Genesis of Iconology

The Genesis of IconologyAuthor(s): Jaś Elsner and Katharina LorenzReviewed work(s):Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Spring 2012), pp. 483-512Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/664548 .Accessed: 24/05/2012 09:26

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The Genesis of Iconology

Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz

Erwin Panofsky explicitly states that the first half of the opening chapterof Studies in Iconology— his landmark American publication of 1939 —contains ‘the revised content of a methodological article published by thewriter in 1932’, which is now translated for the first time in this issue ofCritical Inquiry.1 That article, published in the philosophical journal Logos,is among his most important works. First, it marks the apogee of his seriesof philosophically reflective essays on how to do art history,2 that reachback, via a couple of major pieces on Alois Riegl, to the 1915 essay onHeinrich Wölfflin.3 Under the influence of his colleague at Hamburg ErnstCassirer, the principal interpreter of Kant in the 1920s, Panofsky from 1915

The authors wish to thank Richard Neer and Joel Snyder for savvy reading and saving ourbacon in a number of instances.

1. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance(1939; New York, 1967), p. xv; hereafter abbreviated SI. See Panofsky, ‘Zum Problem derBeschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst’, Logos 21 (1932): 103–19;trans. Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz under the title ‘On the Problem of Describing andInterpreting Works of the Visual Arts’, Critical Inquiry 38 (Spring 2012): 467– 82; hereafterabbreviated ‘P’.

2. See the discussion in Carlo Ginzburg, ‘From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: AProblem of Method’, Myths, Emblems, Clues, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (London, 1990),pp. 17–59, esp. pp. 36 – 41.

3. See Panofsky, ‘Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst’, Deutschsprachige Aufsatze,ed. Karen Michels and Martin Warnke, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1998), 2:1009 –18; ‘Der Begriff desKunstwollens’, Deutschsprachige Aufsatze, 2:1019 –34, trans. Kenneth J. Northcott and JoelSnyder under the title ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’, Critical Inquiry 8 (Autumn 1981): 17–33; and ‘Uber das Verhaltnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie: Ein Beitrag zu derErörterung uber die Möglichkeit kunstwissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe’, DeutschsprachigeAufsatze, 2: 1035– 63, trans. Lorenz and Elsner under the title ‘On the Relationship of ArtHistory and Art Theory: Towards the Possibility of a Fundamental System of Concepts for aScience of Art’, Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008): 43–71.

Critical Inquiry 38 (Spring 2012)

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Matthias Grunewald, the Resurrection, the Isenheim Altar, right outer wing, interior (c.1516).

on exhibits in his work ever more Kantian thinking and language.4 ButLogos was not an art-historical review or one dedicated to aesthetics but aprincipal mainstream journal of the philosophy of culture. So ‘On theProblem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts’ has agood claim to be the culmination of Panofsky’s philosophical thinking inhis German period under the Weimar Republic.

At the same time, this essay is the first and arguably the fundamentalstatement of what would later come to be called the theory of iconology. Itadvocates the three levels of meaning in a work of art and the three levels ofinterpretation needed to elicit them which would be the basis of Panofsky’sprescriptions for the discipline of art history in his American period. Al-though couched very differently from the two versions of his presentationof iconology in 1939 and 1955, much more propositional and arguablyhard-hitting in both form and content, the 1932 essay makes all the keyintellectual points and concludes with a version of the diagram whichwould come to epitomise the later iconology essays.5 It is thus the concep-

4. On neo-Kantianism in pre-Nazi Germany, see Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways:Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago, 2000), pp. 25–37; Eric Dufour and T. Z. R. Creteil, ‘LeStatue du singulier: Kant et le neokantisme de l’Ecole de Marbourg’, Kantstudien 93 (Sept.2002): 324 –50; Edward Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (Princeton,N.J., 2008), pp. 22–51; and Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos(Cambridge, Mass., 2010), pp. 52– 86. Specifically on the Cassirerian Kantianism of Panofsky,see Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven, Conn., 1982), pp. 181– 82;Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984), pp. 91–92,147–52; Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History, trans. RichardPierce (New Haven, Conn., 1989), pp. 174 –77, 182– 84; David Summers, ‘Meaning in the VisualArts as a Humanistic Discipline’, in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside, ed.Irving Lavin (Princeton, N.J., 1995), pp. 9 –24; Mark A. Cheetham, Kant, Art, and Art History:Moments of Discipline (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 68 –77; Paul Crowther, The Transhistorical Image:Philosophizing Art and Its History (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 70 –73; Allister Neher, ‘“The Conceptof Kunstwollen”, Neo-Kantianism, and Erwin Panofsky’s Early Art Theoretical Essays’, Wordand Image 20 (Jan.–Mar. 2004): 41–51; Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images:Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park, Pa.,2005), pp. 4 – 6, 90 –138; and Lorenz and Elsner, ‘Translators’ Introduction’, Critical Inquiry 35(Autumn 2008): 33– 42, esp. pp. 38, 40 – 42.

5. See Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Chicago, 1955),pp. 26 – 41 and SI, pp. 3–17.

J AS E L S N E R is Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow at Corpus ChristiCollege Oxford and visiting professor of art history at the University of Chicago.He works on all aspects of Roman and early Christian art, including theirhistoriographic receptions, as well as on questions of image and description.KATHARINA LORENZ is associate professor in classical studies at the University ofNottingham. Her research is concerned with storytelling, spatial appropriation,and formal development in Greek and Roman art.

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2012 485

tual foundation of Panofsky’s mature work in the United States and theEnglish language—not only the zenith of his German enterprise but thebasis of his American career. We examine here the place of Panofsky’sLogos essay in his corpus—and hence its specific critical contribution forthe discipline of art history— by taking these two historical trajectories inturn.

1. Looking Back: Kunstwollen, Hamburg, and Panofsky’s EarlyCareerPanofsky’s German career consisted of a series of extraordinarily wide-

ranging assaults on fundamental themes from medieval to baroque artboth in northern Europe and in Italy, coupled with a group of ground-breaking and still significant theoretical interventions.6 The theoreticalessays comprise conceptual interrogations of the classic work of Wölfflinand Riegl. He also developed a new method while at Hamburg (1920 –1933)when he came under the influence on the one hand of Cassirer and phil-osophical neo-Kantianism and on the other hand of the scholars associ-ated with the Warburg Library—Aby Warburg himself, Fritz Saxl (withwhom Panofsky collaborated on several projects), and Edgar Wind (Pan-ofsky’s first doctoral student who then habilitated under Cassirer). Manyof these methodological essays have now been translated into English andhave received a fair share of useful commentary.7 ‘On the Problem of De-scribing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts’ is a sketch at defining

6. In addition to the books he published in this period, the articles are now gathered inPanofsky, Deutschsprachige Aufsatze. For a brief account of Panofsky’s early career, see JoanHart, ‘Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim: A Dialogue on Interpretation’, Critical Inquiry 19(Spring 1993): 534 – 66, esp. pp. 550 –53.

7. See Panofsky, ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’; ‘Die Entwicklung der Proportionslehreals Abbild der Stilentwicklung’, Deutschsprachige Aufsatze, 1:31–72, trans. pub. under the title‘The History of the Theory of Human Proportions as a Reflection of the History of Styles’,Meaning in the Visual Arts, pp. 55–108; Idea: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der alterenKunsttheorie (Leipzig, 1924), trans. Joseph J. S. Peake under the title Idea: A Concept in ArtTheory (Columbia, S.C., 1968); ‘On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory’; and ‘DiePerspektive als “symbolische Form”’, Deutschsprachige Aufsatze, 2:664 –757, trans. ChristopherWood under the title Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York, 1991). Useful commentariesinclude Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, pp. 178 –208; Holly, Panofsky and the Foundationsof Art History; Keith Moxey, ‘Panofsky’s Concept of “Iconology” and the Problem ofInterpretation in the History of Art’, New Literary History 17 (Winter 1986): 265–74; Wood,introduction to Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, pp. 7–24; Margaret Iversen, ‘Postscripton Panofsky: Three Early Essays’, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1993),pp. 149 – 66; Summers, ‘Meaning in the Visual Arts as a Humanistic Discipline’; Crowther, TheTranshistorical Image, pp. 36 – 66; Neher, ‘“The Concept of Kunstwollen”, Neo-Kantianism, andErwin Panofsky’s Early Art Theoretical Essays’; and Karlheinz Ludeking, ‘Panofskys Umweg zuIkonographie’, in Ästhetik in metaphysikkritischen Zeiten, ed. Josef Fruchtl and Maria Moog-Grunewald (Hamburg, 2007), pp. 201–24.

486 Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz / The Genesis of Iconology

the problems of art historical description and interpretation which unitesthe two strands in Panofsky’s theoretical enterprise. It is a critical attemptto ground the concepts of the discipline and an interrogation of the mean-ings of images in the context of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic formsand Warburg’s cultural history. Alongside this synthesis, and more than inany of his other works—although with little acknowledgement or directcitation—the 1932 essay comes closer to integrating into his own projectthe intellectual positions of Panofsky’s prime theoretical opponents: notonly Hans Sedlmayr and the theoretical position of the second Viennaschool but also Martin Heidegger and his assault on neo-Kantianism andon Cassirer in particular. In this sense, at a particular (it turns out, late)moment of Weimar scholarship, Panofsky’s Logos essay makes a pitch forthe high ground in the developing argument about what art history shouldbe as a conceptual discipline. It happens that all Panofsky’s collaborators inthe Hamburg scene (and most neo-Kantians) were Jews, while his specificopponents— even in the late twenties and early thirties (namely, Sedlmayrand Heidegger)—would declare for the Nazi Party as soon as the NationalSocialists were on the ascendant.

