f necess~ty. . .• Frequently characterizing mythical thinking

by opposing it to "contemporary" scientific procedure (''Whereas the

scientific causal judgment dissects an event into constant elements and

seeks to understand it through the complex mingling, interpenetration

and constant conjunction of these elements, mythical thinking clings to

the total representation as such and contents itself with picturing the

simple course of what happens") ,54 Cassirer"s broader semiotic implica-

tions are obvious. All thought, not only that of the mythical world "is

and remains a world of mere representations--but in its content, its mere

material, the world of knowledge is nothing else.,,55

The significance of myth, then, lies in its ability to exhibit the

symbolic attitudes which are less exposed in "higher" intellectual pro-

jects. Less exposed, but nevertheless fully func'tional, these attitudes

characterize all human endeavor and, in the end, make ~ priori as sump-

tions and imaginative responses an inevitable fact of human existence:

It seems only natural to us that the world should present itself

to our inspection and observation as a pattern of definite forms,
each with its own perfectly determinate spatial limits that give
it its specific individuality. If we see it as a whole, this whole
nevertheless consists of clearly distinguishable units, which do
not melt into each other, but preserve their identity that sets
them definitely apart from the identity of all the others. But for
the myth-making consciousness these separate elements are not thus
separately given, but have to be originally and gradually derived
from the whole; the process of culling and sorting out individual
forms has yet to be gone through. 56

53
Myth, p. 4.
54
Ibid. , p. 47.
55
Ibid. , p. 14.
56
Cassirer, Language and Myth, p. 13.
 148

The book from which this passage is taken,Language and Myth, is not an

official member of the series of Symbolic Forms, although it too was

published during· the 1920s. Instead, it represents a kind of sidestep

for Cassirer, who in the Symbolic Forms had been concerned only with each

form in its historical and c~ltura1 specificity. After completing the

first two volumes, however, he temporarily stepped off the main track in

order to explore the relationship between the initial two symbolic

forms of language and myth. The conclusion of sequentia1ity which is

implicit in this passage is that while mythic thought differs from modern

because of its lack of distinctions, it provides in its conception of the

world an initial perspective from which. one can develop a more discrimin-

ating view: a view which will allow "the process of culling and sorting

out of individual forms • • • to be gone through." Constantly revivified

by elements of myth in metaphor and other figures' of speech, language

represents a kind of continuing prologue to what is possible, enabling

the mind to make more and more penetrating analyses into the nature of

experience by constructing, as Cassirer says, "forms of its own self-

revelation. ,,57

Because it was not published until 1929, The Phenomenology of

Knowledge, Vol. III of The Philosophy of SymboliC Forms, does not exactly

lie within the temporal purview of Panofsky's early-mid 1920 essays. I

will mention it only in passing, insofar as it brings to fruition ideas

foun~ in the earlier two volumes. Here Cassirer takes on what appears

to many to be the objective realm of mathematical and physical science

57 Ibid., .p. 99.

 149

and explores them in their "inner structure of meanings.,,58 Any science,

he says, "can never jump over its own shadow. It is built up of definite

theoretical presuppositions, with. in which it remains imprisoned. • ••

There is now no road back to that relation of immediate congruence and

correspondence which dogmatism assumes to exist between knowledge and its

object.,,59 The proper route of analysis lies ahead, and we can locate it

only by reversing the traditional direction of inquiry: "We should seek

true immediacy not in the things outside us but in ourselves. • •• The

reality of perception is the only certain and utterly unproblematica1--

60
the only primary--datum of all knowledge." Scientific knowledge is
6l
itself the epitome of a complexly articulated symbolic form.

As in Freud, the "symbol" in all of Cassirer's work is always taken

as a symptom of something else. Although he never mentions the work of

Freud, this paradox has gone neither unnoticed nor unexplained by his

devoted student, Susanne Langer:

• • • both thinkers were struck by the fact that the metaphorical

symbols were most commonly taken not as expressive forms, but simply
as actual objects, true stories, efficacious rites. Yet their ideas
never met and fitted togethe~, because they came to their similar
insights through such widely disparate avenues of thought. Conse-
quently they headed in different directions. • • • Cassirer
dealt with intellect, rational judgment, moral principles, and all
those consciously held ideas and admitted motives which Freud

58
Phenomenology of Knowledge, p. 5.

59 Ibid., pp. 35, 5-6.

60
Ibid., pp. 22-23.
61
"The paradise of immediacy is closed to it: it must--to quote
a phrase from Kleist's article 'On the Marionette Theater'--'journey
round the world and see whether it may not be open somewhere in back, '"
p. 40.
 150

considered surface phenomena masking the unacceptable facts of

brute nature. 62

After scanning the vast array of subjects, from Goethe's poetry to

Melanesian mana to Newtonian physics, on which Cassirer turns his gaze,

one hardly needs to reiterate the expanse' of his vision, although

63
Ricoeur, for example, identifies its breadth as its weakness. Perhaps

more than Ms. Langer's estimate implies, Cassirer is equally interested

in all forms of human endeavor, because all embody, as their architectural

structure, the symbolic forms which the mind uses to comprehend reality.

Those forms of human thought which had been conceived of as detracting

from the "real!! nature of reality, because their substance (e.g., myth)

had been proved to be fictitious, imaginary or even unscientific, are

for Cassirer among the purest and most valid forms of evidence. "For

the ~nd, only that can be visible which has some'definite form," and

it is !!sole1y" by the "agency" of these forms "that anything real becomes

an object for intellectual apprehension.,,64

One premise upon which The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is un-

questionably based is that each of these forms must be kept distinct from

each other, i f only for methodological legitmacy.65 "For the fundamental

principle of critical thinking, the principle of the 'primacy' of the

62
S. Langer, IlDe Profundis," Revue Internationale de Philosophie
No. 110 (1974), Fasc. 4, p. 451.
63
Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, trans. D. Savage (New Haven,
1970), pp. 9-11. "Das Symbo1ische," he says, "designates the common de-
nominator of all the ways of objectivizing, of giving meaning to reality."
64
Language and Myth, p. 8.
65
Eggers, p. 98.
 151

function over the object, assumes in each special field a new form and

demands a new and dependent explanation.,,66 Cassirer investigates each

of these special "odysseys,,67 of the human mind as a "scholar working in

a well-stocked library." For him, the world is "something known only

indirectly • • • an object postulated and described by a series of

authorities. ,,68

An historical survey of the "authorities" is the necessary prerequi-

site to the forms' analyses. "In order to possess the world of culture
69
we must incessantly reconquer it by historical recollection." In

practice, Cassirer's particular historical technique is similar to

Warburg's. The Warburgian method consisted in following a key theme or

telling visual motif through history (ancien~R~naissance) in order to

examine its visual metamorphosis. Its kaleidoscopic transformations, in

turn, provided insight into changing philosophicat and cultural attitudes.

Similarly, Cassirer frequently takes one of his symbolic forms and not

only traces how it alters through the course of time, but also follows the

changing philosophical commentary on it within an historical framework.

"With steady grasp,." declares his biographer, "he picked up the develop-

ment through all its stages and ramifications," and showed "how the same

concept acquired a different meaning, according to the diverse philosophi-

cal systems in which it was ap;lj.ed as a constructive element. ,,70

66
Language, p. 79.
67
Myth, p. 9 and Langer in her Preface to Language and Myth, p. ix.
68
Swabey, 125.
69
Hendel, p. 35.
70
Gawronsky, p. 14.
 152

Having situated each of the forms in its historical context,

Cassirer advises the analyst to elaborate certain philosophical princi-

ples valid for its understanding. In a sentence which might well remind

us of Panofsky's plea in his Riegl critique for the discovery of an

"Archimedian viewpoint" from which to view "the phenomenon of a work of

71
art," Cassirer says philosophy must find a "standpoint situated above

all these forms and yet not merely outside them: a standpoint which

would make it possible to encompass the whole of them in one view, which

would seek to penetrate nothing other than the purely immanent rela--

tion. Critical analysis must always begin with the "given, from

the empirically established facts of the cultural consciousness; but it

cannot stop at these mere data. From the reality of the fact it must in-

quire back into the conditions of its possibility.,,73 Without doubt, the

historical and philosophical understanding of each of these different

symbolic forms (e.g., science, religion, morality, art, myth, language,

etc.) is primary. They just be described and classified' in view of their

distinctness from one another, painstakingly laid out side by side,

creating a vast array of human cultur~.

But still the philosopher's task is not complete. In the end, this

scattered and disordered array is neither sufficient nor meaningful. The

71
See Chapter 2.

72 Language, p. 82. On p. 69 of Essay on Man, Cassirer credits H.

wHlfflin for initiating such a structural scheme for the history of art:
"As WHlfflin insists, the historian of art would be unable to character-
ize the art of different epochs or of different individual artists if he
were not in possession of some fundamental categories of artistic descrip-
tion. He finds these categories by studying and analyzing the different
modes and possibilities of artistic expression."
73
Myth, p. 11.
 153

"morphology of the human spirit,,74 must give way to a general "Kulturwis-

senschaft." "The particular must not be left to stand alone, but must

be made to take its place in a context." The philosopher must "ask

whether the intellectual symbols by means of which the specialized disci-

plines reflect on and describe reality exist merely side by side or

whether they are not diverse manifestations of the same basic human

function. ,,75 Contending that philosophy has traditionally "both aimed

and fallen short of elaborating principles of such high generality that

would, on the one hand, be valid for all domains and, on the other, be

susceptible of modification characteristic of the specific differences

distinguishing these domains,,,76 Cassirer advocates striving towards "a

systematic philosophy of human culture in which each particular form

,,77
would tak e its meaning solely f rom the place in which it stand s. • • .

The task of Kulturwissenschaft should be to find a "unity of spirit"

rather than to discover the "multiplicity of its manifestations.,,78

Scholars of culture must search for the "medium through which all the

configurations effected in the separate branches of cultural life must

pass • . • the factor which recurs in each basic cultural form but in no

74
Language, p. 69.
75
Ibid., p. 77.
76
Hamburg, p. 92.
77
Language, p. 82. "The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is not con-
cerned exclusively or even primarily with the purely scientific, exact
conceiving of the world; it is concerned with all the forms assumed by
man's understanding of the 'World," Vol. 3, Phenomenology of Knvw1edge.
78
Language, p. 114.
 154

two of them takes exactly the same shape.,,79

If all this sounds slightly reminiscent of Hegel, Cassirer intends

to profit by the association. This is not to suggest that Cassirer had

what Hendel has called "full-fledged Hegelian,,80 pretensions. We must

always remember that in each of his three volumes of Symbolic Forms,

Cassirer concentrated on the particularity of language, myth and science

in their singular contexts. Still, in hoping to arrive, finally, at

what he dubbed the "phenomenology of human culture,,8l (in deference to

Herder and his "'thousand protean forms of the human spirit''') ,82

Cassirer d~liberately situated his philosophical system in an ideological

relationship to Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit. As a comparison of

the two titles suggests, however, Cassirer wanted to remain with "known"

objects and "knowable" attitudes and keep the "unknown,,83 at bay. As

much as he professes to be intent on acknowledging the possibility of a

"unified, ideal center" to the various symbolic forms, he attrib\ltes the

hypothetical existence of this center not to a spiritual "essence" but

to a IIcommon project" (that of "transforming the passive world of mere

impressions . . . into a world expressive of the human spirit,,84). The

hub of his wheel of cultural history, as differentiated from Gombrich's

79 Ibid., p. 84.
80 ~nen d e 1 , ~,
M h pp. v~~-v~~.
.. " i ~
For ~ass~rer
. , s cwn dec 1 arat~on
. 0 f
his indebtedness to Hegel, see Myt~, p. xv, and Problem of Knowledge, p. 3.
81
Essay, p. 52.
82
Hendel, p. 41.
83
Ibid., p. 34.
84
Language, p. 80.
 155

earlier diagram of the Hegelian method,8S is not determined by a divine

plan working itself out through history, but rather by a specific his-

torical and cultural propensity to symbolize: '!'We must renounce such

reified carrier standing behind the historical movement; the metaphysical

formula ~ be changed ~ .!. methodological formula.' ,,86

Cassirer's methodology is both simple and eloquent. While empha-

sizing the structural integrity of each symbolic form, he always reserves

the right to postulate the "closest connection,,87 among forms. Col-

lectively, the versatile objectifications of the human spirit pose one

harmonic and organic whole. The separate fields of inquiry on which the

linguist, for example, or the art historian, anthropologist or philosopher

of science all labor are necessary for their 'fintellectual self-preserva-

tion, ,,88 a term Cassirer borrows from t-ll:llfflin, but to limit one's in-

quiry as a scholar is to deny one's fulfillment as a humanist:

Undoubtedly human culture is divided into various activities pro-

ceading along different lines and pursuing different ends. If we
content ourselves with contemplating the results of these activi-
ties--the creations of myth, religious rites or creeds, works of
art, scientific theories . . • so many variations on a common
theme . • . it seems impossible to reduce them to a common denomin-
ator. But a philosophic synthesis means something different". Here
we seek not a unity of effects but a unity of action; not a unity
of products but a unity of the creative process. If the term
"humanity" means anything at all it means that, in spite of all the

85
See Chapter 1.
86
Hartmann, quoting Cassirer in Erkenntnisproblem, I, 16, p. 312.
87
Gawronsky, p. 35.
88 Essay on Man, p. 70. Cf. Wl:llfflin in Kunstgeschichtliche
Grundbegriffe, p. 226 in English translation: "For us, intellectual
self-preservation demands that we should claSSify the infinity of events
with reference to a few results."
 156

differences and oppositions existing. among its various forms, these

are, nevertheless', all working towards a common end. . Man's
outstanding characteristic, his distinguishing mark, is not his
metaphysical or physical nature--but his work. It is this work, it
is the system of human activities, which defines and determines' the
circle of "humanity •• t89

* * * * * * * *
The image is a product of the empirical faculty of the produc-
tive imagination--the schema of sensuous conceptions (of figures in
space, for example) is a product, and, as it were, a monogram of
the pure imagination ~ priori, whereby and according to which im-
ages first become possible, which, however, can be connected with
the conception only mediately by means of the schema which they
indicate, and are in themselves never fully adequate to it.

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

Art, like any other symbolic form, is not an "imitation but a dis-

covery of reality.,,90 Yet art itself plays no major role in Cassirer's

three volumes, except as he uses it as an example of a symbolic form in

general. His notion of art as a symbolic form in' particular did not

appear until several decadeaafter the publication of Philosophie der

symboli~chen Formen in his Essay on Man (1944), and even then it was only

given a chapter's attention. Fortunately, according to a somewhat

typical interpretation of the early works of Panofsky (this one by

Katherine Gilbert),

we are not, however, without indication of the direction his

!£assirer'i] applications might easily have taken in the field
r
of visual arts. • . • Dr. Erwin Panofsky sJ . • • rich icono-
graphical studies in the main illustrate what Cassirer would like

89 Essay on Man, pp. 70-71,68. Note the similarity of the language.

of "circularity" here to Gombrich's idea of the Hegelian wheel. Cassirer
continues on p. 68: IILanguage, myth, religion,:8:rt, science, history are
the constituents, the various sectors of this circle."
90 CassJ.rer,
. Essay, p. 143.
 157

to have understood as the application of his theory of art to

painting and sculpture. • . • For period after period ~anofsky
in IIDie Perspektive als 'Symbolische Form'~ matches the handling
of spatial relations, the particular variant of perspective worked
out by a period's artists, with wider tendencies in philosophy and
science. • • • For instance, ~iero's mathematical perspective
system in.the Renaissance is to be seen in the light of the rising
mathematical rationalism in philosophy; and Rembrandt's distcrtio~
of space symbolizes the modern rise of subjectivism] Thus while
Panofsky is converting spatial symhols into historic monuments, he
is at the same time relating these monuments to the other contem-
porary activities. • • • There is in any case in any age a world
outlook characteristically coloring both art and philosophy • • . .
Within the IIsymbolic form1' are condensed "symptoms" of the politi-
cal, scientific, religious and economic tendencies of the age that
produced the work. 9l

The article to which Ms. Gilbert refers, "Die Perspektive als

'Symbolische Form If' was published in Vortdlge der Bibliothek t-larburg

92
in 1924-25. We will spend time discussing this essay in detail, because

the theoretical connections between Panofsky and Cassirer are most in-

terestingly evident here, but along the way we will encounter several

other essays, all from the 1920s, in which Panofsky demonstrates a similar

familiarity with and indebtedness to the work of his senior Hamburg col-

league. This particular essay, although no published translation exists,

is well-known and is still frequently cited as an authority in the con-

tinuing debate between art theorists on the !'conventionalty" of perspec-

93
tive. The controversy surrounding it arises from Panofsky's assertion,

91 Gilbert, pp. 624-628. Also see K. Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn, A

History of Esthetics, 2nd ed. (1939; New York, 1972), p. 562.

92 Ms. Gilbert points out Cassirer's influence on the early publica-

tions of the Warburg journal (begun in 1922) by citing its first long
article, Jacques Maritain's "Sign and Symbol." Panofsky's was the second
article accepted.
93
See, for example, Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis,
1976), pp. 10-19; Gombrich, Art and Illusion; M. H. Pirenne, Optics,
Painting, Photography (Cambridge, 1970), Chapter 7; James J. Gibson,
 158

in effect, that perspectivally constructed paintings have no absolute

validity, no claim to representing space as we actually see it.

It is my contention that Panofsky's interpretation of the system

of perspective has been consistently minunderstood by his many vocal

critics. Ms. Gilbert's analysis, for example, operates on only one

level--the most obvious one and the one with which most commentators

stop in their identification of the thought of Cassirer and Panofsky

(even the level, ironically, where Panofsky himself seems to stop in the

first part of his essay). If one places this essay in deliberate juxta-

position to Cassirer's work (in the title, "Perspective as a Symbolic

Form," Panofsky has himself intentionally taken his position at Cassirer's

side), much of the bewilderment over what it proposes can be extinguished,

and this ambitious piece of scholarship by an imaginative young writer

can be read as he originally intended it to be.

94
The paper, itself divided into four parts, falls into three fairly

distinct sections in reference to Cassirer's writings. This division,

however, presents problems in the organization of this analysis, for the

last, most complex section is most appropriately discussed in relation to

"The Information Available in Pictures," Leonardo 4 (1971): 27-35; Julian

Hochberg, "The Representation of Things and People," in Art, Perception
and Reality (Baltimore, 1972); and Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual
Perception (Berkeley, 1971), Chapter V.

94 The essay was originally published in German in 1924-25 in the

VortrHge Bibliothek Warourg (Leipzig). I have used an unpublished and
anonymous English translation from the vlarburg Institute. The set of
page numbers cited in parentheses after the 'quotations are from the
Verheyen and Oberer Collection, and the second set refers to the un-
published translation.
 159

the earliest work by Cassirer which we will consider (the 1916 Kant

Commentary, published 1918), while the earlier two (the first section,

Parts I & II, of the text to be viewed as a kind of "popular" synchronic

interpretation of the notion of symbolic forms in general, and the second

~art IIi) diachronic section--the one in which old problems are discussed

at the same time as new issues are raised) can be best interpreted as

carrying on a sophisticated dialogue with Cassirer's first two volumes of

the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.

The first part of his essay calls into question the status of the

Renaissance system of perspective which has been traditionally regarded

by art theoreticians as an instrument or at least a measure of objectivity.

To Panofsky's mind, however., perspective construction, like neo-Kantian

philosophy, reveals to us how the perceiver is determinant of what is

perceived. Beginning with a summary of Alberti's' system of perspective,

Panofsky soon challenges its representational legitimacy by declaring

that such a system involves "an extremely bold abstraction from reality."

