Genesis of Iconology

The Genesis of Iconology
Author(s): Ja Elsner and Katharina Lorenz

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Spring 2012), pp. 483-512
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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The Genesis of Iconology

Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz
Erwin Panofsky explicitly states that the first half of the opening chapter
of Studies in Iconology his landmark American publication of 1939
contains the revised content of a methodological article published by the
writer in 1932, which is now translated for the first time in this issue of
Critical Inquiry.1 That article, published in the philosophical journal Logos,
is among his most important works. First, it marks the apogee of his series
of philosophically reflective essays on how to do art history,2 that reach
back, via a couple of major pieces on Alois Riegl, to the 1915 essay on
Heinrich Wlfflin.3 Under the influence of his colleague at Hamburg Ernst
Cassirer, 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 our
bacon 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 der
Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst, Logos 21 (1932): 10319;
trans. Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz under the title On the Problem of Describing and
Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts, Critical Inquiry 38 (Spring 2012): 467 82; hereafter
abbreviated P.
2. See the discussion in Carlo Ginzburg, From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A
Problem of Method, Myths, Emblems, Clues, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (London, 1990),
pp. 1759, 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 des
Kunstwollens, Deutschsprachige Aufsatze, 2:1019 34, trans. Kenneth J. Northcott and Joel
Snyder under the title The Concept of Artistic Volition, Critical Inquiry 8 (Autumn 1981): 17
ber das Verhaltnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie: Ein Beitrag zu der
33; and U
Errterung uber die Mglichkeit kunstwissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe, Deutschsprachige
Aufsatze, 2: 1035 63, trans. Lorenz and Elsner under the title On the Relationship of Art
History and Art Theory: Towards the Possibility of a Fundamental System of Concepts for a
Science of Art, Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008): 4371.
Critical Inquiry 38 (Spring 2012)
2012 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/12/3803-0001$10.00. All rights reserved.
483
Matthias Grunewald, the Resurrection, the Isenheim Altar, right outer wing, interior (c.1516).
Critical Inquiry / Spring 2012
on exhibits in his work ever more Kantian thinking and language.4 But
Logos was not an art-historical review or one dedicated to aesthetics but a
principal mainstream journal of the philosophy of culture. So On the
Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts has a
good claim to be the culmination of Panofskys philosophical thinking in
his German period under the Weimar Republic.
At the same time, this essay is the first and arguably the fundamental
statement of what would later come to be called the theory of iconology. It
advocates the three levels of meaning in a work of art and the three levels of
interpretation needed to elicit them which would be the basis of Panofskys
prescriptions for the discipline of art history in his American period. Although couched very differently from the two versions of his presentation
of iconology in 1939 and 1955, much more propositional and arguably
hard-hitting in both form and content, the 1932 essay makes all the key
intellectual points and concludes with a version of the diagram which
would come to epitomise the later iconology essays.5 It is thus the concep4. On neo-Kantianism in pre-Nazi Germany, see Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways:
Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago, 2000), pp. 2537; Eric Dufour and T. Z. R. Creteil, Le
Statue du singulier: Kant et le neokantisme de lEcole de Marbourg, Kantstudien 93 (Sept.
2002): 324 50; Edward Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (Princeton,
N.J., 2008), pp. 2251; 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. 9192,
14752; Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History, trans. Richard
Pierce (New Haven, Conn., 1989), pp. 174 77, 182 84; David Summers, Meaning in the Visual
Arts 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 Concept
of Kunstwollen, Neo-Kantianism, and Erwin Panofskys Early Art Theoretical Essays, Word
and Image 20 (Jan.Mar. 2004): 4151; 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. 317.
J A S E L S N E R is Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi

College Oxford and visiting professor of art history at the University of Chicago.
He works on all aspects of Roman and early Christian art, including their
historiographic receptions, as well as on questions of image and description.
KATHARINA LORENZ is associate professor in classical studies at the University of
Nottingham. Her research is concerned with storytelling, spatial appropriation,
and formal development in Greek and Roman art.
485
486
Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz / The Genesis of Iconology
tual foundation of Panofskys mature work in the United States and the
English languagenot only the zenith of his German enterprise but the
basis of his American career. We examine here the place of Panofskys
Logos essay in his corpusand hence its specific critical contribution for
the discipline of art history by taking these two historical trajectories in
turn.
1. Looking Back: Kunstwollen, Hamburg, and Panofskys Early

Career
Panofskys German career consisted of a series of extraordinarily wideranging assaults on fundamental themes from medieval to baroque art
both in northern Europe and in Italy, coupled with a group of groundbreaking and still significant theoretical interventions.6 The theoretical
essays comprise conceptual interrogations of the classic work of Wlfflin
and 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 philosophical neo-Kantianism and on the other hand of the scholars associated with the Warburg LibraryAby Warburg himself, Fritz Saxl (with
whom Panofsky collaborated on several projects), and Edgar Wind (Panofskys first doctoral student who then habilitated under Cassirer). Many
of these methodological essays have now been translated into English and
have received a fair share of useful commentary.7 On the Problem of Describing 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 in
Panofsky, Deutschsprachige Aufsatze. For a brief account of Panofskys early career, see Joan
Hart, 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 Proportionslehre
als Abbild der Stilentwicklung, Deutschsprachige Aufsatze, 1:3172, 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. 55108; Idea: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der alteren
Kunsttheorie (Leipzig, 1924), trans. Joseph J. S. Peake under the title Idea: A Concept in Art
Theory (Columbia, S.C., 1968); On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory; and Die
Perspektive als symbolische Form, Deutschsprachige Aufsatze, 2:664 757, trans. Christopher
Wood under the title Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York, 1991). Useful commentaries
include Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, pp. 178 208; Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations
of Art History; Keith Moxey, Panofskys Concept of Iconology and the Problem of
Interpretation in the History of Art, New Literary History 17 (Winter 1986): 26574; Wood,
introduction to Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, pp. 724; Margaret Iversen, Postscript
on 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, The
Transhistorical Image, pp. 36 66; Neher, The Concept of Kunstwollen, Neo-Kantianism, and
Erwin Panofskys Early Art Theoretical Essays; and Karlheinz Ludeking, Panofskys Umweg zu
Ikonographie, in sthetik in metaphysikkritischen Zeiten, ed. Josef Fruchtl and Maria MoogGrunewald (Hamburg, 2007), pp. 20124.
the problems of art historical description and interpretation which unites