In the Logos essay, without at any point directly referring to Riegl’sconcept of Kunstwollen, but developing his earlier critical reinterpretationof it, Panofsky argues that at the third, or deepest, level of meaning in awork of art (its ‘documentary’ or ‘intrinsic’ meaning, what would be char-acterised in the 1955 revision of the essay as the object of ‘iconologicalinterpretation’) lay

the unintentional and subconscious self-revelation of a fundamentalattitude towards the world that is characteristic in equal measure ofthe individual producer, the individual period, the individual peopleand the individual cultural community. The magnitude of an artisticachievement in the end depends on the extent to which the energy ofsuch a particular worldview has been channelled into moulded matterand radiates towards its viewer. [‘P’, p. 479]

This proposes a model for interpreting art that unpacks ‘an unconsciousattitude which a work betrays rather than a meaning which it displays’.8

That sociologically expressed unconscious—ramifying beyond an individ-ual artist to a whole cultural world in its time and racial or ethnic specific-ity, indebted explicitly in formulation to the work of Karl Mannheim (see

8. Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, p. 202. Podro’s formulation rephrases whatPanofsky himself says on p. 480 (quoting but not naming ‘an intellectually stimulatingAmerican’ who is probably to be identified with C. S. Peirce): the ‘artist knows only “what heparades” but not “what he betrays”’.


‘P’, p. 478) and ultimately deeply influential on Pierre Bourdieu—is Pan-ofsky’s most theoretically developed proposition to date for what art canoffer to the historian and what its interpreter can uncover.9 It is strikingthat when he reformulated this third level of interpretation in the 1939introduction to Studies in Iconology, he did not cite Mannheim but Cas-sirer’s concept and system of symbolic forms (see SI, pp. 8, 16).10

At the same time, this quotation is very close to the final conclusions onKunstwollen in Panofsky’s 1925 essay on the relationship of art history andart theory. There he explicitly redefines Kunstwollen as that which revealsthe ‘immanent sense’ of any ‘visual-artistic phenomena’—and which canbe seen also in ‘the sense of musical, poetic, and even extra-artistic phe-nomena’ (glossed as ‘philosophical, religious, juridical, and linguistic’).11

In 1925 he insists in extremely Kantian terms on the notion of Sinn(‘sense’), in which a fundamental meaning underlying the range of cul-tural epiphenomena is available to the interpreter. By 1932 his model, al-though it owes much to Mannheim’s ‘three distinct “strata of meaning”:(a) its objective meaning, (b) its expressive meaning, and (c) its documen-tary or evidential meaning’,12 is in certain respects closer to somethingactive—the drive with which the Vienna school imbued Kunstwollen—inits expression as an unintentional and subconscious attitude, an energythat is equally manifest from the individual to the collective. The work ofart, in the Logos essay, is granted a dynamic force as the embodiment of anenergy which has been channeled into molded matter and radiates towardsits viewer. In the 1932 formulation—as in his overt discussion of Heideg-ger—Panofsky comes much closer than in his earlier work to taking on

9. For the importance of Panofsky to Bourdieu, see Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Postface’ to ErwinPanofsky, Architecture gothique et pensee scholastique (Paris, 1967), pp. 135– 67. AlthoughBourdieu cites the 1932 essay on p. 138, his main discussion of Panofsky’s theoretical frame relieson the later formulations of 1955; see pp. 138 – 40, 142– 44. On Panfosky’s influence on Bourdieu,see Jeremy Tanner, “Introduction: Sociology and Art History”, in The Sociology of Art: AReader, ed. Tanner (London, 2003), pp. 20 –22, and Bruce W. Hoslinger, ‘Indigineity: Panofsky,Bourdieu, and the Archaeology of the Habitus’, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and theMaking of Theory (Chicago, 2005), pp. 94 –113.

10. The citations are general ones to Cassirer by name alone and not to a work but to thesection headings of the introduction to Ernst Cassirer, Language, vol. 1 of The Philosophy ofSymbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim (1953; New Haven, Conn., 1965), pp. 73–114, whichincludes most of the concepts necessary to Panofsky: ‘The Concept of Symbolic Form and theSystem of Symbolic Forms’, ‘Universal Function of the Sign: The Problem of Meaning’, ‘TheProblem of “Representation” and the Structure of Consciousness’, and ‘Ideational Content ofthe Sign: Transcending the Copy Theory of Knowledge’.

11. Panofsky, ‘On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory’, p. 65.12. Karl Mannheim, ‘On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung’, trans. Paul Kecskemeti,

From Karl Mannheim, trans. Kurt Wolff et al., ed. Wolff (New York, 1993), p. 147. On theinfluence of Mannheim on Panofsky, see Hart, ‘Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim’.


board the arguments and theoretical models of his intellectual oppo-nents. In the case of Heidegger (as we shall see) Panofsky accepts theprinciple of interpretation as an act of violence rooted in the partlysubjective ‘worldview of the interpreter’ (‘P’, p. 480), although he is con-cerned to find limits to police unbridled subjectivity. In the case of theunnamed Kunstwollen and its uncited adherents, he accepts the notion of‘the energy of such a particular worldview’ (Weltanschauungs-Energie; ‘P’,p. 479), although he does not go along with the full model of Kunstwollenas an actual ‘force’, the ‘“objective spirit”’ of a ‘“supra-individual will”’,adumbrated by Sedlmayr in a seminal essay of direct and explicit disagree-ment with both Panofsky and Mannheim.13

Panofsky’s willingness to class together ‘the individual producer, theindividual period, the individual people, and the individual cultural com-munity’ (‘P’, p. 479) reaches closer to Geistesgeschichte than anywhere elsein his work14 and towards Sedlmayr’s ‘objective collective will . . . a forcethat is rightly conceived of by the individual as an objective power’ (‘Q’, p.16). It is important to see the closeness in a fast-changing historical context.In terms of his accommodations with Viennese art-historical positions in1932, however close to Sedlmayr he comes, Panofsky never accepts ‘will’ orthe creative supraindividual subjectivity as the objective force propellingart and history. Moreover, given the virulent attack on Sedlmayr’s articleby Ernst Gombrich in the introduction to Art and Illusion (first publishedin 1959),15 it is worth remembering that positions articulated in the late1920s and before 1933, however fascist they might appear now from thepoint of view of hindsight, need not necessarily have been intended in aprotofascist way or (even if they were so intended) have been read as such.Even in 1939, when Panofsky revised his Logos essay as the introduction toStudies in Iconology (and carefully edited out all his genuflections both toSedlmayr and to Heidegger), while the protofascism of Sedlmayr in the1920s was entirely obvious (given his membership of the Nazi Party from1932 and his subsequent activities), his Nazism’s meaning (before the war

13. Hans Sedlmayr, ‘The Quintessence of Riegl’s Thought’, trans. Matthew Rampley, inFraming Formalism: Riegl’s Work, ed. Richard Woodfield (Amsterdam, 2001), p. 16; hereafterabbreviated ‘Q’. This essay served as the introduction to Riegl’s collected essays in 1929; seeRiegl, Gesammelte Aufsatze (Vienna, 1929). For some discussion of Panofsky and Sedlmayr inthis period, see Frederic J. Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art inTwentieth-Century Germany (New Haven, Conn., 2005), pp. 146 –51.

14. Indeed, on p. 480 he says explicitly and with apparent approval: ‘It is a sense of generalintellectual history [Geistesgeschichte] which clarifies what was possible within the worldview ofany specific period and any specific cultural circle’.

15. See Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of PictorialRepresentation (Princeton, N.J., 1972), p. 17.


and before the Holocaust)16 was not fully clear. By the time Gombrich wasattacking Sedlmayr, the latter’s work was a kind of shorthand for every-thing the Nazi regime stood for and had done.

Arguably, the compelling interest of the Logos essay as the culminatingtheoretical statement of Panofsky’s Weimar career is the way it meets theopponents of his neo-Kantianism halfway—that is, Heidegger (whoseKantbuch was published in 1929) and Sedlmayr, who explicitly affirmedthat ‘Riegl’s ideas, and all ideas organically connected to Kantianism, arelike chalk and cheese. That is clearly demonstrated by the failure of theexcellent interpretative essays by Panofsky and Mannheim’ (‘Q’, p. 27).Admittedly, this very strategy of appropriating one’s foe halfway was bor-rowed by Panofsky from Sedlmayr himself. Sedlmayr had granted the needfor an ‘a priori theoretical discipline’ (without citing Panofsky’s 1925 articlewhich had called for this) and also had accepted the point that if one cangrasp the Kunstwollen of a given work of art, one can determine ‘the cor-responding religion, philosophy, or science’ (‘Q’, pp. 18, 21).17 But Sedl-mayr had then insisted on Kunstwollen as an agent of force, a cultural drivein its own right and on the ‘higher structural principles’, the ‘law’ of that‘very structural principle that lends “inner necessity” to . . . the work of art’(‘Q’, p. 17). In his Logos essay, Panofsky not only summarizes and synthe-sizes his own earlier methodological work but takes on board— going asfar as he is able to go—the premises, methodological points, and even tosome extent the formulations of what by the early 1930s were the ascendanttrends in German philosophy and art history, trends that would be trium-phant after 1933.

