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Figural Philology
Also available from Bloomsbury
Thinking in Film, Mieke Bal

Endless Andness, Mieke Bal
The Curatorial, edited by Jean-Paul Martinon
Figural Philology
Panofsky and the Science of Things
Adi Efal
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2016
© Adi Efal, 2016
Adi Efal has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identified as Author of this work.
Parts of Chapter 1 appeared in Rens Bod, Jaap Maat and Thijs Weststeijn (eds), The Making
of the Humanities Volume II: From Early Modern to Modern Disciplines (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 263–99.
A preliminary version of Chapter 4 was published in Dana Arieli Horowitz and Moshe
Elhanati (eds), Protocols of the History and Theory Department of the Bezalel Academy 14
(October 2009).
Parts of Chapter 5 appeared as ‘Gravity of a Figure’, in Mick Finch and Christopher Smith
(eds), Journal of Visual Arts Practice 12:1 (March 2013), 39–50.
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Contents
Acknowledgements ix
1 Philological rationality and the constitution of the history of art 1
2 Archimedean points: Monuments as duration reservoirs 15

Panofsky’s Riegl 16
Philological imperatives in Riegl’s methods 18
The curse and the blessing in the study of artworks 21
Art history as Korrektur of monuments 22
Riegl’s Alterswert 26
Kunstwollen and meaning 27
Philological reproduction of past realities 30
3 Forms and figures: Two fundamental modes of pictorial production 33

Forms and figures within the pictorial domain 33
Figuration in the history of art 36
The figural situation 37
Figuration and meaning 38
Forms and figures 40
From the plastic to the pictorial 44
4 Pictorial validities in art and history 49

Panofsky’s Idea and the disclosure of the iconoclastic structure 51
Ideas between truth and reality in Idea 52
Auerbach’s ‘Figura’: Plasticity and history 54
‘Real and historical’: The figural mechanics of validation 57
Reality, value and truth: Two versions of realist argumentation 58
Iconophilic method 60
5 Sub figuralitate historiæ 63

The figure and the reality of the past 67
Figural and historical meaning 68
vi Contents
6 Iconological space: Panofsky with Warburg 75

Panofsky’s historical space-time 75
Simmel’s historical time 77
Warburg’s art history and philology 79
Warburg’s philological gaze 83
Vitalisms and archaism 86
Iconology and philology 88
7 The figural synthesis of historical reality in the iconology table 91

Synthesis 92
Symbols, ideas and values 95
From symbolical value to synthetic intuition 99
Intuition and synthesis 100
Figural synthesis 102
8 Philology’s recollective habitus: Panofsky with Spitzer, Auerbach

and Curtius 105
The Aristotelian distinction between memory and recollection 107
Two modes of memory 108
The role of figures in recollection 110
Humanism as a recollective activity 111
Hylomorphist humanism 113
Figural distinction: A model for the recollective disjunction 114
Elastic hylomorphism 116
9 Figural content and the past as a res extensa 119

Iconoclasm, iconism and the reality of the past 120
The past reality of a work versus historical meaning 122
The two unseen prototypes of the artwork 124
Vanishing point and carrying surface: Spatialities of historical
explication 125
Past reality of works and the reality of the past 130
The distance between the reality of the past and the historical reality
of a work 131
Nonseen and figured 133
Conclusion: Towards a figural philology 135

The domain 135
Historical meaning, past reality, historical reality 136
Philological production 137
Contents vii
Figural synthesis 137

Distinctive realism 138
Untemporal history 139
Moderate historicism 140
Panofsky 141
Notes 143
Bibliography 185
Index 203
viii
Acknowledgements
This work began in 2007 as a research project at the Rosenzweig-Minerva

Center in the University of Jerusalem and enjoyed the generous support of
Gabriel Motzkin, Steven Ashheim and Ashraf Noor, for which I am deeply
grateful. The book itself was accomplished between 2010 and 2012 with the
support of the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung in Germany and Ursula Frohne of the
art historical institute of the University of Cologne. The professional encour-
agement of Hannah Taragan, Hannah Nave, Ruth Ronen and Yossi Schwartz
of the University of Tel-Aviv, Christine Goettler of the University of Bern, Raz
Chen-Morris of the University of Bar-Ilan, Helmut Lethen and the wonderful
team of the IFK in Vienna was indispensable.
My deepest gratitude goes to friends and colleagues: Etay Kaminer, Michal
Segal, Yehuda Vizan, Angela Klein, Yotam Hotam, Daniel Whistler, Anja
von Cisewski, Mick Finch, David Wirmer, Jan von Brevern, Alexander von
Schwerin, David L. Marshall, Sabine Forero-Mendoza, Bertrand Prévost, Rens
Bod, Martin Treml, Christine Blaettler, Sjoerd Van Tuinen, Richard Woodfield,
Kerstin Thomas, Frederic Schwartz, Elizabeth Sears and Francesco Valerio
Tommasi for moral and intellectual encouragement.
Many parts of this work were presented in venues too numerous to recount,
and I am thankful to all the readers, editors, correctors, listeners and commen-
tators who helped it evolve.
Adi Efal
Essen, June 2016
x
1
Philological rationality and the constitution

of the history of art
‘La philologie est la science exacte des choses de l’esprit.’

Ernst Renan1
In order to understand Erwin Panofsky’s approach to art history this book will
elaborate on some notable affinities between a certain methodical orientation
in the history of art and what could be regarded as a philological rationality.
The ultimate goal is to establish some guidelines for a philological art history,
a formulation that will be reached only towards the conclusion. At the heart of
the book’s thesis stands the concept of figuration. Since whole chapters will be
dedicated to analysing the figure, we shall not linger upon it in this introductory
chapter. But to begin the inquiry, a preliminary and admittedly gross redefinition
of philological rationality will be necessary, one that accentuates the plastic
aspects of philological investigation. The crossover between art history and
philology is a bilateral one: on the one hand, we must ask in what manner are
pictorial aspects and material monuments imbued with philological rationality;
on the other hand, we must examine the ways in which philological issues have
been approached in art historical investigations, even if in a disavowed manner.
Re-reconsidering philology as a viable route to knowledge is a recent
tendency in the humanities.2 Paul de Man, for one, identified a connection
between the return to a certain kind of philology and the willingness to
theorize3 and, indeed, the present work endorses the possibility of establishing
a relation between a philological approach and the central place given to theory
in the historical sciences. Yet it is not evident that philology and theory are,
in fact, concomitant practices. There are many examples of reconsiderations
of philological methods and principles turning rather to an anti-theoretical
methodology.
As this book patrols the frontiers between philology and the history of art,
it may be a good occasion here, at the beginning, to try to pose in as concise
2 Figural Philology
a manner as possible what will understood here by a philological framework,

together with some textual and historical exemplars. If we talk of a ‘philological
rationality’, it is indeed out of the conviction that philology involves a specific
kind of rationality, a manner of thinking that should be distinguished as such.
Traditionally and in popular usage the term ‘philology’ is used to refer to the
love of, friendship with or loyalty to words. Such loyalty, though, is established
and maintained by habituation to their usage. In this, one ‘contracts’ generic
forms as well as the ways in which these forms have been distilled, produced,
applied and transmitted through the ages. The philological process, therefore,
consists of a movement of transfiguration: the transmission of forms from
medium to medium, body to body, generation to generation, age to age, culture
to culture, etc. A full archaeology of the history of philology would have to
cover a rich multiplicity of sub-schools and sub-methods that it is beyond the
scope of the present work to analyse and comment upon. Nevertheless, several
historically relevant signposts should be noted.
Though baptized in the nineteenth century as a genuinely modern methodical
approach,4 philology is not an invention of the modern age. Most histories
of philological activity trace its beginnings to Roman culture, to the initial
endeavour to translate and transmit Greek terms and texts into the then current
Latin.5 This required the establishment of affinities between a language of the
(Roman) present and a language of the (Greek) past.6 From its beginnings, then,
philology has been occupied with the formation of a primary model, a classical
one and with its transference into a hosting operative language. A philological
position assumes a distance, even strangeness, between the philologist and
his object. This position has often been described in terms of strangeness, the
philologist working from the platform of a language different, other or newer
than the one he is researching, aiming to achieve confidence in his reading
of these foreign articulations. The basic philological impulse arises from the
simple wish to be able to read a foreign language, to habituate oneself to the
language of one’s researched object. Indeed, is there not a similarly fundamental,
unbridgeable strangeness between the art historian and the work to which he
refers? Is not the artwork also a foreign and distanced object, one that the art
historian is always somehow lacking in their ability to read?
Returning to our historical exposition, the long medieval era was not devoid
of philological elements, issuing from the incubation of classical philosophical
texts and their revival in scholasticism after passing through the Arab trans-
lators.7 Nevertheless, most canonical histories of philology do not consider the
medieval era as a genuinely philological one. A better acknowledged history,
Philological rationality and the constitution of the history of art 3
sometimes referred to as the second philological revival, occurred in Italian

Renaissance humanism between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries,8 when
the need to translate texts from Latin or Greek into Italian presented itself. In
Renaissance humanism the philological impulse manifested an explicit and
determining plastic aspect. Erwin Panofsky explored this passage and devel-
opment. On his account, first came the revival of the ‘ancient manner’, most
notably in Florentine art of the fifteenth century, and then, from the second half
of that century onwards, the literal revival of classical motifs and themes in the
plastic arts, where one begins to find depictions of Greek and Roman history
and mythology. Renaissance humanism is a curious case in which the return
to a general ‘manner’ preceded the revival of ‘thematic’ (or ‘iconographic’)
elements. Renaissance humanist syncretism9 was then shaped as much plasti-
cally as verbally.10 From both the Roman and the Italian cases one can deduce
that a philological impulse emerges when there is a need to accommodate a
transition between cultures – in which, generally, one of the cultures is located
in the past – within the confines of a certain tradition that is synchronically
preserved, transmitted and shaped. In this process of transition, formulae,
pictures and, finally, things are an essential requisite.11
The humanist philological activity included, furthermore, a determining
neo-Platonic aspect, consisting of both Platonic and Aristotelian elements.
This relationship between art and neo-Platonism in humanism was frequently
of interest to Panofsky.12 When taking that fact into account, one realizes that
already the first philological episode, in Roman times, was intermingled with
the passage of Greek philosophy into the Roman world through neo-Platonism.
In other words, neo-Platonic philosophy, weaving its thread throughout the
history of western civilization, constitutes an integral, one may even suggest
a determining, part of philological rationality. In relation to the plastic arts,
this was manifested by the notable usage of the principles of hylomorphism.
Panofsky took part in the transmission and conservation of the hylomorphic
tradition, in both its philological and neo-Platonic/Aristotelian aspects, and
several of his researches into the articulations of hylomorphism will be addressed
in this book.
The period between 1700 and 1950 witnessed the process of a third revival, a
maturation and then decline in the status, as well as in the practice, of philology.
In the ‘declining’ stage of this third revival one usually locates the work of Erich
Auerbach, Leo Spitzer and Ernst Robert Curtius, whose genre of philological
rationality forms the spine of this book. A quick look at the initial stages of this
later philological surge is, therefore, vital for the present chapter’s purposes.13
4 Figural Philology
In the first half of the eighteenth century, a major contribution to the