Accordingly, "this whole 'central perspective,' that it may insure the

formation of a fully rational . space, tacitly makes two very impor-

tant assumptions: first, that we see with a single, motionless eye;

second, that the plane section through the cone of sight is an adequate

reproduction of our visual image" (260,2).95

95 "Diese ganze 'Zentralperspektive' macht, um die Gestaltung eines

v8llig rationalen, d.h. unendlichen, steigen and homogenen Raumes
gewHhrleisten zu k8nnen, stillschweigend zwei sehr wesentliche
Voraussetzungen: zum Einen, dass wir mit einem einzigen und unbeweg-
ten Auge sehen wUrden, zum Andern, dass der ebene Durchschnitt durch
die Sehpyramide als adHquate Wiedergabe unseres Sehbildes gel ten dUrfe.
In Wahrheit bedeuten aber diese beiden Voraussetzungen eine uberaus
kUhne Abstraktion von der Wirlichkeit (wenn wir in diesem FaIle als
'Wirklichkeit' den tHtsachlichen subjektiven Seheindruck bezeichnen
dUrfen)" (260).
 160

Panofsky substantiates his claim ot Habstraction" by over a page-

long reference to Cassirer to the effect that "geometrical space" has no

"independent content" of its own, and that it is a 'tpure1y functional

not a substantial being" (260-61, 2_3}.96 In a way it is curious that

Panofsky selected the passage that he did from Cassirer's Symbolic Forms,

for many others, scattered throughout Cassirer's work, on the changing

perception of space seem to be more directly relevant. For instance, this

one from the Language volume succinctly characterizes Cassirer's princi-

pal interpretation of spatial relationships:

~eJ'a11 recognize that space in its, concrete configuration and

articulation is not "given" as a ready-made possession of the psyche,
but comes into being in. the process or, one might say, in the general
movement of consciousness. • • • The spatial unity which we build
in aesthetic vision and creation, in painting, sculpture and archi-
tecture, belongs to an entirely different sphere from the spatial
unity which is represented in geometrical th~orems and axioms. 97

Although most art theorists from Alberti on would concur that the

perspectiv21 image is synonymous with the retinal one, Panofsky is not

so certain. He thinks that we need to distinguish between a "retinal

image" (Netzhautbild) and a "visual image" (Sehbi1d) (261,4), and he

Michael Podro (in a private seminar) says here that Panofsky is confusing
Alberti's perspective system with Brune11eschi's, because Alberti gives
no account of how objects recede in space.

96 Quoting Cassirer, Philo sophie der symbo1ischen Formen, II (Das

mythische Denken, 1925), pp. 107ff.

97 Cassirer, Language, pp. 99,96. "The general critique of knowledge

[2f KanE] teaches us that the act of spatial position and differentiation
is the indispensable condition for the act of objectivization in general,
for 'relating the representation to the object.t " In the 2nd volume on
Myth, Cassirer says "It is self-evident that the space of perception, the
space of vision and touch, does not coincide with the space of pure mathe-
matics, that there is indeed a thoroughgoing divergence between the two."
 161

first challenges perspective on the grounds of its claim to represent

the world as our eye sees it. In order to see things perspectivally

(i.e., if the perspectival image = retinal image), we have to impose

bizarre restrictions on our view. Like Cyclops, we have to stare ahead

with one fixed and motionless eye, and we cannot permit our "psychologi-

cal" predispositions to color what we see. In his WBlfflin critique,

Panofsky had already dispensed with a similar notion as n~ive.98 But

even putting these already-voiced objections aside, Panofsky has what he

considers to be a new (or at least a rediscovery of a very old) mathe-

matical/optical line "of attack ready.

The "retinal image," he says, "shows the shapes of things projected

not on a plane but on a concave surface" (261, 4). The problem with

Renaissance theorists was that they let themselves "be governed by the

rule of pictorial perspective that a straight lin"e is always seen as

straight, without considering that the eye actually projects not on a

plane but on the inner surface of a sphere. • . • rfuile plane perspective

projects straight lines as straight, our organ of sight perceives them

as curves" (263, 262, 6, 5). Ancient optics had understood the play of

curvature and "adapted its theory much more closely than the Renaissance

could to the actual structure of the subjective visual impression." Ac-

cordingly, .Renaissance theoris ts If suppressed" the relevancy of the eigh th

theorem of Euclid and "in part so amended it that it lost its original

meaning" (264, 7-8).

Because Panofsky wants to stress that perspective is a "mythical

98
See Chapter 2. Perspective, he says, "transforms psychophysio-
logical space into mathematical space" (261, 4).
 162

structure" (possibly putting more emphasis on the "artificiality" of a

symbolic form than ~assirer would), the optical and mathematical justi-

fications he provides (the essay contains over thirty diagrams) can be

viewed, ironically, as unnecessary for his principal point. His use of

mathematics might be seen as the recourse of a person who is insecure with

the direction his imagination is taking him, and he therefore resorts to

a rationalistic accounting of a problem which the impulse to theorize on

perspective in the way that he does suggests is basically irrational; or,.

to put it more positively, as Panofsky himself does in his characteriza-

tion of Plato's theory in another ~o]ork, "the value of a work of art" can

be determined in the same way as a "scientific investigation" can--"by

measuring the amount of theoretical and especially mathematical insight

invested in it.,,99

Having provided a rather hasty technical refutation of perspective

as retina11y-exact, Panofsky goes on to ask the obvious. If we "see"

objects in the world as curved, why do we claim that plane perspective

depicts the world as we see it? In effect, because our cu1tura11y-condi-

tioned mind tells us to--the same answer he offered in a slightly differ-

ent context in his w81ff1in critique. Modern perspective differs from .

that of antiquity because our modes of beholding have been tampered with.

Not only have we been persuaded by the representational coherence of

Renaissance paintings and had these attitudes "reinforced" (263, 6) by

advances in photography, but also primarily because we think differently

than did the ancients. We possess a philosophical view of the world of

99
Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, trans. J. J. S. Peake (1924;
New York: Lcon Edition, 1968), p. 5.
 163

which our rectilinear spatial "system" is part and parcel.

I n t h e second part (~t~" 1sect~on

1" one a f my d~v~s~on
" " 100) , Panofsky

addresses himself to the still-contested problem of whether. or not the

ancients, specifically Vitruvius, had some sort of rudimentary recti-

linear perspective system. He concludes that Vitruvius constructed space

according to the "fishbone principle" (267, 11).101 "But this method of

representing space, as compared with the modern, is characterized by a

quite peculiar instability and internal incoherence" (267, 11).

Clearly there are problems surfacing here which begin to hinder

seriously the cogency of his argument. At this point in the essay,

Panofsky seems in doubt which question to ask: How accurate is per-

spective or is accuracy not in question?102 In Part I he had disputed

the validity of Renaissance perspective, but by Part II he has granted it

a certain a1'.thoritative primacy and is judging other spatial systems

against the standard of the fifteenth century. In other words, he is

both undercutting and exalting perspective as a diagnostic instrument

simultaneously--a self-contradictory posture which leads to all sorts of

epistemological quandaries. He finds a less than satisfactory way out by

returning to his statments in the first part and thereby dismissing ac-

curacy as a pictorial value: " . • . if perspective is of no moment for

100
I call Parts I & II "Section I" because they both offer syn-
chronic interpretations of the historical evidence.
101
HWhether such an interpretation of the passage in Vitruvius is
tenable or not (it can hardly be demonstrated for the reason that the
surviving pictures are without exception not strictly constructed), in
any case for the ancients' representation of space, so far as we can
judge, this fishbone principle--or, more seriously, vanishing axis prin-
ciple--was always in force" (11).

102 Michael Padro posed similar questions of Panofsky's essay in a

seminar at the University of Essex, Winter 1977.
 164

value, it is of moment for style," and he turns at this crucial point to

Cassirer:

More than that, it may, to apply to the history of art Ernst

Cassirer's happily coined term, be called one of those "symbolic
forms, through which a spiritual meaning is joined to a concrete
sensuous sign and becomes an essential property of that sign"
(260, 12).103

In this case, what is "significant for the different periods and spheres

of art" is not only if they attempt to construct a coherent spatial sys-

tem or not, but also, especially, what kind they have.

Attempting to muster support for a rather radical hypothesis, Panofsky

also summons the authority of Riegl and reminds his learned audience of the

Austrian theorist's interest in the problem of changing conceptions of

104
space. But Panofsky says he remains wary of the impenetrable bounda-

ries of Riegl's haptic/optic dichotomy, and he ci'tes what he considers

to be "optical" about ancient art:

. • • the Greeks begin to assert along with the val~e of the body
moved from within the charm of the surface seen from without
and • • • to experience as worthy of representation along with
animate nature inanimate nature, along with the plastically beau-
tiful the pictorially ugly or vulgar, along with solid bodies the
space surrounding and connecting them • • • • (268-69, 12)105

Still, Panofsky would basically agree with Riegl that for the ancients,

space was that which was "left as it were between bodies," and once again

he -defines the ancient conception of space against the norm" of the

It

103
Panofsky does not cite the exact reference to Cassirer.
104
He does not, however, refer to Riegl by name.

105 I n ·
us~ng wor d s suc h as "b·
eJah en, "p ano f s k y f a 11 s prey to R·~eg 1 ' s
overpsychologized vocabulary.
 165

Renaissance: Roman space, for example,

remains a spatial aggregate; it never becomes what modern

perspective demands and realizes--a spatial system. • • . For
the modern tendency we designate with this name always posits
that higher unity above empty space and above bodies, so that from
the very start by this assumption its observations get their
direction and unity. • • • While antiquity because of the lack
of that higher unity must pay as it were for each gain in space by
a loss in body. • • • And it is just this that explains the al-
most paradoxical phenomenon that the world of ancient art, as
long as it made no attempt to reproduce the space between bodies,
appears by contrast with the modern as more solid and more har-
monious, but as soon as it includes space in its representation--
especially therefore in landscape painting--it becomes singularly
unreal and contradictory, a world of mists and dreams (269-270,
13-14) •

In the last paragraph of the second part, Panofsky proposes to con-

clude, with a rather spurious use of the word "therefore"

106 what he says

he has already demonstrated: IIAncient perspective is therefore the ex-

pression of a determinate conception of space diverging fundamentally from

the modern conception • • • and at the same time of an idea of the worln,

equally determinate and equally divergent from the modern" (270, 14).107

From Democritus to Aristotle, he declares, ancient philosophers conceived

"the whole of the world" as "something through and through discontinuous

(Diskontinuierliches)" (270, 271, 15). In effect, they had no fixed "per-

spective" on things. When a Greek artist set out to paint objects in

space, "therefore," he dispersed them according to the intellectual prin-

ciples of his time.

Initially writing his essay on the perceptual "accuracy" of linear

106 I would like to credit Podro for first calling my attentio~ to

the theoretical weight this lone word must bear.

107 "So ist also die antike Perspektive der Ausdruck einer bestimmten,
von dem der Moderne grundsatzlich abweichenden Raumanschauung • . • • "
 166

perspective, he has leapt in a few pages from curvilinear retinal percep-

tion to a survey of changing styles of spatial depiction, and now, by way

of summary, he is attempting to link these changing methods of depiction

to changing modes of intellectual expression. This is an ambitious scope

to be sure, but it is not an epistemologically sound one. There are a

number of co~cealed premises here which should not be allowed to lie quiet.

In no way has Panofsky proved how he so easily forges links between per-

ception, depiction and expression (perhaps these links "work" in the

Renaissance, but here he is specifically talking about ancient art).

In a s~ightly earlier essay on a somewhat similar subject, "Die

Entwicklung der Proportionslehre als Abbild der Stilentwicklung" (1921),108

Panofsky more cautiously defined the limits of his investigation. Here

he examines the "history of canons of proportions": "Not only is it im-

portant to know whether particular artists or periods of art did or did

not tend to adhere to a system of proportions, bue the how of their mode
.
of treatment ~s 0f l
rea · ·f·
s~gn~ ~cance.·
.,109 He says in the introduction

that he wants to account for the change with meaningful explanations,

• • • if we concentrate not so much on the solution arrived at as

on the formulation of the problem posed, they will reveal themselves
as. expressions of the same artisticintentian~_(KunstwolleI!} that was
realized in the buildings, sculptures and paintings of a given period
.
or a g~ven .
art~st. • • . 110

108 In Monatshefte fUr Kunstwissenschaft XIV (1921): 188-219. Re-

printed, with Panofsky's own translation, as "The History of the Theory
of Human Proportions as a Reflection of the History of Style," Meaning
in the Visual Arts (Garden City, 1955).
109
Meaning, p. 55.
110
Ibid., p. 56.
 167

Most of the essay, however, refrains from anything other than a formal

and stylistic analysis. In this work he confines his investigations of

the "Kunstwollen" to a certain will-to-form shared by all artists of a

period. Similarly, in his two volume study of medieval German sculpture,

ll1
Die Deutsche P1astik des Elf ten bis Dreizehnten Jahrhunderts (curiously

--considering its methodology--written in the same year {!92iJ as Idea

and "Perspektive"),1~2 Panofsky asserts that his task is above all to de-

fine the "essence of sty1e,,113 (by concentrating on workshops, internal

artistic influences, etc.) in the manner of the Viennese school, and for
114
reasons which we will explore shortly, he remains dogmatically impervi-

ous to the cultural historical situation. When he does resort to a cultural

"text," he does it not to provide background material, but rather to show

that the aesthetic and theoretical principles which organize it are the
115
same. Here the sense of a piece of sculpture 'is constituted entirely

111 CMunich, 1924).

112
See later pp. 186-187 here.
113
Renate Heidt, in a published 1977 German dissertation, Erwin
Panofskx--Kunsttheorie und Einzelwerk (Cologne/Vienna, 1977), attempts
to apply Panofsky's 1925 theoretical essay, Uber das VerhHltnis der Kunst-
geschichte zur Kunsttheorie," Zeitschrift fUr !sthetik.und Allgemeine
Kunstwissenschaft XVIII (1925), to the practical concerns of his book on
German sculpture. She finds this book, in comparison to his early theo-
retical work, an "academically sterile and unsatisfactory" ("akademisch
steril und unbefriedigend") .ahistorical account of the problem, and she
also finds it revealing that at the same time as Panofsky was writing this
stylistic account, he was deeply absorbed in his iconographic work on
DUrer at the Warburg library. I thank Professor Creighton Gilbert for
first bringing this manuscript to my attention. Ms. Heidt, however, only
concentrates on one theoretical work and, as far as I can discern, is
uninterested in the neo-Kantian genesis of even this one essay~ Her bib-
liography is important~ however, for its listing of the continuing German
response to Panofsky.
114 See late~ pp. l79~180.
115
Heidt, ~. 164.
 168

116
through its form: an enterprise which only partially realizes his

plea in the Riegl critique for a "Sinninterpretation" which is "valid not

Just
° f or you an d me, b ut 0 bOO 1
Ject~ve y.
,,117

In the later "Perspective" essay, his synchronic historical program

is much more ambitious. Riegl's Kunstwollen has been replaced by

Panofsky's. interpretation of Cassirer' s das Symbolische. He wants to link

not only all artistic productions of an era together, but all productions

in general, from philosophy to sculpture, thereby weaving a tangled web

of cultural interconnectedness. Everything becomes symptomatic of every-

thing else. This is a sort of proto-iconology gone wild (as t-1s. Gilbert's

quotat~on
o
suggests, 118 or per h aps more to t h e
) °
po~nt, a k ~n d
O

0f popu 1ar

interpretation of Cassirer's more restrained enterprise--a glib linking

together of all the symbolic forms of an era, regardless of function,

shape, or individual significance. Cassirer, we may remember, deliber-

ately refrained from such a project, feeling the time was not yet at hand

for a grand philosophical synthesis: "The particular cultural trends do

not move peacefully side by side, seeking to complement one another; each

becomes what it is only by demonstrating its own peculiar power against

the others and in battle with the others. ,,119

116 In Panofsky's neo-Kantian terms by bringing unity to the manifold:

"Auch das 'massenmassig' empfunde Kunstwerk bedarf ja, wenn anders es
Kunstwerk sein solI, einer bestimmten Organisation, die hier wie libera11
nur darin bestehen kann, dass eine 'Mannigfaltigkeit' zur 'Einheit' gebun-
den wird. • . ," pp. 17-18 ..

117 Because it still concentrates on notions of style instead of the

essential meaning (the Sinninterpretation). See earlier Riegl chapter.
118
See earlier pp. 156-157 here.
119
Language, p. 82.
 169

Did Panofsky, as seems to be the case with the first synchronic

section of his essay (Parts I & II), remain insensitive to this problem?

I think much of the middle section (section 2, Part III) shows us he did

not. Granted, much of what he has to say about finding "analogues"

(273, 17) between philosophy and art still ha.s a synchronic edge to it:

" • • • again this achievement in perspective is only a concrete expression

of what had been put forward at the same time on the part of epistemology

and natural philosophy" (285, 29).120 But for the most part, his confi-

dence as a juggler of many and various symbolic forms seems undermined by

this point, and he acknowledges that his center is not holding. It seems

as though he is now looking for grounds within the visual tradition itself

(as Riegl or WHlfflin might have done) to account for changes in percep-

tion, and he offers us a new concept of art historical periodicity: "out

of the wreckage of the old edifice comes the rearing of the new" ("das

Abbruchsmaterial des alten Geb~udes zur Aufrichtung eines neuen zu benut-

zen"):

Where work on definite artistic problems has gone so far

that • • • going further in the same direction seems to be fruit-
less, it is usual for those great setbacks or reversals to occur
which, often joined with the transference of the leading role to
a new province or style of art, precisely through a renunciation
of what has already been achieved (that is, through a return to
apparently more "primitive" forms of representation) provide the
possibility of using the wreck~ge of the old edifice for the rear-
ing of a new, precisely by establishing a distance preparatory for
the creative taking up again of the old problems. Thus we see
Donatello emerging not from the faded classicism of the followers
of Amolfo but from a definite Gothic tendency • • . and thus, in-
tervening between the ancient and the modern and presenting the

120 " • • • und wiederum ist diese perspektivische Errungenschaft

nichts anderes, als ein konkreter Ausdruck dessen, was glUckzeitig von
erkenntnistheoretischer und naturphilosophischer Seite her geleistet worden
war." His much later work, Gothic Arc and Scholasticism (New York, 1951),
is evidence of-Panofsky's continuing interest in this sort of approach.
 170

greate~t of these "setbacks" came the Middle Ages, whose historical

mission in art was to fuse into a genuine unity what had previous1
appeared as a plurality of individual things • • • • (271-272, 16)1 1 2
The pictorial mode of organization is no longer linked only syn-

chronically to the culture of which it is a part, but diachronically as

well to the visual development of one symbolic form. In a way, Panofsky

here tries something that he had earlier reprimanded WBlfflin for doing.

He locates his cause and effect relationship securely within the visual

tradition itself, sealing the work of art off from the cultural influ-

ences which threaten to prey upon it. Giotto and Duccio, for example,

with their representation of "closed interiors," began the "overthrow

of the medieval principle of representation" (278, 23). They created a

"revolution in the formal significance of the surface of representation"

by painting "a ~picture plane' in the exact sens~ of the word • • • a

piece cut out of space" (278, 23). The Lorenzetti, Masaccio and even

Alberti then continued to think about painting within this one particular

articulated visual format for the organization of representational space.

121 His brief discussion of Romanesque art can serve as an example:

"After the comparatively retrospective and therefore preparatory
epochs of the Carolingian and Ottonian 'renaissances' the style we are
accustomed to call 'Romanesque' is formed, and that style in its full
maturity around the middle of the twelfth century completes the turn-
ing away from antiquity never wholly achieved in Byzantium. Now line
is merely line, that is, a means, of graphic expression ~ generis,
fulfilling its purpose in bounding and ornamenting and a surface; and
surface is merely surface, that is, no longer the indication, however
vague, of immaterial space but the strictly two-dimensional top sur-
face of a material pictorial vehicle. • • • For if Romanesque paint-
ing reduces body and space in the same way and with the same decisive-
ness to surface, by that very act it established for the first time
the homogeneity between the two, changing their loose spatial unity
into something firm and substantial. From now on for better or for
worse body and space are joined together, and when later body is again
freed from its bondage to surface, it cannot develop without a corre-
sponding development of space."
 171

Clearly Panofsky is searching fo'!:' another route of analysis to explain

the existence not only of contradictory trends within one style (e.g.,

Carolingian art) and oppositions between artists of the same period (e.g.,

Rogier van der Weyden and Petrus Christus), but also those seemingly

conflicting characteristics within the work of one artist (e.g •• Donatello).