Most striking of all, one might suggest that the three levels of meaningposited in 1932, which are the genesis of iconology, are indebted not only toMannheim’s three kinds of meaning but also—at least in terms of conflic-tive dialogue—to Sedlmayr’s two levels of Struktur.18 Sedlmayr had pro-

16. On Sedlmayr’s Nazism, see Hans Aurenhammer, ‘Zasur oder Kontinuitat? Das Wienerkunsthistorische Institut im Standestaat und im Nationsozialismus’, Wiener Jahrbuch furKunstgeschichte 53 (2004): 11–54, esp. 25– 49, and Benjamin Binstock, ‘Springtime for Sedlmayr?The Future of Nazi Art History’, Wiener Jahrbuch fur Kunstgeschichte 53 (2004): 73– 86.

17. Also quoted in Schwartz, Blind Spots, p. 150. This specifically picks up from Panofsky,‘On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory’, p. 65, but also on the conclusion of AloisRiegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome, 1985), p. 231, where Riegl maintainedthat Kunstwollen applies beyond material culture to all other epiphenomena of an epoch, hehimself explicitly citing religion, literature, and law.

18. These are posited in Sedlmayr, ‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art’, trans. Mia Fineman,in The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s, ed. Wood (NewYork, 2000), pp. 133–79; hereafter abbreviated ‘T’. See Elsner, ‘From Empirical Evidence to theBig Picture: Some Reflections on Riegl’s Concept of Kunstwollen’, Critical Inquiry 32 (2006):741–76, esp. 760 – 62. Although Sedlmayr’s essay cites neither Mannheim nor Panofsky (as had


posed these in a major methodological manifesto published in 1931 thatwas not cited by Panofsky in the Logos essay.19 In his essay ‘Toward aRigorous Study of Art’, Sedlmayr had divided the study of art into twohistories of art—an empirical level and an interpretative level.20 Each ofthese levels comprises a variety of stages. Notably, Sedlmayr’s second arenaof study includes ‘levels of meaning’ in the work of art (‘die “Sinnschich-ten” des Kunstwerks’), which arise from ‘one central structural principle’(‘einem zentralen Strukturprinzip’) (‘T’, p. 168), seemingly a direct re-sponse to Panofsky’s own essays on Riegl of 1920 and 1925 as well as toMannheim’s essay of 1923 (none of which Sedlmayr cites but all of whichhe certainly knew). Sedlmayr never uses the word Kunstwollen in this ar-ticle, but—after ‘Quintessence’— one might see this central structuralprinciple as the Kunstwollen, driving artistic creativity and equivalent toPanofsky’s third level of meaning explicated in his Logos essay.

The key difference between Sedlmayr’s argument of 1931 and Panofsky’sof 1932 lies in Sedlmayr’s insistence on the singularity of art— on ‘nothingbut the products . . . no data that can be brought into relation to the worksof art, either directly or indirectly’ by contrast with Panofsky’s carefultracing of historicism and the interpreter’s knowledge at any rate in rela-tion to the first two levels of meaning in a work of art (‘T’, p. 139). Sedlmayrinsists that despite all the subjectivity involved in the ‘psychophysical andintellectual’ aspects of looking at art, despite the fact that ‘works of art arerepeatedly re-created and formed anew by viewing subjects’, nonetheless‘each work of art is itself, in its totality, an objective reality, a separateobject world. . . . When viewers with different attitudes look at the sameobject, each sees a different, but nevertheless objective, entity, which isentirely distinct from the truly “subjective” private reactions that the workmay elicit in the viewer but that it does not demand’ (‘T’, p. 145). In effect,although reveling in the subjective force of his engagement with the object

‘Q’), it may be read as a theoretical riposte to their criticisms of Riegl and as one heavilyindebted to them. In particular, Sedlmayr moves away from meaning (Sinn) as emphasized byboth Mannheim’s ‘On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung’ and by Panofsky’s ‘On theRelationship of Art History and Art Theory’ to his notion of structure (Struktur) inherent in thework of art.

19. See the citation to this manifesto in Panofsky, ‘The History of Art as a HumanisticDiscipline’, in The Meaning of the Humanities, ed. Theodore Meyer Greene (Princeton, N.J.,1938), p. 116; rpt. in Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, pp. 1–25, where the reference toSedlmayr appears on p. 22 n. 17.

20. For some discussion, see Wood, introduction to The Vienna School Reader, pp. 11–12, 17,19, and Schwarz, Blind Spots, pp. 153–56. On Sedlmayr’s indebtedness to Gestalt psychology atthis period (for which Panofsky specifically cites ‘T’), see Ian Verstegen, ‘Art History, Gestalt,and Nazism’, Gestalt Theory 26 (June 2004): 134 – 49.


(very much in parallel with Heidegger’s notion of interpretative violence)Sedlmayr insists on the objectivity of the interpretative result. His empha-sis is on the ontology of the object (in terms of structure, in terms of a forcepresent despite, but elicited by, the viewer’s subjectivity). Panofsky—al-ways worried about the subject’s intrusion upon the object— has a muchmore epistemological take and is constantly concerned with the need forcriteria to limit subjective excess.

And yet the similarity between Sedlmayr and Panofsky is at its strongestin the Logos essay. Panofsky argues—for his third and deepest level ofmeaning—that one must throw away all forms of knowledge extrinsic tothe work of art:

In an enterprise like this—in which the exegesis of a work of art iselevated onto the same level as that of a philosophical system or a reli-gious belief—we must abandon even the knowledge of literarysources, at least in the sense of sources which can be directly related tothe relevant work of art. [‘P’, p. 479]

In this space—the Kunstwollen space of intrinsic meanings— his closenessto Sedlmayr is startling, quite apart from the debt he owes to Sedlmayr’sessays in theory. For Panofsky’s argumentative structure of levels (of in-terpretation rather than study, of meaning rather than Struktur) whichforms his iconological framework itself shadows the empirical and inter-pretative levels proposed by Sedlmayr.21

2. Looking Forward: From Describing and Interpreting toIconologyThe differences between the Logos essay and its revision as the introduc-

tion to Studies in Iconology tell us much about the development of Panof-sky’s thought (quite apart from the refiguring of Panofsky himself fromGerman Ordinarius to American professor). They show us not only atrajectory of his art-historical thinking but also a fundamental culturaltransformation, the American assimilation of an already outstandinglyassimilated German Jew. The Logos essay is one of the last, commandingstatements of Panofsky’s Weimar period as holder of the chair of art his-tory at Hamburg.22 The 1939 introduction is his major methodological

21. One way of saving Panofsky from too much of a resemblance to Sedlmayr would be toargue that for Sedlmayr in 1931 intrinsic meaning is embedded in the work of art, while forPanofsky in 1932 it is embedded in the way in which the artwork and its context speak together.Part of what Panofsky is tackling in this passage is the narrow-minded application of externalsources and, when such sources are lacking, the refusal to pursue interpretation.

22. Panofsky was a Privatdozent in Hamburg from 1920 and was appointed to the chair of


statement of American transplantation; it looks both backward as a repriseof earlier work by an exile from the Nazi regime and forward as it wouldbecome the basis of the iconological ascendancy in American art history,spearheaded by Panofsky himself.

But the differences are also about fundamentally different intellectualcontexts. The Logos piece was delivered as a lecture to philosophers at theKant Society in Kiel; Logos’s editorial board included major contemporaryphilosophers like Edmund Husserl and Cassirer, as well as Wölfflin, thegreatest living old master among art historians. The six chapters of Studiesin Iconology were delivered at Bryn Mawr in 1937–38 —to a liberal arts (andhence substantially undergraduate as well as faculty) audience ‘in the fieldof the “Humanities,” using the term “Humanities” in its broadest conno-tation’ (SI, p. xvii).23 These contexts are radically different both in the levelof academic experience and agility one might expect of the audience and intheir levels of education.24 Whereas the 1932 essay is suitably ascetic in notreproducing any photographic illustrations, despite the relatively rich anddetailed interpretative discussions of a number of images such as MatthiasGrunewald’s painting of the Resurrection, for his American college audi-ence Panofsky uses four black-and-white images to illustrate his argument.The more concrete visual form of the 1939 version goes side by side with astriking suppression of what might be seen as the propositional points thatwere made in 1932 by directly addressing specific (even canonical) figuresin the German humanist tradition and their ancient Greek sources. Themove from 1932 to 1939 is away from the display of erudite learning andfrom a kind of point scoring appropriate to the major players in the Ger-man intellectual firmament. Among exiles deprived of nationality and cul-

art history in 1926. See Michels and Warnke, ‘Vorwort’, in Panofsky, Deutschsprachige Aufsatze,p. x. For discussion of Panofsky’s Hamburg years, see Heinrich Dilly, ‘Das KunsthistoricheSeminar der Hamburgischen Universitat’; Ulrike Wendland, ‘Arkadien in Hamburg:Studierende und Lehrende am Kunsthistorischen Seminar der Hamburgischen Universitat’;Horst Bredekamp, ‘Ex nihilo: Panofskys Habilitation’; Warnke, ‘Panofsky: Die HamburgerVorlesungen’; and Michels, ‘Bemerkungen zu Panofskys Sprache’, in Erwin Panofsky: Beitragedes Symposions Hamburg, 1992, ed. Bruno Reudenbach (Berlin, 1994), pp. 1–14, 15–30, 31– 47,53–58, and 59 –70.

23. Some of the correspondence around the Bryn Mawr invitation survives. See MarionEdwards Park, letter to Panofsky, 24 Mar. 1937; Park, letter to Abraham Flexner, 16 Apr. 1937;Panofsky, letters to Park, 22 May 1937, 20 Nov. 1937, and Fritz Saxl, 26 Nov. 1937; and Park,letter to Mary and Bernard Flexner, 23 Nov. 1937, Korrespondenz 1937 bis 1949, ed. DieterWuttke, 4 vols. (Wiesbaden, 2003), 2:16 –20, 30 –32, 37, 81, 84, and 87.