philological impulse, recognized only later in the course of this revival, materi-
alized in the work of the Italian Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), who posited
philology as the basis of his new science (as a reaction to the non-historical
Cartesian metaphysical method). According to Vico,14 philology is interested
in the deeds of man, more specifically in words and things made by man, as
differentiated from the things of nature, made by God, whose related science is
metaphysics. Auerbach, one of Vico’s eminent translators and commentators,
emphasized the historical and humanist character of Vico’s conception of
philology.15 The deeds of man, researched by philology, may be myths, texts,
laws, documents, buildings, paintings and so on, and it is because they are
made by man that they can be known by the latter with certainty. The science
that is able to attain that certainty is, according to Vico, his ‘new science’, based
on philology. The deeds of man, coined by Vico as factum, are the objects of
this science, and its objective is to achieve certainty (certum): a validity attained
through the study of human deeds by the human mind. Both objects together
come in Vico’s articulation of philology as replacing philosophico-theological
verum, i.e. the knowledge of things created by God rather than man, things
whose nature cannot be fully comprehended by the human mind.16 In
Aristotelian terms, the products of man, like human production at large, are
defined under the rubric of making (ποιειν, which can be also translated as
to produce, to create or to do).17 Though Vico himself used the notion of the
‘poetic’ in the more accepted sense of human creation aided by the imagin
ation, his concept of philology is also inherently poietic in the Aristotelian
sense, in so far as it is interested in the products of men. A synthesis of
Aristotelian and Viconian terms supplies an understanding of philology as the
method of adherence to the poietic past. The philological impulse strives to
hold, to have, to possess (equivalent to the Aristotelian category of ἔχειν and
to the Latin habere) the poietic past and is, therefore, a restorative enterprise
whose aim is to conserve and to preserve. Philology can, thus, be articulated
as the manner by which the present is being configured and problematized,
owned and possessed, by its own past, at the same moment in which it owns
and possesses that past. Panofsky, though never occupying himself with Vico’s
science, retained a similar model of double objective components in his
iconology: one supporting the method from the side of the researched work,
the other placed on the side of general history. These mutually corrective
elements are employed by Panofsky to prevent iconology’s ‘certum’ being
understood as fully relativist or subjectivist.
In examining the formation stages of the third philological revival, and

searching for binding links between the history of art and philology, one must
refer primarily to the work of Johann Joachim Wincklemann. Standing between
classical studies, archaeology and art history, Winckelmann’s work highlights
the pedagogic tenor of the philological impulse18 and the Ideal which is always
to be found in its premise. Later philologists included Winckelmann among the
founders of philology. By around 1797, Friedrich Schlegel already considered
Winckelmann in this way,19 and later philologists referred to his authority
frequently.20 Winckelmann was interested in the ancient Greek ideal and in the
formation of that ‘Edle Einfalt und stille Grösse’. He incorporated a philological
impulse to the imitation (Nachahmung) of antiquity, a dynamic that stands at
the heart of philology, responsible for the resurrection and the survival of the
ancient ideal. Winckelmann examined the relation between modern artistic
production and antiquity and the procedures of transmission and reproduction
between these two moments. One must further note that Winckelmann’s ideal
(consisting in itself of a rehearsal of the Renaissance humanist ideal) estab-
lished a central and dominant dictum for the discipline of art history.21 Even
when, not long after Winckelmann’s time, art historians turned their attention
to medieval (i.e. ‘non-classical’) art, the canonic ideal of Greek and Renaissance
classicism was preserved as a point of reference (a sort of ‘Archimedean point’,
to paraphrase Panofsky22) from which they could always deviate.23
Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812), who is considered one of the earliest
fathers of philology in modern Germany, directed the first properly philological
institution (the Thomas Gymnasium) in Leipzig from 1763. Heyne’s student,
Friedrich August Wolf (1795–1824), was the founder of nineteenth-century
institutional philology.24 During the nineteenth century, philological studies
were split into two leading tendencies: the grammatical-positivist and the
historical-cultural.
The grammatical-positivist tendency – sometimes called the ‘critical’ branch
of philology – was initiated by Karl Lachmann (1793–1851). Lachmann
established a school of philology in which the reconstruction of the precise
grammatical form of antique classical sources was the main focus. Gottfried
Jakob Hermann (1772–1848), who extended Lachmann’s critical-grammatical
method to include an explicitly Kantian creed, tried to conceive of abstract
categories and laws of ancient textual traditions. The critical school of philology
had several defining crossing-points with the path of the history of art. It
was this branch of philology that was most attentive to repeating forms and
formulae, and their contribution to meaning-formation in history. One of the
6 Figural Philology
later members of this school was Georg Curtius (1820–85; to be distinguished

from the later Romanist Ernst Robert Curtius, who plays a role in Chapter 8),
who was interested in the transmission of words and terms between the Greek
and the Latin, and whose work bordered the second nineteenth-century philo-
logical tendency, the cultural-historical.
The founder of this cultural-historical school was the above-mentioned
Friedrich August Wolf, who, at the turn of the nineteenth century, redefined the
task of philology as that of achieving the living intuition (lebendige Anschauung)
of antiquity.25 His concept of philology was essentially edifying and pedagogic.
One of his principal followers, August Boeckh (1785–1867) established the
cultural-historical school of philology. Both Wolf and Boeckh were interested
mainly in Greco-Roman antiquity, as well as in the platform of the nation (Volk)
as basic to philology. Georg Anton Friedrich Ast (1778–1841) developed the
cultural-historical school of philology in the field of ancient philosophy, particu-
larly in relation to Plato.26 In his Grundriß der Philologie of 1808, Ast defined
philology as ‘the study of the classical world in its total, artistic and scientific,
public and specific life’.27 The philological rationality of the cultural-historical
school was, therefore, encompassing all the facets of human culture. The last
hero of this tradition was Ulrich Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848–1931).28
Differentiating his approach from that of Boeckh, Wilamowitz-Moellendorff
did not concentrate on understanding the life of antiquity as a whole, but rather
preferred to trace the movement and development of the classical tradition,
promoting a more linear process of becoming and realization.29
During the first half of the nineteenth century, a new and distinct philological
school arrived on the scene: Neuphilologie. The neo-philologist school had two
central objectives: the first regarding the frontiers of philology; the second
regarding its technique. First, to consider the importance of non-classical
traditions and models for the story of language. Within this framework, the
northern and Roman languages (Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese)
were included, although the scope of Neuphilologie eventually broadened
to include all languages. In relation to the German language, Jakob Grimm
(1785–1863; one of the well-known Brothers Grimm) was probably the most
important of the founders. The declared founder of Romance philology was
Friedrich Christian Diez (1794–1876), who established Bonn as a philological
centre which attracted new enthusiasts to advance their learning – among
them Gaston Paris (1839–1903),30 who was to establish the French philological
school. Indeed, the University of Bonn and its philologists were also the initial
training site for the young Aby Warburg.
The second main objective of the neo-philologists was to return, in part, to

the critical-grammatical school of philology, demanding scientific precision
in working with positive textual evidence. Herman Usener (1834–1905), who
lectured in Bonn and was one of Warburg’s influential teachers, was also a
part of the Neuphilologie movement, extending his research to mythological
times, and occupied with cultural and historical issues. As with many turn-of-
the-century philologies, Usener’s was impregnated with Lebensphilosophie, a
tendency that was also to become important in Warburg, a point that will be
elaborated on in Chapter 6.
One must emphasize yet again that ‘Romance philology’ was initially a
German phenomenon: it is when one is not certain, or better, not at home in one’s
usage of a certain language that one engages in philology. As suggested above,
the art historian is prone to a similar kind of stammering as well, incapable
of spontaneously comprehending and incorporating his artistic objects in
language, a situation necessitating a work of translation, clarification, and the
mediation of words, genres, codes, typographies and iconographies.
Naturally, Neuphilologie also had an impact on classical philology. One of
the results of the return movement from the new philology to classical philology
was the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, re-examining the classical and redefining
its characters and values with the help of non-classical sources and ideas.
In a short piece titled ‘Wir Philologen’, Nietzsche speculated upon a radical
philology, which, to his mind, had yet to be created. Nietzsche made it clear
in this essay that the philological vocation cannot lean only on the technical
aspects of learning or preserving the classical sources – it must also involve
a self-examination and, most importantly, an examination of the values to
which it adheres. Nietzsche’s works are also an example of that point at which
philology’s and philosophy’s roads crossover, though in a way that reshapes any
conventional hylomorphism.31 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, previously referred
to as the last of the great historical-cultural philologists, denounced Nietzsche’s
work not only as non-rigorous in its philological techniques but also as
involving an exceedingly speculative and philosophical approach (causing a
now familiar scandal and exemplifying the uneasy relationship of philology
with philosophy32). Nietzsche’s relation to antiquity, in turn, nourished the
art history of Warburg. Nietzsche’s radical reformulation of the philological
impulse is crucial for any inquiry into the affinity between art history and
philology, which also concerns the notion of humanism as it was redefined
in this later stage of philology. Nietzsche, and after him Warburg, Panofsky,
Auerbach, Spitzer, Edward Said and Paul de Man,33 retained their relation to the
8 Figural Philology
humanist tradition, while re-shaping the sense of humanism into something