The larger symbolic form, ~ (or even perhaps Renaissance art), contains

within itself several varying ideas and techniques--some old, some "revo-

lutionary"--for expressing spatial relationships.

This sort of speculation prefigures by half a century the concerns,

of George Kubler in The Shape of Time, where he develops the notion of

varying formal sequences within a specific period or style (for Meso-

American pottery). The problem which delimits one series, defined as a

sequence of·formal relations--for example, how to organize figures in

space--may well have little or nothing to do with contemporary concerns

of how to impart lifelikeness to figure studies. Just because two dif-

ferent artists--or perhaps even an artist and a philosopher, were born in

the same era, Kubler implies, does not mean that the cultural analyst

should burden them with the same imagination. The morphological detection

of what elements constitute a series, he says, should be kept independent

of questions of meaning and must be unaffected by symbolic interpretations.

Kubler attributes, by the way, this overemphasis on questions of meaning

122
to the influence of Cassirer. A closer reading of Cassirer (of the

122 I quote the opening sentences of Kubler's "Preamble": "Cassirer's

partial definition of art as symbolic language has dominated art studies
in our century. Anew history of culture anchored upon the work of art
as a symbolic expression thus came into being. By these means art has been
made to connect with the rest of history. But the price has been high, for
while studies of meaning received all our attention, another definition of
art, as a system of formal relations, thereby suffered neglect. The
otructural forms can be sensed independently of meaning."
 172

sort Panofsky seems to have given him) 1 however, would disclose a similar

interest in the problem of formal sequences: "The result is an extraordin-

ary diversity of formal relations, whose richness and inner .involvements,

however, can be apprehended only through a rigorous analysis of each

fundamental form.,,123

Panofsky's thinking on the system of perspective in general and

perspectivally-constructed pictures in particular becomes much more com-

plex and labyrinthine. As we proceed through the paper, the rather dog-

matic and one-tracked position of the first half is diminished by the

second. In some sense, we can read this response to the complexity of

the issue as having connections with another of Cassirer's texts, the

124
1916 (~ub1ished 1918) commentary on Kant, Kants Leben und Lehre. I do

not want to stress the influence of this work on Panofsky, for I am not

sure he ever read it. 125 But I th:f.nk it merits some attention, for

whether or not we can make direct connections is almost less important

than locating some of the basic philosophical assumptions which the two

thinkers shared.

It is in the sixth chapter of the Kant commentary,"Die Kritik der

Urtei1skraft," that Cassirer turns to Kant for guidance ·in thinking about

works of art and the idiosyncratic problems they pose for the philosopher.

123
Language, p. 97.

124 See, in particular Chapter 6, "Die Kritik der Urteilskraft" of

Kants: Leben und Lehre (Berlin, 1918). No published translation exists.
As part of my project in the Kunstwissenschaft seminar at the University
of Essex, 1976-1977, I did an almost one hundred page translation.
125
M. Podro, on the other hand, says he has discerned definite
linguistic similarities between ~he two texts which indicate Panofsky's
intimacy with the work.
 173

The central problem of concern is how the pure, concrete forms of art

require different modes of investigation than those employed in scientific

inquiries. 126 In the physical sciences, analysts proceed with their "re-

search and discovery by constructing a whole out of parts,,,127 but another

model of cognition is clearly needed for the aesthetic understanding:

"The truth in its actual and perfect sense is opened up to us first, if

we no longer begin with single things as given and real, but rather end
with them.,,128

The model for this discourse has already been provided by biology,

and the correlation between biological and aesthetic problems is reveal-

ing. "There is, as Kant calls it, a 'principle of formal purposiveness'

. 1ve d 1n
. our un derstand1ng
. 9
1nvo 0 f '1nd'
1V1. dua1 f
orm'1n nature. ,,12 In any

one organism, the biologist (and here he is helped along by the dis-

coveries of Leeuwenhoek) discovers the whole as already given and con-

stitutive of its various parts. It is "both cause and effect of it-·

,,130
se lf • The biological organism as such requires no external completion

126 Refer to pp. 25-29 in the first chapter here, where the posi-
tivist position is outlined.
127
Hendel, p. 19.

128 !{ants Leben, pp. 298-299. "Die Wahrheit in ihrem eigentlichen

und vollstHndigen Sinne wird sich uns erst erschliesslich, wenn wir nicht
mehr von Einzelnen, also dem Gegebenen und Wirklichen beginnen, sondern
mit ihm enden."
129
Hendel, p. 20.
130
Kants Leben, pp. 360-361. In this context, Cassirer quotes Kant's
example of a tree from the Criti ue of Jud ement, tr.ans. James Creed
Meredith (1928; Oxford, 1973), 64. Meredith entitles this section, "The
Critique of Teleological Judgment":
"A tree produces, in the first place, another tree, according to a
famil~ar law of nature. But the tree which it produces is of the samE
genus. Hence, in its genus, it produces itself. . • . Secondly, a
 174

outside itself in order to be characterized in its organic individuality.13l

"But the most direct and immediate apprehension of individual form is in

art, which is a concrete representation where the phenomenon is experi-

enced as the whole being determinant of the parts and disclosing itself

through them." Only in art, where the "resonance of the whole in its

particular and single circumstances is treated, do we stand in the freedom

of play and perceive this freedom.,,132

A work of art is a single and self-contained whole that is based upon

itself and whose purpose exists solely within itself (precisely Panofsky's

earlier sentiments in the Riegl critique, written only two years after

this book). Taking his departure from the problem of Zweckmassigkeit,

Kant, in the Critique of Judgement, attempted to "establish the direction

our knowledge takes when it judges something as purposeful, as the ex-

.
press~on 0
f an ~nner
. f orm. 1t133 According to Cassirer, the entire teleolo-

gical system of the Enlightenment had mistaken purposiveness

tree produces itself even as an individual • . . but growth is here to

be understood in a sense ,that makes it entirely different from any in-
crease according to mechanical laws. . •. Thirdly, a part of a tree
also generates itself in such a way that the preservation of one part
is reciprocally dependent on the preservation of the other parts."
Cassirer, on p. 361, says that what is significant about this passage
from Kant is that here "nature is not just regarded through laws of
substantiality, causality, effect, etc.--but for the first time is de-
scribed in terms of a quality peculiar to its being and becoming • • .
a new deepening of the contents of nature."

131 Kants Leben, pp. 358-359. "Instead of regarding the process of

time in which every preceding moment is intertwined with the present and
loses its existence in it, let us think of the appearance of life as a
mu.tual interlocking of si~gle moments, where the past remains contained in
the present and both are recognizable in the future."
132
Ibid., p. 339.
133
Ibid., pp. 306, 303.
 175

(Zweckmassigkeit) with common usefulness (Nutzbarkeit).134 A work of art

bespeaks of a certain purposiveness without purpose. The pleasure

135
(Lustempfindung) we derive from its contemplation is disinterested.

We do not experience satisfaction because we realize that this individual

work is an example of an empirical law that we can put to use or classify,

but rather because we are affected by its "internal ordering of appear-

ances" which seems to reify the appropriateness or suitability (Zweck-

136
massigkeit) of our own perceptions. Here the laws of purely mechanical
137
causality do not carry us sufficiently far. In the company of a work

of art, we are not interested in "causal connections . but only in

138
pure presences." Only the aesthetic understanding does "not ask what

h
teo .
bJect i s and h
ow '~t wor k s, but wh at I mak e 0 f '~ts presentat~on.
. ,,139

The aesthetic observation does not require any external completion; it

has no basis or goal outside itself. The feeling'of the "sublime" which

it can engender is loosed from other concerns. The idea of a non-purposive

134
Ibid., p. 361.
135
Ibid., pp. 323, 332. Note, Cassirer says, how the concept of
pleasure is here being drawn into the circle of ~ priori determinations.
Cf. Kant! 2 Critique of Judgement.

136 Ibid., pp. 327, 322, 357: "The· aesthetic formulation is immedi-
ately laid down in reality itself; but it is comprehended more deeply and
purely and therefore more clearly • • • in the unity of being, which is
put up before us, wants to be and can be nothing other, than the reflection
of a unity of mood and feeling which we experience in ourselves."
137
Ibid., p. 367.
138
Ibid., pp. 330-331.

139 Ibid., p. 333. "Nur die M:sthetische Funktion fragt nicht danach,
was das Objekt sei und wirke, sondern was ich aus seinerVorstellung in
mie mache."
 176

pUT.pose "serves not the basic idea of mathematical physics . • • not

analysis, but synthesis, because it first creates a reflective unity which

on1yater
1 ·
can b e d ~ssecte d ~nto
. causale I d
ements an cond··
~t~ons. ,,140 The

single thing here is evidence not of an abstract universal standing behind

it, but rather it is the universal itself, because it holds its contents
14l
symbolically within itself. It is a picture of a total mental cosmos.

In this long and often repetitive critique, Cassirer makes two prin-

cipal points which are interesting precisely because we can discern

Panofsky's attempts to cope with these same two issues, sequentially, in

different sections of his essay on perspective. First of all, as the pre-

ceding paragraphs have asserted, Cassirer intends to emphasize that a work

of art is a unique and detached thing, independent and possessing its own

end within itself, and its interpretation has little to do with the cul-

tural or artistic context out of which it arose. In this sense, Cassirer's

aesthetic understanding seems to run counter to Panofsky's, at least as

exemplified in the first three parts of his essay which we have just re-

viewed. As we shall see, however, this concern becomes primary by

Panofsky's highly speculative concluding section. Cassirer, like Kant,

is not interested for the most part in causal connections, but only in
142
pure presences, the non-purposive purpose of a work of art.

140 Ibid., pp. 332, 352, 367. Cf. § 25 in Kant: "The sublime is
that which in comparison all else is small. • • • The sublime is that:
the mere capacity of thinking which evidences a faculty of mind trans-
cending every standard of sense."

141 Ibid., p. 328. "Das Einzelne weist hier nicht auf ein hinter
ihm stehendes, abstr°akt-Universelles hin; sondern es its dieses Univer-
selle selbst, weil es seiner Gehalt symbolish in sich fasst. 11°
142
Ibid., pp. 330-331.
 177

But, on the other hand, Cassirer also stresses the compatibility

of different methods for understanding a work of art. Kant had compre-

hended the aesthetic sphere as self-contained, but he placed it next to

a causal and mechanical explanation of the universe. A work of art pos-

sesses its own center of gravity at the same time as it interacts with

other essences. Just as individual causal laws are cases of laws in

general (according to a mechanistic model), so a work of art fits together

with other works of art and carries with it the symbolic import of a total

causal ordering. The claim of purpose in Kant, says Cassirer, was not

to correct or complete the thinking on causality, for a work of art can

143
always be seen as subject to causal law. Just as there is no contra-

diction between the self-contained "beauty of nature and the laws of

144
natlure," there can be no conflict between the non-purposive purpose

of a work of art and the causal conditions of its' existence. "Every

special form has to be explainable out of the preceding conditions of

"
th e surround1ng • d • ,,145
wor~

The antinomy between the conception of a non-purposive purpose

(Zweckbegriff) and the causal connections (Kausalbegriff) disappears as

soon as we think of both as two different, but complementary, methods of

ordering, through which we strive to bring unity to the manifold pheno-

_ 1L.6
mena of exper1ence. As Cassirer later summarizes Kant's two methods

'143
Ibid., pp. 304, 328.
144 Ibid., p. 363.

145 Ibid., p. 364: "Jede besondere Gesta1tung, die in einer Entwick-

lungsreihe auf tritt, muss aus der vorhergegangenen und aus den Bedingungen
der Umwelt erklHrbar sein."
146 Ib-d
1 . , p. 369.
 178

of order in The Problem of Knowledge:

The Critique of Judgment aims to prove that there is no

antinomy whatsoever between these two forms of order in knowledge.
They cannot contradict one another because they relate to problems
in distinct fields that must be kept carefully apart. Causality
has to do with knowledge of the objective temporal succession of
events, the order in change, whereas the concept of purpose has to
do with the structure of those empirical objects. • • • To appre-
ciate this structure as much in its characteristic and specific
form does not mean that we must desert the general domain of cau-
sality in order to explain it or catch at some sort of superempir-
ical or supersensuous cause. It is enough if we recognize a
special kind of being--that of "natural forms"--and understand it
in its systematic order as a unified self-contained structure. 147

That the reconciliation of teleology and mechanism is perhaps possible

in transcendental contemplation signifies one thing above all else: for

explanation's sake we need unswervingly to make use of both possibili-

t
"
l.es. 148 The principle of purpose does not so much "resist meaning as

prepare for it, as it calls the causal principle to it and assigns it

its tasks." Every individual form "encloses within itself unlimited

149
entanglements."

As we proceed through Panofsky's essay, we see him trying to un-

scramble these entanglements within the system of perspective. Following

147 Problem of Knowleuge, p. 121.

148 Kants Leben, pp. 371, 370. Cf. Kant § 75:
"It is I mean, quite certain that we can never get a sufficient know-
ledge of organized beings and their inner possibility~ much less get
an explanation of them, by looking merely to mechanical principles of
nature. Indeed, so certain is it, that we may confidently B.ssert
that it is absurd for men even to entertain any thought of so doing
or to hope that maybe another Newton may someday arise, to make in-
telligible to us even the genesis of but a blade of grass from natural
laws that no design has ordered."
149
Ibid., pp. 366, 372, 365. "Es wiedersetzt sich diesen Deutung
nicht, sondern es bereitet sie vor. Das Zweckprinzip selbst ruft
das Kausalprinzip herbei und weist ihm seine Aufgabe an • • • jede indivi-
duelle Form eine unbegrenzte Verwicklung in sich schliesst."
 179

Cassirer, who follows Kant:, he "experiments" with different modes of order-

ing his problem. Consequently, his essay should not be criticized for its

randomness as much as praised for its scope. Earlier, he had experimented

with approaches in separate works. Die Deutsche Plastik, for example, ex-

cluded iconographic questions; "Melencolia I" raised them to the status

of a science. ISO Wl:llfflin was reprimanded for not being "cultural enough";

Riegl was admonished for not being more "rigorously" formal. Panofsky has

attempted, within the confines of this one essay, what he accomplished

only in piecemeal fashion earlier: a totally comprehensive (formal,

cultural, philosophical) treatment of one particular visual form. Although

the various approaches reach no completely satisfactory resolution here

because they are still distinguished by divisions in this essay, they are

nonetheless encouraged to lie side by side and contribute to the quality

. of one another's vision of the artistic phenomeno~. The first two ap-

proaches in Panofsky's text are patterned on what Cassirer would call

mechanistic laws, although they are different in intent to be sure. The

first attempted to establish causal conneccions synchronically--examiniog

the work of art in relation to other forms of thought in which the culture

was engaged, while the middle section looked after diachronic connections

--explanations of causal development wrought within the visual tradition

alone. (Remember Panofsky had earlier criticized both Riegl and Wl:llfflin

for not being broad-minded enough.)

In the last part of Panofsky's essay the recognition of a work's

ISO Reidt, p. 201.

 180

internal structure or intrinsic meaning (Sinn)15l occupies a position

of considerable importance, playing a role, a new method of ordering,

which has been mostly ignored up to this point in the text. Here Panofsky

begins to approach the system of perspective from what Cassirer would call

a teleological vantage or what Panofsky himself would elsewhere refer to

as the "Archimedian viewpoint.,,152 He is no longer considering the sym-

bolic form of perspective construction in terms of causal connections, but

is, rather, regarding it in itself alone, as a singly-centered symbolic

form, or a "forming accomplishment of the content of reality,,,153 examining

its internal coherence and wholeness in the way Cassirer advocated with his

first approach in the Kant Commentary.. "The painting in perspective may

have ceased to be consistent with the world around it, but it remains
154
closely knit within its own system of references."

StiJ,.l concerned with the "intellectual pOiTerty,,155 (Begriffsarmut)

of the history of art, in 1925 Panofsky also composed a new theoretical

manifesto, iittber das Verhaltnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie:

151 Jan Bialostocki defines the German word Sinn in this sense: "It
is the tendency one finds expressed in the choice and in the shaping of
formal and figurative elements, and which can be discerned in the uniform
attitude towards the basic artistic problems." In "Erwin Panofsky (1892-
1963); Thinker, Historian, Human Being," Simiolus Kunsthistorisch
Tijdschrift IV, no. 2 (1970): 73~

152 See Chapter 3 here.

153
Chapter 3, P. 82.
154
Gombrich, Art and Illusion, p. 277. Gombrich is here referring
to the consistency of reading that illusion requires.

155 In Zeitschrift fUr Xsthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft,

XVIII (1925), fn. lIon p. 71 in the Oberer and Verheyen Anthology. Writ~
ten as a response to Alexander Dorner, "Die Erkenntnis des Kunstwollens
durch die Kunstgeschichte li in Zeitschrift fUr Xsthetik und Allgeme::ne
Kunstwissenschaft XVI (1922): 216-222. Bialostocki suggests Panofsky's
 181

Ein Beitrag zu der ErBrterung Uber die Moglichkeit 'Kunstwissenschaft-

Ucher Grundbegriffe,'" a brief examination of which may help to clarify

his rationale for conjoining methods in this perspective paper. Here he

continues to worry over both Riegl's and w8lfflin's ~ posterioristic

categories of art historical anaylsis, especially Rieglts Kunstwollen,

which because it is a psychological reality, fails to explain art as a

"metaempirical object" ("ein metempirischen Gegenstand lt ) . 156 He wants,

above all else, even as he did in 1920, to make Kunsttheorie philosophi-

cally legitimate, and he sees the only way of accomplishing this task is by

developing ~ priori categories: Grundbegriffe which only perform the

. 1~~'l""Ii"..i.

:'positing and not • . . the solutions of the artistic problem," which ask

the "questions" of the object but do not provide the "answers.,,157 In

order to be valid in Kantian terms, these categories must be independent

of all experience; they must be based on "purely intellectual routes"

("auf rein verstandesmassigen ~oJ"ege") .158 Like philosophy, art history

requires a "transcendental analysis of the very possibilities of art.,,159

article might more aptly be entitled, "Prolegomena to any future art

history which could claim to be a science," p.. 73.
156
ItAls etwas, das als 'immanenter Sinn' im kUnstlerischen PhHno-
mene 'liegt,'" Ibid., p. 49. Roughly translated continuation: "VIe can
only comprehend its valid ~ priori principles if we regard it in this way:
that is as an object of thought (Denkgegenstand), which is not primarily
encountered in a 'WirklichkeitsphHre,' but rather, as· Husserl says, in
its 'eidetischen' character."
157
Panofsky, Oberer and Verheyen edition, p. 56.
158
"Even if the Kunstwissenschaftliche Grundbegriffe are doubtless
based ~ priori, and therefore are valid independently of all experience,
this is not t~ say that they are independent of all experience, that is,
they can be based on purely intellectual routes."
159
Bialostocki, p. 73.
 182

In this regard, he adopts the ~ priori categories posited by his

160
Hamburg friend, the philosopher and art historian, Edgar tlind. The

most general ontological antithesis in art, according to Hind, is that

t<lhich is between "FUl1e" and "Form" (in neo-Kantian terms, Panofsky de-

fines them as correlating to "time" and "space"). For a work to come into

existence, a sort of balance or lIsettlement" (Auseinandersetzung)161 must

162
be achieved between these opposing poles of value:

160 Panofsky says the work of his friend, Winq, was not yet published
but hopes that it soon will be under the title, t:1{sthetischer und kunst-
wissenschaftlicher Gegenstand, ein Beitrag zur Methodo10gie der Kunstge-
schichte." It was finally published but not under that cumbersome title.
See Edgar Wi»d, "Zur Systematick der kUnstlerischen Probleme" in Zeit-
schrift fUr Asthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft XVIII (1924-25):
438-486.
161
Panofsky, Oberer and Verheyen edition, p. SO. According to
Cassell's 1909 (1936) German dictionary, "fUlle" is defined as "Fullness,
abundance, plenty and only rarely as contents. 'Form' denotes form,
figure, make or mode."