24. As Panofsky put it, in the epilogue: ‘The American scholar more frequently faces anonprofessional and unfamiliar audience than does the European’ (Panofsky, ‘Epilogue’,Meaning in the Visual Arts, p. 332).


tural homeland, it was more important to assimilate nonaggressively in anew world which had welcomed them. Studies in Iconology thus cuts thediscussions of Lucian and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (including all theoriginal Greek) with which Panofsky opens the Logos essay; it cuts many ofthe learned scholarly asides, especially as they venture outside art history(such as ‘following Mannheim’ [‘P’, p. 478], or the explicit invocation ofKant at p. 481); 25 it cuts the personally witnessed history of the reception ofFranz Marc’s The Mandrill in Hamburg between 1919 and 1932, that heused to illustrate the speed of cultural change through the habituation tonew forms of visual expression (see ‘P’, p. 471);26 it cuts the discussion ofZeuxis and Greek art; it cuts the critical discussion of the uses and viabilityof external textual sources; above all it cuts the fascinating and direct en-gagement with Heidegger which is the substance of section 4 in the Logosessay and arguably shows Panofsky at his most brilliant. Instead of thisrange of Wissenschaft, much of it accompanied by a polemical edge asPanofsky positioned himself in German art history at the very border ofphilosophy, in 1939 he refers to one principal scholarly authority— his oldfriend, mentor, and Hamburg colleague, Ernst Cassirer, and the theory ofsymbolic forms (see SI, pp. 8 and 16). One might read this on a number oflevels: a personal gesture to a fellow exile and a genuflection to their jointneo-Kantian enterprise during their Hamburg collaboration in the Wei-mar years. In the preface to Studies in Iconology (see SI, p. vi), Panofskyoffers a litany of thanks— either to Americans who have welcomed him orto the group of exiles with whom he has fled (such as Saxl and RudolfWittkower).27 The spirit, in short, of the 1932 essay is one of taking issuewith opponents like Heidegger and of claiming a new theoretical under-standing of art history in relation to interpretation and description whichwas not only philosophically inflected but could stand side by side withphilosophy itself. The spirit of the introduction to the 1939 book is funda-mentally different. It is more casual in its pragmatic opening and through-out in its choice of examples. At the same time it is more magisterial (and

25. The exception here is Wölfflin, mentioned explicitly on p. 469, and in SI, p. 6 —in bothcases referring to formal analysis.

26. We might note that this was a moment in a swift-moving story; by 1937 Marc, althoughhe had died at the front in the Battle of Verdun in 1916, was firmly among the degenerates in theNazi period. The Mandrill (1913) controversially was bought for the Hamburg Kunsthalle in1919, removed from display in 1936, and exhibited in room 6 of the Entartete Kunst show of1937. See ‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, ed. Stephanie Barron(New York, 1991), pp. 62, 294.

27. The exception is Warburg, whom he cites as a teacher, and who would as a Jew likelyhave been an exile by 1939 had he been still alive. Other refugees listed include MargareteBieber, Otto Brendel, Karl Lehmann-Hartleben, Jakob Rosenberg, Alfred Scharf, HansSwarzenski, and Kurt Weitzmann.


less open) in tone—a plea for his inclusion in a new country and a newcultural system, as an adaptable (but also entertaining) thinker and as aserious scholar. Both the 1932 and the 1939 pieces culminate in what Pa-nofsky calls in 1939 ‘a synoptical table’ (which remains in place for itsrepublication, with some additions, as the opening chapter of Meaning inthe Visual Arts in 1955; see SI, p. 16). The differences between the Germanand the American versions of this table will be discussed below. But at thispoint it is worth commenting on the different structures of argument thatbuild to what is apparently the same point. The 1932 article— explicitly onquestions of the description and interpretation of works of art— buildsempirically by means of examples (pictorial, if not illustrated, and inter-pretative) to the tripartite structure of meaning summarized in the table. Itopens obliquely and historically with an interpretative problem high-lighted by Panofsky’s twentieth-century reading of Lessing’s eighteenth-century reading of Lucian’s second-century AD reading of a picture byZeuxis from the fifth century BC (in fact, though Panofsky does not men-tion this, of a Roman-period copy of Zeuxis’s picture). The 1939 essay,entitled ‘Introductory’ for a book called Studies in Iconology and openingwith the word iconography, proposes in its first paragraph to ‘define thedistinction between subject matter or meaning on the one hand, and formon the other’ (SI, p. 3). After the famous discussion of how to interpret anacquaintance tipping his hat (something historically and contextually sit-uated in that Panofsky avers that ‘neither an Australian bushman nor anancient Greek’ would get it [SI, p. 4],28 he lays out his three strata of mean-ing without particularly arguing for them and then proceeds to illustratethem with some pictorial examples. It is a much more didactic, even au-thoritarian, model of exposition than the German essay on which it isbased.

The changes in pictorial examples between the 1932 and 1939 versionsare intriguing. In the Logos essay, Panofsky’s key and complex example isGrunewald’s painting of the Resurrection and the need for us to have priorknowledge of its narrative to interpret Christ’s ‘hovering’ correctly. Panof-sky repeatedly returns to his example’s numerous ramifications, playingthem off against various other visual comparanda as he marshals his visualmaterial to lay out the theoretical problems which he will conclude whenhe sets out the famous table of iconology at the end of the essay. In the

28. Note that even this example is in fact found on p. 478, where the instance of a greetingon the street is used to analyze Panofsky’s third level of meaning and analysis. As Hart rightlyobserves, the origins lie in Mannheim’s anecdote: ‘I am walking down the street with a friend; abeggar stands at a corner; my friend gives him an alms’ (Mannheim, ‘On the Interpretation ofWeltanschauung’, p. 148; see Hart, ‘Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim’, pp. 535–36).


introduction to Studies in Iconology, Panofsky lays out the three-fold con-tent of his table at the outset, illustrates it with visual examples, and thensummarizes the entire exposition (it is not obvious that it deserves to beseen as an argument) with the ‘synoptical table’. His images here certainlydo not constitute an argument, as do the images of the 1932 essay, and aremuch more simply used— one picture at a time (rather than a constantbouncing off from and return to Grunewald’s hovering Christ) to makeone point at a time. He gets rid of Grunewald altogether and replaces thisexample with a simpler ‘pre-iconographical’ account of Rogier van derWeyden’s three magi (SI, p. 9). This too focuses on hovering: ‘the appari-tion of a small child is seen in the sky. . . . That the child in Rogier’s pictureis meant to be an apparition can only be deduced from the additional factthat he hovers in mid-air’ (SI, pp. 9 –10). In effect Panofsky makes the sameconceptual point (more simply) with a different example, but one whichalso focuses on Christian scripture and the visual depiction of miraculousdefiance of the laws of nature.

It could be that Panofsky shifts from so excellent an example as theGrunewald to van der Weyden as a prefiguration of Panofsky’s long-termproject on Netherlandish art.29 And yet by changing his lead examplesPanofsky loses the discussion of the discrepancies between a work of artand the textual sources mustered for its interpretation and, hence, theobligation of the interpreter to cross-examine the use of any literarysources against the history of types (see SI, p. 9). In the 1939 version thisissue is no longer pursued, and indeed the foundations are laid for whatstill attracts the fiercest criticism of Panofsky’s iconology as a whole: its

29. See Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, 2 vols.(Cambridge, Mass., 1953). On the shift from Grunewald one may hazard a number ofpossibilities. Grunewald— only rediscovered at the end of the nineteenth century—rapidlyemerged as a hugely popular and essentially German artist of particular influence on theexpressionist avant-garde; see Andree Hayum, The Isenheim Altarpiece: God’s Medicine and thePainter’s Vision (Princeton, N.J., 1989), pp. 120 –30, and Robert A. Lofthouse, Vitalism inModern Art, c. 1900 –1950: Otto Dix, Stanley Spencer, Max Beckmann, and Jacob Epstein(Lewiston, N.Y., 2005), pp. 70 –71, 84, 96, 197, 286. All the Logos essay’s intimations ofmodernism (such as the references to Marc, Auguste Renoir, and Paul Cezanne) and toGermanism implied by the central place of Grunewald were significant to the subtext ofPanofsky’s larger argument in 1932 about where art history in the German world should go inthe later Weimar period. They were irrelevant to his agenda in America in 1939. DespiteGrunewald’s Germanness, the Nazis do not seem to have especially claimed him, although thepainter was the subject of a celebrated opera, Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, composed in1933–35 and banned by the regime. See Siglind Bruhn, The Temptation of Paul Hindemith(Stuyvesant, N.Y., 1998), esp. 21– 42 on Grunewald in the 1930s, and Claire Taylor-Jay, TheArtist Operas of Pfitzner, Krenek, and Hindemith: Politics and the Ideology of the Artist(Burlington, VT., 2004), pp. 143–92.


reliance on the textual over and above the evidence of the visual.30 It couldbe argued that the objective of Studies in Iconology, namely, Renaissanceart, required this move to the textual in order to support Panofsky’s ex-tensive use of neo-Platonism in what followed.31 But, whatever Panofsky’smotive, his methodological franchise in 1939 thereby lost the basis for ananalytical equilibrium between the different types of evidence on offer toan interpreter.