‘deeper and more dangerous than that which one usually understands by the
word’, in Auerbach’s articulation.34
The philologists of the later generation of ‘Romanists’, including Spitzer,
Karl Voßler, Curtius and Auerbach, synthesized the neo-philological attention
to the factuality of language and its morphological positivity with the more
encompassing holistic (classicist and humanist) model coming out of the
cultural-historical school. It is this same philological synthesis that, we will
suggest here, can be associated with the art histories of both Warburg and
Panofsky. The relation of philology to language in this third era emphasized
plastic elements of variations, nuances, transfigurations, transmutations and
genealogies of usage of typological realities. Most notably, philology in this later
stage was interested in etymologies. Spitzer viewed the distillation of an etymo-
logical route as a kind of miracle,35 suggesting that etymological units behave as
‘inner forms’ of literary traditions.36 Etymologies are traced by philology much
as morphological patterns in the things of nature are followed by evolutionary
biology. Indeed, as Foucault noted in his Les mots et les choses, for philology (to
which he refers in a rather general manner), words themselves are considered as
objects or as things.37 If that is so, then it may offer a means with which to begin
to construct the sought-after bond between art history and philology, wherein
morphemes and figures construct the meaning of material works.
The third revival of the philological method was part of the process of the
institutionalization of the historical sciences, intermingled with the activities
of other evolving or established discourses in the humanities such as hermen
eutics, universal history and Kulturgeschichte. Yet the bases of philological
morphologies have remained the reading of ancient languages and the critical
editions and translations of ancient texts, which are considered classical (i.e.
belonging to a canon).38 The texts that are of interest to philological inquiries
are considered to have merit; they are valuable texts, texts that serve as a model
or as an ideal, anchoring the reading of other texts and generating traditions of
production. Therefore, philology cannot be an indifferent, entirely non-judge-
mental and, so to speak, ‘objective’ science; its very existence presupposes a view
of its objects as worthy of being read. This is one of the reasons why philology
could not sustain its position in the gradually objectifying scene of the historical
sciences in the twentieth century. The classical status of philology’s objects
points to the inherent connection of philology with pedagogy and education
(Bildung). It is an inquiry imbued with value judgements, as it sifts and selects,
as well as protects, restores and preserves a canon; it thereupon presents and
transmits the canonical material. The latter belongs to a tradition, extending

from an ancient beginning to a series of subsequent past textual manifestations.
Unable to function without a stable hypothesis regarding the ideal, philology
is a ‘dogmatic’ activity. But from this it does not follow that philology is neces-
sarily a rigid or thoughtless practice; rather, by working with the hypothetical
beginning the philologist examines his own doxas and mental habits.
The humanist moment of philology has continued to serve as a core reference
point for later philological generations, and there is an inherent connection
between philology and a humanist creed. According to Auerbach, Vico’s
philology was above all a science concerning that which is Human.39 The science
of the human should be differentiated from the science or the history of culture
(Kulturwissenschaft, Kulturgeschichte), even though for many philologists,
culture, humanity and philology are inseparable.40 The trappings of philology
as an investigation of organic-cultural totalities had facilitated its dubious
affiliation with the study of race and nation, which the generation of Auerbach,
Spitzer and Curtius tried to oppose by emphasizing their universal humanist(ic)
vocation. Panofsky’s methodical essay of 1940, ‘The history of art as a human-
istic discipline’,41 joins and articulates the same creed. The present endeavour
follows that lead, attempting to differentiate between philology and cultural
history, and arguing that the historical reality (‘Geschichtliche Wirklichkeit’, in
Auerbach’s terms42) of produced things is prior to their belonging to a certain
culture. If philological rationality is indeed interested in culture, it is not as an
organic whole, but rather as the web of sequences of transitions between different
cultures and ages.43 Moreover, the Panofskyan version of philological practice,
as this book presents it, is focused on the universal human capacity to distin-
guish, define and discern. This capacity features in most if not all of Panofsky’s
investigations and forms a basis for our emphasis here on the connection
between philology and the history of philosophy.
As an initial guide for the inquiry, we can attempt a general definition of
the term Φιλολογία (philologia). The philological adherence to the poietic past
takes the form of a search for a definition of the poietic thing, ‘definition’ being
one of the possible senses of the Greek λόγος.44 In searching for ways to define
a produced work the philologist engages in a regressive voyage into tradi-
tions, generations and mentalities, and it is in the midst of this longue durée
of regressive voyage that the philologist may distil genres (stemming from the
Aristotelian γένος) of historical reality. The following chapters will explore the
way in which the distinction of the artwork, as a placement in a series of human
historical-realities, produces figures. In this context, a philological ‘prototype’ is
10 Figural Philology
neither an object nor an ‘idea’ inherent in the object, but rather a poietic action,
an action of the production of a work by man. Because it constructs series of
produced things according to subject matter, philology is inherently inter-
ested in genres. Let us recall that for Aristotle (384–322 bce) a genre appears
‘When there is a continuous generation of things of the same type.’45 Philology
is likewise interested in accounting for the continuous generation of forms.
Pictures, transmitting their prototypes more or less efficiently, must hence have
an important role to play in philological inquiries. In philology, therefore, the
γένος precede the εἶδος, and the philological prototype is not an idea but an act
of production of a work. In the morphological, hylomorphic series, form and
meaning are inseparable. Philology, as the activity synthesizing those series, is
not only a science but also an art, a technique.46 As an art, it rehearses the repeti-
tions of statements, imperatives, inscriptions, articulations and imprinting, and
by so doing it produces figures. Its ‘artificial’ character also includes an essential
element of working with misunderstandings and errors: of copies, interpret
ations, inscriptions, applications, extensions, etc.
All these kinds of errors occur in the midst of restorative rehearsal operations.
The significance of rehearsal was already apparent in the Viconian determi-
nation that humans are capable of knowing things that other humans have
made; later, in the nineteenth century, this capacity for rehearsal was formulated
in Boeckh’s principle of ‘Erkenntnis des Erkannten’,47 or the knowing of the
(already) known. This version of the philological dictum collapses certum and
factum into each another: the made is the known, and therefore knowing and not
making (as in Vico’s case) stands at the heart of this version of the philological
method. Indeed, Boeckh’s epistemic understanding of philology points in the
direction of affiliating philology with memory, memory being the knowledge
of the already known.48 In the twentieth century, this principle of rehearsal
was transformed once more in Spitzer’s formulation: ‘to read is to have read,
to understand is equivalent to having understood’.49 Here it is the habitus of
reading that carries the weight of the obligation towards the reality of the past.
Synthesizing the above three versions of the ‘philological rehearsal’ together,
modern philology, understood thus, is a method responsible for the rehearsal
of poietic memory. It would lead us to also consider memory as a human deed,
as a factum. This is why, on numerous occasions in the chapters that follow,
Henri Bergson’s articulations of the relation between memory, duration and
creation will serve as a guiding orientation. Can we read Panofsky and Warburg
with Bergson in mind? Can we read one tradition of discussion with another
tradition in mind? This is part of the task to be undertaken in the present work.
While a full picture of the place of philology within the nineteenth-century

limbo of intellectual tropes far exceeds the limits of this introduction, it will
nevertheless be useful to refer to philology’s relation to three general tropes:
historicism, neo-Kantianism and hermeneutics, each of which will feature
prominently in the following inquiry since they all played a decisive role in the
development of Panofsky’s intellectual career.
1. Historicism. Though it played its part in the nineteenth-century

‘historization’ of thought,50 modern philology to some extent also retains
a non-historicist character. This is because, for the philological gaze, not
everything is history. Rather, history is knitted out of atoms of poietic
things and privileged sources. Indeed, in 1920, Panofsky insisted that
art historical inquiry necessarily requires something else besides mere
historical explanation.51 It is because philology presents tradition according
to some prototype in its generative capacity that it resists, at least partially,
the historicist tendency to yield to the eternally complex, chaotic and
singular flux of historical temporality. One can say that, within the limits of
a philological rationality, the significance of the past reality of human works
takes precedence over the significance of historical events. This primacy of
past reality in relation to history will be discussed throughout the various
chapters of this book, and will serve as one of its guiding themes.52 It is the
very ‘pastness’ of its cherished things that philology labours to preserve and
transmit.53
2. Hermeneutics. Though for most nineteenth-century philologists
hermeneutics was inseparable from philology, the two practices were
nevertheless distinguished.54 If hermeneutic deciphering searches for
meaning inside the honoured text, philology searches rather for the
dynamics of transmission of forms from one language to another and
from text to text, a transmission which is observable and apparent in
linguistic forms themselves. Philology is interested in the certainty that
can be deduced from the factum, the surface of historical production
(that would be equivalent to Vico’s certum), whereas hermeneutics
searches for the truth which lies within history (closer to Vico’s verum).
Hermeneutics and philology can be seen as representing two aspects of
reading (Lesung): whereas hermeneutics seeks to understand (Verstehen)
and uncover, philology seeks to present (Darstellen) and preserve. Indeed
for hermeneutics, philology is considered to be the initial, preparatory stage
of inquiry, enabling the subsequent process of interpretation. Philological
rationality, on the other hand, includes a hermeneutic aspect, in the sense