162 Here is Panofsky's table which he says he constructs "to make

things clearer!"
Universal Specific contrasts inside of the Universal
antithesis phenomenal, and to be sure, visual antithesis
inside of spheres inside of
ontological the methodo-
sphere ~
l. Contrast 2. Contrast 3. Contrast logical
of elemen- of figura- of composi- sphere
tary values tive values tional
values
I
The "FUlle" "0pt ischen" The deep The value of Time stands
stands values values "into one an- opposed to
opposed to (open space.) stand other" (merg- space
form stand opposed to ing) stands
opposed to surface opposed to
:'haptischen': values the values of
values "next to one
, Ebodies) another'! ,
(division) :
:

"This line of thinking," according to Bialostocki (p. 73), "leads

Panofsky to formulate the system of three layers of opposed values
 183

The manner in which elements are composed in a work of art reveals

a specific creative principle, i.e., a specific principle of solv-
ing problems. In a given work the set of principles used for solv-
ing artistic problems constitutes a unity. And this unity is for
Panofsky the essential meaning of a work or of an artistic period.
It corresponds for him to what he understands by 'artistic voli-
tion." 163

The elegance of this concept is to be attributed to its methodolo-

gical usefulness, according to Jan Bialostocki, because it permits the

art historian "to join two methodological positions usually opposed in

the study of art • • • the method which stresses the autonomy of artistic'

present in every work of visual art,

1. elementary values (optical"';tactile, i.e., space as opposed to
bodies)
2. figurative values (depth-surface)
3. compositional values (internal-external links, i.e., internal
organical unity as opposed to external juxtaposition).
In order for·a work of art to be created, a balance must be struck
within each of these scales of value. The ab'solute poles, the limit-
ing values themselves, are outside of art: purely optical values char-
acterize only amorphous luminous phenomena. Purely tactile values
characterize only pure geometrical shapes derived of any sensual full-
ness. A solution which determines the position of the work of art at
some point on any given scale at the same time determines its position
on the other scales. To decide for surface (as opposed tp depth) means
to decide for rest (as opposed to movement), for isolation (as opposed
to connection) and for tactile values (as opposed to optical ones):
a typical example confirming the analysis quoted above may be the
Egyptian relief.
The individual work of art is not, as claimed by v1Blfflin, defined
by one antithetical category or the other, but is situated at some
point on the scale between the limiting values. For instance, the
scale 'optical-tactile' takes actual form in such categories as
'painterly' (near the 'optical' pole), through 'sculptural' (in the
middle of the scale) to 'stereometric-crystalline' (closest to the
ideal, untrodden pole of the absolute 'tactile' quality). The border-
lines and values attainable on the scale are conditioned by historical
tendencies~ the qualities considered as most painterly on the Renais-
sance scale moved closer to the tactile pole in the Baroque, because
the whole scale had shifted towards the optical pole."
See Panofskyf·s later discussion of the same problem, in Meaning in the
Visual Arts, pp. 2lff.

163 Bialostocki, p. 74.

 184

phenomena and the method which stresses their links with the other elements

of the historical process." Employed in the right way, it can posit a

"common factor in the intrinsic meanings found in the various fields of

culture. ,,164

Its "specific creative principle," grounded in the poles of "neces-

sity" (289, 33) which gives a painting in perspective its actual material

existence,165 are reflective of a traditional neo-Kantian dialectic between

the mind and the world, between subject and object, or perhaps (one could

argue), between FUlle and Form. Where Cassirer says each symbolic "sphere

not only designates but actually creates its particular and irreducible

basic relation between 'inside' and 'outside,' between the I and the

world,,,166 Panofsky, in kind, defines perspective as being

• • • by its very nature a two-edged weapon. " • . It subjects the

images of art to fixed, that is mathematically exact rules, but on
the other hand, it makes them dependent on man, even on the indi-
vidual insofar as these rules refer to psychophysical conditions of
the visual impression and insofar as the way in which they are car-
ried out is determined by the freely chosen position of a subj'ective
"point of view" (287, 31).167

Note here how Renaissance perspective, branded "mythical" and "culturally

164 Ibid.

165 Cf. Cassirer on Myth, p. 14: "The mythical world is "and remains
a world of mere representations--but in its content, its mere material,
the world of knowledge is nothing else."
166
Language, p. 91.
167
"Denn sie ist ihrer Natur nach gleichsame sine zweischneidige
Waffe • • • sie bringt die kUnstlerische Erscheinung auf feste, ja mathe-
matisch-exakte Regeln, aber sie macht sie auf andern Seite vom Menschen,
ja vom Individuum abhMngig, indem diese Regeln auf die psychophysischen
Bedingungen des Seheindrucks Bezug nehmen, und indem die Art und Weise, in
der sie sich auswir.ken, durch die frei wMhlbare Lage eines subjektiven
':8lickpunktes' bestimmt wird."
 185

conventional" in the first half of the paper, has now gained stability

enough to be assessed as a viable, almost empirically verifiable way of

articulating space. Its significance has become doubly enhanced. It is

not just one very effective spatial construction, but is itself a philo-

sophical reflection on constructiveness.

As the "categorical distinction between 'I' and 'not-I' proves to be

an essential and constant function,,168 of Cassirer's thought, Panofsky

here stresses that a perspective painting owes its existence to the neces-

sary "distance" between man and the objects in his world. Quoting DUrer

(following Piero della Francesca), he advances the notion of distance in

order to let the system of perspective attempt its own, somewhat arbi-

trary, reconciliation of the metaphysical opposition betwe~n subjectivity

and · ..
0 b Ject~v~ty: 169. "'D as Erst ~s
. das Aug,d as d0 . h t, das And er ~s
s~c . t

der Gegenwurf, der gesehen wird, das Dri t t is t di'e ~.J'ei ten dozwischen'"

(287, 31).

Gegenwurf
the object seen
> WElTEN
<
~
the eye that sees

The "distance between" is bilaterally dependent upon the relationship be-

tween eye and object, as is Cassirer's notion of a symbolic form. The

middle territory which in itself has no tangible existence, except as it

is expressed in various symbolic forms, becomes, in effect, the sole

168
Language, p. 90.
169
Cf. Kant's transcendental schema, Language, p. 158: "In Kant the
object, as 'object in experience,' is not something outside of and apart
from cognition; on the contrary, it is only 'made possible,' determined
and constituted by the categories of cognition."
 186

"object" of study in both DUrer's painting and Cassirer's epistemology.

He attributes the historical attack on perspective "from two quite

different sides" to its unique halfway positioning:

• •. • if Plato condemned it in its modest beginnings because it

distorts the "true sizes" of things and puts subjective appear-
ance and caprice in the place of reality and law, the ultra-modern
criticism of art makes exactly the opposite charge that it is a
product of a narrow and narrowing rationalism • • • in the end it
is hardly more than a question of emphasis whether the charge
against perspective is that it condemns "true ~eing" to the appear-
ance of things seen or that it binds the free and as it were the
spiritual intuition of form to the appearance of things seen (290-
291, 34-35).

In his Idea: Ein.Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der alteren Kunsttheorie

(written in the same year as the perspective paper as a response to a

lecture given by Cassirer on "The Idea of the Beautiful in Plato's

Dialogues" at the lolarburg Library), Panofsky continues his interest in

what he calls the subjective/objective problem and its historically

changing polarities: "the problem of the relationship between 'I' and

the world, spontaneity and receptivity, given material and active form-
170
ing power." What distinguishes Renaissance art theorists from those

of the Middle Ages was their concentration on the notion of distance.

Renaissance theorists laid a "distance between 'subject' and 'object,'

much as in artistic practice perspective placed a distance between the

eye and the world of things--a distance which at the same time objectifies

the 'object' and personalizes the 'subject. ,,,171 But Panofsky emphasizes

170
Translated Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, p. 1.

171 Idea, pp. 50-51. This "attitude" differed from the Middle Ages
"in that i't'""removed the object: from the inner world of the artist's ima-
gination and placed it firmly in the 'outer world. '"
 187

that Renaissance art theory was practical, not speculative. Calling

Alberti "no anticipative neo-Kantian,,,172 he stresses his lack of a philo-

sophic point of view. The Itn~ive" purpose of Renaissance art theory, was

only "to provide artists with firm and scientifically grounded rules for

their creative activity.1t This goal could only be attained on "the pre-

supposition • • • that above the tsubject' as well as above the 'object'

there exists a system of universal and unconditionally valid laws frcm

which the artistic rules are to be derived, and that the understanding

of these laws was the specifically 'art-theoretical' task.,,173

The task of art theory had, however, substantially altered since the

Renaissance. Since Kant had discounted the notion of universally valid

laws, the art theoretician, by choice or not, operates in a new universe

of discourse:

In epistemology the presupposition of this "thing in itself" was

profoundly shaken by Kant; in art theory a similar view was proposed
by Alois Riegl. We believe to have realized that artistic perceptj.on
is nO more faced with a "thing in itself" than is the process of
cognition; that on thfr contrary the one as well as the other can be
$uta of the validity of its judgments precisely because it alone
determines the rules of its world, i.e., it has no objects other than
those that are constituted within itself. 174

The ideology behind spatial configuration can no longer be based on the

"nM.ive" assumption that a perspective painting is in any way isomorphic

with the world it depicts. But as a metaphor for perception, the form

of a Renaissance painting remains well-suited to a neo-Kantian vision of

the human project.

172
Ibid. , footnote 17 on p. 206.
173
Ibid. , p. Sl.
174
Ibid. , p. 126.
 188

.
For Cass~rer ref er to ear l'~er d'~agram,
( ) 175 a symbol ~s
. " not on+y an

ideal object {1ocateil half-way between man and his world and binding

the two. It is also a busy messenger running back and forth between [EhemJ

wi th the office of conciliation." " 'The beautiful, says Ca~.,;irer, is

essentially and necessarily symbol because • it is cleft inwardly;

because it is ~lways' and everywhere both one and double. In this split,

in this attachment to the sensuous, it • expresses the tension which

runs through the world of our consciousness • • . and the basic polarity

of being itself",,176 or, to continue quoting Cassirer, this time from

the Language volume, "Art can no more be defined as the mere express.ion

of inward life than as a reflection of the forms of outward reality."l77

In these terms, perspective can be viewed not so much as a "two-edged

weapon," as Panofsky' calls it, as much as a two-sided mirror. Alberti1s

model of the cross section through the visual pyramid, with its apex in

the eye and its base in the object, can be converted, in this Cassirerian

context, into a metaphor of man's perception of the chaos of experience

at large, with the concept of the symbolic form adopting the position of

the picture plane in the pyramidal design.

symbolic form Mind Cassirer

Cassirer

object
in two- edged :::::=- (Panofsky)
mirror weapon
world (Panof skv_'
Alberti "
.
p~cture plane
Eye Alberti

175 See earlier p. 141.

176 Gilbert and Kuhn, p. 560.

177
Language, p. 93.
 189

To Panofsky's mind, this p~rticular symbolic form, the system of perspec-

tive--witness the history of its success--is inserted in the Renaissance

exactly half-way between the two worlds of subjective and objective experi-

ence. I quote from Panofsky's conclusion:

So the history of perspective may be understood with equal right as

a triumph of the feeling for reality, making for distance and ob-
jectivity, and as a triumph of the human struggle for power, deny-
ing distance; it may be understood equally well as a fixing and
systematizing of the external world and as an extension of the ego's
sphere. It had therefore constantly to pose for artistic thought
the problem as to the sense in which this ambivalent method was to
be used (287, 31).178

From one side of the g:ass, we receive the record of events in the

world behind it, while the other brings in systems of order generated by
179
the mental processes of the observer (remember, there is no such thing

as the "innocent eye!!). An artist's language in C~ssirer's sense, per-

spective is "!! ~ a sensuous and intellectual form of expression. ,,180

Hence the stress on equally valid, though decidedly antithetical ways of

interpre~ing perspective construction, which can be recognized by simply

. -
looking into the merging forms on the surface of the glass, whose mutual

interaction indicates the presence of a symbolic form that is in itself

both a humanly originated experience and the revelation of another reality.

178 "So Ulsst sich die Geschichte der Perspektive mit gleichem Recht
als ein Triump des distanziierenden und objektivierenden Wirklichkeits-
sinns, und als ein Triump distanverneinenden menschlichen Machtstrebens,
ebensowohl. If

179 Cf. Cassirer, p. 10 of The Phenomenology of· Knowledge: "Now it

is no longer contradictory but actually necessary that what from one point
of view may be designated as the matter of cognition, is from another
standpoint recognized as something formed, or at least form-containing."
180 .
Language, p. 319.
 190

The "perspective view • . • mathematises visu~l space, but it is

still visual space that it mathematises; it is an ordering, but an order-

ing of visual appearance" (290, 35).

Yet despite his philosophical emphasis on the system or symbolic

form as maintaining a delicate balance between its objective and subjective

determinants, Panofsky clearly decides what side of the mirror he will

favor in future art historical work: "'The perspective view, whether as-

sessed and interpreted in the sense of ratio and objectivism or rather in

the sense of chance and subjectivism, rests upon the will to construct

pictorial space (with whatever abstraction from the psycho-physiologically

'given') out of the elements and in accordance with the schema of empiri-

cal visual space" (290, 34-35). It becomes once again a matter of priority,

as it was several years before in the w8lfflin critique. Something deter-

mines what objects are perceived", and it is not the biological eye alone
181
which can be credited with the distinctly human enterprise of art:

It is accordingly only a matter of course that the Renaissance

interpreted the meaning of perspective quite differently from the
Baroque, Italy quite differently from the North: there--to speak
very generally--its objective significance was felt to be the more
important, here its subjective significance. . . • We see that a
decision could only be reached • • • on the basis of those large
oppositions we are accustomed to call caprice and norm, individual-
ism and collectivism, irrationality and ratio or the like, and that
times, nations, and individuals would have to take an especially
definite and evident position on these modern problems of perspective
(my italics) (288, 32).

181 Svetlana Alpers, on p. 6 of her essay, "Is Art History?" states

that " • • • ~lthough he is suspicious of subjectivity, Panofsky's view of
art and its history is clearly on the side of certain values, certain no-
tions of man, art and history for which he claims objective validity.
Thus although his methods for studying art and its history were histori-
cally located as appropriate ways of dealing with Renaissance art, he came
to treat them as normative and so they came to be seen by the discipline
itself."
 191

Perspective painting originates in the human intellect. 182 It is a fixing

and systematizing, on a painted surface, of what Kant called a "'synthesis

of recognition'" and Herder "'reflection''': "'Man demonstrates reflection

when the force of his soul works so freely that in the ocean of sensations

that flows into it from all the senses, he can, in a manner of speaking,

isolate and seop one wave, and direct his attention toward this wave, con-

scious that he is so doing. ",183

By the conclusion of this long and experimental essay on ways of

"ordering" artistic impressions, the "convention" of perspective has been

provided with a new and broader meaning. It is no longer the limited and

creatively limiting structure it was in the first half of the paper, but

has become itself expressive of a creative unity between the mind and the

world--a symbolic form, man and nature here, on the painted canvas, exhib-

iting the same form-giving character, mutually eXpressing each other's

meanings. In works of art, such as Rembrandt's for example, "the perspec-

tive treatment of space It trans forms reality into appearance ~ncg seems to

182
Idea, fn. 38 on pp. 248-249:
"Just--a5""the intellect 'causes the perceptible world to be either not
an object of experience at all or to be a nature' (Kant, Prolegomena,
§ 8), so, we may say, the artistic consciousness causes the sensory
world to be either not an object of artistic representation at all or
to be a 'figuration.' The following difference, however, must be re-
membered. The laws which the intellect 'prescribes' to the percepti-
ble world and by obeying which the perceptible world becomes 'nature,'
are universal; the laws which the artistic consciousness 'prescribes'
to the perceptible wor.ld and by obeying which the perceptible world
becomes 'figuration' must be considered to be individual--or to use an
expression recently suggested by H. Noack, Die systematische und
methodische Bedeutung des Stilbegriffs (diss. Hamburg, 1923),
j idiomatic. ' If

183 Language, p. 152. From Herder, "Uber den Ursprung der Sprache"
(1772), Werke, ed. B. Suphan.
 192

reduce the divine to a mere content of human consciousness, but to that

end, conversely, [it] enlarges human consciousness into a vessel for the

divine" (291, 35).184 Panofsky has translated Alberti's description of

perspective into a neo-Kantian metaphor of perception. He calls perspec-

tive an artifical cop.vention, neither because the Renaissance called the

mathematical methoa of constructing pictures "perspectiva artificialis,"

nor because this c'onstruction historically distorts our "real" view of the

world, but because it is a system of knowledge which can be viewed, in its

most humanistic sense, as a mere construct, a symbolic form, interposed

between the perceiver and the perceived. In this sort of dynamic--as

Cassirer, paraphrasing Goethe eloquently puts it--"in the continuous mo-

bility of the spirit, all sight • • • passes into contemplation, all con-

templation into sp'eculation, all speculation into combination, so that at

every attentive glance into the world we are theorizing. • • • The most
185
important thing • • • is to recognize that all fact is in itself theory."

184 " • • • das GBttliche zu einem blossen Inhalt des menschlichen

Bewusstseins zusammenuziehen.scheint, dafUr aber um gekehrt das menschliche
Beusstsein zu einem Gef~sse des GBttlichen weitet."
185 Neither Cassirer nor Goethe, of course, is talking about per-
spective painting in particular. Phenomenology of Knowledge, pp. 16, 25.
 VI. Later Work: An Iconological Perspective

Wenn ich mich beim UrphHnomen zuletzt beruhige, so ist es doch

auch nur Resignation; aber es bleibt ein grosser Unterschied,
ob ich mich an den Grenzen der Menschkeit resigniere oder
innerhalb einer hypo thetis chen Beschr~nktheit meines bornierten
Individuums. (When I at last rest in the realm of original
phenomena--so it is still only a resignation, but there is a
great distinction between whether I am resigned at the limits
of humanity or inside the hypothetical limits of my narrow-
minded individuality.)
Goethe

Contemporary art history is in large part dependent upon the method-

ological vision of Erwin Panofsky. It is now common practice for a

student of past art to attempt to situate his/her work in a" context and

to decipher, on"some level, the personal and cultural ideas which it expres-

ses. Questing after the always elusive "meanings" of works of art, scholars

trained within the last thirty-five or forty years continue to demonstrate

their special indebtedness to Panofsky' s later works. Out of the almost

two hundr~d listings in his bibliography, Studies in Iconology (1939),1

Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951), Early Netherlandish Painting

(1953), and Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955) have together come to repre-

sent the so-called iconological method.

1 Originally delivered as the Mary Flexner Lectures at Princeton.

liThe introductory chapter synthesizes the revised content of a methodolo-
gical article published by the writer in "1932 (:'Zum Problem der Beschrei-
bung und Inhaltsdeutung von ~.]erken der bildenden Kunst, 11 Logos XXI (1932):
103-110 with a study on classical mythology in l!!ediaeval art published in
the following year by the writer in collaboration with Dr. F. Saxl C'Clas-
sical ~l.,thology in Mediaeval Art,!1 Metrooolitan Museum Studies IV (1933):
228-28~Preface, xv. "

193
 194

Ironically, however, th~se later works ("later" in comparison to the

1920 theoretical papers I have discussed), which are generally regarded

as the theoretical culmination of Panofsky's career, in fact recreate only

the initial stages of a program implied by his earlier writings. Art

historians not acquainted with the theoretical background of many of

these ideas frequently see in this later work only a practical program

for the deciphering of specific and not-so-hidden symbols in visual images.