In both essays he then turns to a medieval example ‘in which humanbeings, animals and inanimate objects seem to hang loose in violation ofthe law of gravity’ (SI, p. 10; compare ‘P’, p. 472). In both cases he uses theGospels of Otto III in Munich, but interestingly he chooses different min-iatures—the nativity in 1932 (that continues the Christological theme ofthe Grunewald Resurrection) and the ‘real city of Nain’ in 1939 (SI, p. 10).As he moves to the complicating issue of the history of types and styles, inboth essays Panofsky uses and indeed argues from Francesco Maffei’spainting of Judith with the head of Holofernes. The footnote in the Logostext (see ‘P’, p. 474 n. 8) which discusses the isolated ‘devotional picture(Andachtsbild)’ of the head of St John on a platter is not only elevated intothe main text in 1939 but is supplied with an illustration, despite its mini-mal significance for the argument (see SI, p. 13). Of the numerous otherexamples in the 1932 essay, both specific and ideal-typical—Marc’s TheMandrill, Albrecht Durer’s The Dream of the Doctor and Melancholia,Renoir’s Still Life with Peaches, Zeuxis’s centaurs, and Cezanne’s still life bycontrast with a Raphael Madonna—all are cut in 1939 except for briefreferences to Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (see ‘P’, p. 469, and SI, p.8) and Michelangelo (see ‘P’, p. 470, and SI, p. 7). The effect of thesechanges—a radical reduction of examples and especially of their temporalrange, coupled with the illustration of all the main examples in 1939 —isfundamental. It moves the thrust of a general case about the nature ofdescription and the interpretation of art, taken as an atemporal categoryfor a philosophical audience and deliberately ranging across a span ofmaterial from antiquity to the contemporary, to a specific and much morenarrowly conceived historicist enterprise. The 1939 focus is wholly on theRenaissance, as announced by the subtitle to Studies in Iconology, namely,

30. See Gombrich, ‘Obituary: Erwin Panofsky’, Burlington Magazine 90 (June 1968): 359:‘The misunderstanding that Panofsky was mainly interested in texts emphasizing the meaningof symbols and images.’ See also Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, pp. 164 – 65,and Michael Squire, Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (New York, 2009), pp. 77–79.

31. See Bredekamp, ‘Götterdammerung des Neuplatonismus’, in Die Lesbarkeit der Kunst:Zur Geistesgegenwart der Ikonologie, ed. A. Beyer (Berlin, 1992), pp. 75– 83.


Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance.32 Panofsky restricts theclaims of his argument by purging evidential examples in order to producea much safer, tamer, less daring piece. It is constrained within specificsocial, historical, and cultural limits—the venture into the Ottonian Mid-dle Ages being justifiable as a genuflection to the prehistory of medieval artthat the Renaissance did away with.

Despite the claim (in the 1939 preface) that the introduction to Studiesin Iconology is but the revision of the Logos essay of 1932, in fact its scopeand aims are radically restricted. No longer a broad and general set ofstatements about the methods of approaching all art in the Western tradi-tion which follows Panofsky’s earlier confrontations with the formalism ofWölfflin and Riegl and his neo-Kantian attempts to build a ground offundamental concepts for the discipline of art history,33 it is rather a rela-tively less ambitious claim about the Renaissance. Before we condemnPanofsky too swiftly, we need to remember the context for this much morerestrained and less exciting model of art history. This is not only a questionof Panofsky’s American assimilation in the 1930s and his attempt to pro-vide what was valued in a new intellectual marketplace but also of what hewas resisting when he left the German intellectual scene. Here the confron-tation with Heidegger which forms the climax of the 1932 essay becomes sointeresting and revealing.

The tables of 1932 and 1939 are different in two respects (figs. 1–3). First,the 1939 table has the same three levels of interpretative depth as that of1932 (defined in the later version as ‘subject matter’ and in the earlierversion as ‘meaning’ or ‘sense’ [Sinn]), but adds a fourth column of expo-sition for the three levels in addition to the three columns of the Logosessay. Second, many of the terms used across the table have changed in1939, partly as a matter of translation from German to English34 and partlyas a result of the process of revision. Deeper than this formal issue is thequestion of cultural assimilation as an ideological driver for the changes

32. Marion Park, president of Bryn Mawr, alludes to Panofsky’s ‘general heading’ for thelectures as ‘Problems of Secular Iconography in the Renaissance’ (Marion Edwards Park, letterto Panofsky, 16 Apr. 1937, Korrespondenz 1937 bis 1949, 2:31). By the time the flier for the lectureswas printed in time for the first to be given on 11 October, the title of the series was ‘HumanisticThemes in the Art of the Renaissance’; see figure 8, Korrespondenz 1937 bis 1949, 2:85.

33. So that section 2 of the 1932 essay ends explicitly with a direct reference to Panofsky’searlier methodological essay on the relationship of art history and art theory, at n. 5.

34. It is a virtually canonical assumption that Panofsky, like the other great German emigrescholars, shifted gears effortlessly between the German and the English languages and theconceptual systems the two languages implied (‘to write his lovely English’ as Summers puts itin ‘Meaning in the Visual Arts as a Humanistic Discipline’, p. 9). As a generalization, this ispious bunkum. Remarkable though it was, the immediate shift to English must inevitably havecome with numerous compromises of nuance of which the author was not wholly conscious.


between the two versions. In both essays, all the columns are about inter-pretation (the word is used as part of the heading for each column in both1932 and 1939). While the term object appears as the title of the first column(‘object of interpretation’) in both versions, the term subjective (as in ‘sub-jective source of interpretation’, the title of the second column in 1932)appears nowhere in 1939. This set of changes points to what is perhaps thegreatest difference between the Logos essay and its American revision: thefundamental transformation of the Panofskian enterprise from its Ger-man origins to its American transplantation. The 1932 article remains em-bedded in the Kantian framework for finding fundamental concepts for ascience of art, that was most strikingly elaborated in a great essay of 1925.35

By objective (as in the title of the last column in the table in the Logos essay,‘objective corrective of interpretation’), Panofsky means the agreed con-ceptual apparatus and terminology we adduce as investigators to ‘correct’subjective or interpretative excess or—to use his own terminology (see ‘P’,p. 477)—to ‘legitimize’ interpretation by means of a ‘higher level of au-thority’, a topic that in fact becomes the culmination of the Logos essay’scritique of Heidegger. That is, the 1932 article stands as the end point of the

35. See Panofsky, ‘On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory’.

F I G U R E 1 . From Panofsky, ‘Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung vonWerken der bildenden Kunst’, Logos 21 (1932): 103–19.


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application of Kantian models to thinking about art history to create aclear and rational paradigm for controlling the inevitable subjectivisminvolved in the creation and appreciation of art. From the point of view ofa scientific art history this meant a sound descriptive and interpretativelanguage founded on a philosophically robust set of metaempirical con-cepts;36 these were to counter particularly the psychological and collectivepsychic impulses implicit in the idea of Kunstwollen and the theoreticalformalism of the Vienna school from Riegl in the late nineteenth centuryto its contemporary 1930s superstars, such as Sedlmayr.

By 1939, the Kantian framework has effectively been abandoned alongwith the philosophical project for the history of art,37 and instead we havea much more pragmatic offering that lays out a method for the study ofRenaissance art.38 It is the loss of vision and intellectual ambition between1932 and 1939 —a loss which is absolutely related to exile, to assimilation ina new cultural and academic context, and to relinquishing the heady butdangerous high ground of the philosophy of art to the likes of Heidegger(arguably a relinquishing forced on Panofsky by exile)—which makes thecontrast (for a modern reader) of the 1932 and 1939 essays so depressing.39

The gain in the more limited agenda of 1939 might be seen in moving froma top-heavy and abstract engagement with art, that silently skirted thegiants of German philosophy, to a more sociocultural engagementfounded on philosophical pragmatism and the Warburg-Wind model ofcultural history.

In both tables, the first column lists the three levels of meaning which,Panofsky argues, may be inferred from (or found to inhere in) a work ofart. But they are very differently expressed. In 1932, they are ‘phenomenalmeaning’ (Phanomen-sinn), that is divided into ‘factual’ (Sach-) and ‘ex-pressive’ (Ausdrucks-) meaning (-sinn); ‘meaning dependent on content’

36. See, for example, Panofsky, ‘On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory’, pp.44, 52 n. 22, 68, and 69.

37. Cheetham claims that the Kantian remained in place in Panofsky’s American periodbut ‘so thoroughly internalized that he no longer needed to invoke it directly’ (Cheetham, Kant,Art, and Art History, p. 77). For a shift from Panofsky’s German reliance on Kant’s epistemologyto an American emphasis on Kant’s ‘humanistic cosmopolitanism’, see Cheetham, ‘TheoryReception: Panofsky, Kant, and Disciplinary Cosmopolitanism’, Journal of Art Historiography 1(Dec. 2009): www.gla.ac.uk/departments/arthistoriography/number1december2009/

38. Hart argues that Panofsky’s American readership found his work difficult tounderstand even when it was not theoretical; he therefore sought to demonstrate the usefulnessof iconology rather than to theorize about it; see Hart, ‘Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim’, p.564.

39. Didi-Huberman puts it this way: ‘From Germany to America: it’s a bit like the momentwhen the antithesis dies and the synthesis— optimist, positive, even positivist in somerespects—takes over. It’s a bit like a desire to pose all questions having suddenly been replacedby a desire to give all the answers’ (Huberman, Confronting Images, p. 102).


(Bedeutungssinn); and ‘documentary meaning’ (Dokumentsinn), with agloss of this given in brackets as ‘intrinsic meaning’ (Wesenssinn). In 1939the three levels are no longer given as ‘meaning’ but as ‘subject matter’.This is a simpler, more objectivist definition which moves away from theKantian subtleties surrounding subjective and objective categories. In-stead of ‘phenomenal meaning’ we now have ‘primary or natural subjectmatter’, still divided into two (and listed as ‘factual’ and ‘expressional’) butglossed as ‘constituting the world of artistic motifs’). Instead of ‘meaningdependent on content’, in 1939 Panofsky offers ‘secondary or conventionalsubject matter’ and glosses this rather obscure phrase with ‘constitutingthe world of images, stories and allegories’. The final level is no longer‘documentary’ with ‘intrinsic’ in parentheses but has become ‘intrinsicmeaning or content’, glossed in explicitly Cassirerian terms as ‘constitut-ing the world of “symbolical” values’.