the two strands in Panofskys theoretical enterprise. It is a critical attempt
to ground the concepts of the discipline and an interrogation of the meanings of images in the context of Cassirers philosophy of symbolic forms
and Warburgs cultural history. Alongside this synthesis, and more than in
any of his other worksalthough with little acknowledgement or direct
citationthe 1932 essay comes closer to integrating into his own project
the intellectual positions of Panofskys prime theoretical opponents: not
only Hans Sedlmayr and the theoretical position of the second Vienna
school but also Martin Heidegger and his assault on neo-Kantianism and
on Cassirer in particular. In this sense, at a particular (it turns out, late)
moment of Weimar scholarship, Panofskys Logos essay makes a pitch for
the high ground in the developing argument about what art history should
be as a conceptual discipline. It happens that all Panofskys collaborators in
the Hamburg scene (and most neo-Kantians) were Jews, while his specific
opponents even in the late twenties and early thirties (namely, Sedlmayr
and Heidegger)would declare for the Nazi Party as soon as the National
Socialists were on the ascendant.
In the Logos essay, without at any point directly referring to Riegls
concept of Kunstwollen, but developing his earlier critical reinterpretation
of it, Panofsky argues that at the third, or deepest, level of meaning in a
work of art (its documentary or intrinsic meaning, what would be characterised in the 1955 revision of the essay as the object of iconological
interpretation) lay
the unintentional and subconscious self-revelation of a fundamental
attitude towards the world that is characteristic in equal measure of
the individual producer, the individual period, the individual people
and the individual cultural community. The magnitude of an artistic
achievement in the end depends on the extent to which the energy of
such a particular worldview has been channelled into moulded matter
and radiates towards its viewer. [P, p. 479]
This proposes a model for interpreting art that unpacks an unconscious
attitude which a work betrays rather than a meaning which it displays.8
That sociologically expressed unconsciousramifying beyond an individual artist to a whole cultural world in its time and racial or ethnic specificity, indebted explicitly in formulation to the work of Karl Mannheim (see
8. Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, p. 202. Podros formulation rephrases what
Panofsky himself says on p. 480 (quoting but not naming an intellectually stimulating
American who is probably to be identified with C. S. Peirce): the artist knows only what he
parades but not what he betrays.
487
488
P, p. 478) and ultimately deeply influential on Pierre Bourdieuis Panofskys most theoretically developed proposition to date for what art can
offer to the historian and what its interpreter can uncover.9 It is striking
that when he reformulated this third level of interpretation in the 1939
introduction to Studies in Iconology, he did not cite Mannheim but Cassirers 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 on
Kunstwollen in Panofskys 1925 essay on the relationship of art history and
art theory. There he explicitly redefines Kunstwollen as that which reveals
the immanent sense of any visual-artistic phenomenaand which can
be seen also in the sense of musical, poetic, and even extra-artistic phenomena (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 cultural epiphenomena is available to the interpreter. By 1932 his model, although it owes much to Mannheims three distinct strata of meaning:
(a) its objective meaning, (b) its expressive meaning, and (c) its documentary or evidential meaning,12 is in certain respects closer to something
activethe drive with which the Vienna school imbued Kunstwollenin
its expression as an unintentional and subconscious attitude, an energy
that is equally manifest from the individual to the collective. The work of
art, in the Logos essay, is granted a dynamic force as the embodiment of an
energy which has been channeled into molded matter and radiates towards
its viewer. In the 1932 formulationas in his overt discussion of HeideggerPanofsky comes much closer than in his earlier work to taking on
9. For the importance of Panofsky to Bourdieu, see Pierre Bourdieu, Postface to Erwin
Panofsky, Architecture gothique et pensee scholastique (Paris, 1967), pp. 135 67. Although
Bourdieu cites the 1932 essay on p. 138, his main discussion of Panofskys theoretical frame relies
on the later formulations of 1955; see pp. 138 40, 142 44. On Panfoskys influence on Bourdieu,
see Jeremy Tanner, Introduction: Sociology and Art History, in The Sociology of Art: A
Reader, 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 the
Making 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 the
section headings of the introduction to Ernst Cassirer, Language, vol. 1 of The Philosophy of
Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim (1953; New Haven, Conn., 1965), pp. 73114, which
includes most of the concepts necessary to Panofsky: The Concept of Symbolic Form and the
System of Symbolic Forms, Universal Function of the Sign: The Problem of Meaning, The
Problem of Representation and the Structure of Consciousness, and Ideational Content of
the 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 the
influence of Mannheim on Panofsky, see Hart, Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim.
board the arguments and theoretical models of his intellectual opponents. In the case of Heidegger (as we shall see) Panofsky accepts the
principle of interpretation as an act of violence rooted in the partly
subjective worldview of the interpreter (P, p. 480), although he is concerned to find limits to police unbridled subjectivity. In the case of the
unnamed 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 Kunstwollen
as an actual force, the objective spirit of a supra-individual will,
adumbrated by Sedlmayr in a seminal essay of direct and explicit disagreement with both Panofsky and Mannheim.13
Panofskys willingness to class together the individual producer, the
individual period, the individual people, and the individual cultural community (P, p. 479) reaches closer to Geistesgeschichte than anywhere else
in his work14 and towards Sedlmayrs objective collective will . . . a force
that 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 in
1932, however close to Sedlmayr he comes, Panofsky never accepts will or
the creative supraindividual subjectivity as the objective force propelling
art and history. Moreover, given the virulent attack on Sedlmayrs article
by Ernst Gombrich in the introduction to Art and Illusion (first published
in 1959),15 it is worth remembering that positions articulated in the late
1920s and before 1933, however fascist they might appear now from the
point of view of hindsight, need not necessarily have been intended in a
protofascist 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 to
Studies in Iconology (and carefully edited out all his genuflections both to
Sedlmayr and to Heidegger), while the protofascism of Sedlmayr in the
1920s was entirely obvious (given his membership of the Nazi Party from
1932 and his subsequent activities), his Nazisms meaning (before the war
13. Hans Sedlmayr, The Quintessence of Riegls Thought, trans. Matthew Rampley, in
Framing Formalism: Riegls Work, ed. Richard Woodfield (Amsterdam, 2001), p. 16; hereafter
abbreviated Q. This essay served as the introduction to Riegls collected essays in 1929; see
Riegl, Gesammelte Aufsatze (Vienna, 1929). For some discussion of Panofsky and Sedlmayr in
this period, see Frederic J. Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in
Twentieth-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 general
intellectual history [Geistesgeschichte] which clarifies what was possible within the worldview of
any specific period and any specific cultural circle.
15. See Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial
Representation (Princeton, N.J., 1972), p. 17.
489
490
and before the Holocaust)16 was not fully clear. By the time Gombrich was
attacking Sedlmayr, the latters work was a kind of shorthand for everything the Nazi regime stood for and had done.
Arguably, the compelling interest of the Logos essay as the culminating
theoretical statement of Panofskys Weimar career is the way it meets the
opponents of his neo-Kantianism halfwaythat is, Heidegger (whose
Kantbuch was published in 1929) and Sedlmayr, who explicitly affirmed
that Riegls ideas, and all ideas organically connected to Kantianism, are
like chalk and cheese. That is clearly demonstrated by the failure of the
excellent interpretative essays by Panofsky and Mannheim (Q, p. 27).
Admittedly, this very strategy of appropriating ones foe halfway was borrowed by Panofsky from Sedlmayr himself. Sedlmayr had granted the need
for an a priori theoretical discipline (without citing Panofskys 1925 article
which had called for this) and also had accepted the point that if one can
grasp the Kunstwollen of a given work of art, one can determine the corresponding religion, philosophy, or science (Q, pp. 18, 21).17 But Sedlmayr had then insisted on Kunstwollen as an agent of force, a cultural drive
in 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 synthesizes his own earlier methodological work but takes on board going as
far as he is able to gothe premises, methodological points, and even to
some extent the formulations of what by the early 1930s were the ascendant
trends in German philosophy and art history, trends that would be triumphant after 1933.
Most striking of all, one might suggest that the three levels of meaning
posited in 1932, which are the genesis of iconology, are indebted not only to
Mannheims three kinds of meaning but alsoat least in terms of conflictive dialogueto Sedlmayrs two levels of Struktur.18 Sedlmayr had pro16. On Sedlmayrs Nazism, see Hans Aurenhammer, Zasur oder Kontinuitat? Das Wiener
kunsthistorische Institut im Standestaat und im Nationsozialismus, Wiener Jahrbuch fur
Kunstgeschichte 53 (2004): 1154, 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 Alois
Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome, 1985), p. 231, where Riegl maintained
that Kunstwollen applies beyond material culture to all other epiphenomena of an epoch, he
himself 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 (New
York, 2000), pp. 13379; hereafter abbreviated T. See Elsner, From Empirical Evidence to the
Big Picture: Some Reflections on Riegls Concept of Kunstwollen, Critical Inquiry 32 (2006):
74176, esp. 760 62. Although Sedlmayrs essay cites neither Mannheim nor Panofsky (as had
posed these in a major methodological manifesto published in 1931 that