that philology reads hermeneutical traditions and acts of interpretation
backwards, as the philologist questions his own doxas regarding history
and its meanings.55 This was what Auerbach meant by the approach he
called ‘radical relativism’, in which the past is understood and transformed
by the reader–researcher, at the same time as the historical object research
transforms the reader–researcher himself.56 This same bilateralism is
sharply expressed in Nietzsche’s above-mentioned ‘Wir Philologen’.57
Philological possession determines both what it is that the past demands
of the researcher and what it is that the researcher demands of the past. As
in the case of historicism, the philological impulse dives into the depths of
hermeneutic ‘subjectivism’ in order to find its way out of it.
3. Neo-Kantianism. Neo-Kantianism shaped many of the accepted conceptions
regarding the functionality of the historical sciences, determining their
nature as sciences of culture and positioning them vis-à-vis the sciences
of nature.58 While a few nineteenth-century philologists, such as Gottfried
Hermann, were avowed Kantians,59 philology nevertheless poses a
resistance of sorts to neo-Kantianism. The latter searches for the conditions
of experience and sets of abstract categories, or rather values (to use the
same notion deployed by Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) and Heinrich
Rickert (1863–1936))60 that will account for a certain cultural whole.
Philology, on the other hand, is more attuned to the diachronic aspects of
history, sensitive to particular nuances rather than to generalizing values.
Philology does not look for the condition of a certain experience but rather
for the modus operandi of models and prototypes – poietic, produced
things; it is on this basis that philology furnishes series and sequences, the
transference of which, from culture to culture, is the very work of humanity
at large.
These three lines of resistance between philology and the dominant orienta-
tions of the humanities in the nineteenth century delineate three borderlines
of philological rationality: (a) temporal experience, (b) interpretation, and
(c) conditions of experience.61 The following inquiry will present Panofsky’s
iconology as engaging along all three borderlines.
The argument to be developed in the following chapters goes two ways: it
is not only that philology includes an essential pictorial-formal element, but
also that art history, in its development as a discipline, has been imbued with a
philological impulse. Philological tendencies can be found in the works of many
of the founders of the history of art, such as Aloïs Riegl (1858–1905; who will
be discussed in Chapter 2), Julius von Schlosser (1866–1938),62 Aby Warburg
(discussed in Chapter 6), Edgar Wind (1900–1971)63 and, in a more nuanced
fashion, in Henri Focillon (1881–1943)64 and Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001).65
But, as this book proposes, philological traits appear most explicitly in the work
of Panofsky.66 A good opening example of Panofsky’s engagement with philo-
logical rationality can be found in his essay ‘Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the
Elegiac Tradition’ of 1955 (an earlier, different version appeared in 1936).67 This
essay stemmed from an explicitly philological question: how should one read
the inscription in Poussin’s painting carrying the same title?68 Panofsky presents
Poussin neither as a classicist nor as a philosopher-artist, but as an agent of what
he termed the ‘elegiac’ tradition. Poussin, he argues, is responsible for a ‘change
in interpretation’, leading to a ‘mistranslation’, which worked ‘at the expense
of grammar but in the interest of truth’.69 After presenting the philological
problem, Panofsky proceeds to an exploration of texts, commentaries and visual
images (all having the same status as facta), pointing to the various possible
ways to read the inscription in question. Likewise in Panofsky’s other works,
pictorial history itself is inserted into a series of readings, translations and most
importantly mistranslations of formulae. In this essay, Panofsky neither explored
the historical situation in which Poussin’s inscription was made, nor set out to
excavate a universal set of categories that could be used for a Kantian-critical
analysis of the painting (as he would have done in some of his earlier essays).
Rather, he revealed a linkage of transmissions, transfigurations and readings
of a formula, an original ‘type’. The connection between Poussin’s painting
and its own past is the figure that Panofsky drew in this essay. The latter thus
merits being described as paradigmatic, as its iconographic riddle points to the
question of the relation of the western tradition to its primordial past: a past that
is represented by Arcadia, a kind of a hypothetical topos of a primary, eternal
archaic state of living, in which death nevertheless existed.70 Poussin’s picture
is itself presented by Panofsky as a philological reflection on the status of the
archaic origins of the European tradition.
It is on the platform presented thus far that this book will seek to understand
Panofsky’s ‘iconology’; it is an art history, as he himself declared, deeply rooted
in the soil of the humanist tradition.71 The accentuated philological character
of Panofsky’s later works will be touched upon in the later chapters. In his
American period, Panofsky corresponded with Auerbach, Spitzer and Curtius.72
Was his accentuated philologism a consequence of his exile? A remnant of a
shattered European ‘tradition’ resurfacing in the United States of America? That
may well have been the case, but it is not our objective here to explore this facet
of Panofsky’s biography. What is sought after, rather, is a coherent reading of
Panofsky’s project. Many have tried to ponder the meaning of his later icono-
logical phase.73 The thesis to be developed here will present Panofsky’s iconology
as both pertaining to and practising philological rationality. Indeed, this may
also account for the passage of his work from its neo-Kantian beginnings to
a more humanistic, work- and problem-oriented phase. The special character
of Panofsky’s philological awareness is rooted in a hylomorphic dynamics of
form and matter. In fact, as early as the 1920s Panofsky was using hylomorphic
terminology that presented the plastic artwork as composed ‘ontologically’ from
a duality of ‘plenitude’ (Fülle) and ‘form’ (Form).74 On the historiographical level,
the Panofskyan hylomorphist atom mediates between the attention given to
nuances, versions and dialects, and the serial generalization of forming generic
series.75 Panofsky’s art history, as we will endeavour to show, can facilitate the
search for a re-integration of philology into art historical method, as well as the
placing of art history within the general framework of the humanities.
2
Archimedean points: Monuments as

duration reservoirs
The first chapter raised the possibility of thinking of the history of art as a
philological practice. The critical reader may suspect from the outset that in
proposing such a goal, the searched for method will eventually lose the plastic,
‘formalist’ reality of art history. It is possible to conjecture that Panofsky would
have himself subscribed to such an attitude, since in several places in his letters
he recounts that from early on he considered himself as participating in the
Warburgian school, whose efforts, according to Panofsky, were directed at
inaugurating an anti-formalist, that is an anti-Wölfflinian, history of art.1 In
order to support the conviction that, although not a formalist, Panofsky was
nevertheless continuously occupied with establishing a morphological art
historical method, the present chapter endeavours to establish a bond between
Panofsky’s and Riegl’s art histories. The aim is not to go so far as considering
Panofsky a formalist, but rather to show that, like Riegl’s, his method was
heavily bound up with morphological terms. Indeed, in one letter from 1965,
Panofsky explicitly attested to a morphologist creed.2 Riegl and Panofsky are
commonly thought of as representing two competing ways of conceiving of
art history as a discipline: Panfosky as the founder of the textually oriented
iconological tradition; Riegl as one of the founders of the formalist discourse
in the history of art. Hence, if we can establish a stable link between these two
art historical pillars, we may thereby open up a path for forming an alliance
between iconology and explicitly ‘plastic’ formalisms, such as, for example, that
of Henri Focillon.3
David Summers has noted that Panofsky’s art history is marked by a Rieglian
quality4 and Panofsky himself identified the ‘three lights of the Vienna school’
– Riegl, Dvořák and Schlosser – as the most important influences on his work,
after Vöge and Goldschmidt, his direct teachers, but before Warburg and his
school.5 Riegl’s presence is evident in Panofsky’s 1924 book on German Gothic
sculpture, in which Panofsky uses the notion of the ‘Kunstwollen’ several times,
as well as other typically Rieglian concepts such as cohesiveness, unity, optic

and haptic approaches and free-space.6 It seems that before 1920 Panofsky was
already adhering to a Rieglian rather than Wölfflinian conception of style. In his
1915 essay dedicated to the latter, Panofsky mainly concentrated on criticizing
Wölfflin’s dichotomy between form (considered by Wölfflin as auto-referential)
and spiritual content (which inheres in forms but is yet distinguished from and
therefore external to them).7 Instead, Panofsky suggested that art historians
have to discuss form, as well as spiritual content on the same ground and as
essentially and radically united. There is no real distinction between ‘content’
and ‘form’ according to Panofsky. Indeed, this cohesiveness between meaning
and form corresponds with the figural double platform (the lingual and the
plastic) that will be presented in the following chapters. Panofsky’s guidelines
for art historical method are essentially non-psychological and non-empathic
(on this point, it should be recalled, Panofsky parted ways with Warburg,
who endorsed both psychologism and a theory of empathy in his art history).
It is rather, notably, to a philological platform of terms and procedures that
Panofsky turns in his 1920 essay on Riegl’s concept of the Kunstwollen, and
it is this platform that binds the two art historians together. This connection
is enhanced by a certain Kantianism shared by both authors, that is, a certain
striving to excavate and/or construct an autonomous set of principles of plastic
production, while assuming the reality of the monument, of the artistic work,
which can never be entirely reconstructed using transcendental grammatical
formules, but which nevertheless partially corresponds with these. If we must
look beyond the formalist-literary divide for the principles of a philological
method for the history of art, then it is in the space opened up between Riegl’s
and Panofsky’s works that it may be possible to do that.
Panofsky’s Riegl
Panofsky’s 1920 essay on the Kunstwollen was written several years after his
criticism of Wölfflin’s notion of style. The ‘Kunstwollen essay’ has merited
the attention of numerous scholars, among them Michael Podro, Michael
Ann Holly, Margaret Iversen, Allister Neher and Frederic Schwartz.8 All have
noted the anti-psychologist, neo-Kantian approach that the young Panofsky
implicitly adopts in this reading. Neher criticizes Holly’s and Iversen’s readings,9
claiming that Panofsky’s reading of Riegl’s Kunstwollen hails the establishment
of a transcendental (i.e. synthetic a priori) science of art, rather than of an
Archimedean points: Monuments as duration reservoirs 17
interpretative method regarding specific artworks. At stake here is the status

of this science of art.10 The view of the present work is that the science estab-
lished by Riegl is (correctly) understood by Panofsky as involving philological
considerations, considerations that sometimes take the science of art away from
history itself. Panofsky’s reading of Riegl’s method is contra-historicist, and his
understanding of Riegl’s concept of ‘Kunstwollen’ is bluntly philological, posed
by Panofsky as an alternative to overly historical or historicist approaches to the
history of art. Later in this chapter, we will discuss the relevance of Riegl’s notion
of the Alterswert (age-value) to this philological, contra-historicist approach to
the history of art.
Already in his essay on Wölfflin’s notion of style, Panofsky was trying to
overcome the simple dichotomy between linguistic and plastic realities. Against
Wölfflin’s differentiation of the self-referencial world of forms from the world
of contents arising from the vital powers of the spirit, Panofsky insisted on
the grammatical nature of the movement of the soul as well as of the world of
forms. Meaning is to be found as a necessary component of form, not as an
external content expressed in it. This ‘morphological atom’ motivated Panofsky
throughout his researches, up to those of his later period. Uncovering the
hylomorphic atom is the task of the iconologist, and is equivalent to what the
later Panofsky called, following Karl Mannheim, the ‘Dokumentsinn’.11 Instead of
the psychological, intentional, subjective understanding of Riegl’s Kunstwollen,
Panofsky suggested a hylomorphist understanding of its principles. He posed
this hylomorphism explicitly at the end of the essay:
Art is not a subjective expression of feeling or the confirmation of the existence

of certain individuals; it is a discussion, aimed at the achievement of valid
results that objectifies and realizes a formative force, using material which has
to be mastered.12
Die Kunst ist nicht, wie eine den Widerspruch gegen die Imitationstheorie
überspannente Ansicht heute vielfach glauben machen will, eine subjektive
Gefühlsäußerung oder Daseinsbetätigung bestimmter Individuen, sondern die
auf gültige Ergebnisse abzielende und objektivierende Auseinandersetzung einer
formenden Kraft mit einem zu bewältigenden Stoff.13
This formulation is an expression of a hylomorphic structure, in which the soul