Icono1ogy, despite Panofsky's emphasis on semantics, is still understood

as only a slightly more refined and sophisticated version of iconegraphy.

In some sense, this predicament was created and then perpetuated by

Panofsky himself, especially in his English writings. Having investigated

the epistemological assumptions underlying the genesis of Panofsky's ap-

proach to art history, we cannot let the success and popularity of his

later work distract us from a continuing critical' examination of 'its prin-

,cip1es.

Although Panofsky first posited the icono1ogica1 approach as a pos-

sible direction for art historical inquiry in "Hercules am, Scheidewege

und andere antike Bi1dstoffe in der neureren Kunst" (1930) and "Zum

Problem der Beschreibung und Inha1tsdeutung von l.J'erken der bi1denden Kunst"

'(1932),2 as a "method" it lacked a coherent systematization until 1939.

2 In Studien der Bibi10thek Warburg 18 (1930) and Logos (see previous

footnote), respectively. Gombrich views the Hercules paper as one of
Panofsky's best:
"What may have looked like a specialized and even marginal question,
the transformations which the images of the ancient gods and stellar
dieties unde~ent in their migrations, appeared to offer a much more
precise and manageable indicator of this link than the conventional
approach through period styles. It was Panofsky who generalized this
~ethod and put it to the test in one of his most consistent books--also
still untrans1ated--his Hercules am Scheidewege (1930), in which the
various refractions and transmutations of a classical theme are
 195

Studies in Iconology categorizes, in tabular form, three levels of meaning

or subject matter present in every visual image and provides specific sug-

gestions, as well, for their interpretation:

1) a "pre-iconographical description," on the basis of "practical

experience," interprets "primary or natural subject matter";
2) an "iconographical analysis" C'in the narrower sense of the word")
is interested in the "secondary or conventional meanings" which can
be discovered by a knowledge of literary sources; 3
3} an iconological ("iconography in a deeper sense") interpretation
directs itself towards Panofsky's original concern with "intrinsic
meaning or content." To reveal the meaning of a work of art on this
level, one must familiarize himself with the "essential tendencies of
the human mind" as they are conditioned by cultural predispositions
and personal psychology.

Both an iconographic and an iconological reading present the art

historian with symbols that demand decoding. But the similarity stops

there. Although they share the same name, Panofsky categorically dis-

tinguishes between what he calls "symbols in the ~rdinary sense" and

"symbols in the Cassi:rerian sense.,,4 As "ordinary symbols," he l!ites

brilliantly analysed as symptoms of changing philosophies" in "Obitu-

ary," Burlington Magazine 110 (June 1968): 359.

3 It is most interesting to note that between the publication date

of Studies in Iconologx (1939), and Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955),
the phrasing of Iliconographical analysis in the narrower sense" and "icono-
graphical analysis in the deeper sense" have been altered, respectively,
to "iconography" and "iconology." Iconology as a word does not appear in
the 1939 edition. When I refer to this "Introduction" article, I use
Studies in Iconology. In "Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to
the Study of Renaissance Art" originally published in Studies in Iconology
but reprinted in Meaning in the Visual Arts, Panofsky inserts a parenthet-
ical paragraph on p. 32 to explain his renewed use of the world "icon-
ology." For further discussion, on this- shifting vocabulary, see Joseph
Margolis, The Language of Art and Art Criticism (Detroit, 1965), pp. 79-80.
4
Studies in Iconology, p. 6, footnote 1.
 196

examples such as ttne Cross or the Tower of Chastity, images which can

be rather perfunctorily deciphered by a learned acquaintance with the

literary,and visual traditions. A "Cassirerian symbol," on the othe:r

hand, requires a subtler sensitivity.5 If one wishes to interpret motifs

and images as "manifestations of underlying principles," he/she must be-

come familiar not only with the work of art in both its stylistic form

and storied content, but also with all of the possible ineffable and ul-

timately unverifiable forces (psychological, societal, cultural, political,

spiritual, philosophical, etc.) which have come together to shape its

singular existence--forces which may well be "unknown to the artist him-

self and may even emphatically differ from what he consciously intended

to express":

This means what may be called a history of cultural symptoms

--or "symbols" in Ernst Cassirer's sense--in 'general. The art
historian will have to check what he thinks is the intrinsic
meaning of the work, or group of works, to which he devotes his
attention, against what he thinks is the intrinsic meaning of as
many other documents of civilization historically related to that
work or group of works, as he can master: of documents be:-aring
witness to the political, poetical, religious, philosophical and
social tendencies of the personality, period, or country under
investigation. 6

As compelling as this idea or method is in theory, it nevertheless has

led to a certain confusion in practice. Let us recollect a few of

Panofsky's later "practical" works as illustration.

Take, for example, an essay published as an illustration of the

5 I am here reminded of Panofsky's much later characterization of

a humanist: "Humanists cannot be 'trained'; they must be allowed to
mature or, if I may use so homely a simile, to marinate" in Meaning in
the Visual Arts, p. 341.
6
Studies, pp. 8, 16.
 197

iconological approach, "The Neoplatonic Movement and Michelangelo. ,,7 As

many scholars before Panofsky had demonstrated, Michelangelo came into

contact with Neoplatonic ideas in his Florentine circle. "All this is

not exceptional. With an Italian artist of the sixteenth century the

presence of Neoplatonic influences is easier to account for than would

be their absence."a But his intention in this essay is to prove how

deeply infused Michelangelo became with a Neoplatonic conception of life,

not just as "a convincing philosophical system, let alone as the fashion

of the ,day, but as a metaphysical justification of his own self.

Michelangelo resorts to Neoplatonism in his search for visual symbols of

9
human life and destiny, as he experienced it." Frequently paraphrasing

philosophers such as Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, Panofsky spends much

time providing a worki.ng sketch of Neoplatonism. Without the least self-

consciousness, he equates Michelangel~'s Weltanschauung with his under-

standing of this specific philosophical doctrine. This particular philos-

ophy, he suggests, became intentionally expressed in Michelangelo's works

of art. In Gothic Art and Scholasticism, Panofsky again donates a certain

primacy to philosophical thought as it is embodied in one particular doc-

10
trine. The work of scholastic scholars exuded a compelling and

7
In Studies, pp. a, 16.
8
Ibid. , p. 180.
9
Ibid. , pp. 180, 182.

10 M. Schapiro in "Style" in Anthrouology Today, pp. 305-306, criti-

cizes this sort of project as spurious, although he does not name Pano£sky
directly:
"The attempts to derive style from thought are often too vague to
yield more than suggestive aper9us; the method breeds analogical
speculations which do not hold up under detailed critical study. The
history of the analogy drawn between the Gothic cathedral and
 198

determinative force, whose "mental habits" and "controlling principles"ll

became appropriated, unintentionally in this instance, by the architects

working in the great cathedrals affiliated with the universities.

In practice, Panofsky's "system" of iconology in these sorts of in-

quiries which direct themselves towards. the discovery of Ilintrinsic analo-

gies" can be represented, according to G8ran Hermeren, by a simple dis-

12
gram:

world view or philosophy l

! expressed by

.---w-o-r-k......:o;.,.f-a~

This illustration exemplifies, however, an inherent confusion in the icono-

logical method. In his introduction to Studies in Iconology, it is obvi-

ous that Panofsky intends to draw a significant distinction between a

world view and a particular philosophy which either contributes to or ar-

ticulates, but does not itself form, that \ve1tanschauung: "The intrinsic'

meaning or content • • • is apprehended by ascertaining those underlying

scholastic theology is an example. The common element in these two

contemporary creations has been found in their rationalism and in
their irrationality, their idealism and their naturalism, their en-
cyclopedic completeness and thej.r striving for infinity, and recently
in their dialectical method. Yet one hesitates to reject such 'ana1o-
gies in principle, since the cathedral belongs to the same religious
sphere as does contemporary theology."

11 Gothic Art and Scholasticism, pp. 21, 36,. 38.

12
Representqtion and Meaning in the Visual Arts: A Study in the
Mythology of Iconography and Icono1ogy (Sweden, 1969), p. 137.
 199

principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class,

a religious or philosophical persuasion--unconsciously qualified by one

personality and condensed into one work. ,,13 In this sense, Panofsky's

purpose seems to be to study a world view which is expressed in a work of

art. If so, then Hermerln thinks the first diagram of Panofsky's work

should be replaced by the one which he suggests in theory:

I world view

expressed by; (1) I l expressed by

(2)

I,-----------~~ ~~~--------~
work of art Ice-, I philosophy I
(3)
Sometimes Panofsky's practice seems to suggest that he is primarily
interested in the horisontal relation (3), that is, in similarities
or analogies between works of art and specific doctrines. But to
be consistent with his theoretical views in the introduction to
Studies in Iconology he should • • • in the ~irst place be interested,
in the vertical relation (1) . . . . The principal goal of iconology
••• is to study the vertical relation (1); and the study of the
horisontal relation is • • • a means to achieve that goal. If icono-
logical writings are viewed in this way, then the apparent discrep-
ancy between what iconologists ~1rite in their theoretical moments
and what they actually do when they interpret works of art seems to
,disappear. 14

But the ideal is lost sight of, ~nd the practical iconological program

turns out to be much narrower in scope. In the words of a harsher critic,

Kurt Forster, this sort of establishment of direct connections, for example

between Neoplatonic philosophy and Michelangelo's art, "led to highly

questionable results • • • Where philosophical prop,ositions are ~iven a

generative role for the making of art. ,,15

13
Studies, p. 7.
14
He~eren, p. 138.
15
"Critical History of Art, or Transfiguration of Values?" New
Literary History III, 3 (Spring lS'r2) ~ 466.
 200

This reversal in direction leads to other problems with the icono-

logical method according to Panofsky, as Otto pHcht intimated twenty-five

years ago. Ina.'.book review of Early Netherlandish Painting for the

Burlington MagaZin~:I6 pHcht questions the integrity of Panofsky's dictum

of discovering "'symbolical values' • which are generally ,tnknown to

the artist himself and may even emphatically differ from what he con-

sciously intended to express." If it is true that the new materialism in

17
northern art was secretly and ingeniously strewn with hidden symbolism,

as Panofsky proposes in his central chapter, "Reality and Symbol in Early

Flemish Painting: 'Spiritualia sub Metaphoris Corporalium,'" then pHcht

questions what is unusual about these symbols' need to be deciphered.

When Panofsky remarks "'that this imaginary reality was controlled to the
18 he obviously
smallest detail by a preconceived symbolical program, "'

means to suggest that this disguised symbolism was intentionally and

deliberately planned by painters such as the Master of Flemalle and Jan

van Eyck, and is, therefore, part of a consistent iconographic program.

The significant question in this case is, in short, how can this sort of

decoding be called iconological rather than second-order iconographic?

16
"Panofsky's Early Netherlandish Painting," Burlington Magazine
XCVIII (1956): 276.
17 "Is Art History?" p. 5. Alpers criticizes Panofsky's understand-
ing of Netherlandish painting on the grounds that he interprets northern
art mainly in terms of the Italian Renaissance·: " ••• Panofsky's defini-
tion of disguised symbolism--his inventive way of analyzing the combina-
tion of new pictorial realism and old medieval symbolism in the art of
the north--in effect follows Italian fashions by subordinating surface
imitation to meaning. He does not allow for the fact that the appearance
of the first seems SO often to outrun the verbal presence of the second,
even in van Eyck."
18 Early Netherlandish Painting, p. 137. Regard how contradictory
this statement is to sentiments about the artist's intention expressed
earlier in the Riegl critique.
 201

Panofsky's objective here is decidedly different from the one he advanced

in "Perspective as a Symbolic Forml! and the introduction to Studies in

11
Iconology: since the creative act is placed on the level of con-

sciousness and is imagined to be of non-intuitive nature, art-historical

interpretation is orientated in a new direction; its ultimate aim being

no longer to understand the philosophy embodied by, and implicit in, the

visual form, but to discover the theological or philosophical preconcep-

tions that lie behind it. 1I19 As practiced in 1953, the iconologica1

method, in Bia1ostocki's view, had IIdeve10ped in the direction of inter-

preting 'conscious' rather than 'unconscious' symbolism . . . ~ndJ iconol-

ogists are frequently more interested in interpreting the second level,

that of conventional symbolism, than in analyzing a work of art as a cu1-

20
tura1 symptom."

Creighton Gilbert attacked the practice of i'cono1ogy from the other

21
way around. Assuming icono1ogy to be the result of a method rather than

the technique itself, he argues that the iconologist's problems begin just

at that point when he decides not to stick to the iconographic evidence,

but presses on into the "deeper" content and significance of a work. Ac-

cording1y, he preaches moderation. Must every Renaissance painting pos-

sess a secret--a deeper meaning than that which appears at first to be the

case? Is every Nativity scene a prefiguration of the Lamentation; every

beam of sunlight passing unbroken through a pane of glass a symbol of

19
pMcht, p. 276.
20
"Ic.onography and Iconology," p. 781.
21
"On Subject and non-Subject in Italian Renaissance Pictures,1I
Art Bulletin xx.,{IV (1952): 202-216.
 202

Mary's chastity?

Panof'sky, as we might expect, was not insensitive to the obvious

difficulties which iconology presented, and he cautioned against letting

the imagination run wild: "There is, however, admittedly some danger

that iconology will behave, not like ethnology as opposed to ethnography,

but like astrology as opposed to astrography." "There is, I am afraid,"

he concludes

• • • no other' answer to this problem than the use of historical

methods tempered, if possible, by connnon sense. tole have to ask our-
selves whether or not a symbolical significance of a given motif is
a matter of established representational tradition; • • • whether
or not a symbolical interpretation can be justified by definite texts
or agrees with ideas demonstrably alive in the period and presumably
familiar to its artists; • . • and to what extent such a symbolical
interpretation is in keeping with the historical position and personal
tendencies of the individual master. 22

A familiarity, then, with contexts (translated in practice primarily as

"texts") became, for Panofsky, the necessary prerequisite to any art his-

torical analysis. It was his pursuit of humanistic knowledge, in parti-

cular his mastery of Greek and Latin commentaries, which increasingly

began to distinguish his r.esearch from that of his formalist predecessors.

And this brings us to the most perfunctory criticism leveled at iconology:

the notion that Panofsky knew nothing about art as art. From his reputa-

tion as a classical scholar, says Gombrich, "there was only a short step

to the misunderstanding that Panofsky waa mainly interested in texts ex-

plaining the meaning of symbols and images, and that he did not respond

to the formal qualities of art.,,23 Walter FriedlHnder, on the other hand,

22
"Iconography and Iconology," see fn. 3, p. 32 and Early Nether-
landish Painting, pp. 142-143.

23 "Obituary," p. 358.
 203

upon being told by a mutual colleague that Panofsky was very erudite,

but lacked the discerning eye of a connoisseur, retorted, tI'I think it is

just the other way around. • He is not as learned as all that, but
he has a wonderful eye.' ,,24

As a matter of fact, so it is said, Panofsky was very proud to be

25
blessed with one nearsighted and one farsighted eye, and he humorously

interpreted this quirk of nature as a symbol of his art historical destiny.

As we have discussed repeatedly in earlier chapters, it is no doubt true

that Panofsky put a long-neglected emphasis on content back into the

practice of art history, but it is equally important to stress that he

26
hardly forsook an admiration for formal qualities in the process. In

his "History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline," he even goes so far as

to assert that "in the case of a work of art, the interest in the idea is

balanced, and may even be eclipsed, by an interest in form.,,27 It is not

in the· least unusual to discover, in the midst of his erudite iconographic

24 Ibid.

25 William S. Heckscher, Erwin Panofsky: A Curriculum Vitae, re-

printed by the Department of Art and Archaeology from the Record of the
Art Museum, Princeton University XXVIII, no. 1 (1969), appendices I-IV
addedf a paper read at a symposium held at Princeton on March 15, 1969
to mark the first anniversary of Panofsky's death, p. 14.
26
Schapiro, p. 305:
" • • • the meaning or content has been extended, and attention has
been fixed on broader attitudes or on general ways of thinking and
feeling, which are believed to shape a style. The style is then
viewed as a concrete embodiment or projection of emotional dispositions
and habits of thought common to the whole culture. The content as a
parallel product of the same viewpoint will therefore often exhibit
qualities and structures like those of the style."

27 Reprinted in Meaning in the Visual Arts, p. 12.

 204

expositions, an attention to other matters. iihen he deciphers Titian's

"abstruse 'Allegory of Prudence, t i l for example, he closes his study with

an eloquent tribute to Titian's formal virtuosity:

And it is doubtful whether this human document would have fully

revealed to us the beauty and appropriateness of its diction had
we not had the patience to decode its obscure vocabulary. In a
work of art, "form" cannot be divorced from "content": the dis-
tribution of color and lines, light and shade, volumes and planes,
however delightful as a visual spectacle, must also be understood
as carrying a more-than-visua1 meaning. 28

On what basis, then, is Panofsky's reputation as an art historian

identified with his interest in meaning, to the exclusion of form? . First

of all, from the very start of his scholarly career (recall the 1916

"t-181ff1in critique), his avowed aim was to encompass both form and content

in his ana1ysis--to treat both as mutually expressive of meaning, or as

he would later call it, the "essential tendencies of the human mind.,,29

But this task was easier to wish for than to practice, an~ as a result,

we see Panofsky in the "Humanistic" essay, struggling to characterize

anew the traditional art historical vocabulary:

Anyone confronted with a work of art, whether aesthetically recreat-

ing it or rationally investigating it, is affected by its three con-
stituents: materialized form, idea (that is, in the plastic arts,
subject matter) and content. • . • One thing, however is certain;
the more the proportion of emphasis on l1idea" and "form" approaches
a state of equilibrium, the more eloquently will the work reveal what
is called "content."30

28 "Titian's Allegory of Prudence: A Poatscript," in Meaning, p. 168.

Note, however, how form is here defined only in relation to meaning.
29
Studies, p. 16.
30
"The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline," Meaning, pp. 16,
13-U.. Cf. This description of "form,t and "content" to that he provided
in the W81ff1in c=itique.
 205

Conten~ is regarded as the precipitate of the reaction of form upon idea:

it is "that which a work betrays but does not parade. It is the b.asic

attitude of a n·ation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical

persuasion--all this unconsciously [;y italic~ qualified by one person-

. 31
ality and condensed into one work." To anyone familiar with the icono-

logical "system," these three constituents, form, idea and content, Sef:71.1

to cort:espond, respectively, to Panofsky's three levels of iconography.

The pre-iconographic description attends to the formal presentation of

the objects in "certain configurations of line and colour" apart from

their significance; the iconographic analysis "in the narrower sensen in-

vestigates the specific idea (literary) behind the formal presentation;

and the iconological interpretation ("iconography in a deeper sense")

uncovers the hidden attitudinal contents which generate the "need" for a

"form" to give shape to an "idea" in the. first piace. Based on an almost

Freudian metaphor of discovering deeper and deeper "strata" of meaning,

this implied sequence, despite Panofsky's protestations to the contrary

(rr • • • in actual work, the methods of approach which here appear as three

unrelated operations of research merge with each other into one organic

and indivisible process"), presents in tabular form, a sort of hierarchy

. ~ " .. 32
of art historical inv'e'S·tigation.