was not cited by Panofsky in the Logos essay.19 In his essay Toward a
Rigorous Study of Art, Sedlmayr had divided the study of art into two
histories of artan empirical level and an interpretative level.20 Each of
these levels comprises a variety of stages. Notably, Sedlmayrs second arena
of study includes levels of meaning in the work of art (die Sinnschichten des Kunstwerks), which arise from one central structural principle
(einem zentralen Strukturprinzip) (T, p. 168), seemingly a direct response to Panofskys own essays on Riegl of 1920 and 1925 as well as to
Mannheims essay of 1923 (none of which Sedlmayr cites but all of which
he certainly knew). Sedlmayr never uses the word Kunstwollen in this article, butafter Quintessence one might see this central structural
principle as the Kunstwollen, driving artistic creativity and equivalent to
Panofskys third level of meaning explicated in his Logos essay.
The key difference between Sedlmayrs argument of 1931 and Panofskys
of 1932 lies in Sedlmayrs insistence on the singularity of art on nothing
but the products . . . no data that can be brought into relation to the works
of art, either directly or indirectly by contrast with Panofskys careful
tracing of historicism and the interpreters knowledge at any rate in relation to the first two levels of meaning in a work of art (T, p. 139). Sedlmayr
insists that despite all the subjectivity involved in the psychophysical and
intellectual aspects of looking at art, despite the fact that works of art are
repeatedly re-created and formed anew by viewing subjects, nonetheless
each work of art is itself, in its totality, an objective reality, a separate
object world. . . . When viewers with different attitudes look at the same
object, each sees a different, but nevertheless objective, entity, which is
entirely distinct from the truly subjective private reactions that the work
may 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 heavily
indebted to them. In particular, Sedlmayr moves away from meaning (Sinn) as emphasized by
both Mannheims On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung and by Panofskys On the
Relationship of Art History and Art Theory to his notion of structure (Struktur) inherent in the
work of art.
19. See the citation to this manifesto in Panofsky, The History of Art as a Humanistic
Discipline, 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. 125, where the reference to
Sedlmayr appears on p. 22 n. 17.
20. For some discussion, see Wood, introduction to The Vienna School Reader, pp. 1112, 17,
19, and Schwarz, Blind Spots, pp. 15356. On Sedlmayrs indebtedness to Gestalt psychology at
this period (for which Panofsky specifically cites T), see Ian Verstegen, Art History, Gestalt,
and Nazism, Gestalt Theory 26 (June 2004): 134 49.
491
492
(very much in parallel with Heideggers notion of interpretative violence)

Sedlmayr insists on the objectivity of the interpretative result. His emphasis is on the ontology of the object (in terms of structure, in terms of a force
present despite, but elicited by, the viewers subjectivity). Panofskyalways worried about the subjects intrusion upon the object has a much
more epistemological take and is constantly concerned with the need for
criteria to limit subjective excess.
And yet the similarity between Sedlmayr and Panofsky is at its strongest
in the Logos essay. Panofsky arguesfor his third and deepest level of
meaningthat one must throw away all forms of knowledge extrinsic to
the work of art:
In an enterprise like thisin which the exegesis of a work of art is
elevated onto the same level as that of a philosophical system or a religious beliefwe must abandon even the knowledge of literary
sources, at least in the sense of sources which can be directly related to
the relevant work of art. [P, p. 479]
In this spacethe Kunstwollen space of intrinsic meanings his closeness
to Sedlmayr is startling, quite apart from the debt he owes to Sedlmayrs
essays in theory. For Panofskys argumentative structure of levels (of interpretation rather than study, of meaning rather than Struktur) which
forms his iconological framework itself shadows the empirical and interpretative levels proposed by Sedlmayr.21
2. Looking Forward: From Describing and Interpreting to

Iconology
The differences between the Logos essay and its revision as the introduction to Studies in Iconology tell us much about the development of Panofskys thought (quite apart from the refiguring of Panofsky himself from
German Ordinarius to American professor). They show us not only a
trajectory of his art-historical thinking but also a fundamental cultural
transformation, the American assimilation of an already outstandingly
assimilated German Jew. The Logos essay is one of the last, commanding
statements of Panofskys Weimar period as holder of the chair of art history 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 to
argue that for Sedlmayr in 1931 intrinsic meaning is embedded in the work of art, while for
Panofsky 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 external
sources 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 reprise

of earlier work by an exile from the Nazi regime and forward as it would
become the basis of the iconological ascendancy in American art history,
spearheaded by Panofsky himself.
But the differences are also about fundamentally different intellectual
contexts. The Logos piece was delivered as a lecture to philosophers at the
Kant Society in Kiel; Logoss editorial board included major contemporary
philosophers like Edmund Husserl and Cassirer, as well as Wlfflin, the
greatest living old master among art historians. The six chapters of Studies
in Iconology were delivered at Bryn Mawr in 193738 to a liberal arts (and
hence substantially undergraduate as well as faculty) audience in the field
of the Humanities, using the term Humanities in its broadest connotation (SI, p. xvii).23 These contexts are radically different both in the level
of academic experience and agility one might expect of the audience and in
their levels of education.24 Whereas the 1932 essay is suitably ascetic in not
reproducing any photographic illustrations, despite the relatively rich and
detailed interpretative discussions of a number of images such as Matthias
Grunewalds painting of the Resurrection, for his American college audience 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 a
striking suppression of what might be seen as the propositional points that
were made in 1932 by directly addressing specific (even canonical) figures
in the German humanist tradition and their ancient Greek sources. The
move from 1932 to 1939 is away from the display of erudite learning and
from a kind of point scoring appropriate to the major players in the German 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 Panofskys Hamburg years, see Heinrich Dilly, Das Kunsthistoriche
Seminar 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 Hamburger
Vorlesungen; and Michels, Bemerkungen zu Panofskys Sprache, in Erwin Panofsky: Beitrage
des Symposions Hamburg, 1992, ed. Bruno Reudenbach (Berlin, 1994), pp. 114, 1530, 31 47,
5358, and 59 70.
23. Some of the correspondence around the Bryn Mawr invitation survives. See Marion
Edwards 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. Dieter
Wuttke, 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 a
nonprofessional and unfamiliar audience than does the European (Panofsky, Epilogue,
Meaning in the Visual Arts, p. 332).
493
494
tural homeland, it was more important to assimilate nonaggressively in a