The fundamental shift is from a relatively subjectivist take on the objectof art history as the focus on meaning as an interface between a work of artand its interpreter (highly appropriate in a discussion of description andinterpretation) to a systematic attempt to ground the three levels in the‘subject matter’ offered by the object itself (something more objective thanmeaning).40 Only in the third level of 1939 is the subjectivist term meaningallowed, but this is immediately given the alternative formulation of ‘con-tent’; frankly ‘intrinsic meaning’ (whatever that is, but surely somethingimputed or found by an observer) is a different thing from ‘intrinsic con-tent’ (which one assumes to be proper to the object). It is this shift toobjectification (from ‘meaning’ to ‘subject matter’) which requires theaddition of the fourth column in Panofsky’s scheme (immediately after thefirst column), labeled ‘act of interpretation’ that lists the levels of art his-torical intervention which render the subject matter meaningful. These are‘pre-iconographical description (and pseudo-formal analysis)’, ‘icono-graphical analysis in the narrower sense of the word’, and ‘iconographicalinterpretation in a deeper sense (iconographical synthesis)’.41 Whateverone thinks of this,42 it is a brilliant calling card for a professional art histo-rian and his or her teaching skills. The instrumentality and pragmatism of

40. Though there is, as we have said, a shift from a discussion of all interpretation of anykind of art in any period at least in the Western tradition (in 1932) to one of interpretationproper to understanding the art of the Renaissance (in 1939).

41. The last two items would be revised again in Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, p.40. There ‘iconographical analysis in the narrower sense of the word’ becomes ‘iconographicalanalysis’ tout court, and ‘iconographical interpretation in a deeper sense (iconographicalsynthesis)’ becomes (finally and canonically) ‘iconological interpretation’.

42. We may worry that it is a sleight of hand to parcel up the analytic distinctions so neatly,but it is also frankly a woolly move in that in the end it is impossible to be clear or precise about


the conversion of an analytic table and a proposition for further thoughtinto a claim to disciplinary distinction and didacticism makes one partic-ularly distrust the motives for the changes in Studies in Iconology. But theyare entirely understandable in the context of American assimilation andthe need to create a set of services for which there might be a demand.

The revision of the title of the second column of the 1932 table is reveal-ing. In 1932, ‘the subjective source of interpretation’ implies a move fromthe different subjects or levels of meaning in the first column to theirsource in the interpreter’s knowledge base or intuitions. In 1939, as thethird column heading, this becomes much more mechanically, and didac-tically, the ‘equipment for interpretation’. Again, there is a good deal ofglossing in the later version as well as much revision. What in the Logosessay was the ‘vital experience of being’—a formulation with some reso-nance in relation both to German vitalist thinking in the early twentiethcentury43 and, not least (in the context of the essay’s attack on Heidegger),to Heidegger’s philosophy of Being— becomes the utterly mundane andphilosophically empty ‘practical experience (familiarity with objects andevents)’. The ‘literary knowledge’ of 1932 becomes ‘knowledge of literarysources (familiarity with specific themes and concepts)’. This is an inter-esting shift. Panofsky could easily take for granted his 1931 audience ofKantians’ literary knowledge. For his audience of American college stu-dents he laid out all the education needed even to aspire to the second,iconographical level of Panofskian analysis. The third level in 1932 is con-cisely if obscurely labeled ‘Worldview Ur-behaviour’ (WeltanschaulichesUrverhalten), and its discussion in the Logos text (see ‘P’, p. 478) specificallyalludes to Mannheim’s work in turning a critique of Riegl’s work into asociology of culture in the exposition of Weltanschauung.44 This is exten-sively expanded in 1939, although the result is hardly less obscure: ‘syn-thetic intuition (familiarity with the essential tendencies of the humanmind), conditioned by personal psychology and “Weltanschauung”’. Here

the difference between ‘iconographical analysis in the narrower sense’ and ‘iconographicalinterpretation in a deeper sense’.

43. On Panofsky’s debt to the ‘romantic vitalism’ of Georg Simmel, see Ferretti, Cassirer,Panofsky, and Warburg, pp. 215–19; on vitalism in German art, see Lofthouse, Vitalism inModern Art, c. 1900 –1950, pp. 12– 41 on the movement and its contexts.

44. See Mannheim, ‘On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung’; Hart, ‘Erwin Panofsky andKarl Mannheim’; and Tanner, ‘Introduction’, pp. 10 –12 and ‘Karl Mannheim and Alois Reigl:From Art History to the Sociology of Culture’, Art History 32 (Sept. 2009): 755– 84, esp. pp. 757–59 and 778 on Panofsky. Incomprehensibly, given that Panofsky’s text names Karl Mannheimexplicitly, Podro confuses him with the translator Ralph Manheim; see Podro, The CriticalHistorians of Art, p. 205. The same mistake is made by Rampley; see ‘Q’, pp. 28 –29 n. 9.


the German word—in italics—no longer signifies Mannheim but seemslargely a marker of learning. However, the text of the 1939 essay is one ofthe few places there where some of the concerns running the Logos essayare allowed to intrude. Panofsky writes, ‘the more subjective and irrationalthis source of interpretation (for every intuitive approach will be condi-tioned by the interpreter’s psychology and “Weltanschaung”), the morenecessary the application of . . . correctives and controls’ (SI, p. 15). Here,despite his table’s insistence on ‘equipment for interpretation’, the prob-lem of subjective sources (the title of the column in 1932) and the risks ofirrationality in psychology—that are Panofsky’s great themes of his Ger-man period in fighting against both the Vienna school and Heidegger—make a momentary reentry.

The third column in the 1932 chart is labeled ‘objective corrective ofinterpretation’, highlighting its specific role in drawing a line against in-terpretative violence or roving arbitrariness or to limit ‘ontological exege-sis’ in relation to the subjectivity of the second column (‘P’, p. 481). By 1939the emphasis on correctives to subjectivism has been entirely lost, replacedby the sense of a controlling principle in the title of the fourth columnwhich is ‘controlling principle of interpretation’. The broad characteriza-tions of each item are close— history of styles, history of types (in both 1932and 1939). Then the final entry ‘general intellectual history’ in 1932 be-comes ‘history of cultural symptoms or “symbols” in general’ in 1939 —making it more directly Cassirerian. All three items in the final column arebracketed as ‘history of tradition’ in a much more directly Warburgiansense than anything suggested in 1932, and this becomes even morestrongly the case in the 1955 version where ‘history of tradition’ is elevatedto an alternative title for the whole column. But the more interesting dif-ference in the last column between the Logos essay and the Studies in Ico-nology introduction is in the glosses. In 1932, these are poetically elegantbut somewhat obscure and reflect Panofsky’s extended thinking with andagainst the essentialism of the Riegl tradition of art history. ‘History ofstyles’ is ‘the quintessence of what it is possible to represent’ (at any giventime, one presumes, following Panofsky’s earlier arguments against theclassical archaeologist Gerhard Rodenwaldt and his interpretation ofKunstwollen);45 ‘history of types’ is ‘the quintessence of what it is possibleto imagine’ (again at any given time); ‘general intellectual history’ is ‘the

45. See Panofsky ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’, pp. 21–23, 26 n. 10 and ‘On theRelationship of Art History and Art Theory’, pp. 35–36 and n. 27. There he attacks GerhardRodenwaldt, ‘Zur begrifflichen und geschichtlichen Bedeutung des Klassischen in derbildenden Kunst: Eine kunstgeschichtsphilosophische Studie’, Zeitschrift fur Ästhetik undAllgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 11 (1916): 113–31.


quintessence of what is possible within a given worldview’. The emphasisin the Logos essay on the possible within a given worldview and historicalframe is a striking model of historicism—more ambitious, more general,and more risky than the Warburgian ‘history of tradition’ which Panofskysees as his topic in 1939 and 1955.

The glosses of 1939 reflect quite a careful thinking-through of what thestages of control or correction to interpretative subjectivism might imply.‘History of style’ is ‘insight into the manner in which, under varying his-torical conditions, objects and events were expressed by forms’; ‘history oftypes’ is ‘insight into the manner in which, under varying historical con-ditions, specific themes or concepts were expressed by objects and events’;‘history of cultural symptoms or “symbols” in general’ is ‘insight into themanner in which, under varying historical conditions, essential tendenciesof the human mind were expressed by specific themes and concepts’. Herewe have the full scheme of iconology (and it would be labeled as ‘icono-logical interpretation’ in 1955) where the skilled interpreter can move fromforms (through preiconographical description) to themes and concepts(to be adduced through iconographical analysis) to the intrinsic meaningof symbolic values (the object of iconological analysis). It is already there in1932, but modulated in much more general terms which confront the es-sentialisms of the adherents of Kunstwollen on the one hand andHeidegger’s interpretative violence on the other. By 1939, where there wereno intellectual opponents in this area in America, Panofsky was moreexplicitly historical and laid out the schematism more directly.