is a formalizing force, and matter is that which is being formed. Hylomorphic
unity is evident in artworks, but not exclusive to them, since hylomorphism
(according to the Aristotelian and Scholastic formulations14) pertains to any
element of reality, certainly to any produced thing or monument. Panofsky tries
to articulate the correct method of inquiry into this ‘formulating force’, which
can be used as the atom of the work of art. This hylomorphism accompanies
Panofsky’s development, from his earlier systematic Platonic neo-Kantianism
to the dynamic synthesis of the iconological period. Hylomorphist rationality
can also be found operating in Riegl’s various writings, where the forming
capacity of the plastic arts is enabled and generated by contact with an ever-
changing, dynamic nature. The Rieglian Kunstwollen, as Panofsky’s ‘formulating
force’, represents the meeting point between the human formative power and
material reality.15
Philological imperatives in Riegl’s methods
A few presentations of Riegl’s work have already noted the latter’s philological
character.16 Yet the philological character of Riegl’s art history is different from
the hermeneutic oriented philological tradition, the closer sibling of the icono-
logical method. It rather originates in the critical, positivist school of philology,
originating in Germany in the method of Jakob Grimm and Karl Lachmann,
and developed, for example, in the diplomatics of Theodor von Sickel (1826–
1908) in Vienna. Riegl’s academic education was undertaken at the Institute
for Austrian Historical Research, led by von Sickel, whose basic task was to
teach and practise diplomatics, i.e. the preparation of critical editions of textual
sources, mostly juridical in nature.17 Von Sickel developed a process of working
with documents which, based on the distinction between external and internal
(inner structure and grammar) ‘markings’ (Merkmale), reveals patterns and
precedents that are handed down from generation to generation by subsequent
versions of a certain text.18 The critical editing of texts – trying to establish an
original text (Urtext) that is deduced (Lachmann insisted on this term) by the use
of analogies between several versions of the text – was the basic occupation of
the positivist philologists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.19 Though
considered as a primary reality, the Urtext is not materialized by a specific
manuscript version, but is rather a grammatical reconstruction. This kind of
inquiry, a mixture of diplomatics and palaeography (the integrative empirical
research of original texts, including their material characters), was the basic
method absorbed by Riegl in his historical training. The establishing of ‘original’
texts, distinct from lines of transmissions and transmutations, manifested the
basic demand of this school of philology. The deciphering of grammar was
part and parcel of this branch, and was less dominant in the culturally oriented
philology suggested by Boeckh and Usener, and also later by Auerbach and to
some extent Spitzer (whose formation was in the positivist school of philology).
On that basis, Riegl’s use of the notion of Historische Grammatik – the
‘historical grammar of the visual arts’, to cite the title of the two lecture
series he gave at the University of Vienna in 1897 and in 1899 – becomes
understandable.20 Historical grammatics was a linguistics school that was just
beginning to develop at the time, and Riegl’s lectures offer a rare example of
the application of its method to a discussion of the plastic arts. As a discipline
bordering on philology, history and linguistics, it pursued a comparative study of
the structure of words, word groups and sentences in their historical mutations
and various rhythms of development. It differentiated between the historical
dynamics of linguistic change and the basic linguistic entities that remain
constant throughout linguistic transformations, or that change very slowly.21
Warburg’s and Panofsky’s iconologies – tracking durational transmutations of
plastic structures and motifs over historical periods, but still presupposing basic
constant units – are not so far removed from this type of inquiry. In the above-
mentioned lectures, Riegl explored the morphological foundations of artistic
production while describing their periodical development.
This pioneering enterprise had its followers. In Panofsky’s time, a similar
experiment in forming an essential conjunction between words and things, a
sort of a historical grammar, could be found in the work of a group of Austrian
and German philologists named ‘Wörter und Sachen’. The group established a
journal with the same title, to which the young Leo Spitzer (arriving in Marburg
from Vienna) contributed articles, as did one of the important figures in the
second Vienna school, Jacob Strzygowsky.22 The motto of the journal, taken
from Jakob Grimm, hailed a historical science of language pending between
words and things.23 For this group, there existed a continuity between produced
things and words, a continuity to be followed by the description of series of
repeating morphological units in different monuments, instruments and lingual
expressions. Julius von Schlosser, a Viennese art historian who was slightly
older than Panofsky, was also busy integrating philology into the history of art,
notably in his book Die Kunstliteratur (1924). In its opening pages, Schlosser
declared that it was ‘occupied with philological tasks, and the division of the art
historical sources is also determined by guidelines furnished by this wonder-
fully refined discipline, classical philology’.24 As mentioned above, Panofsky
considered Schlosser to be one of the main influences on his work. In a later
lecture published in 1935, entitled ‘Style History and Language History of the
Visual Arts’,25 Schlosser noted the close relation between Riegl’s art history and
questions of historical linguistics,26 and declared this relation to be the prelim-

inary inquiry needed in order to intuit the living reality of genuine creation.27
The philological impulse in Riegl’s methods, as Panofsky understood, derives
from the critical philological tradition, connected to the Lachmannian school
dedicated to the establishment of critical editions of texts. This school, to recall,
was a positivist one, and it was against this positivist tendency that idealist
philologists such as Benedetto Croce and Karl Voßler were arguing. Schlosser,
who chose the Crocean path in his Kunstliteratur, was effectively both practising
and criticizing this same positivist philology. Nevertheless on a general level,
as Walter Benjamin suggested, the Viennese school of art history exhibited the
nature of the ‘real philology’ (‘Geiste wahrer Philologie’) of the Grimm school,
which was responsible for the establishment of a morphological reconstruction
of etymological lineages, and which became an inspiration for the ‘Wörter und
Sachen’ group.28
In Panofsky’s ‘iconological table’ – to be explored in depth later on – the
pre-iconographical level of ‘description’ corresponds to this positivist philo-
logical mechanism. Nevertheless, the table makes clear that it is impossible to
establish the ‘text’ of the work without passing beforehand through the more
comprehensive levels of iconological synthesis. What distinguishes Panofsky’s
philological practices from Riegl’s and Schlosser’s is, in fact, Panofsky’s lesser
systematics: Riegl’s and Schlosser’s aspiration was notably to establish a basic,
universal set of tools (universal grammar in the case of the former, a lexicon
of Kunstliteratur in the case of the latter) for the historical study of art. This
is different from the iconological method of Panofsky, where there is actually
no a priori set of rules or texts that can be used as a basic and permanent
grammar referent or source (except for tradition in a general sense). As such,
for Panofsky, any inquiry, any picture, sets its own course and demands its
own special sources and texts; and one never knows a priori which text will
be found on the trail of the search. In that sense, following Neher’s argument
mentioned above, Panofsky’s earlier systematic texts differ from his problem-
related iconological inquiries, and in themselves they are intended to construct
the foundations of art theory, not engage in specific readings of specific works.
The orientation of the Rieglian school is slightly different: on the one hand,
the methodical tools are entirely integrated into specific inquiries concerning
particular works, but on the other hand, the philological and terminological
apparatus is maintained in a compact and regulated state, and based on a need
for establishing a grammar, rather than unearthing a trail of textual trans-
mission, as is more characteristic of the iconological school.
The next point, which is decisive for any philological rethinking of the
history of art, regards the problem of historicism.
The curse and the blessing in the study of artworks
As Frederic Schwartz has noted, Panofsky’s anti-psychologist reading of the

Kunstwollen leans on his anti-historicist reading.29 At the beginning of his essay,
Panofsky famously stated: ‘It is the curse and the blessing of the academic study
of art that its objects necessarily demand consideration from other than a purely
historical point of view.’30 What exactly is this external viewpoint? And before
that, what is a historical viewpoint? Panofsky explains:
A purely historical study, whether it proceeds from the history of form or the
history of content, never explains the work of art as a phenomenon except in
terms of other phenomena. Historical study does not draw on a higher source
of perception: to explain the artistic production of a particular artist within the
framework of his time (or in light of his individual artistic character), it traces
a particular representation iconographically, or a particular formal complex
according to a history of types, or even tries to determine if such a complex
is derived from any particular influence at all. This means that each real
phenomenon to be investigated is referred to all the others within the whole
complex; their absolute locus and significance is not determined by a fixed
Archimedean point outside their essential nature. Even the longest ‘develop-
mental series’ represents only lines which must have their starting and finishing
points within such a purely historical nexus.31
Hence, already upon turning his attention to Riegl’s work, Panofsky acknow
ledged that the question with which they were both occupied was one regarding
the relation between art history and history. Should art history, in the full
and strict sense, be considered as a historical science? The basic problem of
historical explanation, Panofsky specified, is that historicism does not actually
give us permission to posit some fixed point of reference that could be used
as a measure against which to clarify the work. Instead, Panofsky suggested,
the very reality of artistic objects posits a measure or a criterion that is not
entirely embedded in historical ebbs and flows. Accordingly, what characterizes
a historical investigation as such is its inherently contextual nature, built out of
frames of reference; this is a practice that lies at the basis of any iconological
inquiry. But what is lacking in a strictly historical explanation, according to
Panofsky, is an Archimedean point that might supply the possibility of studying
the artwork ‘itself ’, independently of the contexts in which it is embedded, or,

more precisely, of studying ‘what it was to treat a work as a work of art’.32 This
Archimedean point can be reached, Panofsky thinks, by way of the method of
the Rieglian Kunstwollen. In a slightly earlier, rarely commented upon text,
entitled ‘Problems of the History of Art’ (1927),33 Panofsky tried to clarify the
character of this non-contextual, unhistorical encounter with a work of art:
The aesthetic object is effectively, as long as it is an aesthetic object, just as

minimally connectable to whatever externally existent content, as it is dividable
in itself. As long as I am attracted to certain content in an aesthetic manner, I
am, to a certain extent, alone in the world with it.
Der ästhetische Gegenstand ist in der Tat – solange er einen ästhetischen

Gegenstand ist – Ebensowenig mit irgendeinem außerhalb seines existierenden
Inhalts verknüpfbar, als er in sich selber teilbar ist. Solange ich auf einem wie
immer gearteten Inhalt ästhetisch bezogen bin, bin ich mit ihm gewissermaßen
allein in der Welt.34
So, if the ‘aesthetic object’ is in itself indivisible and non-contextualizable,

what then can historians do with it, in a manner that will preserve to a
certain extent its autistic, sovereign character? What would be the unhistorical,
non-contextual point from which one could understand an artwork? Panofsky,
reading Riegl, suggests that this Archimedean point would be an inner formula,
a cohesiveness holding the artwork together. As was suggested above, the appli-
cation of a philological approach in the history of art would imply an attempt to
define the logos, the ‘saying’ contained by a work of art (which is not identical
with its communicative contents). This saying would supply an ‘authoritative
viewpoint […] which would show how the various factors within a work of art
cohered and the work took on the distinctive meaning it had qua work of art’.35
This is to be distilled from a series of representations and readings of a certain
work. And indeed the affinity between Panofsky’s and Riegl’s art histories comes
down to this basic logos.
Art history as Korrektur of monuments
The third section of Panofsky’s essay on the Kunstwollen engages a clear and
distinct philological vocabulary, paralleling art historical work to the work of a
critical philology. This is also how Panofsky understands Riegl’s Kunstwollen: art
historical method should be a process of correction and deciphering, working
through and sifting layers of mistakes and misunderstandings formed by tradi-

tions of transmission. It is precisely as a practice of philological correction that
art history escapes the full grasp of historical contextualization.
What comes out of the long paragraph quoted below is the same impulse that
will be presented here as a figural structure: it is the endeavour to read a work, a
document, a monument, which necessarily passes through processes of contex-
tualization, but which nevertheless aspires to hold on to some non-contextual
reality of the work. The Belgian philologist Servais Étienne, active mainly in the
first half of the twentieth century, expressed this principle in a very simple and
clear manner: the task of philology is simply to regulate, or normalize, the usage
of valuable works.36 As such, prior to any interpretation, the philologist works
rather as a representative of the selected and sifted work.
The monument, then, is compared to a document. Any document is
constructed out of sentences, containing a proposition, a ‘positive content’,
which is also the epistemological essence (erkenntnistheoretisches Wesen) of the
work. This positive epistemological content can be deformed or falsified in the
historical process of the transmission of the text:37
This understanding [Verständnis] can […] be rendered opaque or hindered