new world which had welcomed them. Studies in Iconology thus cuts the
discussions of Lucian and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (including all the
original Greek) with which Panofsky opens the Logos essay; it cuts many of
the learned scholarly asides, especially as they venture outside art history
(such as following Mannheim [P, p. 478], or the explicit invocation of
Kant at p. 481); 25 it cuts the personally witnessed history of the reception of
Franz Marcs The Mandrill in Hamburg between 1919 and 1932, that he
used to illustrate the speed of cultural change through the habituation to
new forms of visual expression (see P, p. 471);26 it cuts the discussion of
Zeuxis and Greek art; it cuts the critical discussion of the uses and viability
of external textual sources; above all it cuts the fascinating and direct engagement with Heidegger which is the substance of section 4 in the Logos
essay and arguably shows Panofsky at his most brilliant. Instead of this
range of Wissenschaft, much of it accompanied by a polemical edge as
Panofsky positioned himself in German art history at the very border of
philosophy, in 1939 he refers to one principal scholarly authority his old
friend, mentor, and Hamburg colleague, Ernst Cassirer, and the theory of
symbolic forms (see SI, pp. 8 and 16). One might read this on a number of
levels: a personal gesture to a fellow exile and a genuflection to their joint
neo-Kantian enterprise during their Hamburg collaboration in the Weimar years. In the preface to Studies in Iconology (see SI, p. vi), Panofsky
offers a litany of thanks either to Americans who have welcomed him or
to the group of exiles with whom he has fled (such as Saxl and Rudolf
Wittkower).27 The spirit, in short, of the 1932 essay is one of taking issue
with opponents like Heidegger and of claiming a new theoretical understanding of art history in relation to interpretation and description which
was not only philosophically inflected but could stand side by side with
philosophy itself. The spirit of the introduction to the 1939 book is fundamentally different. It is more casual in its pragmatic opening and throughout in its choice of examples. At the same time it is more magisterial (and
25. The exception here is Wlfflin, mentioned explicitly on p. 469, and in SI, p. 6 in both
cases referring to formal analysis.
26. We might note that this was a moment in a swift-moving story; by 1937 Marc, although
he had died at the front in the Battle of Verdun in 1916, was firmly among the degenerates in the
Nazi period. The Mandrill (1913) controversially was bought for the Hamburg Kunsthalle in
1919, removed from display in 1936, and exhibited in room 6 of the Entartete Kunst show of
1937. 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 likely
have been an exile by 1939 had he been still alive. Other refugees listed include Margarete
Bieber, Otto Brendel, Karl Lehmann-Hartleben, Jakob Rosenberg, Alfred Scharf, Hans
Swarzenski, and Kurt Weitzmann.
less open) in tonea plea for his inclusion in a new country and a new
cultural system, as an adaptable (but also entertaining) thinker and as a
serious scholar. Both the 1932 and the 1939 pieces culminate in what Panofsky calls in 1939 a synoptical table (which remains in place for its
republication, with some additions, as the opening chapter of Meaning in
the Visual Arts in 1955; see SI, p. 16). The differences between the German
and the American versions of this table will be discussed below. But at this
point it is worth commenting on the different structures of argument that
build to what is apparently the same point. The 1932 article explicitly on
questions of the description and interpretation of works of art builds
empirically by means of examples (pictorial, if not illustrated, and interpretative) to the tripartite structure of meaning summarized in the table. It
opens obliquely and historically with an interpretative problem highlighted by Panofskys twentieth-century reading of Lessings eighteenthcentury reading of Lucians second-century AD reading of a picture by
Zeuxis from the fifth century BC (in fact, though Panofsky does not mention this, of a Roman-period copy of Zeuxiss picture). The 1939 essay,
entitled Introductory for a book called Studies in Iconology and opening
with the word iconography, proposes in its first paragraph to define the
distinction between subject matter or meaning on the one hand, and form
on the other (SI, p. 3). After the famous discussion of how to interpret an
acquaintance tipping his hat (something historically and contextually situated in that Panofsky avers that neither an Australian bushman nor an
ancient Greek would get it [SI, p. 4],28 he lays out his three strata of meaning without particularly arguing for them and then proceeds to illustrate
them with some pictorial examples. It is a much more didactic, even authoritarian, model of exposition than the German essay on which it is
based.
The changes in pictorial examples between the 1932 and 1939 versions
are intriguing. In the Logos essay, Panofskys key and complex example is
Grunewalds painting of the Resurrection and the need for us to have prior
knowledge of its narrative to interpret Christs hovering correctly. Panofsky repeatedly returns to his examples numerous ramifications, playing
them off against various other visual comparanda as he marshals his visual
material to lay out the theoretical problems which he will conclude when
he 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 greeting
on the street is used to analyze Panofskys third level of meaning and analysis. As Hart rightly
observes, the origins lie in Mannheims anecdote: I am walking down the street with a friend; a
beggar stands at a corner; my friend gives him an alms (Mannheim, On the Interpretation of
Weltanschauung, p. 148; see Hart, Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim, pp. 53536).
495
496
introduction to Studies in Iconology, Panofsky lays out the three-fold content of his table at the outset, illustrates it with visual examples, and then
summarizes the entire exposition (it is not obvious that it deserves to be
seen as an argument) with the synoptical table. His images here certainly
do not constitute an argument, as do the images of the 1932 essay, and are
much more simply used one picture at a time (rather than a constant
bouncing off from and return to Grunewalds hovering Christ) to make
one point at a time. He gets rid of Grunewald altogether and replaces this
example with a simpler pre-iconographical account of Rogier van der
Weydens three magi (SI, p. 9). This too focuses on hovering: the apparition of a small child is seen in the sky. . . . That the child in Rogiers picture
is meant to be an apparition can only be deduced from the additional fact
that he hovers in mid-air (SI, pp. 9 10). In effect Panofsky makes the same
conceptual point (more simply) with a different example, but one which
also focuses on Christian scripture and the visual depiction of miraculous
defiance of the laws of nature.
It could be that Panofsky shifts from so excellent an example as the
Grunewald to van der Weyden as a prefiguration of Panofskys long-term
project on Netherlandish art.29 And yet by changing his lead examples
Panofsky loses the discussion of the discrepancies between a work of art
and the textual sources mustered for its interpretation and, hence, the
obligation of the interpreter to cross-examine the use of any literary
sources against the history of types (see SI, p. 9). In the 1939 version this
issue is no longer pursued, and indeed the foundations are laid for what
still attracts the fiercest criticism of Panofskys 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 of
possibilities. Grunewald only rediscovered at the end of the nineteenth centuryrapidly
emerged as a hugely popular and essentially German artist of particular influence on the
expressionist avant-garde; see Andree Hayum, The Isenheim Altarpiece: Gods Medicine and the
Painters Vision (Princeton, N.J., 1989), pp. 120 30, and Robert A. Lofthouse, Vitalism in
Modern 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 essays intimations of
modernism (such as the references to Marc, Auguste Renoir, and Paul Cezanne) and to
Germanism implied by the central place of Grunewald were significant to the subtext of
Panofskys larger argument in 1932 about where art history in the German world should go in
the later Weimar period. They were irrelevant to his agenda in America in 1939. Despite
Grunewalds Germanness, the Nazis do not seem to have especially claimed him, although the
painter was the subject of a celebrated opera, Paul Hindemiths Mathis der Maler, composed in
193335 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, The
Artist Operas of Pfitzner, Krenek, and Hindemith: Politics and the Ideology of the Artist
(Burlington, VT., 2004), pp. 14392.
reliance on the textual over and above the evidence of the visual.30 It could
be argued that the objective of Studies in Iconology, namely, Renaissance
art, required this move to the textual in order to support Panofskys extensive use of neo-Platonism in what followed.31 But, whatever Panofskys
motive, his methodological franchise in 1939 thereby lost the basis for an
analytical equilibrium between the different types of evidence on offer to
an interpreter.
In both essays he then turns to a medieval example in which human
beings, animals and inanimate objects seem to hang loose in violation of
the law of gravity (SI, p. 10; compare P, p. 472). In both cases he uses the
Gospels of Otto III in Munich, but interestingly he chooses different miniaturesthe nativity in 1932 (that continues the Christological theme of
the 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, in
both essays Panofsky uses and indeed argues from Francesco Maffeis
painting of Judith with the head of Holofernes. The footnote in the Logos
text (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 into
the main text in 1939 but is supplied with an illustration, despite its minimal significance for the argument (see SI, p. 13). Of the numerous other
examples in the 1932 essay, both specific and ideal-typicalMarcs The
Mandrill, Albrecht Durers The Dream of the Doctor and Melancholia,
Renoirs Still Life with Peaches, Zeuxiss centaurs, and Cezannes still life by
contrast with a Raphael Madonnaall are cut in 1939 except for brief
references to Leonardo da Vincis The Last Supper (see P, p. 469, and SI, p.
8) and Michelangelo (see P, p. 470, and SI, p. 7). The effect of these
changesa radical reduction of examples and especially of their temporal
range, coupled with the illustration of all the main examples in 1939 is
fundamental. It moves the thrust of a general case about the nature of
description and the interpretation of art, taken as an atemporal category
for a philosophical audience and deliberately ranging across a span of
material from antiquity to the contemporary, to a specific and much more
narrowly conceived historicist enterprise. The 1939 focus is wholly on the
Renaissance, 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 meaning
of 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. 7779.
31. See Bredekamp, Gtterdammerung des Neuplatonismus, in Die Lesbarkeit der Kunst:
Zur Geistesgegenwart der Ikonologie, ed. A. Beyer (Berlin, 1992), pp. 75 83.
497
498
Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance.32 Panofsky restricts the