3. Flirting with HeideggerOne of the most interesting aspects of the Logos essay is Panofsky’s

willingness to confront Heidegger directly. His discussion of Heidegger ischaracteristically acute. Picking on a passage which he rightly says appearsat first to be about philosophical analysis but is in fact about all interpre-tation, Panofsky highlights a piece of incisive brilliance in Heidegger’sargument: ‘“In order to wring from what the words say, what it is they wantto say, every interpretation must necessarily use violence”’ (‘P’, p. 476).46

46. Panofsky is quoting Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans.Richard Taft (1973; Bloomington, Ind., 1997), p. 141; hereafter abbreviated KPM. Panofsky picksup here on the attack made on this passage by Cassirer in his long review of Heidegger’sKantbuch; see Cassirer, ‘Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik: Bemerkungen zu MartinHeideggers Kant-Interpretation’, Kant-Studien 36 (1931): 1–26; trans. Moltke Gram under thetitle ‘Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics: Remarks on Martin Heidegger’s Interpretation ofKant’, in Kant: Disputed Questions, ed. Gram (Chicago, 1967), pp. 131–57. There Cassirer seesHeidegger’s apologia for violence as a willful act of distortion in which ‘Heidegger no longerspeaks as commentator but as usurper, who penetrates, as it were, by force of arms into the


The issue is highly pertinent to every level of Panofsky’s 1932 analysis ofinterpretative description and meaning, and Panofsky is right to recognizeHeidegger’s clarity on the question. What Panofsky emphasizes in thequestion of the subject’s violence to the object of interpretation is the needfor a corrective—the ‘objective corrective’ of the third column of his tablein 1932 (that becomes the ‘controlling principle’ of the fourth column in1939). That is, he sees that the necessary violence of interpretation (whichin art history one might place beside the subjective will—individual orcollective— of the Vienna school’s notion of Kunstwollen) needs to beconstrained by some agreed upon, preferably a priori, ground rules. This isthe legacy of Panofsky’s Kantianism and the high point of his philosophicalsearch for a priori concepts which had informed the theoretical basis of hisart history since the beginning of the 1920s. Panofsky’s worry about Hei-degger is a concern about the risks of what he interprets as an underlyinglack of interest in constraints, a love affair with the existential dynamic ofinterpretative violence.47 Heidegger describes the force that guides andjustifies such violence in these terms:

‘The power of an idea which shines forth must drive and guide thelaying-out. Only in the power of this idea can an interpretation riskwhat is always audacious, namely, entrusting itself to the concealed innerpassion of a work in order to be able, through this, to place itself withinthe unsaid and force it into speech.’ [‘P’, p. 477; KPM, p. 141]

As Panofsky comments, ‘this idea is necessarily misleading . . . since itstems from the same subjectivity that produces the violence in the firstplace’ (‘P’, p. 477).48

Kantian system in order to subdue it and make it serviceable for his [own] problem’ (p. 149; seeGordon, Continental Divide, p. 278). However, where Cassirer’s review focuses on Kant andwhat he sees as the violence of Heideggerian usurpation, Panofsky takes the doctrine of‘interpretative violence’ in a much more general sense and responds with a much broadercritique.

47. On Heidegger’s doctrine of interpretative violence, see Martin Weatherstone,Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant: Categories, Imagination, and Temporality (Basingstoke, 2002),pp. 3, 34, 177.

48. One might add that the entirety of Heidegger’s discussion (in section 35 of KPM, fromwhich Panofsky draws) argues that while most see the ‘the transcendental power ofimagination’ as being an ‘intermediate faculty’ in Kant’s picture of ‘the two basic sources forthe mind (sensibility and understanding)’, ‘the more original interpretation of this previouslylaid ground . . . unveils this intermediate faculty not just as original, unifying centre, but ratherit unveils this centre as the root of both stems’ (KPM, p. 137; compare p. 141). In placing priorityon ‘the transcendental power of imagination’, Heidegger admits he is doing violence to Kant, inthat he must resist the revisions and clarifications Kant himself made in the second edition of


It may be said that philosophically Panofsky’s argument is only a partialresponse to Heidegger. He sees clearly that the ‘source of the interpretationof intrinsic meaning is effectively the worldview of the interpreter’, that‘this source of knowledge is fundamentally subjective’ and that ‘its abso-lutely personal nature’ is in huge need of ‘an objective corrective’ (‘P’, p.480). What he proposes is ‘general intellectual history’ (allgemeine Geistes-geschichte—a surprising formulation for Panofsky, who in his wider cor-pus is hardly one of the prime advocates of Geistesgeschichte)—a stronglyhistoricist constraint that aims to clarify ‘what was possible within theworldview of any specific period and any specific cultural circle’ (‘P’, p.480). In historicising the boundaries within which interpretative violencecan rove, Panofsky is surely right. But academic humanism’s perhapsdeepest weakness is that it chooses to confront what seems specificallyrelevant rather than the bigger ethical picture. Thus by adhering to thelimited constraints of a historical academic subject like art history, Panof-sky does not specifically address what both he and Cassirer take to beHeidegger’s advocacy of an unbridled subjective drive or the ethics that arecalled into question by what they read as untrammeled subjectivity givingvent to violence (compare KPM, p. 149).

Although the issue on which he chooses to quote and criticize Heideg-ger— namely, the nature of interpretation—is clearly of direct relevance tothe essay’s subject (the problem of interpreting the work of art), the selec-tion of a passage from Heidegger’s Kantbuch is in fact freighted with con-temporary academic history and overdetermined in several ways. By thelate 1920s Heidegger had appeared as the most brilliant, mesmerising, anddynamic force in German philosophy—the ‘hidden king’ (in Hannah Ar-endt’s famous phrase) of whom rumour spread before he emerged.49 Ofparticular relevance to Panofsky’s intervention was the famous debate in

the Critique of Pure Reason and argue that ‘with reference to this most central question ofthe whole work, therefore, it [the first edition of the Critique] deserves a fundamentalpriority over the second. All reinterpretation of the pure power of imagination as afunction of pure thinking . . . misunderstands its specific essence’ (KPM, p. 138). It is tojustify the perversity of his reading of Kant (against the Kant of the second edition) thatHeidegger introduces his argument about interpretative violence. Further, on Heidegger’sexegesis of Kant (but without discussion of the doctrine of interpretative violence whichjustifies Heidegger’s moves), see William Blattner, ‘Laying the Ground for Metaphysics:Heidegger’s Appropriation of Kant’, The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. CharlesGuignon (Cambridge, 2006), esp. 167– 69, and Beatrice Han-Pile, ‘Early Heidegger’sAppropriation of Kant’, in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark Wrathal(Oxford, 2005), pp. 80 –101.

49. Hannah Arendt, ‘Martin Heidegger at Eighty’, in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy:Critical Essays, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven, Conn., 1978), p. 294.


Davos in March 1929 between Heidegger and Cassirer on the interpreta-tion of Kant.50 At Davos, the great neo-Kantian tradition of an epistemo-logical reading of Kant,51 reaching back to Hermann Cohen (the first Jew tohold an Ordinarius chair in philosophy in Germany) and characterised bythe number of Jews (like Cassirer and Panofsky himself)52 among its advo-cates, was assaulted—many observers thought with great panache andsuccess— by Heidegger’s new ontological reading which sought to find,not the a priori grounding of knowledge, but the ground of being as a forceof imagination,53 in Kant’s philosophical work. Heidegger’s all-out attackon neo-Kantianism, at this period and in this context, was open to beingtaken as an attack on the place of Jews in German philosophy, in academia,and hence in German cultural life altogether.54 Heidegger swiftly followedhis face-to-face success in debate with Cassirer by publishing his book on

50. The literature on Davos is very large now. Since the millennium, see Martin Friedman,A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago, 2000), pp. 1–9;Cassirer-Heidegger: 70 Jahre Davoser Disputation, ed. Dominic Kaegi and Enno Rudolph(Hamburg, 2002); Gordon, ‘Continental Divide: Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger at Davos,1929 —An Allegory of Intellectual History’, Modern Intellectual History 1, no. 2 (2004): 219 – 48;Michael Friedman, ‘The Davos Disputation and Twentieth Century Philosophy’ and JohnMichael Krois, ‘Why Did Cassirer and Heidegger Not Debate in Davos?’ in Symbolic Forms andCultural Studies: Ernst Cassirer’s Theory of Culture, ed. Cyrus Hamlin and Krois (New Haven,Conn., 2004), pp. 227– 43, 244 – 62; Deniz Coskun, ‘Cassirer in Davos: An Intermezzo on MagicMountain (1929)’, Law and Critique 17, no. 1 (2006): 1–26; Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer, pp. 196 –97,204 –19; Michael Roubach, ‘The Limits of Order: Cassirer and Heidegger on Finitude andInfinity’, in The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. JeffreyAndrew Barash (Chicago, 2008), pp. 104 –13; and Gordon, Continental Divide.

51. On the neo-Kantian conviction that ‘the emphasis of Kant’s system is to be sought in itsepistemology’, see KPM, p. 132 (in response to Heidegger).

52. On the perception of neo-Kantianism as ‘“Jewish formalism”’ and its principal journal,Kant-Studien, as ‘“Jew-ridden”’, see Gordon, Continental Divide, p. 56. See also Krois, ‘Why DidCassirer and Heidegger Not Debate in Davos?’ pp. 246 – 48, and Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer, pp.37– 42.