by a number of objective and subjective circumstances. The original form of
the statement can be distorted by a typographical error, a lapsus calami, or by
a subsequent correction; an expression which occurs in it can (particularly if
we are dealing with an old text) have changed its meaning; and finally, a slip
in reading or a lapsus memoriæ [Gedächtnisfehler] by the reader can make the
proper understanding [Erfassung] of the proposition impossible.
In approaching the positive sense of a work, one has to give an account,

primarily, of its simple, phenomenal appearance, which, as will be demostrated,
parallels the first pre-iconological level in the later iconological table:
In exact keeping with this, the work of art whose immanent meaning is to be
perceived must also be understood, first of all, in the concrete and formal sense
of its phenomenal appearance which contains this meaning, and, as was said
earlier, this understanding [Verständnis] can be hindered […] the proper under-
standing of a work of art [Kunstdenkmal] can be interfered with by the same trio
of errors or delusions: by errors about the original nature [Beschafenheit] of the
object (if objective changes [sachliche Veränderungen] have come about in it);
through errors about the original effect of the work (if there has been a general
change in the view of art [Kunstanschauung]); and finally, through errors about
the present nature of the object (if by chance it was misunderstood as to its
positive data). Just as the linguistic text can be lost by faulty reproduction or
by subsequent correction of its original content, so the work of art, because of
some unperceived later changes (rebuilding, painting over, or the inadequate
later completion of an unfinished work), can forfeit its objective appearance.
Just as a particular word can have changed its meaning because of a change
in linguistic usage and thus have changed the whole tenor of the linguistic
proposition, so, too, within the total artistic organism any detail at all can be
interpreted in the present completely differently from what it was in the past
and so have a completely erroneous formal effect upon us. (We can think, for
example, of a plastic work which was originally connected in a particular place
with a particular building but which is today conceived as a separate work.)
And finally, just as the understanding of the text can be made impossible by
a slip in reading or a slip of memory, so, too, the understanding of an artistic
phenomenon can be placed in question or disturbed by a material error about
its measurement, its colour, its material significance, or its intention.
The question then arises: what is it that enables us to determine the proper
perception of the monument? First, writes Panofsky, there are documents:
And now we are at the point where the effort to establish the perception of the
immanent meaning needs the help of ‘documents’ […] The documents may
correct these objective and subjective delusions, whether they are documentary
records, art-critical evaluations, theoretical statements about art, or, finally,
pictorial reproductions. The document’s corrective function, as can be seen,
is threefold. The document is first and foremost corrective if it makes possible
the reconstruction of the lost state of a work of art by documentary proof or
pictorial transmission. Second, it corrects exegetically when it proves that a
change of meaning in the formal components has altered the effect which a work
of art has upon us today (whether this correction is expressed in some critical
or theoretical form or, even, by a representation which reproduces the object
in the sense of a particular artistic impression). Finally, it operates correctively
when it moves us to change a false view of the positive data which determine the
appearance of a work of art as such, by means of indications which can again be
in the form either of written remarks or of pictorial reproduction.
Working with documents, applying the methods of correcting and determining

the original text, necessitates exegetical commentary:
What should be added is that the reconstructive or corrective emendation of

any artistic view always includes its exegetical correction since the removal of
an error about the actual nature of the work of art must, by its very nature, also
imply a correction of its impression.38
A clearer proof of Panofsky’s philological orientation in his early years can hardly
be found. In particular, what becomes clear towards the end of this paragraph
is the importance of error. Errors are the essential reality in the transmission
of texts: philological reality is in its essence a reality of deformation, of myopic
readings and depictions of original works. Without this deflective dynamics, there
would be no need for philological practice at all; and it is by following mistakes
and deformations in the representation of artworks that the philological trail is
formed. Pierre Cerquiglini has suggested that philology is ‘a bourgeois thought
of the family, paternalist and hygienic, which cherishes descent, chases adultery
and detests contamination’. Philology is interested in branches, sources, families,
roots and traditions, but also in the multiple errors and variants shaping these.39
For both Riegl and Panofsky, the researcher must also establish, as comple-
mentary to this serial unfolding, some synthetic a priori set of categories, always
subject to reinspection and rehabilitation. The ‘re-creative synthesis’40 – as Giulio
Carlo Argan referred to the basic iconological gesture, the re-reproduction of the
Urtext – must be aided by these grammatical schemes.
The German–Austrian group Wörter und Sachen was especially interested in
families and homologies of words, in etymologies and their plastic aspect and
in binding words and things together. The vocation of this group was morpho-
logical, connecting the positivist and realist Vienna to the neo-Kantian centres of
Germany. One of its leading members was Meyer-Lübke, who was Leo Spitzer’s
teacher in Vienna. Of his classes, described as ‘historical grammar’, Spitzer wrote:
when I attended the classes of French linguistics of my great teacher Meyer-

Lübke no picture was offered us of the French people, or of the Frenchness of
their language: […] In all this, there were many facts and much rigor in the
establishment of facts, but all was vague in regard to the general laws under-
lying these facts […] We saw incessant change working in language – but why?
[…] And we were never allowed to contemplate a phenomenon in its quiet
being, to look into its face: we were always looking over our shoulder. There
were presented to us the relationships of phenomenon a and phenomenon b;
but phenomenon a and phenomenon b did not exist in themselves, nor did the
historical line a–b.41
In Spitzer’s view, historical grammar thus lacked the essence of historicity, which
he related to a cultural spirit. Riegl, coiner of the term ‘historical grammar of the
visual arts’, articulated the consequences of this positivist philological tendency
(not always coinciding with historical impulses) in the domain of the history of
artworks.
Riegl’s Alterswert
The critical correction and reconstruction that is the duty of the art historian,
though not always working in the service of history, received yet another articu
lation in Riegl’s 1903 essay. Here Riegl was occupied with the problem of the
various practices modern culture had been developing regarding things from
the past, or in his terms, monuments (Denkmale).42 In this essay, Riegl deployed
a typology of the various values that modern culture attaches to monuments
(within which category Riegl includes any produced thing). Working with the
notion of value (Wert), familiar from contemporary discourses of history and
economy, Riegl attempted to distinguish exactly what one means when one
uses the term ‘value’ in regard to works of art, but also what can be determined
as the content and meaning of works of art by using this coinage. As will be
seen in Chapter 7, ‘symbolical value’ occupied a central place in Panofsky’s
iconological table, and served for him as the content to be distilled from the
inspected work of art. Value, then, is inseparable from iconology, as well as
from philology.
The various types of value that Riegl enumerates include the following:
historical-value, age-value, memory-value, art-historical value, artistic-value,
newness-value and use-value. On the platform of this historical ‘value-grammar’,
modern culture, according to Riegl, develops its various practices in relation to
monuments. Of all the types of value, it is the concept of age-value that is most
original, suggestive and relevant to the present discussion. As far as I know, the
concept of ‘age-value’, unlike any of the other values, cannot be found as such
in any major text produced around Riegl’s time.43 Age-value, simply put, is the
value of old things, of things having a past, coming to us from the past, as aged-
things. It is a durational value, registering that which the work has been carrying
and gathering around itself through different eras, uses and cultures, with the
deformations and mutations that such a duration includes.
Importantly, Riegl differentiates between age-value and historical-value.44
Whereas historical-value traces a linear trail of development, age-value exclu-
sively follows and stands for everything contracted by a work throughout the
ages: decay, ruin, changes in colour, disintegration, but also additions, changes
of location, etc. While insisting on the effectiveness of age-value, Riegl was
reminding his readers that neither artistic nor historical values are exclusively
at work in the processes by which monuments are received. Indeed, this is the
very same argument that Panofsky elucidated in regard to Riegl’s notion of the
Kunstwollen: neither history nor aesthetics are sufficient to read the artwork.
Riegl’s 1903 essay seems to form a full circle with Sickel’s formulation of the
‘markings’, the formulae to be found in a series of versions of a certain text.
Age-value is the index of such a series of markings or registrations, changes and
variations over time, and it is this value that philology works through, opens up,
deploys and overcomes, but also protects and preserves.
At the time of Riegl’s essay, value-discourse stood for a whole complex
of competing intentions and metaphysical constructions, mostly centred
around German-speaking intellectual milieus. It was into the midst of this
discourse that Riegl weaved his typology of values. The concept of value was
also integrated into the neo-Kantian discourse of history. Riegl’s notion of
age-value meets this constellation head-on. Age-value is a value that disturbs
the historical wish to construct narratives. It testifies to the duration of a thing
throughout history, ages and cultures, without necessarily evolving, becoming
better or worse, even when decayed by the forces of time and nature. In the
framework of age-value, readings and representations of works act like forces
of nature, changing, forming and transmitting a produced thing, and the
place of the work in world history, or in the history of styles, is of secondary
importance. The work is not considered primarily on the basis of universal or
localized canons of beauty; rather, age-value registers the material acquisition
of marks or changes on the surface of the work. Age-value, wrote Riegl, ‘appre-
ciates the past for its own sake’45 (‘dem Alterswerte, der die Vergangenheit
allein als solche schätzt’).46 The relevance of age-value to museum culture
and practice is evident.47 And the parallel with Panofsky’s interpretation of
the Rieglian Kunstwollen is by now, I hope, rather clear: since the method
of the Kunstwollen tries to correct the reading of a certain monument, it
is with the fabrics of historical-values, age-values and memory-values that
the art historian should work. These are always the marks that time and
culture imprints on a monument, marks in which one can read backwards
the durational sequence carried by it, in order to excavate an approximate
historical reality of the monument in question.
Kunstwollen and meaning
It now becomes possible to draw a line of continuity between Panofsky’s

reading of Riegl’s Kunstwollen and his later formulations concerning ‘mental
habit’. The ‘will’ that sustains the Kunstwollen is inherently a cohesive will, a will
oriented towards the maintenance of regularity in the human organism.48 It is