claims of his argument by purging evidential examples in order to produce
a much safer, tamer, less daring piece. It is constrained within specific
social, historical, and cultural limitsthe venture into the Ottonian Middle Ages being justifiable as a genuflection to the prehistory of medieval art
that the Renaissance did away with.
Despite the claim (in the 1939 preface) that the introduction to Studies
in Iconology is but the revision of the Logos essay of 1932, in fact its scope
and aims are radically restricted. No longer a broad and general set of
statements about the methods of approaching all art in the Western tradition which follows Panofskys earlier confrontations with the formalism of
Wlfflin and Riegl and his neo-Kantian attempts to build a ground of
fundamental concepts for the discipline of art history,33 it is rather a relatively less ambitious claim about the Renaissance. Before we condemn
Panofsky too swiftly, we need to remember the context for this much more
restrained and less exciting model of art history. This is not only a question
of Panofskys American assimilation in the 1930s and his attempt to provide what was valued in a new intellectual marketplace but also of what he
was resisting when he left the German intellectual scene. Here the confrontation with Heidegger which forms the climax of the 1932 essay becomes so
interesting and revealing.
The tables of 1932 and 1939 are different in two respects (figs. 13). First,
the 1939 table has the same three levels of interpretative depth as that of
1932 (defined in the later version as subject matter and in the earlier
version as meaning or sense [Sinn]), but adds a fourth column of exposition for the three levels in addition to the three columns of the Logos
essay. Second, many of the terms used across the table have changed in
1939, partly as a matter of translation from German to English34 and partly
as a result of the process of revision. Deeper than this formal issue is the
question of cultural assimilation as an ideological driver for the changes
32. Marion Park, president of Bryn Mawr, alludes to Panofskys general heading for the
lectures as Problems of Secular Iconography in the Renaissance (Marion Edwards Park, letter
to Panofsky, 16 Apr. 1937, Korrespondenz 1937 bis 1949, 2:31). By the time the flier for the lectures
was printed in time for the first to be given on 11 October, the title of the series was Humanistic
Themes 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 Panofskys
earlier 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 emigre
scholars, shifted gears effortlessly between the German and the English languages and the
conceptual systems the two languages implied (to write his lovely English as Summers puts it
in Meaning in the Visual Arts as a Humanistic Discipline, p. 9). As a generalization, this is
pious bunkum. Remarkable though it was, the immediate shift to English must inevitably have
come with numerous compromises of nuance of which the author was not wholly conscious.
1 . From Panofsky, Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von

Werken der bildenden Kunst, Logos 21 (1932): 10319.
FIGURE
between the two versions. In both essays, all the columns are about interpretation (the word is used as part of the heading for each column in both
1932 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 subjective source of interpretation, the title of the second column in 1932)
appears nowhere in 1939. This set of changes points to what is perhaps the
greatest difference between the Logos essay and its American revision: the
fundamental transformation of the Panofskian enterprise from its German origins to its American transplantation. The 1932 article remains embedded in the Kantian framework for finding fundamental concepts for a
science 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 conceptual apparatus and terminology we adduce as investigators to correct
subjective or interpretative excess orto use his own terminology (see P,
p. 477)to legitimize interpretation by means of a higher level of authority, a topic that in fact becomes the culmination of the Logos essays
critique 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.
499
FIGURE
2.
From Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939; New York, 1967), pp. 14 15.
FIGURE
3.
From Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Chicago, 1955), pp. 40 41.

501
502
application of Kantian models to thinking about art history to create a

clear and rational paradigm for controlling the inevitable subjectivism
involved in the creation and appreciation of art. From the point of view of
a scientific art history this meant a sound descriptive and interpretative
language founded on a philosophically robust set of metaempirical concepts;36 these were to counter particularly the psychological and collective
psychic impulses implicit in the idea of Kunstwollen and the theoretical
formalism of the Vienna school from Riegl in the late nineteenth century
to its contemporary 1930s superstars, such as Sedlmayr.
By 1939, the Kantian framework has effectively been abandoned along
with the philosophical project for the history of art,37 and instead we have
a much more pragmatic offering that lays out a method for the study of
Renaissance art.38 It is the loss of vision and intellectual ambition between
1932 and 1939 a loss which is absolutely related to exile, to assimilation in
a new cultural and academic context, and to relinquishing the heady but
dangerous high ground of the philosophy of art to the likes of Heidegger
(arguably a relinquishing forced on Panofsky by exile)which makes the
contrast (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 from
a top-heavy and abstract engagement with art, that silently skirted the
giants of German philosophy, to a more sociocultural engagement
founded on philosophical pragmatism and the Warburg-Wind model of
cultural 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 of
art. But they are very differently expressed. In 1932, they are phenomenal
meaning (Phanomen-sinn), that is divided into factual (Sach-) and expressive (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 Panofskys American period
but so thoroughly internalized that he no longer needed to invoke it directly (Cheetham, Kant,
Art, and Art History, p. 77). For a shift from Panofskys German reliance on Kants epistemology
to an American emphasis on Kants humanistic cosmopolitanism, see Cheetham, Theory
Reception: Panofsky, Kant, and Disciplinary Cosmopolitanism, Journal of Art Historiography 1
(Dec. 2009): www.gla.ac.uk/departments/arthistoriography/number1december2009/
38. Hart argues that Panofskys American readership found his work difficult to
understand even when it was not theoretical; he therefore sought to demonstrate the usefulness
of 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: its a bit like the moment
when the antithesis dies and the synthesis optimist, positive, even positivist in some
respectstakes over. Its a bit like a desire to pose all questions having suddenly been replaced
by a desire to give all the answers (Huberman, Confronting Images, p. 102).
(Bedeutungssinn); and documentary meaning (Dokumentsinn), with a

gloss of this given in brackets as intrinsic meaning (Wesenssinn). In 1939
the three levels are no longer given as meaning but as subject matter.
This is a simpler, more objectivist definition which moves away from the
Kantian subtleties surrounding subjective and objective categories. Instead of phenomenal meaning we now have primary or natural subject
matter, still divided into two (and listed as factual and expressional) but
glossed as constituting the world of artistic motifs). Instead of meaning
dependent on content, in 1939 Panofsky offers secondary or conventional
subject matter and glosses this rather obscure phrase with constituting
the world of images, stories and allegories. The final level is no longer
documentary with intrinsic in parentheses but has become intrinsic
meaning or content, glossed in explicitly Cassirerian terms as constituting the world of symbolical values.
The fundamental shift is from a relatively subjectivist take on the object
of art history as the focus on meaning as an interface between a work of art
and its interpreter (highly appropriate in a discussion of description and
interpretation) to a systematic attempt to ground the three levels in the
subject matter offered by the object itself (something more objective than
meaning).40 Only in the third level of 1939 is the subjectivist term meaning
allowed, but this is immediately given the alternative formulation of content; frankly intrinsic meaning (whatever that is, but surely something
imputed or found by an observer) is a different thing from intrinsic content (which one assumes to be proper to the object). It is this shift to
objectification (from meaning to subject matter) which requires the
addition of the fourth column in Panofskys scheme (immediately after the
first column), labeled act of interpretation that lists the levels of art historical intervention which render the subject matter meaningful. These are
pre-iconographical description (and pseudo-formal analysis), iconographical analysis in the narrower sense of the word, and iconographical
interpretation in a deeper sense (iconographical synthesis).41 Whatever
one thinks of this,42 it is a brilliant calling card for a professional art historian 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 any
kind of art in any period at least in the Western tradition (in 1932) to one of interpretation
proper 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 iconographical
analysis tout court, and iconographical interpretation in a deeper sense (iconographical
synthesis) 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
503
504
the conversion of an analytic table and a proposition for further thought