And secondly, while it is undoubtedly true that the separation of

form and content has been responsible for untold confusion in art criti-

cism, as Panofsky would be the first to admit, he nonetheless made certain

31 Ibid., p. 14. Cf. this stress on the "unconscious" intentions of

works with what PHcht criticizes in Early Netherlandish Painting.
32·
Studies, p. 17. The sequence is, in fact, actually cyclical.
See later discussion in this chapter.
 206 '.

irreversible choices when he first began to investigate an image according

to the Warburg method and its implied ability to pull an.image apart into

its two formative components. "So long as we are speaking of conventions

th.~ distinction" between form and content, James Ackerman declares

• • • not only is permissible but necessary for description, becaucz

the life of symbols and the life of forms has not been everywhere
coexistent in history. Some symbols (such as those for the Holy
Ghost or the Virtues and Vices) pass through varied forms, while for-
mal conventions (such as those of late antique sculpture or Gothic
manuscript illumination, which were used for pagan and Christian
themes alike) are applied to symbols of different, even conflicting
significance. 33

With his concentration on the significance of the separation of classical

themes and classical motifs in medieval art (for example, the motif of

Hercules and its transformation into an image of Christ), Panofsky drove

a kind of permanent methodological wedge in his work between the idea of

a work of art and the particular shape this idea variously assumed. The

form becomes partly revelatory, a clue to the more significant ideational

content: its role is one of offering contributions to the "more-than-

visual meaning.,,34
•
Although both activities must ~e acknowledged in their own right--

the formal analysis of the connoisseur and the interpretative enterprise

of the icono1ogist--the icono1ogist utters the last word. Icono1ogy sub-

sumes, under its own interest in '~contexts, It the necessary first steps of

formal analysis. The metaphor. H. van de Waa1 created for describing the

universality of Panofsky's project can be employed as well for the char-

acterization of the final "focus" of his scholarly attention:

33
"The Historian as Critic," Art and Archaeology, p. 152.

34 See footnote 28 here.

 207

For many years historiography has known two complementary forms:

the first, particularizing, directed towards the thorough study
of a single item; the second, more general, directed towards the
exposition of the characteristics of a larger whole. In the first
case the researcher may be said to use a microscope to arrive at
the most precise specification possible of the material under scru-
tiny. In the second--to continue our metaphor--he uses· a reversed
telescope in his effort to sketch an overall view of a wide pano-
rama. • •• In art history critical connoisseurship is clearly a
"microscopist" discipline par excellence. In Panofsky's day every
fonn of art history that was oriented towards cultural history pre-
sented itself exclusively in the second, the panoramic variety. • . •
Panofsky now set himself to study the single, individual work of
art, working just as scrupulously as the connoisseur (and often led
by an intuition at least as strong). It was his innovation to
practice· this detailed form of art study within the broad framework
of general cultural history. His "question, "What did this individual
work of art mean in its own time?" tended to cause raised eyebrows,
because, with regard to an individual work of art, the posing of such
questions had fallen into disfavour. 3S----

Although Panofsky preferred to assume, for theory's sake, t~at form

and content are inseparably wed and that only together can they give birth

to icono1ogical meaning and "Cassirerian" significance in a work of art,

the kind of art historical analysis he tended increasingly to practice in

his English works--and especially the historiographic techniques his

35 H. van de Waal, "In Memoriam Erwin Panofsky," p. 232. From a letter

to Dr. J •. G. van Gelder, June 2, 1965, cited by van de Waal in fn. 10:
"'But as regards the crucial question whether icono1ogy is a discipline
in '"its own right or just one of the methods that may be applied for the
elucidation of works of art, I always was, and still am, of the opin-
ion that the second alternative is true. Being an eclectic by nature,
I am basically opposed to all divisions, particularly within one dis-
cipline which, after all, has a history of at least five-hundred years.
I even deplore the basic distinction which is made in this country be-
tween art historians and students of architectural history, and it would
be a real misfortune if people were "icono1ogists," "analysts of space,"
"anslysts of color," etc.,·instead of being art historians ~ court.
Of course, everybody has his natural predilections and shortcomings
and should be conscious of these in order to develop some kind of
humility. "'
 203

students saw fit to continue--belie this theoretical postulation. The

fact that the methodology of the art historian, as opposed to that of the

"more advanced" literary critic, according to Svetlana Alpers, is based

"on a clear separation between style and iconography, form and content"

can be directly traced to Panofsky's focus. "The poles of this methodology

• dramatize this split ~etwee~ • • • wHlfflin's Principles of Art

History and Panofsky's iconographic studies.,,36

One should be very cautious, however, about limiting Panofsky's con-

tribution to the field of iconography. "The link between thoughts and

images, between philosophies and styles is a problem," Gombrich asserts,

"which far transcends the confines of iconography.,,37 Iconography is a

method of research; iconology is an art historical vision: an "intuitive,

aesthetic recreation," in Panofsky's words, of a work of art as i!: existed

in its own time and place. As the earlier quotat'ion from van de Waal im-
38
plies and Panofsky's long time friend P. O. Kristeller corroborates,

Panofsky was a sort of cultural historian in the grand old tradition, who

began with works of art as his point of departure. A work of art, for

whose survival one must be forever grateful, is an intact physical "piece

of history" (a "frozen, stationary record • • • which has emerged from

the stream of time,,).39 In his most "iconological" moments, for example

in regarding High Medieval architecture in Gothic Art and Scholasticism,

36 Svetlana and Paul Alpers, "Ut Pictura Noesis? Criticism in

Literary Studies and Art History," New Directions in Literary History,
ed. Ralph Cohen (Baltimore, 1964), p. 201.
37
"Obituary," p. 358.
38
See Chapter 1 here.
39
"The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline," p. 24.
 209

Panofsky sees neither the individual stones of the cathedral nor the

thrusts and counterth~lsts of the structure, but instead regards the

architecture as embodying, in stone, an historical argument or metaphysi-

cal explanation of the world.

Discerning, ~ priori, the symbolic significance "in the Cassirerian

sense" of the individual work of art or architecture, he broke through

the frames wBlfflin had held sacros~nct. Not interested in the forced

isolation of artifacts, he recognized that beyond the "illuminated zone"

in which most art historical research operates, there is a "knot of re-

lationships" that "extend and branch off infinitely into the innnense
40
area" of other cultural phenomena, conscious or unconscious. And where

the going got rough, Gombrich recalls, Panofsky became "joyful.,,4l He

took pleasure in the intricacies of relationships and loved nothing more

than to provide ingenious solutions which brought sense into apparent

chaos. An avid rea~er of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Pa~ofsky sided with the

master detective Sherlock Holmes: "'If all that which is impossible has

been excluded, the improbable that r~mains must be tl'ue. ,,,42

At what point, then, can one be satisfied that the mystery has been

solved? How many of the cultural ties which lead into this knot of re-

lationships have to be sorted out? And does this iconological act of

40 Giulio'Carlo Argan, "Ideology and Icpnology," Critical Inquiry II,

no. 2 (vlinter 1975): 304.
41
"Obituary," p. 358.
42
Heckscher, "Erwin Panofsky," p. 17. According to Heckscher,
Panofsky illustrated this dictum by saying, "a saint receiving a rose
from Heaven is improbable but convincing. If, on the other hand, Disraeli
on entering Queen Victoria's drawing room finds the Queen smoking a big
black cigar, this is possible but unconvincing and cannot therefore be ad-
mitted as a literary motif" (Feb. 1948).
 210

detection conform--if we want to make art history an epistemologically

respectable discipline--to the established mandates of logical thinking?43

Panofsky presumed that a work of art signifies a variety of things,

only one of which is the subject represented. It also testifies to an

assortment of cultural "symptoms." The work of art--illustrated by a re-

44
versal of Gombrich's Hegelian whee1 _-is the physical piece of evidence.

the locus classicus from which one can draw out symbolic beliefs, habits,

assumptions. Clockwise, in order of decreasing significance (here indi-

cated by dotted lines), Panofsky investigated this somewhat arbitrary

array of cultural "spokes." More

philosophy often than not, his "knot of rela-
iterary tionships" is comprised of the stan d-
,tra.dition
politics psychology ard influence of philosophy, liter-
of artist
ary tradition and psychological pre-

dispositions (e.g., see studies of

theology
Piero, Titian, Poussin, Michelangelo,

Suger)--not the whole culture or

realm of contributors to the symbolic understandings, but a decidedly

limited spectrum of influences. As far as this goes, Panofsky was only

doing what any cultural historian must who has to start somewhere. Prac-

ticing what Jacques Barzun has called the "crooked ways" of cultural

histo~~, Panofsky abandoned the straightfoward historical approach. He

began with a tangible element, the work of art, and followed it into the

43 This, we may remember, is what Panofsky wanted to establish above

all else in the Riegl critique. See Chapter 3.
44
See Chapter 1.
 211

45
"imponderable influence" of cultural habits at large.

He used his initial study of a work of art (on steps 1 & 2 of the

iconological method), in other words, as a means to understanding something

else (step 3). This procedure is consistent with most cultural histories.

But Panofsky refused to stop there; and the continuation his imagination

and training as an art historian demanded eventually led his third level

investigation into posing an inescapable tautology. The final goal of

his enterprise, we remember from earlier chapters, was always the "expo-

sition of the uniqueness of a single work of art, ,A6 whose immanenten

~ was characterized as early as 1920. Is it sensible to say that in

understanding that "something else" in the culture, one will be better

equipped to study the work of art? Not according to David Rosand (who

seems to have been unfamiliar with Panofsky's early work):

• • • historicism, unfortunately, tends to avoid confronting some

fundamental issues of hermeneutics. Our methods of style descrip-
tion, iconographic interpretation, and contextual commentary depend
upon-external comparisons--with other works of art, cultural con-
ventions, and social situations. Hardly ever do we attempt to deal
with the communicative functioning, the visual mechanics, so to
speak, inherent in the work of art itself. 47

Did not Panofsky simply find what he decided to go looking for in the

first place? Be~ng philosophically inclined himself, he held fast to the

~p'riori conception of the wQrk as a philosophical entity. When he-re-

garded a work by Michelangelo, he presumed that -it embodied a phi10sophi-

cal understanding of the subject:

45 Barzun, "Cultural History as a Synthesis," Varieties ot History.,

ed. Fritz Stern (1956; New York, 1963),_ pp. 389, 394.
46
Ackerman, p. 158.
47 "Art History and Criticism: The Past as Present," p. 437.
 212

The preter-individual or even preter-natural beauty of his figures,

not qualified by conscious thoughts or distinct emotions, but either
dimmed as in a trance or glowing with the excitement of a "furor
divinus" reflects--and is reflected by--his Neoplatonic belief that
what the enraptured mind admires in the "mirror" of individual forms
and spiritual qualities is but a reflex of the one, ineffable splen-
dour of the light divine in which the soul has revelled before its
descent to the earth, Michelangelo's works reflect this Neo-
platonic attitude not only in form and motifs but also in iconography
and content, although we cannot expect them to be mere illustrations
of the Ficinian system . . . . 48

Should an analyst begin with the work of art, have some ideas about it,

go to philosophy to confirm those ideas and return with that knowledge

back to the work? One dubious critic, Kurt Forster, characterizes the

whole project as rather spurious:

Just as philosophy according to Hegel's aesthetic finally outstrips

and supplants art, so art is transformed for the time being both
from history and from itself, into the sphere of philosophy • . . .
Instead of seeing through the mystifications that the work may re-
produce, the interpreter makes himself another 2uasi-believer of
the very ideology he is setting out to analyze. 9

Is there not a built-in fallacy in iconology's prescribed line of

deductive reasoning? Panofsky postulates, in effect before he ever gets

to the objects under investigation, that philosophical views affect works

of art. Ther~ seems to exist, in other words, a putative pre-pre-icono-

graphic commitment to a certain sort of interpretation. Only secondarily

does he regard the work itself. Is it logical to conclude, therefore,

that this work of art necessarily has buried within it a specific philo-

sophical understanding? Not according to the rules of logic. The

48 "The Neoplatonic Movement and Michelangelo," Studies in Icono1ogy,

pp. 181-182.
49
"Critical History of Art, or Transfiguration of Values?" p. 467 .

.•.
 213

IfA~B (Ehilosophical views affect works of art)

proposition B (Here is a work of art)
Therefore A (Therefore, we see expressed in this work a
philosophical view)

is neither logical nor commonsensical (as opposed to the acceptable form

If A-+B)
A . It is equivalent to saying
Therefore B

If it is raining ~ I' 11 get tvet

I am wet , a declaration which ignores the
Therefore it's raining

fact that I could be wet because I have been swimming in the ocean or tak-

ing a shower or been the victim of a water balloon attack. Michelangelo

might well have expressed Neoplatonic beliefs in his art, but the marble

figures for the Tomb of Julius II could just as conceivably be indicative

of the artist's unqualified love of sculpturally beautiful nudes or specif-

ic patronage requests or guiding theological principles or the demands

of certain kinds of funerary art, not to mention their intended position

in the church. The "A's" of the proposition, in fact, are innumerable.

So innumerable that they continue to be tapped today as a resource. The

"new" emphasis on contexts in art historical studies (e.g., physical

~hilipJ or social ~axendal2J) falls well within the iconol~gical purview

as conceived of by Panofsky, even though the "spokes" of cultural history
50
appear to be new ones. Panofsky himself, of course, would not deny this

observation. It is one of the many exciting and promising aspects of the

iconological method that, in principle, it excludes nothing reasonable

50 Lotte B. Philip, The Ghent Altarpiece and the Art of Jan van Eyck
(Princeton, 1971) and Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fif-
teenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style
(Oxford, 1972).
 214

when it comes to interpreting works of art. But does it not also can-

tinue to be true that the dangers inherent in the old major premises have

slipped unnoticed into the new ones?

Panofskyundoubted1y gave a certain primacy to hidden philosophical

meanings in his own research projects,Sl and it is this tradition of anal-

ysiswhich is identified as his legacy. The impact of a work often

seems dependent upon not how long we look but how much we read. To one

familiar with Panofsky's earlier theoretical wor~s, this recognition is

indeed disappointing. What happened, for instance, to the kind of art

history envisioned in the second half of the perspective paper or the

Introduction to Studies in Icono1osy? Suggested routes of analysis were

tentative t.O be sure, but at least they existed. tfuen Panofsky spoke of

a philosophical understanding of works of art there, he did not refer to

the mere para11e1izing of doctrine and painted subject. How did the

"meaning" of a work come to be restricted to such a degree? Henri Zerner

(as one can tell even in this rough translation from the French) does not

mince words when it comes to assigning the responsibility to the art his-

tori cal establishment:

Meaning can only be revealed by the methods and techniques of

interpretation. This is the sense in which we should understand
Panofsky's development. His aim was to work out a technique of read-
ing which would be valid only for the Christian Hest. But his final
objective was the t'icono1ogical" level, 1. e., the objective immanent
meaning. Because his. followers lost sight of his theoretical pre-
occupations (which ~ himself appears ~ ~ neglected ~ and ~
.!! time ~ on), the discipline he created has been transformed into
a mere technique of deciphering. The u1tim2.te iconological level has
been generally abandoned and, what is worse, iconographical deciphering

51
See earlier pages in this Chapter.
-----: ...
 215

has too often taken the place of meaning (my italics).52

If one agrees with Zerner's bleak assessment, we could suppose that

as far as theory goes, the discipline has come to a dead end, with not

only the champion of theory in his last works, but art history in general,

having· abandoned the early twentieth century debate about what the methods
53
and intentions of art history should be. .If art history has decided to

forsake "theoretical preoccupations,"~or at least turn them over to

philosophical aestheticians--because as a discipline it has other tasks at

hand, we can still turn to some examples of contemporary thought in the

history of science, intellectual history, and literary criticism which

direct us back to some of Panofsky's older ideas about art theory and cause
,..
us to think about them anew. Gerald Holton's Thematic Origins of Science

(1973), M. Foucault's The OrdLr of Things (1966),. and a selection of re-

cent essays on art and semiotics will not be invoked here simply because

they appear to represent the avant-garde in representational theory, but

because I believe a brief discussion of them can renew our interest in

the scope of Panofsky's early theoretical essays.

Interested in "the way the scientific mind works," Hoiton says that

the human intellect in general regards the physical universe and manipu-

lates it on at least three levels of determination (we will discuss

52
Henri Zerner, "Art," in Faire de l'histoire, ed. J. LeGoff and
Pierr~ Nora, I.(Paris, 1974). I thank Alison Kettering of Swarthmore
College "for making available an unpublished English translation of this
article by Peter Franco.

53 K1einb~uer, p. 30, says the only recent "major theoretical trea-

tise" is Kubler's The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things.
 216

the third momentari1y).54 The first way, called the "empirical" (hold in

mind here Panofsky's "pre-iconographic" step),

I. Empirical
a result of
concerns itself with the "givenness of things,"
--sensations
--experience
_._" f ac ts" and its observations are those which are derived
--experiments
from sense experience. The second level, the
II. Analytic
uses "analytic," devotes itself to making sense of
--reason
--logic and theorizing about the givens posed as signif-
--common sense
--hypotheses icant by the first level of determination. 55
--generalization
to make sense of These two levels, however, are not necessarily
Level I
sequential, Holton points out, for it may be the

case that we can experience the world only in the terms of our own hypo the-

ses about it, our own eX'P1anations of ~:hat we can expect to experience

(cf. Cassirer's definition of a symbolic form).56 It is, in any event,

the dialogue between these two ways of knowing the world that makes sci-

ence meaningful.

In 1916 (1 find this date important in terms of cultural background

because this is also approximately the time we begin our study of both,
.
Panofsky and Cassirer), Einstein was similarly intrigued by the intel-

lectua1 processes we go through to arrive at scientific information. Our

tendency, he says, is to accept scientific explanations as facts, gra-

cious1y handed over to us by nature, rather than to view them as human1y-

originated explanations:

54
Holton, p. 11.

55 I excerpt ideas in general from Holton's "Introduction," pp. 11-

43, and Section II of Chapter 6, "Poincare and Relativity," pp. 190-192.
56
See Chapter 5 here.
 217

"Concepts which have proved useful for ordering things easily

assume so great an authority over us, that we forget their ter-
restrial origin and accept them as unalterable facts. They then
become labelled as 'conceptual necessities,' '~priori situations,r
etc. The road of scientific progress is frequently blocked for
long periods by such errors. It is therefore not just an idle
game to exercise our ability to analyse familiar concepts, and to
demonstrate the conditions on which their justification and use-
fulness depend, and the way in which these developed, little by
little • . • • "57

Holton reads this passage by Einstein as indicative of a third level

of determination, which he calls the "thematic" and here attests to the

existence of preconceptions--either innate or culturally-induced--which

appear to be unavoidable for scientific thought but are themselves de-

rived neither from observation nor from analytic reasoning. A thematic

commitment (the belief in cause and effect,for example), Holton suggests,
-. h t we 11 b e a
~g
. .
prerequ~s~te to .
percept~on
.
~tse
If • 58 What a man sees in

the world depends not only on what he looks at bu't also on what his pre-

vious visual/conceptual/cultural/linguistic experience and training have

taught him to see. In the absence of such "themata," there can only be,

as ~.J'illiam James calls it, "a blooming, buzzing confusion" out there in

the world. Nature is too complex and varied to be explored at random.

One must begin somewhere. The thematic "map," whose details are subse-

guentlY elucidated by "normal" scientific research on levels one and two,

forces, as it were, the scientist to look with already focussed attention

59,
on t h e data. A couple of contemporary examples of themata might be

57
Excerpted from Holton's headnote.
58
Ibid., p. 23.

59 Levels I an d II ,as H
0 tonI '
po~nts out, are f ar more l'~ k
e I
y t0
have a much larger range and scale, while the themata change very slowly.
 218

1) the belief that there is a numerical basis to the order of things: a

faith in the efficacy of mathematics as an explanatory tool, or 2) since

Freud, a belief in the unconscious. An historical example, up until the

time of Copernicus, is the reigning conception of the universe as a

static, harmoniously arranged cosmos with the earth at the center (even

when Copernicus discovered that the earth was not the center of the uni-

verse, astronomical diagrams continued to be dominated by the "thema"

that the solar system was purposefully-ordered, God-generated, God-·

axpressing, etc., and there was no room in this ordered world for

random and nonhierarchical phenomena).60

If we are willing to acknowledge the possibility of this third

level, we must also consider the corollary. The distinction between

scientific and humanistic thought--

III: The Thematic
'consists of
which is undisputed and real in many
--beliefs
--assumptions ways (see, for example, Panof.sky' s
--expectations
--prejudices "Art as a Humanistic DisciplineI!62)--
--intuitions
"essential tendencies becomes far less impressive if one
of the mind" (cf. 61
Panofsky's third level)
looks carefully at the thematic origin
which are not subject to
either empirical or ana- of s~ientific theories. And this is
lytic verification.
where Panofsky's avant-garde vision of

art comes in. While it is perhaps easier to understand that a painting,

. 60 Holton~ pp. 36 , 26 • Holton suggests that the "most pervasive char-

acterlstic of,.modern science is the generally accepted. thema of the un-
limited possibility of doing science, the belief that nature is inexhaus-
. tibly knowable,'· p'. 29.