a plastic, morphological tendency arranging the rules of artistic production at
a certain historical moment. Evidently, as Panofsky emphasized, this should
not be understood as a psychological essence, but rather as a dynamis, a
potentiality inherent in a given work. It is a durational will, a conatus of
holding together, of the cohesion of the work. Again, the continuity between
the early and the later Panofsky should be noted: the unified sense that he
was after was to be formulated in his later years in the iconology table. This is
Panofsky’s Rieglian realism: meaning, or the ‘document-sense’ of the facticity
of art historical research, refers exclusively neither to the artist nor to the
artwork, but rather to both together; neither to the object nor to the subject,
but to both; and most importantly, neither to reality nor to ideas, but again, to
both. This art historical method refers to a middle terrain, like that between
the peak and the bottom of a wave, as Riegl himself described it, where the
extremes intermingle.49 This middle ground, which interested Panofsky as
early as his 1915 doctoral dissertation on Dürer’s artistic theory,50 is also the
place where an architect and a theologian can meet, i.e. it is the terrain of
mental habit.
What, then, is actually being sought after when one tries to formulate an
Archimedean point in relation to a certain monument? The Archimedean
point is relevant only when there is some movement of transmission, that is,
only when one can detect versions or variations of the same text, or of the same
genre of monument. The Archimedean point is neither an ‘idea’ to be found
within the work, nor strictly a formal stylistic, but rather that which passes at
the moment of transmission, like the moment of the wave of the hand to the
friend across the street. Nevertheless, the Archimedean point includes this
moment of transmission together with the possibility of mistakes and changes,
of coverings and versions; and this content is traced by following the age-value
of the work.
Properly understood, a method of the sort which Riegl introduced does no

more damage to the purely historical writing of art history, which is directed
toward the recognition and analysis of valuable individual phenomena and their
relationships, than, for example, epistemology does to the history of philosophy.
Assuming the concept of artistic volition to be methodologically justified, the
‘necessity’ which it, too, determines in a particular historical process consists
not in determining a causally dependent relationship between individual
phenomena which succeed each other in time but in discovering in them (just
as in an artistic phenomenon) a unified sense.51
Eine Methode, wie Riegl sie inauguriert hat, tritt – richtig verstanden – der rein
historischen, auf die Erkenntnis und Analyse wertvoller Einzelphänomene und ihrer
Zusammenhänge gerichteten Kunstgeschichtsschreibung ebensowenig zu nahe,
wie etwa die Erkenntnistheorie der Philosophiegeschichte: die ‘Notwendigkeit’, die
auch sie in einem bestimmten historischen Prozesse feststellt, besteht ja – vorausge-
setzt, daß der Begriff des Kunstwollens methodologisch berichtigt ist – nicht darin,
daß zwischen mehreren zeitlich aufeinander folgenden Einzelerscheinungen ein
kausales Abhängkeitsverhältnis konstatiert würde, sondern darin, daß innerhalb
ihrer, als in einem künstlerischen Gesamtphänomen, ein einheitlicher Sinn
erschlossen wird.52
In his later essay, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism,53 Panofsky regarded

the deciphering of the causal relations between several simultaneous historical
realities as less important than the determination of a ‘uniting sense’ (einheitlicher
Sinn) of a certain work. Panofsky noted that the determination of the Kunstwollen
does to the history of art what theory of knowledge (Erkenntnistheorie) can do
to the history of philosophy. In other words, it can establish an elementary set
of structures of that which is recounted in a historical manner. The Kunstwollen
stands for a defining operative principle of a work and it is this reality that
is being transmitted through ages and traditions, as long as the work has a
conatus, as long as it survives. The Kunstwollen is that which endures as long as
a work endures within history. This ‘necessity’ (‘Notwendigkeit’, which Panofsky
chooses to enclose in quotation marks) is to be found not in historical causation
and context, but rather in an interior morphology of the work under exami-
nation. To recall, Panofsky insisted on the non-contextualisable element in the
moment of the encounter between artwork and viewer. In the same sense, the
Kunstwollen should supply a formative, unhistorical element in the chaotic flux
of the history of art. In any case, it is not a causal explanation that Panofsky
seeks, but rather a unity of sense, the principle that maintains the cohesion of an
artwork. The Kunstwollen should supply a form within the form of the artwork.
As will become clear, this situation of a form within another form produces,
according to our terms, a figure. Now and again Panofsky found a strict parallel
between the work of art and the work of the art historian, with both sharing a
dynamics of figurability.
The decisive difference between Panofsky and Riegl concerns the relationship
between art history and cultural history. Both were convinced that there exists
an affinity and continuity between art history and the science of culture, or
the encompassing platform of universal history.54 Nevertheless, for Riegl,
this relation is restrained in its effectiveness and appearance in art historical
inquiries, as the art historian should concentrate on the inner dynamics of

artistic production and leave the history of culture to the cultural historian.
For Panofsky, by contrast, this unification is total, bilateral and rigorous; in the
iconological process both art history and culture affect and construct each other
constantly. When performing an iconological gesture, the researcher necessarily
changes the spatio-temporal coordinates of historical reality.
Philological reproduction of past realities
Riegl’s notion of the Kunstwollen is inherently bound up with the question

of natural reality. The Kunstwollen is activated by the things of nature, being
encountered as exterior to the human mind. On this point one can discern
an affinity with the Warburgian method, which will be discussed in our sixth
chapter. Yet, if for Warburg, these are the powers of nature that cause the
appearance of pathos-formulae and finally artworks, then for Riegl, they are the
moving things of nature that engage the human being in producing artworks.
For Panofsky, a generation later, natural reality consists of artworks and their
duration through traditions and ages.
The reality of those monuments that are of interest to the history of art is
a peculiar one: it connects the past and the present in the reality of a concrete
material thing, and though the thing itself is contemporary to the researcher
(in the moment of the encounter with the work), the reality that is researched
lies in the past. Both Riegl and Panofsky were fully aware of the complexity
of the unique situation with which the art historian has to cope. This kind of
double-bound situation can be understood within the framework of a certain
realist type of neo-Kantianism – as developed by thinkers such as Friedrich
Herbart, Alois Riegl, Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert55 – which
insisted on both the necessity of transcendental schemes and a tenable concept
of reality. Though neo-Kantianism was an essential part of the establishment of
the Kulturwissenschaft, our interest here is not in the history of the neo-Kantian
movement, but rather in a certain reality that is acclaimed for monuments. In
the cases of Panofsky and Riegl, they sought to establish a positively induced set
of formulae that might serve as a ladder upon which the researcher climbs in
order to approach the past object. (And in both cases one can note the important
part played by the notion of ‘value’ in establishing this essential grammar.) Both
scholars, therefore, treated the transmission of the past reality of monuments as
a matter of a grammatical set of marks and formulae.
In an instructive paper on the problem of facsimile reproduction, Panofsky

approached the problem of the correct representation of a work of art.56 The
basic argument of this paper is that a copy of a work must not in any way
aspire to mimic the exact ‘natural’ apprehension of the original artwork. The
argument is very similar to that of the Kunstwollen essay discussed above, and
is relevant to the dynamics of transmission in the philological art historical
process. The mediating elements, their concrete materials and dynamics, wrote
Panofsky, are always included positively in the process of reproduction and must
not be removed, ignored or simply abhorred on the basis of a wish to preserve
an authentic experience (Echtheitserlebnis) of the work of art.57 The value of a
reproduction, according to Panofsky, is first and foremost epistemological: it
should give the researcher as good as possible an account (not an experience) of
the researched thing. Similarly, in his essays on monuments, Riegl endorsed the
use of reproduction instruments (Reproduktionsmittel) for historical research,
and understood these as working in the service of historical value.58 Rather than
basing art historical knowledge on an authentic experience of the original work,
and preferring this experience to any other, both art historians were highly
aware of the essentially mediated and constructed nature of their methods, and
of the manner in which any wish to represent the artwork should positively
take into account the means and mediums through which the work has passed
before reaching the art historian’s desk – i.e. the very age-value of the historical
investigation in itself.
Before returning to the question of realism in the history of art, in the next
chapter we will take a first look at the concept of figure and try to define its
position in relation to formal and plastic realities.
32
3
Forms and figures: Two fundamental modes of

pictorial production
L’objet figuratif et la forme constituent le fondement de toute interprétation