into a claim to disciplinary distinction and didacticism makes one particularly distrust the motives for the changes in Studies in Iconology. But they
are entirely understandable in the context of American assimilation and
the 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 revealing. In 1932, the subjective source of interpretation implies a move from
the different subjects or levels of meaning in the first column to their
source in the interpreters knowledge base or intuitions. In 1939, as the
third column heading, this becomes much more mechanically, and didactically, the equipment for interpretation. Again, there is a good deal of
glossing in the later version as well as much revision. What in the Logos
essay was the vital experience of beinga formulation with some resonance in relation both to German vitalist thinking in the early twentieth
century43 and, not least (in the context of the essays attack on Heidegger),
to Heideggers philosophy of Being becomes the utterly mundane and
philosophically empty practical experience (familiarity with objects and
events). The literary knowledge of 1932 becomes knowledge of literary
sources (familiarity with specific themes and concepts). This is an interesting shift. Panofsky could easily take for granted his 1931 audience of
Kantians literary knowledge. For his audience of American college students he laid out all the education needed even to aspire to the second,
iconographical level of Panofskian analysis. The third level in 1932 is concisely if obscurely labeled Worldview Ur-behaviour (Weltanschauliches
Urverhalten), and its discussion in the Logos text (see P, p. 478) specifically
alludes to Mannheims work in turning a critique of Riegls work into a
sociology of culture in the exposition of Weltanschauung.44 This is extensively expanded in 1939, although the result is hardly less obscure: synthetic intuition (familiarity with the essential tendencies of the human
mind), conditioned by personal psychology and Weltanschauung. Here
the difference between iconographical analysis in the narrower sense and iconographical
interpretation in a deeper sense.
43. On Panofskys debt to the romantic vitalism of Georg Simmel, see Ferretti, Cassirer,
Panofsky, and Warburg, pp. 21519; on vitalism in German art, see Lofthouse, Vitalism in
Modern Art, c. 1900 1950, pp. 12 41 on the movement and its contexts.
44. See Mannheim, On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung; Hart, Erwin Panofsky and
Karl 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 Panofskys text names Karl Mannheim
explicitly, Podro confuses him with the translator Ralph Manheim; see Podro, The Critical
Historians of Art, p. 205. The same mistake is made by Rampley; see Q, pp. 28 29 n. 9.
the German wordin italicsno longer signifies Mannheim but seems

largely a marker of learning. However, the text of the 1939 essay is one of
the few places there where some of the concerns running the Logos essay
are allowed to intrude. Panofsky writes, the more subjective and irrational
this source of interpretation (for every intuitive approach will be conditioned by the interpreters psychology and Weltanschaung), the more
necessary the application of . . . correctives and controls (SI, p. 15). Here,
despite his tables insistence on equipment for interpretation, the problem of subjective sources (the title of the column in 1932) and the risks of
irrationality in psychologythat are Panofskys great themes of his German 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 of
interpretation, highlighting its specific role in drawing a line against interpretative violence or roving arbitrariness or to limit ontological exegesis in relation to the subjectivity of the second column (P, p. 481). By 1939
the emphasis on correctives to subjectivism has been entirely lost, replaced
by the sense of a controlling principle in the title of the fourth column
which is controlling principle of interpretation. The broad characterizations of each item are close history of styles, history of types (in both 1932
and 1939). Then the final entry general intellectual history in 1932 becomes history of cultural symptoms or symbols in general in 1939
making it more directly Cassirerian. All three items in the final column are
bracketed as history of tradition in a much more directly Warburgian
sense than anything suggested in 1932, and this becomes even more
strongly the case in the 1955 version where history of tradition is elevated
to an alternative title for the whole column. But the more interesting difference in the last column between the Logos essay and the Studies in Iconology introduction is in the glosses. In 1932, these are poetically elegant
but somewhat obscure and reflect Panofskys extended thinking with and
against the essentialism of the Riegl tradition of art history. History of
styles is the quintessence of what it is possible to represent (at any given
time, one presumes, following Panofskys earlier arguments against the
classical archaeologist Gerhard Rodenwaldt and his interpretation of
Kunstwollen);45 history of types is the quintessence of what it is possible
to imagine (again at any given time); general intellectual history is the
45. See Panofsky The Concept of Artistic Volition, pp. 2123, 26 n. 10 and On the
Relationship of Art History and Art Theory, pp. 3536 and n. 27. There he attacks Gerhard
Rodenwaldt, Zur begrifflichen und geschichtlichen Bedeutung des Klassischen in der
bildenden Kunst: Eine kunstgeschichtsphilosophische Studie, Zeitschrift fur sthetik und
Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 11 (1916): 11331.
505
506
quintessence of what is possible within a given worldview. The emphasis

in the Logos essay on the possible within a given worldview and historical
frame is a striking model of historicismmore ambitious, more general,
and more risky than the Warburgian history of tradition which Panofsky
sees as his topic in 1939 and 1955.
The glosses of 1939 reflect quite a careful thinking-through of what the
stages of control or correction to interpretative subjectivism might imply.
History of style is insight into the manner in which, under varying historical conditions, objects and events were expressed by forms; history of
types is insight into the manner in which, under varying historical conditions, specific themes or concepts were expressed by objects and events;
history of cultural symptoms or symbols in general is insight into the
manner in which, under varying historical conditions, essential tendencies
of the human mind were expressed by specific themes and concepts. Here
we have the full scheme of iconology (and it would be labeled as iconological interpretation in 1955) where the skilled interpreter can move from
forms (through preiconographical description) to themes and concepts
(to be adduced through iconographical analysis) to the intrinsic meaning
of symbolic values (the object of iconological analysis). It is already there in
1932, but modulated in much more general terms which confront the essentialisms of the adherents of Kunstwollen on the one hand and
Heideggers interpretative violence on the other. By 1939, where there were
no intellectual opponents in this area in America, Panofsky was more
explicitly historical and laid out the schematism more directly.
3. Flirting with Heidegger

One of the most interesting aspects of the Logos essay is Panofskys
willingness to confront Heidegger directly. His discussion of Heidegger is
characteristically acute. Picking on a passage which he rightly says appears
at first to be about philosophical analysis but is in fact about all interpretation, Panofsky highlights a piece of incisive brilliance in Heideggers
argument: In order to wring from what the words say, what it is they want
to 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 picks
up here on the attack made on this passage by Cassirer in his long review of Heideggers
Kantbuch; see Cassirer, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik: Bemerkungen zu Martin
Heideggers Kant-Interpretation, Kant-Studien 36 (1931): 126; trans. Moltke Gram under the
title Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics: Remarks on Martin Heideggers Interpretation of
Kant, in Kant: Disputed Questions, ed. Gram (Chicago, 1967), pp. 13157. There Cassirer sees
Heideggers apologia for violence as a willful act of distortion in which Heidegger no longer
speaks 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 Panofskys 1932 analysis of

interpretative description and meaning, and Panofsky is right to recognize
Heideggers clarity on the question. What Panofsky emphasizes in the
question of the subjects violence to the object of interpretation is the need
for a correctivethe objective corrective of the third column of his table
in 1932 (that becomes the controlling principle of the fourth column in
1939). That is, he sees that the necessary violence of interpretation (which
in art history one might place beside the subjective willindividual or
collective of the Vienna schools notion of Kunstwollen) needs to be
constrained by some agreed upon, preferably a priori, ground rules. This is
the legacy of Panofskys Kantianism and the high point of his philosophical
search for a priori concepts which had informed the theoretical basis of his
art history since the beginning of the 1920s. Panofskys worry about Heidegger is a concern about the risks of what he interprets as an underlying
lack of interest in constraints, a love affair with the existential dynamic of
interpretative violence.47 Heidegger describes the force that guides and
justifies such violence in these terms:
The power of an idea which shines forth must drive and guide the
laying-out. Only in the power of this idea can an interpretation risk
what is always audacious, namely, entrusting itself to the concealed inner
passion of a work in order to be able, through this, to place itself within
the unsaid and force it into speech. [P, p. 477; KPM, p. 141]
As Panofsky comments, this idea is necessarily misleading . . . since it
stems from the same subjectivity that produces the violence in the first
place (P, p. 477).48
Kantian system in order to subdue it and make it serviceable for his [own] problem (p. 149; see
Gordon, Continental Divide, p. 278). However, where Cassirers review focuses on Kant and
what 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 broader
critique.
47. On Heideggers doctrine of interpretative violence, see Martin Weatherstone,
Heideggers Interpretation of Kant: Categories, Imagination, and Temporality (Basingstoke, 2002),
pp. 3, 34, 177.
48. One might add that the entirety of Heideggers discussion (in section 35 of KPM, from
which Panofsky draws) argues that while most see the the transcendental power of
imagination as being an intermediate faculty in Kants picture of the two basic sources for
the mind (sensibility and understanding), the more original interpretation of this previously
laid ground . . . unveils this intermediate faculty not just as original, unifying centre, but rather
it unveils this centre as the root of both stems (KPM, p. 137; compare p. 141). In placing priority
on the transcendental power of imagination, Heidegger admits he is doing violence to Kant, in
that he must resist the revisions and clarifications Kant himself made in the second edition of
507
508
It may be said that philosophically Panofskys argument is only a partial