53. See Weatherstone, Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant, pp. 155– 65, 176 –77.54. The topic of assimilation of Jews in Germany is vast. See for example Shulamit �Vol�kov,

Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 224 –55 onWissenschaft and Bildung; see Gordon, Rosensweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and GermanPhilosophy (Berkeley, 2003), pp. 1–38, on Jews and Germans in Weimar philosophy. Thequestion of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism (quite apart from the bigger question of anti-Semitismin late Weimar Germany) is inseparable from that of his adherence to Nazi principles bothbefore and after he officially joined the party on 1 May 1933. Apologists of Heidegger havetended to divide the man from his work; others have seen the work as inextricably embedded inthe man’s politics and views. See most recently Emmanuel Faye, “Before 1933: Heidegger’sRadicalism, the Destruction of the Philosophical Tradition, and the Call to Nazism” for adetailed and persuasive account of the period before 1933, and Tom Rockmore, ‘Foreword tothe English Edition’ for a good summary of the earlier discussion, in Faye, Heidegger: TheIntroduction of Nazism into Philosophy, trans. Michael Smith (New Haven, Conn., 2009), pp.8 –38 (esp. 32–37 on neo-Kantianism and ‘Jewification’), pp. vii-xxii.


Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (known as the Kantbuch),55 thatwould be subject to a long and searching but respectful review from Cas-sirer in 1931.56 Given Panofsky’s closeness to Cassirer and his Cassirerianposition on Kant, there is little doubt that his choice to comment on Hei-degger directly is the affirmation of a position, and a politics, in relation towhat in the late Weimar years were still open questions of intellectualdirection and culture within the German tradition, but would shortlycease to be a possible area for open discussion.57

Yet, as we argued in discussing Sedlmayr, the 1932 essay comes closerthan any other work of Panofsky to accommodating his opponents. It isstriking that such commentary as there has been about Panofsky’s account ofHeidegger in the Logos essay is strongly divided between those who think himin certain respects enamoured of, and influenced by, Heidegger’s propositionof interpretative violence, on the one hand, and those who read him as explic-itly choosing Cassirerian Kantianism over the Heideggerian option, on theother.58 In a certain sense, both views are right. There is no doubt that onone level Panofsky strongly upholds Cassirer’s reading of Kant and thedevelopment of the philosophy of symbolic forms, as is supported by theentire trajectory of his earlier theoretical work, which entails fundamentalopposition to Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant. But, as in other places inthe Logos essay, Panofsky sees the need to take on, adopt, and integrate inhis own argument some aspects of a theoretical language and set of atti-tudes, not only art historical in the case of Sedlmayr, but also philosophicalin the case of Heidegger, which were clearly on the ascendant by 1932.59

55. On the Kantbuch as an attack on neo-Kantianism, see Gordon, Continental Divide, pp. 126–35.56. See Cassirer, ‘Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics’, and Calvin O. Schrag, ‘Heidegger

and Cassirer on Kant’, Kant-Studien 58, no. 1 (1967): 87–100, esp. 96 –100.57. Heidegger’s own comments effectively acknowledge this in the intriguing preface to the

second edition of the Kantbuch, written in 1950, where he refers to the offense taken against ‘theviolence of my argument’ and its potential to violate the ‘laws’ of ‘thoughtful dialogue betweenthinkers’ (KPM, p. xx).

58. For a Heidegger-friendly Panofsky, see Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg, pp.224 –331, and Didi-Hubermann, Confronting Images, pp. 101–2, 136 –37, 167– 68. For an anti-Heideggerian (that is, Cassirerian Panofsky), see Stephen Melville, ‘The Temptation of NewPerspectives’, October, no. 52 (1990): 3–15, esp. p. 10; Summers, ‘Meaning in the Visual Arts as aHumanistic Discipline’, pp. 10 –11; and Cheetham, Kant, Art, and Art History, pp. 70 –71.

59. The closest Panofsky comes to refuting Heidegger is through implied rather than directarguments—for instance the comment that the source of interpretation is the interpreter’sworldview and the final footnote with its acceptance that in principle one might approachinterpretation as ‘creative reconstruction’ based on ‘systematic originality and consistency’ butthat this is strictly ‘transhistorical’ and ‘extrahistorical’ and can never be allowed to replacehistory (‘P’, p. 481 n. 22). One wonders whether Panofsky’s reticence here is that— before theNazi regime— he senses where the energy and dominant forms of argument have gone inGerman culture and is reluctant to stand directly against them, as he much more easily can inAmerican exile when such thinking is unambiguously fascist.


Panofsky could thus use Heidegger to override any elements of empiricismin his scholarly method in order to place the problem of description, andhence art history itself, on the highest philosophical footing.60

It is here that the ethical issues are at their most complex and difficult toresolve. Are we to read the 1932 essay in its time of writing as an integrationof some aspects of Heidegger and Sedlmayr— both the opposition’s lan-guage and formulations—all the better to resist them? This reading hasPanofsky endorsing the violence of interpretation but not what Heideggerdoes with it. Or are we to see Panofsky flirting with the beginnings of a shiftin direction that might—in a hypothetical Weimar trajectory that contin-ued through the 1930s— have taken his Warburgian neo-Kantianismmuch closer to the forceful drives of being that animated both Heideggerin philosophy and the second Vienna school? Such a suggestion is scan-dalous but really only so in relation to hindsight. It does not commitPanofsky as it does other prominent Jewish scholars, like Ernst Kantoro-wicz or Nikolaus Pevsner, to anything like a flirtation with the spirit ofnationalist politics animating National Socialism.61 But the awkwardnessPanofsky may have felt after his move into exile about an essay, that wassimultaneously the high-water mark of his theoretical development andthe closest point of integration with those scholars and viewpoints thatwould shortly be revealed as Nazi, may explain his persistent need to revisethe piece in 1939 and 1955, as well as its dumbing down from propositionalargument to didactic pragmatism. The dates of revision are themselvessignificant. By 1939 — before the war and the Final Solution—what Na-tional Socialism was about was clear, by contrast with the early 1930s beforethe regime took power. But in 1939 it was impossible to imagine what theconsequences of the racist policies and the ideologies that animated themwould actually lead to. That was not so in the later 1940s and 1950s when

60. This is in contrast to Edgar Wind’s attempt in his Habilitation of 1929, published in1934, to integrate empiricism within the neo-Kantian and Cassirerian understanding ofsymbolic forms. See Bredekamp, ‘Falsche Skischwunge: Winds Kritik an Heidegger und Sartre’,in Edgar Wind: Kunsthistoriker und Philosoph, ed. Bredekamp et al. (Berlin, 1998), pp. 207–18,esp. pp. 207–10, and Rampley, introduction to Wind, Experiment and Metaphysics: Towards aResolution of the Cosmological Antinomies (Oxford, 2001), pp. xiii-xxviii, esp. p. xxvii. Clearly, inAmerican exile, Panofsky reversed course from a philosophically grounded art history towardspragmatic empiricism, and he moved much closer to Wind and a more socioculturalunderstanding of art.

61. On Pevsner, see Stephen Games, Pevsner: The Early Life: Germany and Art (London,2010), pp. 151–53, 170 –72, 178 – 84, 195–97, 205; on Kantorowicz, see Martin A. Ruehl, ‘“InThis Time without Emperors”: The Politics of Ernst Kantorowicz’s Kaiser Friedrich derZweite Reconsidered’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 63 (2000): 187–242.


everything was known. 62 Along with the growth of knowledge comes—forthe Jewish refugee survivor—the absolutely unmeasurable question ofguilt: the guilt of leaving when so many had stayed, of surviving in easewhen so many had suffered, of living when so many had died. That guiltvaried from individual to individual, but inevitably it tempered radicallythe nature of European Jewish assimilation in America; everyone hadfriends or relatives who had perished. If any of this was at play in Panof-sky’s consciousness, it may help to explain the peculiar squeamishness ofhis additions in 1955 to the revision of 1939 — especially the strange com-ments about iconography and iconology as parallel to ethnography andethnology but also to astrography and astrology, that appear to imply (invery highfalutin terms) that he may no longer fully believe in anything heis saying, and perhaps he never had.63

Beyondthis,andofcoursewearenowintheworldofspeculationsincenothingis or can be documented, lies the fundamental question of the ethics of Panofsky’sownarthistory.Hisplace in thediscipline—both inGermanybeforehisexileandin America thereafter—was preeminent. He seems with hindsight to have beenalways at the forefront of theoretical developments, magisterially learned, vastlyinfluential both in the discipline and beyond it (for instance, on Bourdieu). Wasthis the result of pure intellectual acuity and an extraordinary instinctive sense ofwherethefuture lay(combinedwiththegoodluckofbeingintherightplaceat theright time,HamburgandthenPrinceton)?Ordidhisacutenose for theascendantposition at any given moment (the assimilated Jew’s unflinching instinct to fightthe academic war on the winning side) take him from the theoretics of Warburg-inflected neo-Kantianism to the pragmatisms of iconology via a momentary flir-tation—or, rather, the faintest hint of such a flirtation which was nipped in thebud as soon as the Nazi regime took power—with what was to be the dominantintellectual Zeitgeist of Germany between 1933 and 1945? The question here is notabout Panofsky’s intellect, acuity, or intuition—all of which were about as power-ful as such faculties have ever been in any art historian—nor about his ability tomarshal them alongside hard work and copious learning over an extraordinarilywide range of material. It is about what he wanted from all this and about theunconscious drives (to choose a Sedlmayrian rather than a Panofskian term) thatmay lead an ambitious scholar, who is the perpetual assimilated outsider, to makeasuccessofhisassimilationbytriumphingwithinthehostcultureaccordingtothecriteria established by that culture, even when such criteria shifted so radically asthey did in Germany in the late 1920s and the early 1930s.

62. This is the moment of Wind’s attack on both Heidegger and his French followers(especially Jean-Paul Sartre) published in 1946. See Wind, ‘Jean-Paul Sartre: A FrenchHeidegger’, in Edgar Wind, pp. 219 –22, and Bredekamp, ‘Falsche Skischwunge’.

63. See Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, pp. 31–32.


Documents

Genesis of Iconology