61 Studies " p. 15.

62 This essay i s "1y concerned
prec~se ~"th thi s ~ssue.
. See,. in par-
ticular, pp. 14-22.
 219

more than a scientific proposition is "made up," Panofsky's interpretation

of Leonardo's ~ Supper in Studies in Iconology63 can be usefully com-

pared to the sort of analysis Holton brings thirty-four years later to

Leonardo's contemporary, Copernicus. Both interpreters, it seems to me,

are seeking to discover the same sort of fundamental interpretative prin-

ciples and, by way of a comparison, I would like to suggest what these

might be. What is now considered radical in the history of science has

been traditional in the theoretical underpinnings of the history of art

for at least three decades.

Holding Holton's tripartite scheme in mind, let us look at what

Panofsky sees as the "three strata of meaning,,64 implicit in the Last

Supper:

I. Pre-Iconographic (Holton: empirical) level

Deals with Simply on the basis of' our "practical experi-
form ence,1t we could here identify thirteen men
lines seated around a dinner table laden with food 65
colors and discuss the colors and shapes they assume.
expressions

1
sensations

II. Iconographic (Holton: analytic) level

Makes sense of the first level
reading by way of hypotheses,
generalizations, interpretations
Requires a "knowledge of
literary sources." "Appre-
hended by realizing . . •
that a group of figures
seated at a dinner table in

63
Interspersed throughout "Introduction" of Studies.
64
Studies, p. 16. "But we must bear in mind that the neatly dif-
ferentiated categories, which in this synoptical table seem to indicate
three individual spheres of meaning, refer in reality to aspects of one
phenomenon, namely, the work of art as a whole. So that, in actual work,
the methods of approach which here appear as three unrelated operations
of research merge with each other into one organic and indivisible pro-
cess."

65 Ib.fd.,
... p pJ5
. . ,8.
 220

a certain arrangement and in

certain poses represents the
Last Supper. ~ • • Our
Australian bushman would be
unable to recognize the sub-
ject of a Last Supper;, to
him it would only convey the
idea of an excited dinner
party. "66

III. Iconological (Holton: thematic) level

The realm of the Itessential It • when we try to understand
tendencies lt of the human mind, it as a document of Leonardo's
consisting of personality, or of the civiliza-
beliefs tion of the High Renaissance, or
assumptions of a peculiar religious attitude,
expectations we deal with the work of art as a
attitudes symptom of something else which
religious and expresses itself in a countless
cultural values variety of other symptoms, and we
interpret its compositional and
iconographical features as more
particular evidence of this 'some-
thing else.' "67

When considering this third level, we can reasonably ask whether or not

it is merely accidental that both Copernicus' hierarchical system, his

heliocentric universe, a~d Leonardo's rigidly symmetrical, Christ-centered

painting, correspond to the political and theological principles of the

early sixteenth century. The same kinds of thematic quests for symmetry

and order seem to underlie both the scientific and artistic practice of

the day:

It is in the search for intrinsic meanings or content that the vari-

ous humanistic disciplines meet on a, common plane instead of serv-
ing as handmaidens to one another.,. •• The art-historian will have
"to check what he thinks is the intrinsic meaning of the work, or group
'o'f works, to which he devotes h:[s attention, against what lie thinks is
the intrinsic meaning of as many other documents of civilization his-
torically r'elated t'o that work or group of works, as he can master: of
documents bearing witness to the political~ poetical, religious,

66 'Ibid~, pp. 15, 8.

67 Ib J.°d . , pp • 15, 6, 11.
 221

philosophical, and social tendencies of the personality, perio~ or

country under investigation. 68

The "context of discovery," as Holton puts it, which "is about to

come into its own,,69 in the history of science has existed (although it

is an ideal often ignored) for a long time in the history of art. Al-

though both Panofsky and Holton pose this "deep context" as a kind of

third step for the historian of science or art, they characterize it as

something fundamental and primary for the scientist or artist at work.

Clearly, both thinkers imply that if there is indeed any identifiable

sequence involved in the genesis of both scientific and visual "explana-

tions" of the world, then this thematic or iconological level provides

the ground on which the first two "strata of meaning" perform their oper-

ations. This deep structure acts as a kind of hidden field of possibili-

ties upon which the grammar of representation (both scientific and artis-

tic). plays out its game. It is "apprehended by ascertaining those under-

lying principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period,

a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion--unconsciously qualified

by one personality and condensed into one work.,,70 Never p€;rceiving it

directly, but only having its structure implied by a juxtaposition of

"as many other documents of civilization,,7l as possible, the scholar soon

understands that this thematic level does not ever provide the answers,

but it at least begins to limit the questions. It may indeed be only

68 Ibid., p. 16.
69
Holton, p. 70.
70
Studies, p. 7.

71 Ibid., p. 16.
 222

preliminary--a tentative "tabula" in Foucault's terms, of the "conditions

of POSS1"b 1"I"1ty,,72 i n wh"1Ch t he s1ng

" 1e work 0 f art--a1ways t he pro f esse d

end of Panofsky's work--can exist.

Understood in this way, the iconological level is not a final stage,

but a beginning, with the art historian (or "talented layman,,)73 having

achieved, by a sequence of steps, the same "intuition" of the "underlying

principles" as that with which the artist began. Maybe the search for the

deep strl1cture of a work has led to problems and predicaments in writing

because most art historians are convinced that once the iconological level

transitively74 declares its statements of cultural meanings--says that

this work is about and such (some extrinsic state of affairs)--their work

is over. Perhaps, on the other hand, they should think of this stage as

only an initial ,process, as Panofsky clearly once did.

Try as he might to locate the development of' perspective, for example,

within both a synchronic and diachronic "context of discovery," we have

seen. manifested in successive sections of his perspective essay, the

struggle to return to the individual work on a sort of pre-iconographic

level: to understand what he persists in calling its immanenten Sinn or

intrinsic meaning. By the conclusion of his essay, I find that he has a

75
far more interesting intransitive project in mind. Ever since he wrote

72 See later pages in this chapter. The existence of a tautology

here may be argued as well, as it was earlier in this chapter. It seems
to me, however, it is finally a question of the way it is done. If this
is indeed: a tautological scheme, it is at least a well-informed tautology,
fully conscious of its cyclicality.
73
Studies, p. 15.

74 I borrow this terminology from Gerald Graff, Literature Against

Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (Chicago, 1979), p. 48.
75
See Chapter 5.
 223

the Riegl essay (or perhaps ever since he read Cassirer's commentary on

Kant), he conceived of the work as an "organism r , which ultimately displays

its own meaning within its own system of references, its Ifown rules of

becoming,1f he called it in the Riegl critique. When all is said and

done, a work of art is not about anything except itself. A perspective

painting is not, finally, only a "window on the world"; it is a system

of knowledge articulated in paint. Panofsky's last questions of pers~ec-

tive deal with its processes of signifying, apart from what is in the end

actually signified. And in this ambition, the concluding part of his

essay can be legitimately called ffproto-semiotic.fl76

Giulio Argan has, in fact, crowned Panofsky the "Saussure lf of art

h~story. 77
o
With his a9sumption that the content of a work cannot be re-
78
stricted to just literary subject matter _-that there is indeed a fl mean-

ing!! beyond the iconographic--Panofsky thought about matters which have

recently been appropriated by a variety of semioticians. Semiotics and

iconology share "the same concern for 'deep' meaning in cultured products

and a conviction that it is accessible to analysis. rr79 There are prob-

lems, however, in simply calling Panofsky's work "semiotic,H as Christine

Hasenmueller has pointed out, because this current revisionist mode of

interpretation specializes in reading all works as a commentary on their

76
Jean-Claude Bonne, in a seminar on the r:Semiotics of the Visual
Arts" given by the Society for the Humanities at Cornell in the Spring of
1975 first called my attention to the "semiotic ll properties of this essay.
77
Argan, p. 299.
78
Rosand, p. 441.
79
Christine Hasenmueller, "Panofsky, Iconography and Semiotics,1f
Journal vf Aesthetics and Art Criticism XXXVI, no. 3 (Spring 1978): 297.
 224

own epistemological problematics. Semiotics presumes, in the words of

one 0f '
~ts cri t~cs,
' to n not b e answerabl e to anyt h'~ng outs~ , de ~tse
' ' l'f . ,,80

Iconology, as a mode of interpretation is more temperate, more conserva-

tive. It is a method that unearths the materials (the signified) with

which the signifying plays its game. Intellectual history is not just a

"support" but a "form of explanation. 1t8l The language of art (in semiotic

terms, the "intertextuality of the work"), contrary to what Panofsky might

have been advocating earlier in the Riegl essay, does not arise in a her-

metic environment (the issue raised by the V18lfflin critique). The his-

torical context (both cultural and artistic) is established so that when

the art historian investigates the grammar of the work, its signifying

structure, he has some "sense,,82 of the rules of syntax and semantics with

which he is dealing. Content is not just, in T. S. Eliot's memorable

phrase, "'the bit of nice meat the robber holds out to the house dog while

going about his work. ,,,83 "Panofsky's immanent meaning is a world view
'
( Weltanschauung ) an d imp l ~es t h e woe
h 1 0 f t h e cu1 ture t h at und erp~ns
' " ~t. ,,84

Despite the way we tend to read his table, Panofsky characterizes

each of his levels of interpretation not as goals but as conditions, and

implies, in a footnote, that their operations should properly be viewed

as cyclical rather than sequential. The first referential reading (toward

80
Graff repeatedly characterizes semiotics in this sense. See,for
example, p. 2l.
81
Hasenmueller, p. 297.
82
Cf. fn. 3, Studies, p. 11.

83 Quoted in Graff, p. 49 from Eliot's The Use of Poetry and the Use
of Criticism (1933), p. 151.
84
Zerner, "Art," p. 8.
 225

which steps 1, 2 and 3 are directed) enhances a re-reading of the non-

referential (step 1):

Whether we deal with historical or natural phenomena, the individual

observation assumes the character of a "fact" only when it can be
related to other, analogous observations in such a way that the
whole series "makes sense." This "sense" is, therefore, fully capable
of being applied, as a control, to the interpretation of a new in-
dividual observation within the same range of phenomena. If, however,
this new individual observation definitely refuses to be interpreted
according to the "sense" of the series, and if an error proves to be
impossible, the "sense" of the series will have to be re-formulated
to include the new individual observation. This circulus methodicus
applies, of course, not only to the relationship between the inter-
pretation of motifs and the history of style, but also to the rela-
tionship between the interpretation of images, stories and allegories
and the history of types, and to the relationship between the inter-
pretation of intrinsic meanings and the history of cultural sxmPtoms
in general. 85

Having delimited the conditions of possibility by research on the third

level, the theorist might find it advisable to re~urn to the pre-icono-

graphic step and investigate how the lines, colors, volumes, etc., come

together as semiotic "conventions" to generate meaning.

Panofsky, of course, did not ever consciously articulate a "semiotic"

position. But the congruence of much of current semiology with writings

by Panofsky in both theory (Studies in Iconology) and practice ("Per spec-

tive as a Symbolic Form," where perspective construction is seen as a

carrier of meaning distinct from what it signifies) is always interesting

to note. Iconology, like any theory worthy of the name, has assumed a

life of its own and has become a living testimony to the imagination of

85 Studies, fn. 3 on p. 11. Viewed in th~s way, I think we need not

perceive the situation in the self-contradictory way that Graff does:
" • • • we have • • • numerous self-contradictory attempts in the twentieth
century to define art as a discourse somehow both referential and non-
referential, closed off from the external world yet embodying profound
knowledge of the external world," p. 37.
 226

its deceased originator:

If it is possible to do an iconological history of perspective, pro,-

portions, anatomy, representational conventions, symbolic references
of color, and even of rituality and gesturality in technique, no one
has said that it must stop there and that it is not possible to study
historically, like so many other iconologies, line, chiaroscuro, tone,
penstrokes, and so forth. It certainly would be possible and it would
be a very useful kind of research, one to recommend to young art his-
torians desirous of exploring new fields. The name would change, how-
ever, and this research would no longer be called iconology but, fol-
lowing modern terminology, semantics or, more exactly, semiotics •
. • • in many aspects, then, the iconological method begun by Panofsky,
although by design rigidly philosophical, can be qualified as the most
modern and efficacious of historiographic methods, open moreover to
great future developments which truthfully it has 'not as yet experi-
enced, perhaps because Panofsky's own followers have reduced its range,
making of it an almost esoteric science for a few initiates and pro-
viding thereby a case for the ideal-formalists who consider it a
heterodox methodology.86

Meyer Schapiro, for example, in several articles on the semiotics of

the visual arts, has, in effect, returned with renewed fervor to the pre-
.
~conograp
1 87
h'~c 1eve. But he has come equipped with the tools of an icon-

ological historian, in order to distinguish between natural and conven-

tional "signs" in work. He wonders, by way of a series of illustrative

examples, how "non-mimetic elements,,88 in a painting--e.g., frame, direc-

tion, colors, movement, size, etc.--acquire a semantic value and contri-

bute to the general meaning of a work. Panofsky, as Argan has pointed

86
Argan, pp. 302-303, 304.

87 Meyer Schapiro, "On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art:

Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs," in Semiotica I, 3 (1969): 223-242 •.
Cf. Words and Pictures. On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustra-
tion of a Text, 1973. The substance of both essays grows out of a sym-
posium, "Language, Symbol, Reality" presented at St. Mary's College of
Notre Dame, November 7, 1969.

88 Ibid., p. 223. As Zerner points out on p. 7 in his essay,

Schapiro rather "unexpectedly" regards the status of perspective as
"natural" (vs. "conventional"). Panofsky, of course, would write otherwise.
 227

out, was perhaps too modest when he claimed that icono10gy, because of

its obsession with subject matter, seems to ignore the role formal qua1i-

ties play in the construction of the "sense" of a painting:

If a Madonna with Child by Raphael is not simply a cult object but a

work of art which visibly expresses the tie between natural and di-
vine which can be seen in a determined historical moment, this mean-
ing is not established solely by the fact that the madonna is a
beautiful woman seated in a lovely landscape but also by the progres-
sion of the lines which is the same in figure and in landscape, by
the relationship between the blue of her cloak and the blue of the
sky, and by the subtleties of color which make one feel the diffused
presence of the atmosphere. 89

Collectively, the three levels teach us how to read images. They

initiate us, by an almost ritualistic process, into the secrets of an his-

toric visual order. Images are culturally-determined, and if we wish to

I:recreate" the dynamics of a work, we have to uncover what Holton has

called its context of discovery; we have to familiarize ourselves with

the subjects, on a variety of levels, about which the images are "speak-

ing." It is a careless student of icono10gy who thinks his work at an

end when he can enumerate, one by one, the hidden symbols, for. example,

in a Northern Renaissance painting. Panofsky never conceived of iconology

as a technique for an accumulation of information of the sort that allows

a freshman instructor to utter some statement of displacement such as,

"The :.hg in the Arnolfini portrait is really not a dog; it stands for

marital fidelity. " Although this kind of reading is undoubtedly part of

an icono10gica1 program, it itself only represents the tip of the iceberg.

Icono10gy does not so much unlock a painting or representational form

as a statement of explicit meanings so much as it addresses itself to the

89
Argan, p. 302.
 228

el':Jsive "underlying principles" of representation: "The intrinsic mean-

ing or content may be defined as a unifying principle which underlies and

explains both the visible event and its intelligible significance, and

which determines even the form in which the visible event takes shape." 90

Its' implied direction is, one of discovering how meaning becomes expressed

in a specific visual order, i.e., it asks, in theory, why certain images,

attitudes, historical situations, etc., have assumed this particular form

of .
representat~on.
?9l Because Panofsky says we really "read 'what we see'

according to the manner in which objects and events were expressed by

forms under 'varYing historical conditions,!l92 in his scheme, content. fin-

ally becomes a formal problem. A painting may be derived from a once

existent physical or mental universe, but it has transformed this world

according to the dictates of its own laws. The microscopically detailed

world of physical objects in a van Eyck painting is ultimately a depiction

of an "imaginary reality.,,93 A- painting in perspective is not just an

90 Studies, p. S. Cf. Gombrich pp. 8-9 in Art and Illusion:

"Just as the 'study of poetry remains incomplete without an-awareness
of the language of prose, so, I believe, the study of art will be
increasingly supplemented by inquiry into the linguistics of the
visual image. Already we see the outlines of iconology, which in-
vestigates the function of images in allegory and symbolism and
their reference to what might be called the 'invisible world of
ideas.' The way the language of art refers to the visible world is
both so obvious and so mysterious that it is still largely unknown
except to the artists themselvas who can use it as we all use
languages-without needing to know its grammar and semantics •."

91 Studies, p. 14: " ••• basic principles which underlie the choice
and presentation of motifs, as well as the production and interpretation
of images, stories and allegories, and which give meaning even to the
formal arrangements and technical procedures employed • • • • "
92 Studies, p. 11.
93
Early Netherlandish Painting, p. 137.
 229

exercise in mimesis; it is an expression of a desire to order the world in

a certain way--a definition, by way of spatial configuration, of the

Kantian relationship between I and not-I.

We have discussed on several occasions in this last chapter how

Panofsky's own practical art history often contradicted--or to put it

more affirmatively, only rarely fulfilled--the challenge of his theoretical

work. Perhaps this situation is the result of his having ideas which ex-

ceeded the paradigm of cultural history which he inherited. In theory,

Panofsky would not have been content to parallel philosophy with painting,

or theology with architecture in the traditional "Hegelian" sense. In

theory, as we have seen, it is frequently the case that many of the ideas

he expressed in his early papers and the introduction to Studies tn Iconol-

~ fit more appropriately into a framework of recent thought. One par-

ticular contemporary scholar deserves the last reference in this regard.

Panofsky's repeated emphasis in 1939 on "those basic principles which

underlie the choice and presentation of motifs, as well as the production

and interpretation of images, stories and allegories, and which give mean-
94
ing even to the formal arrangements and technical procedures employed,"

anticipates the work of the French philosopher of history, Michel Foucault.