response to Heidegger. He sees clearly that the source of the interpretation
of intrinsic meaning is effectively the worldview of the interpreter, that
this source of knowledge is fundamentally subjective and that its absolutely personal nature is in huge need of an objective corrective (P, p.
480). What he proposes is general intellectual history (allgemeine Geistesgeschichtea surprising formulation for Panofsky, who in his wider corpus is hardly one of the prime advocates of Geistesgeschichte)a strongly
historicist constraint that aims to clarify what was possible within the
worldview of any specific period and any specific cultural circle (P, p.
480). In historicising the boundaries within which interpretative violence
can rove, Panofsky is surely right. But academic humanisms perhaps
deepest weakness is that it chooses to confront what seems specifically
relevant rather than the bigger ethical picture. Thus by adhering to the
limited constraints of a historical academic subject like art history, Panofsky does not specifically address what both he and Cassirer take to be
Heideggers advocacy of an unbridled subjective drive or the ethics that are
called into question by what they read as untrammeled subjectivity giving
vent to violence (compare KPM, p. 149).
Although the issue on which he chooses to quote and criticize Heidegger namely, the nature of interpretationis clearly of direct relevance to
the essays subject (the problem of interpreting the work of art), the selection of a passage from Heideggers Kantbuch is in fact freighted with contemporary academic history and overdetermined in several ways. By the
late 1920s Heidegger had appeared as the most brilliant, mesmerising, and
dynamic force in German philosophythe hidden king (in Hannah Arendts famous phrase) of whom rumour spread before he emerged.49 Of
particular relevance to Panofskys intervention was the famous debate in
the Critique of Pure Reason and argue that with reference to this most central question of
the whole work, therefore, it [the first edition of the Critique] deserves a fundamental
priority over the second. All reinterpretation of the pure power of imagination as a
function of pure thinking . . . misunderstands its specific essence (KPM, p. 138). It is to
justify the perversity of his reading of Kant (against the Kant of the second edition) that
Heidegger introduces his argument about interpretative violence. Further, on Heideggers
exegesis of Kant (but without discussion of the doctrine of interpretative violence which
justifies Heideggers moves), see William Blattner, Laying the Ground for Metaphysics:
Heideggers Appropriation of Kant, The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles
Guignon (Cambridge, 2006), esp. 167 69, and Beatrice Han-Pile, Early Heideggers
Appropriation 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 interpretation of Kant.50 At Davos, the great neo-Kantian tradition of an epistemological reading of Kant,51 reaching back to Hermann Cohen (the first Jew to
hold an Ordinarius chair in philosophy in Germany) and characterised by
the number of Jews (like Cassirer and Panofsky himself)52 among its advocates, was assaultedmany observers thought with great panache and
success by Heideggers new ontological reading which sought to find,
not the a priori grounding of knowledge, but the ground of being as a force
of imagination,53 in Kants philosophical work. Heideggers all-out attack
on neo-Kantianism, at this period and in this context, was open to being
taken as an attack on the place of Jews in German philosophy, in academia,
and hence in German cultural life altogether.54 Heidegger swiftly followed
his 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. 19;
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 John
Michael Krois, Why Did Cassirer and Heidegger Not Debate in Davos? in Symbolic Forms and
Cultural Studies: Ernst Cassirers 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 Magic
Mountain (1929), Law and Critique 17, no. 1 (2006): 126; Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer, pp. 196 97,
204 19; Michael Roubach, The Limits of Order: Cassirer and Heidegger on Finitude and
Infinity, in The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Jeffrey
Andrew Barash (Chicago, 2008), pp. 104 13; and Gordon, Continental Divide.
51. On the neo-Kantian conviction that the emphasis of Kants system is to be sought in its
epistemology, 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 Did
Cassirer and Heidegger Not Debate in Davos? pp. 246 48, and Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer, pp.
37 42.
53. See Weatherstone, Heideggers Interpretation of Kant, pp. 155 65, 176 77.
54. The topic of assimilation of Jews in Germany is vast. See for example Shulamit V
olkov,
Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 224 55 on
Wissenschaft and Bildung; see Gordon, Rosensweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German
Philosophy (Berkeley, 2003), pp. 138, on Jews and Germans in Weimar philosophy. The
question of Heideggers anti-Semitism (quite apart from the bigger question of anti-Semitism
in late Weimar Germany) is inseparable from that of his adherence to Nazi principles both
before and after he officially joined the party on 1 May 1933. Apologists of Heidegger have
tended to divide the man from his work; others have seen the work as inextricably embedded in
the mans politics and views. See most recently Emmanuel Faye, Before 1933: Heideggers
Radicalism, the Destruction of the Philosophical Tradition, and the Call to Nazism for a
detailed and persuasive account of the period before 1933, and Tom Rockmore, Foreword to
the English Edition for a good summary of the earlier discussion, in Faye, Heidegger: The
Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy, trans. Michael Smith (New Haven, Conn., 2009), pp.
8 38 (esp. 3237 on neo-Kantianism and Jewification), pp. vii-xxii.
509
510
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (known as the Kantbuch),55 that

would be subject to a long and searching but respectful review from Cassirer in 1931.56 Given Panofskys closeness to Cassirer and his Cassirerian
position on Kant, there is little doubt that his choice to comment on Heidegger directly is the affirmation of a position, and a politics, in relation to
what in the late Weimar years were still open questions of intellectual
direction and culture within the German tradition, but would shortly
cease to be a possible area for open discussion.57
Yet, as we argued in discussing Sedlmayr, the 1932 essay comes closer
than any other work of Panofsky to accommodating his opponents. It is
striking that such commentary as there has been about Panofskys account of
Heidegger in the Logos essay is strongly divided between those who think him
in certain respects enamoured of, and influenced by, Heideggers proposition
of interpretative violence, on the one hand, and those who read him as explicitly choosing Cassirerian Kantianism over the Heideggerian option, on the
other.58 In a certain sense, both views are right. There is no doubt that on
one level Panofsky strongly upholds Cassirers reading of Kant and the
development of the philosophy of symbolic forms, as is supported by the
entire trajectory of his earlier theoretical work, which entails fundamental
opposition to Heideggers interpretation of Kant. But, as in other places in
the Logos essay, Panofsky sees the need to take on, adopt, and integrate in
his own argument some aspects of a theoretical language and set of attitudes, not only art historical in the case of Sedlmayr, but also philosophical
in 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. 12635.
56. See Cassirer, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, and Calvin O. Schrag, Heidegger
and Cassirer on Kant, Kant-Studien 58, no. 1 (1967): 87100, esp. 96 100.
57. Heideggers 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 the
violence of my argument and its potential to violate the laws of thoughtful dialogue between
thinkers (KPM, p. xx).
58. For a Heidegger-friendly Panofsky, see Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg, pp.
224 331, and Didi-Hubermann, Confronting Images, pp. 1012, 136 37, 167 68. For an antiHeideggerian (that is, Cassirerian Panofsky), see Stephen Melville, The Temptation of New
Perspectives, October, no. 52 (1990): 315, esp. p. 10; Summers, Meaning in the Visual Arts as a
Humanistic 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 direct
argumentsfor instance the comment that the source of interpretation is the interpreters
worldview and the final footnote with its acceptance that in principle one might approach
interpretation as creative reconstruction based on systematic originality and consistency but
that this is strictly transhistorical and extrahistorical and can never be allowed to replace
history (P, p. 481 n. 22). One wonders whether Panofskys reticence here is that before the
Nazi regime he senses where the energy and dominant forms of argument have gone in
German culture and is reluctant to stand directly against them, as he much more easily can in
American exile when such thinking is unambiguously fascist.
Panofsky could thus use Heidegger to override any elements of empiricism