In The Order of Things (1966), Foucault characterizes what can aptly

be defined as his iconological (although he entitles it "archaeological")

task:

. . . what I am attempting to bring to light is the epistemological

field, the ~isteme in which knowledge, envisaged apart from all cri-
teria having reference to its rational value or to its objective
forms, grounds its positivity and thereby manifests a history which

94 Stud"~es, p. 14 .
 230

is not that of its growing perfection, but rather that of its condi-
tions of possibility; in this account what should appear are those
configurations within the space of knowledge which have given rise to
the diverse forms. • •• Such an enterprise is not so much a history,
in the traditional meaning of that word, as all "archaeology."95

Like Panofsky, Foucault is interested in the "essential tendencies of the

human mind," but believes that that mind can· only be known as it manifests

itself in the surfaces of things it produces. He wants to describe the

mechanisms by which a culture experiences the "propinquity of things;,,96

from coins to the classification of plants, for example, and in doing so,

to reveal the "rules of formation which were never formulated in their own

right, but are to be found only in widely differing theories, concepts,

97
and objects of study.1l When Panofsky defines his goal as that which will

divulge the "principles which underlie the choice of images,,,98 he too is

clearly pursuing the essential order of a certain submerged code of knowl-

edge, one of whose sur~ace manifestations is the presence of a physical

work of art. 1i1hat order of knowledge--what "underlying, unifying princi-

pIe" (or to return to Holton, what thema)--he asks by implication, permits

this visual world to take shape? 99

95 The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Trans.

Les Mots ~ les choses (1966; New York, 1973), p. xxii.
96
Ibid., p. xxiv.
97
Ibid., p. xi.
98 Studies, p. 14 •
99
In many ways this sort of pursuit is analogous to the Annales
school of French historiography. I quote one of the founders, Fernand
Braudel from The Mediterranean and The Mediterranean World in the Age of
Philip II, 2 vols., 2nd ed •. , trans. Sian Reynolds (1946; New York, 1976),
p. 16: "Is it possible somehow to convey simultaneously both that con-
spicuous history which holds our attention by its continual and dramatic
changes--and that other, submerged, history, almost silent and always
 231

Panofsky tried to explore the system of perspective not from the

point of view of the artist who practiced it, nor from the point of view

of the formal principles upon which it was founded (this sort of thing

was only preliminary), but finally from the point of view of the hidden

rules of knowledge that come into play in the very exidtence of such a

discourse. lOa This impulse to acknowledge such a unifying principle seems

to have faded in time. "Michelangelo and Neoplatonism," for example, only

hints at the possibility that Renaissance knowledge possessed a well-de-

fined regularity. In later works such as this one, Panofsky frequently

resorts t 0 t he "I l le 1"~ng

e para
s~mp r
0 f "f estat~ons,
man~ " 101 rat h er t h an ~n-
"

quires into their shared principles of form. Something seems to have been

lost; or, rather, considering the obvious congruence of Panofsky's early

twentieth century essays with Foucault's and Holton's contemporary work,

something in Panofsky needs to be rediscovered so that art history as a

discipline may avoid the chastisement that "most of the recent critical

impulses have come from 'outsiders' (in respect to the maiustream of

discreet, virtually unsuspected either by its observers or its partici-

pants, which is little touched by the obstinate erosion of time?"
100
Paraphrasing Foucault, p. xiv, who says he "tried to explore
discourse not from the point of view of the individual speaking,"nor from
the point .of view of the formal structures of what they are saying, but
from the point of view of rules that come into play in the very existence
of such discourse."

101 And even this is often neglected. Julius Held, for example, in
a review of Early Netherlandish Painting for the Art Bulletin 37 (1955),
says on p. 206: "It is perhaps • • • important to point out that in Early
Netherlandish Painting, more than in any of his previous works, even in-
cluding the DUrer, Panofsky enters the fields of stylistic criticism and
connoisseurship, and that he does it highly successfully."
 232

,,102
academic history 0f art.
)

Apart from his art historical insights, one final note worth redis-

covering in Panofsky is his reflectiveness on the nature of historiogra-

phy. Contemporary art historians, as we have discussed in the first chap-

ter and as a variety of critics from Ackerman to Alpers have claimed,

. 103
think their histories are tl not made but discovered." "As scholars,"

Alpers contends, "art historians all too often see themselves as being

in pursuit of knowledge without recognizing how they themselves are the

104
makers of that knowledge." In retrospect, we can recall and survey

numerous instances where Panofsky deliberately eluded this position of

IJ ,
na1vete. His research into the rules of art, especially the hidden rules

such as spatial organization (to Panofsky perspective is not a tangible

image with attached meanings, but rather an invisible technique of organ-

ization which he has nevertheless shown to have a thematic constituent)

clearly awakened him not only to the existence of a submerged code of

knowledge structuring the object at which he was looking, but also made

him sensitive to the existence of hidden rules of order in his own work

as an historian.

In 1939, the Renaissance system of perspective was invoked not just

as an example of a particular iconology of space, but as a controlling

metaphor for the modern claim to historical re-presentation:

102
Forster, p. 465. Svetlana and Paul Alpers in "Ut Pictura
Noesis?" also spend time characterizing this problem and suggesting how
art history as a discipline might profit from a more thorough familiarity
with literary criticism.
103
Ackerman, p. 142.
104
Alpers, "Is Art History?," p. 6.
 Just as it was impossible for the Middle Ages to elaborate the
modern system of perspective, which is based on the realization
of a fixed distance between the eye and the object and thus en-
ables the artist to build up comprehensive and consistent images
of visible things; just as impossible was it for them to evolve
the modern idea of history, which is based on the realization of
an intellectual distance between the present and the past, and
thus enables the scholar to build up comprehensive and consistent
concepts of bygone. periods. lOS

. '!
Although Panofsky may have been nal.ve himself in his conviction that "to
.' 106
grasp reality we have to detach ourselves from the present," he at

least recognized early the need for establishing an historical distance,

and, as time went on, devoted entire essays to the problem ("Art as a

Humanistic Discipline" and "Three Decades of Art History in the United

States"):

We are chiefly affected by that which we allow to affect us; and

just as nat~ral science involuntarily selects what it calls the
phenomena, the humanities involuntarily selec't what they call the
historical facts.

Even when dealing with the remote past, the historian cannot be
entirely objective. I07

In passages such as these, Panofsky speaks with the words one can imagine
he would wish his most self-conscious Renaissance painter (or modern

historian) might utter, certain that he was representing something in the

world, but well aware of his swn contribution in explaining or giving

105 Studies, pp. 27-28. Cf. footnote 1 in "Art as a Humanistic

DisCipline. "

106 "Art as a Humanistic Discipline," p. 24. For. "checks" on his-

torical objectivity, see p. 17 in the same essay.

107 "Art as a Humanistic Discipline," p. 6 and "Three Decades of Art

History in the United States," in Meaning in the Visual Arts, p. 321.

...
 234

order to that something. And he viewed his own work, as Svetlana Alpers

has pointed out, precisely in this regard:

For all of Panofsky's claims to employing an objective method (his

three levels of meaning, for example) he accepted the responsibility
for his own thought and his commitment to certain values. In study-
ing Renaissance art he was aware of having made certain choices;
he was aware of the phenomena he excluded by making them. He cele-
brated the accomplishments of a humanistic art and despaired at the
loss of it. l08

Forever lost in time are the emotions, the moods, the human motives

and desires which gave birth to medieval and Renaissance art. Of this

Panofsky, composing most of his work in the shadow of war and persecution

and the threatened destruction of the values of humanism which he had

long cherished, was acutely aware. The art historian may be deluded into

thinking that because he confronts an actual physical object--a painting,

a building, a piece of sculpture--he has direct access to the ?ast. Since

the second decade of this century, however, Panofsky nevp-r rested secure

in this knowledge. Although we can view his whole corpus as a carefully'

thought out attempt to be certain and objective about what he was saying,

he never lost sight of the issue of how the historian renders an account

of the past intelligible. "The problem. of pastness," as he was well aware,

" ~s
. pecu1·~ar I y t h e h·~stor~an
. , s 1·· . ,.109
~m~tat~on.· Implicit in many of his

essays, but- interestingly enough, particularly in his very early and late

ones, is the need to come to terms with his own struggle as a scholar be-

tween the otherness of the past and the familiarity of the present.

108
Alpers, "Is Art History?" p. 9.

109. A quotation borrowed from Russell Nye, "History and Literature:

Branches of the Same Tree, I! in Essays on History and Liter~_turp-, ed. R. H.
Bremner (Columbus, 1966).
 235

Once again, Panofsky's work can be situcted in the vanguard of con-

temporary thought. Like Hayden White or Peter Gay,110 he seems to have

recognized that any historian's account is shot through and through with

a certain style or order. History writing is never simply a verbal model,

as it often pretends to be, of a significant historical event or object. III

All historical accounts, whether they are of political events, societal

situations, or works of art, are necessarily translations. The historian

inevitably invokes some theory, some underlying rule or principle in order

to shape the dispersed historical facts into a meaningful configuration

that makes sense of their apparent chaos, as surely as a perspective con-

struction orders the chaotic impressions reaching us from our visual

world.

It is likely that it was this recognition that caused Panofsky to

spend much of his early career writing about what· other art historia~-

said. Like Momigliano, he perceived the implicit danger of circularity

in historical scholarship: the way the writing of history itself becomes

" 112
a kind of h~story. Its assumptions tend to go unchallenged because

they belong to a well-established tradition of scholarship. The young

Panofsky wrote about Riegl and W8lfflin, I suspect, because he was already

aware that critical reflection upon contemporary scholarly work aids in

113
the removal of limitations we unwittingly may impose upon past artifacts.

110 Whit'e, Metah"~story an d Gay, Sty 1e ~n

" Hi stOry.
111
A paraphrase of an often reiterated notion in White. Cf. Gom-
brich's ideas throughout In Search of Cultural History.

112 A. Momigliano, Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography. Re-

viewed by George Steiner, The London Sunday Times (July 17, 1977): 41.
113
Cf.- Forster, p. 470.
 236

Although he always strove to comprehend the work of art in its aesthetic

purity, unencumbered by explanations or arguments about what it represents,

Panofsky discovered soon enough in his historiographic research that an

historian, in order to write at all, inevitably exploits a particular view

which in no way exhausts all the data. 114 The problem for the historian

rears up at precisely that pOint wh&re he becomes unwilling simply to draw

up mere lists of historical artifacts and desires instead, as Vasari

once remarked, to offer explanations for their existence. Any historian

worthy of recognition seeks to be intellectually curious as well as com-

memorative. As much as Panofsky criticized the authority of Riegl and

WBlfflin, he undoubtedly respected their perspicacity. The last act of

the great historian is always an act of the imagination. Something exists

in the world of art, which did not exist before Riegl and WBlfflin wrote
115
about it: an insight, a perception, a reason, a cause. And it was

Panofsky's particular hope that his own insights in some way would either

match or evoke the original deed or object with which he was concerned:

The humanist, dealing as he does with human actions and creations,

has to engage in a mental process of a synthetic and subjective
character: he has mentally to re-enact the actions and to re-create
the creations. It is in fact by this process that the real objects
of the humanities come into being. • • • Thus the art historian
subjects his "material" to a rational archaeological analysis at
times as meticulously exact, comprehensive and involved as any physi-
calor astronomical research. But he constitutes his "material" by
means of an intuitive aesthetic re-creation • • . . 116

114 See y1hite throughout.

115
Cf. Nye, p. 145.

116 "Art as a Humanistic Discipline," p. 14.

 237

In The Past Recaptured, Marcel Proust wrote that the problem of a

writer interested in the past is "'to rediscover, to grasp again, and lay

bare before us that reality from which we have so far been removed. • . ,
l 7 Panofsky
to grasp again our life, and also th~ life of others .• a 1

trusted that iconology could achieve a similarly meaningful evocation,

"an intuitive aesthetic re-creation," with the work of art as a guide to

a time long since past. In the hands of a talented and sensitive scholar,

one enchanted with the power of a singular work of art or the genius of

a particular historical period, he hoped that his "iconography turned in-

terpretative,,118wauld engender research which would be both circumspect

and bold, both "archaeological ll and poetic. The skilled historian would

use iconologyt s underlying theoretical principles, in turn, to comprehend

underlying historical principles, to penetrate beyond the facts of the

work's existence into the ~ood, the des~res, the beliefs and the motives

of the individual and time that created it:

The humanities • • • are not faced by the task of arresting what

otherwise would slip away, but of enlivening what otherwise would
remain dead. Instead of dealing with temporal phenomena, and caus-
ing time to stop ~s do the scientist§J, they penetrate into a re-
gion where time has stopped of its own accord, and try to reacti-
vate it. Gazing as they do at those frozen, stationary records of
which I have said that they "emerge from the stream of time," the
humanities endeavor to capture the processes in the course of which
those records were produced and became ~7hat they are .119

Fou:t:.ye~rs after ~~tl0fsky wrote this ~loquent homage to the histqrian's

117
Nye, p. 147.
118 "Iconography and Iconologyll in Meaning in the Visual Arts--a
phrase added in these later parenthetical remarks.

119 "Art as a Humanistic Discipline," p. 24.

 238

task, Ernst Cassirer, in an interesting reversal of the direction of in-

fluence I have traced during the course of this essay, echoed Panofsky's

faith in the recreative capacities of a judicious and imaginative his tori-

cal discourse:

Human works • • • are subject to change and decay not only in a

material but also in a mental sense. Even if their existence con-
tinues they are in constant danger of losing their meaning. Their
reality is symbolic, not physical; and such reality never ceases to
require interpretation and reinterpretation. And this is where the
great task of history begins. • • • Behind these fixed and static
shapes, these petrified works of human culture, history detects the
original dynamic impulses. It is the gift of the great historians
to reduce all mere facts to their fieri, all products to processes,
all static things or institutions to their creative energies. 120

Writing of Vasari, Panofsky once said he was "a pioneer of a his-

torical way of thinking--a way of thinking which in itself must be judged

'historically.,,,l21 The same holds true of Panofsky and his pioneering

efforts in twentieth century art history. Confronting tradition as a

young scholar, he dared to ask new questions and to invent fresh principles

of interpretation. As I have tried to show in this essay, his work, like

Vasari's, needs to be "judged historically"; it deserves to be situated in

its own "context of discovery." I have investigated the "underlying prin-

cipleslt of Panofsky's art history by articulating the problems, tracing

the influences, and bringing up the contradictions, not in order to deny

the validity of his 'theories of art but to recollect the scope of his

120
Essay on Man, pp. 184-185.

121 "The First Page of Giorgio Vasari' s 'Libro' It in Meaning in the

Visual Arts, p. 206. Originally published as I~as erste Blatt aus dem
'Libro' Giorgio Vasaris; eine Studie fiber der Beurteilung der Gotik in
der italienischen Renaissance mit einem Exkurs fiber zwei Fasadenprojekte
Domenico Beccafumis" in Sdldel-Jahrbuch VI (1930): 25-72.
 239

imagination and locate it in an identifiable epistemological development.

In principle, I think Panofsky would agree, iconology can well be thought-

fully applied to any cultural achievement. It is an irony not lost on me

that without Panofsky's attention to iconological principles of interp=e-

tation, I might well not have known how to ask iconological questions

about the first iconologist.

 Selected Bibliography

I. Essays by Erwin Panofsky

Panofsky, Erwin. "Aby Warburg." Repertorium fUr Kunstwissenschaft LI

(1930): 1-4.

___~. "Der Begriff des Kunstwollens." Zeitschrift fUr Xsthetik und

Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft XIV (1920): 321-339.

Panofsky; E. and Saxl, F. "Classical Mythology in Mediaeval Art."

Metropolitan Museum Studies IV (1933): 228-280 •

• "In Defense of the Ivory Tower." Association of Princeton

--~-
Graduate Alumni Report of the Third Conference. Princeton (1953):
77-84.

Panofsky, Erwin. Die Deutsche Plastik des Elf ten bis Dreizehnten
Jahrhunderts. Munich: K. Wolff, 1924.

Panofsky; E. and Saxl, F. DUrers "Melencolia I," eine quellen-und

typengeschichtliche Untersuchung. Leipzig, Berlin: Studien der
Bibliothek Warburg II, 1923.

Panofsky, Erwin. Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origin and Character.

The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1947-1948. 2 vols. 1953; New
York: Icon Editions, 1951.

"Die Entwicklung der Proportionslehre als Abbild der Stilent-

wicklung." Monatshefte fUr Kunstwissenschaft XIV (1921): 188-219.
Reprinted in translation in Meaning in the Visual Arts.

"Die Erfindung der verschiedenen Distanzkonstruktionen in der

malerischen Perspektive." Repertorium fUr Kunstwissenschaft XLV
(1925): 84-86.

"The First Page of Giorgio Vasari' s 'Libro.'" Meaning in the

Visual Arts. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955. Or~ginally
published ''is "Das erste Blatt aus dem 'Libro'·Giorgio Vasaris; eine
Studie Uber der Beurteilung der Gotik in der italienischen Renaissance
mit einem Exkurs Uber zwei Fasadenprojekte Domenico Beccafumis."
StHdel-Jahrbuch VI (1930): 25-72.

Gothic Art and Scholasticism: Au Inquiry into the Analogy of

the Arts, Philosophy, and Religion in the Middle Ages. New York:
The New American Library, 1951.

240
 241

Panofsky, Erwin. "Heinrich WHlfflin. Zu seinem 60. Geburtstage am 21

Juni 1924." Hamburger Fremdenblatt (June 21,1924).

"Hercules am Scheidewege und andere antike Bildstoffe in der

neureren Kunst." Studien der Bibliothek Warburg 18 (1930).

"The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline." Meaning in

the Visual Arts. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955. Origin-
ally published under same title in The Meaning of the Humanities.
Ed. T. M. Greene. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940.

"The History of the Theory of Human Proportions as a Reflection

of the History of Styles." Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City:
Anchor Books), 1955. Originally published as "Die Entwicklung der
Proportions1ehre als Abbild der Sti1entwick1ung." Monatshefte fUr
Kunstwissenschaft XIV (1921): 188-219.

Idea: A Concept in Art Theory. Ed. J. J. S. Peake. New York: Icon

Edition, 1968. This work was originally published as Idea: Ein
Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der alteren Kunsttheorie. Studien
der Bibliothek 1ilarburg, Nr. 5. Leipzig: B. Teubner, 1924.

"'Imago Pietatis': Ein Beitrag zur Typengeschichte des 'Schmerz-

ensmannes i und der 'Maria Mediatrix.'" Festschrift filr Max J.
Fried1~nder zum 60 Geburtstage. Leipzig (1927): 261-308.

"Letter to the Editor" (Zur Rezension von: Studies in Icono1ogy

durch A. H. Gilbert und H. W. Janson). Art Bulletin XXII (1940): 273.

The Life and Art of Albrecht DUrer. 1943; Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1955.

Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History.

Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955.

"The Neoplatonic Movement and Michelangelo." Studies in Iconol-

~. 1939; New York: Harper Torchbook, 1972.

"Note on tha Importance of Iconographical Exactitude." Art

Bulletin XXI (1939): 402.

(With Dora Panofsky). Pandora's Box: The Changing Aspects of

a Mythical Symbol. 2nd ed. New York: Bollingen Series, 1962.

"Die Perspektive als 'symbolische Form. '" 1924/25; Leipzig,

VortrHge der Bibliothek Warburg, 1927.

"Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inha1tsdeutung von Werken

der bildenden Kunst." Logos XXI (1932): 103-119.

. "Das Problem des Sti1s in der bildenden Kunst." Zeitschrift

---.."....,...... "
fUr Asthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft X (1915): 460-467.
 242

Panofsky, ErWin. Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art. ; 1960;

New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969.

"Stellungnahme zu: E. Cassirer, Mythischer, Hsthetischer und

theoretischer Raum (Vortrag). Vierter Kongress fUr Xsthetik und
Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. Hamburg, 1930. Bericht. Herausge-
gegeben von H. ~oack. Beilageheft zur Zeitschrift fUr Xsthetik und
Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft XXV (1931): 53-54.

Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the

Renaissance. 1939; New York: Harper Torchbook, Icon Edition, 1972.

Die theoretische Kunstlehre Albrecht DUrers (DUrers Ksthetik).

Berlin, 1914 (Inaug. Diss.-Freiburg).

"Three Decades of Art History in the United States." Meaning

in the Visual Arts. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955.
Originally published as "The History of Art" in The Cultural Higra-
tion~. The European Scholar in America. Ed. W. R. Crawford.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953.

"Titian's Allegory of Prudence: A Postscript." Meaning in the

Visual Arts. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955. Originally
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Uber das VerhHltnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie: ein

Beitrag zu der ErBrterung tiber die MBglichkeit 'Kunstwissenschaft-
"
licher Grundbegriffe.' Zeitschrift fUr Asthetik und Allgemeine
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