in his scholarly method in order to place the problem of description, and
hence art history itself, on the highest philosophical footing.60
It is here that the ethical issues are at their most complex and difficult to
resolve. Are we to read the 1932 essay in its time of writing as an integration
of some aspects of Heidegger and Sedlmayr both the oppositions language and formulationsall the better to resist them? This reading has
Panofsky endorsing the violence of interpretation but not what Heidegger
does with it. Or are we to see Panofsky flirting with the beginnings of a shift
in direction that mightin a hypothetical Weimar trajectory that continued through the 1930s have taken his Warburgian neo-Kantianism
much closer to the forceful drives of being that animated both Heidegger
in philosophy and the second Vienna school? Such a suggestion is scandalous but really only so in relation to hindsight. It does not commit
Panofsky as it does other prominent Jewish scholars, like Ernst Kantorowicz or Nikolaus Pevsner, to anything like a flirtation with the spirit of
nationalist politics animating National Socialism.61 But the awkwardness
Panofsky may have felt after his move into exile about an essay, that was
simultaneously the high-water mark of his theoretical development and
the closest point of integration with those scholars and viewpoints that
would shortly be revealed as Nazi, may explain his persistent need to revise
the piece in 1939 and 1955, as well as its dumbing down from propositional
argument to didactic pragmatism. The dates of revision are themselves
significant. By 1939 before the war and the Final Solutionwhat National Socialism was about was clear, by contrast with the early 1930s before
the regime took power. But in 1939 it was impossible to imagine what the
consequences of the racist policies and the ideologies that animated them
would actually lead to. That was not so in the later 1940s and 1950s when
60. This is in contrast to Edgar Winds attempt in his Habilitation of 1929, published in
1934, to integrate empiricism within the neo-Kantian and Cassirerian understanding of
symbolic forms. See Bredekamp, Falsche Skischwunge: Winds Kritik an Heidegger und Sartre,
in Edgar Wind: Kunsthistoriker und Philosoph, ed. Bredekamp et al. (Berlin, 1998), pp. 20718,
esp. pp. 20710, and Rampley, introduction to Wind, Experiment and Metaphysics: Towards a
Resolution of the Cosmological Antinomies (Oxford, 2001), pp. xiii-xxviii, esp. p. xxvii. Clearly, in
American exile, Panofsky reversed course from a philosophically grounded art history towards
pragmatic empiricism, and he moved much closer to Wind and a more sociocultural
understanding of art.
61. On Pevsner, see Stephen Games, Pevsner: The Early Life: Germany and Art (London,
2010), pp. 15153, 170 72, 178 84, 19597, 205; on Kantorowicz, see Martin A. Ruehl, In
This Time without Emperors: The Politics of Ernst Kantorowiczs Kaiser Friedrich der
Zweite Reconsidered, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 63 (2000): 187242.
511
512
everything was known. 62 Along with the growth of knowledge comesfor

the Jewish refugee survivorthe absolutely unmeasurable question of
guilt: the guilt of leaving when so many had stayed, of surviving in ease
when so many had suffered, of living when so many had died. That guilt
varied from individual to individual, but inevitably it tempered radically
the nature of European Jewish assimilation in America; everyone had
friends or relatives who had perished. If any of this was at play in Panofskys consciousness, it may help to explain the peculiar squeamishness of
his additions in 1955 to the revision of 1939 especially the strange comments about iconography and iconology as parallel to ethnography and
ethnology but also to astrography and astrology, that appear to imply (in
very highfalutin terms) that he may no longer fully believe in anything he
is saying, and perhaps he never had.63
Beyondthis,andofcoursewearenowintheworldofspeculationsincenothing
is or can be documented, lies the fundamental question of the ethics of Panofskys
own art history. His place in the disciplineboth in Germany before his exile and
in America thereafterwas preeminent. He seems with hindsight to have been
always at the forefront of theoretical developments, magisterially learned, vastly
influential both in the discipline and beyond it (for instance, on Bourdieu). Was
this the result of pure intellectual acuity and an extraordinary instinctive sense of
where the future lay (combined with the good luck of being in the right place at the
right time, Hamburg and then Princeton)? Or did his acute nose for the ascendant
position at any given moment (the assimilated Jews unflinching instinct to fight
the academic war on the winning side) take him from the theoretics of Warburginflected neo-Kantianism to the pragmatisms of iconology via a momentary flirtationor, rather, the faintest hint of such a flirtation which was nipped in the
bud as soon as the Nazi regime took powerwith what was to be the dominant
intellectual Zeitgeist of Germany between 1933 and 1945? The question here is not
about Panofskys intellect, acuity, or intuitionall of which were about as powerful as such faculties have ever been in any art historiannor about his ability to
marshal them alongside hard work and copious learning over an extraordinarily
wide range of material. It is about what he wanted from all this and about the
unconscious drives (to choose a Sedlmayrian rather than a Panofskian term) that
may lead an ambitious scholar, who is the perpetual assimilated outsider, to make
asuccessofhisassimilationbytriumphingwithinthehostcultureaccordingtothe
criteria established by that culture, even when such criteria shifted so radically as
they did in Germany in the late 1920s and the early 1930s.
62. This is the moment of Winds attack on both Heidegger and his French followers
(especially Jean-Paul Sartre) published in 1946. See Wind, Jean-Paul Sartre: A French
Heidegger, in Edgar Wind, pp. 219 22, and Bredekamp, Falsche Skischwunge.
63. See Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, pp. 3132.

Genesis of Iconology

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The Genesis of Iconology

Author(s): Ja Elsner and Katharina Lorenz

The Genesis of Iconology

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2012

J A S E L S N E R is Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi

Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz / The Genesis of Iconology

1. Looking Back: Kunstwollen, Hamburg, and Panofskys Early

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2012

the problems of art historical description and interpretation which unites

Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz / The Genesis of Iconology

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2012

Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz / The Genesis of Iconology

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2012

posed these in a major methodological manifesto published in 1931 that

Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz / The Genesis of Iconology

(very much in parallel with Heideggers notion of interpretative violence)

2. Looking Forward: From Describing and Interpreting to

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2012

statement of American transplantation; it looks both backward as a reprise

Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz / The Genesis of Iconology

tural homeland, it was more important to assimilate nonaggressively in a

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2012

Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz / The Genesis of Iconology

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2012

Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz / The Genesis of Iconology

Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance.32 Panofsky restricts the

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2012

1 . From Panofsky, Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2012

Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz / The Genesis of Iconology

application of Kantian models to thinking about art history to create a

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2012

(Bedeutungssinn); and documentary meaning (Dokumentsinn), with a

Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz / The Genesis of Iconology

the conversion of an analytic table and a proposition for further thought

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2012

the German wordin italicsno longer signifies Mannheim but seems

Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz / The Genesis of Iconology

quintessence of what is possible within a given worldview. The emphasis

3. Flirting with Heidegger

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2012

The issue is highly pertinent to every level of Panofskys 1932 analysis of

Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz / The Genesis of Iconology

It may be said that philosophically Panofskys argument is only a partial

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2012

Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz / The Genesis of Iconology

Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (known as the Kantbuch),55 that

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2012

Panofsky could thus use Heidegger to override any elements of empiricism

Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz / The Genesis of Iconology

everything was known. 62 Along with the growth of knowledge comesfor

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