de l’art
Pierre Francastel
‘Figuration et Signification’1
Forms and figures within the pictorial domain
The present chapter sets out to distinguish between formalization and figuration,
a distinction that can be conceived as a foundation for theorizing the pictorial
domain of production. This foundation can be construed by way of integrating
the element of the figure into the understanding of what is usually referred
to as the ‘formalist tradition’, that is to say, methodological discussions of art
furnishing a unitary set of a priori characteristics of plastic and visual elements
– that same tradition, it will be recalled, of which Alois Riegl is considered one
of the founders and to which Panofsky’s work is usually taken to be opposed.
Intuitively one realizes that a figure is not identical with a form. In the first
place, a figure does not belong to the strict order of abstraction or general
ization, adhering rather to a concrete specific physical reality whose outlines
are portrayed in the process of the delineation of the figure. The specificity of
the figure makes it capable of relating to decipherable and identifiable themes,
genres and types, and thereby capable of drawing together plastic things and
literal topics, just as formalization, at least in its radical version, tends to take
one away from concrete themes towards abstract structures. The distinction
between forms and figures is a modal one;2 that is, both forms and figures pertain
to the pictorial domain. In this domain, nevertheless, forms and figures answer
to two distinct functions: just as forms belong to the transcendental-structural
foundation of an artwork (a level which for Panofsky relates to the level of art
theory3), figures result from the observation of specific realities in movement
– that is to say, they exist as historical realities. Riegl referred to this moving
reality, causing and forming the artwork, as ‘transitory nature’ (die vergängliche
Natur4), marking the foundation of the formation of the plastic arts. Forms,
on the other hand, belong to what Riegl called the ‘historical grammar of the
visual arts’, discussed in the previous chapter. Within the domain of pictorial
reality, forms and figures intermingle and each needs the other in order to
function as pictorial entities. In order for a form to be deduced, one must begin
with the figural data; on the other hand, figures effectuate mutations in the
formal schemes. If the form is traditionally associated with an inner idea,5 with
the structure of the work of art or its inner scheme (as will be shown in the
following chapters), then the figure pertains to the outlines of things, furnishing
their contours.
In so far as the formalist tradition, exemplified in the writings of Heinrich
Woelfflin or Clement Greenberg, has been concerned with structural differenti-
ations between various media on the basis of their respective dimensionalities,6
discussions and analyses concerning the figure are usually occupied with the
interstice between two- and three-dimensionality. The figure, therefore, binds
the various plastic dimensions rather than separates them from each other.
Figuration works as bridging between media, enabling passages between them.
The ‘matter’ from which the figure is furnished is the pictorial domain at large,
within which figures effectuate selections,7 distinctions and separations. In
what follows, we will focus on describing what happens when the figure unites
and distinguishes between the surface and the depth of the picture. And the
suggestion here is that this distinction is fundamental for the production of
figures.
In the history of the theory of art, one encounters a continuous discussion
of plastic works of art as effecting a perceptual movement between a flat-
surface sensuality (based on the sense of touch) and a sensuality capable of
spatial representation (based on the sense of sight). This binary thematics
appeared already in the eighteenth century, for example in Johann Gottfried
von Herder’s Plastik,8 and it continued to serve as a central theme in
nineteenth-century theory of art, for instance in Adolf von Hildebrand’s differ-
entiation between Nahbild and Fernbild, in his Das Problem der Form in der
bildenden Kunt of 1893,9 a differentiation that was adopted and developed by
Riegl in both ‘Naturwerk und Kunstwerk II’10 and Spätromische Kunstindustrie
(1901).11
Forms and figures: Two fundamental modes of pictorial production 35
The distinction between the haptic and the optic distinguishes two levels
within plastic perception: a basic, primary level generally associated with haptic
perception, and a secondary, ‘developed’ level associated with optical perception.
In some cases, such as in Herder’s Plastik, haptic perception is considered the
more truthful of the two, on the grounds of its primary, ‘simple’ character. In
all of the mentioned sources, sculpture is considered as related to the sense of
touch, just as painting is related to the sense of sight. On this basis, painting is
treated as illusionist to its very core, while sculpture is considered as adhering
to material reality.12 Indeed, it was the illusionistic ‘threat’ that Greenbergian
formalism disclaimed: instead of incorporating an illusionistic subject matter,
Greenberg wished painting to concentrate and incorporate its own sovereign
two-dimensional elements. Nevertheless the approach here will be to suggest
the following, cohering with earlier versions of formalism such as those of Riegl
or Focillon:13 the possibility of the formation of a two-dimensional surface
presupposes the conditions of foundation, matter and borderline, all three
originating in the extended reality of three-dimensional bodies. Thus form,
foundation, matter and borderline compose the figural dynamics. Riegl, in his
Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, insisted that ‘All things in nature possess
form [geformt]; that is, they extend themselves in the three dimensions of
height, width, and depth.’14 One can follow Riegl and suggest that the dynamics
of the possession of form – to have a form, to lose a form, to engage in a form,
to change form, etc. – belong to the figural mode.
Therefore, the duality here is designated as figural, the one taking place
between surface and depth is to be conceived from within the framework of
formalist discourse. Figural dynamics, so conceived, relate to the thematics of
the possession of forms: things having forms, bodies having forms, histories
having forms, but also thoughts having form. And figuration, it is here suggested,
should be located at the point of passage between the two modes of appre-
hension: surface-perception and depth-perception. Approaching the question
of the basic concepts of the history of art, Panofsky also based his analysis of the
entire structure of the pictorial arts on the movement between ‘values of depth’
(Tiefenwerte) and ‘values of surface’ (Flächenwerte), a movement that he called
the ‘contrast of figural values’ (Gegensatz der Figurationswerte).15 And, likewise,
in Panofsky’s description, surface and depth are intrinsically intermingled
within the pictorial domain, on the figural level of analysis.
Within a tradition of writing regarding the ‘grammar’ of the plastic arts,
figural dynamics conform to the understanding of the pictorial field as a domain
extending between the various dimensions of point, line, surface, space and
change. This should be differentiated from the more ‘purist’ formalist approaches
that developed ‘separatist’ methods, distinguishing between artistic media and
their basic characteristics, like those of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Wölfflin,
Greenberg16 or Adrian Stokes.17 Separatist formalism can be of help in our
endeavour to articulate what happens in the figural passage, when a perceptual
movement is formed from a certain surface to a certain depth by the gesture of
drawing a separating line. And it can also assist in defining the plastic elements
that compose situations of figuration. However, the less ‘separatist’ formalist
authors, who addressed a continuous, encompassing, multi-dimensional plastic
domain, traversing two- and three-dimensional realities – such as Riegl,
Focillon, Pierre Francastel, Kurt Badt,18 Rosalind Krauss and, indeed, iconolo-
gists like Warburg, Panofsky or Edgar Wind – are closer in attitude to the one
adopted here.
Figuration in the history of art
Before continuing to discuss the pictorial domain, we must note an analogy,

of central importance for the present work, between the figural dynamics of
the passage between surface and depth and the art historical drawing of a
connection between a work and its past. This regards the manner in which art
historians, in various ways, locate artistic works on some platform: context,
background, stylistic grid, etc. Art historical readings conduct a passage between
a delineated thing and its background or foundation, in the sense of its context,
cause or surroundings; in that sense, art historical inquiry can be considered
as participating in a figural dynamics. At a more basic level, in scholarly texts,
‘figures’ function as illustrations, referring the reader to the ‘work’ or the ‘reality’
being discussed in the text. Indeed, the clarifying, methodological function
of the figure was signalled already by René Descartes, who declared: ‘As for
figures we have already shown how ideas on all things can be formed by means
of these alone.’19 The suggestion here is that we take this epistemic instrument
seriously, and think its operative rationality within the art historical vocabulary.
The passage between surface and depth has further implications regarding the
bringing together of plastic and lingual activities. Indeed, it is probably not an
arbitrary fact that the scholar most attentive to the characters of the figure was
Erich Auerbach, a philologist rather than an art historian or critic,20 in as much
as it is very difficult to find a systematic art-historical treatment of the subject
of the figure, even though it is such an important part of the art historian’s
mundane work. The following section will look at the fundamental movement
of the plastic figural situation, that between a figure and its carrying surface.
The figural situation
When examining the place of the concept of the figure in the history and theory
of art, one confronts a rather scattered and fragmented corpus of evidence.
Rosalind Krauss, in her Optical Unconscious, gives an informative theoretical
account of the figure, locating it in a structuralist (‘Kline group’) scheme
in which the figure is posed vis-à-vis the ground. The dialectical dynamics
between ground and figure, Krauss argues, stand at the basis of modern, specifi-
cally avant-garde, pictorial production. Here are central passages from Krauss’s
description of how she arrived at this constellation of figure and ground:
I start with a square. In its upper right corner I write figure and in its upper
left I write ground. This […] is the universe of visual perception, the one
that is mapped by a distinction between figure and ground so basic that it is
unimaginable […] without the possibility of this distinction.
[…] Figure versus ground, and not-figure versus not-ground. But also, figure
versus not-figure and ground versus not-ground […] All around the square we
find the same thing stated over and over […] The opposition without which
no vision at all: vision occurring precisely in the dimension of difference, of
separation, of bounded objects emerging as apart from, in contrast to, the
ambiance of ground within which they appear […] The not-figure/not ground
of the ‘neutral axis’ is that peculiar conversion of empirical vision’s figure/ground
distinction that can be seen to have generated one modernist icon after another:
the grid, the monochrome, the all-over painting, the color-field, the mise-en-
abyme of classical collage […] The ground is not behind; the ground is what it,
vision, is […] Perception marks this figure that the eye singles out by labeling
it ‘pure exteriority’: set off from the field on which it appears, it is even more
surely set off from me, the beholder […] figure versus ground; ground versus
not-ground; not-ground versus not-figure; not-figure versus figure […] figure
in this case being the ‘same’ as not-ground […] The frame-within-a-frame is a
way of entering the figure into the pictorial field and simultaneously negating it,
since it is inside the space only as an image of its outside, its limits, its frame.21
Krauss uses the movement between a figure and its ground as the basis for an
understanding of modern art and its apprehension. Indeed, Krauss developed
her figure-ground scheme specifically as a criticism of Greenberg’s separatist
formalism, which identified a (painterly) form and the ground (Form =

Ground). The Kraussian scheme, by contrast, opens up a range of variations of
differentiation between the two pictorial elements. The figure becomes a key site
for the formation of the modern ‘optical unconscious’, which is concealed yet
determining in the formation of that which is visible; and this capacity of the
figure issues from its basic operation of framing. The modernist version of the
plastic domain, as described by Krauss, is a framing experiment. Frames instead
of simply forms: this is the heart of the Kraussian criticism of Greenberg’s
formalism. What is strictly ‘formal’ in Krauss’s construction is first and foremost
her structural instruments themselves.
Krauss’s account of the figure appeared two decades after the question of
the plastic figure had been raised in France, though she did not explicitly draw
on these earlier discussions. Yet, remarkably, both Krauss’s discussion and the
earlier studies by Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze emphasize the
dynamical nature of figuration and the dual structure of the figure between
surface and depth. About a decade before Krauss, Deleuze, in his 1981 book
examining the paintings of Francis Bacon (a modern ‘yet’ a figurative painter),
used the notion of the figure as a central element in his discussion.22 Deleuze
differentiated the figure from the ‘diagram’ (which is closer to what is meant
here by ‘form’).23 In Deleuze’s account, as in Krauss’s, the figure registers the
passage from a carrying surface to a fragment of it which is isolated and
delineated upon it (just as the diagram presents the range of potentialities of a
painting24). Deleuze himself refers to25 the suggestions of Lyotard’s earlier book
from 1971, Discours, Figure.26 If for Deleuze and Krauss the figure is more or
less identified with a form distinguished on a surface, for Lyotard, interested
above all in lingual articulations, the figure is a surface, which is not neces-
sarily apparent and approachable, but which enables and founds the appearance
of any comprehensible communicable unit. Nevertheless, all three theorists
concur regarding the connection between figural dynamics and the strata
of non-conscious processes of signification that are not expressible in literal
significations or in perceivable phenomena. Figuration contains a depth that is
non-literal or non-seen, a depth serving as the support of the artwork.
Figuration and meaning
The figure, thus, appears to be a mode whose capacity is to charge a platform

with meaning, by stressing or distinguishing a segment within that which is
being literally said or shown. As will be demonstrated in the following chapters,

this capacity of the figure is emphasized in Auerbach’s explication of the figural
structure. Auerbach posits two determining stages in the formation of figural
modality, or what he termed Figuraldeutung:27 Roman theory of rhetoric and
Christian theology. In both stages, all the non-literal components of a discourse,
for example, symmetry, repetition, rhythm, but also allegories, metaphors and
so forth, are considered as figural. While being a supplementary element of
discourse, the figure is also a carrier of meaning as it enhances the literal and
creates a rhetorical effect.
In Christian theology from the Church Fathers onwards, the figural
structure establishes a continuity between the Old and the New Testaments,
thereby informing history and supporting the Christian meta-narrative. In
both the Roman and the Christian versions, a figural situation is one in which,
within what is literally said, something else speaks: this is a latent, background,
unrevealed yet real, foundation of discourse. It is the surface upon which
the figure is located. When we encounter a figure, its ground simultaneously
comes into the framework of observation. In the following chapters, we will
attempt a more detailed definition of this ground, but in the first place it is to
be identified with the meaning of the figure. In some works, the grounding-
meaning of the figure is its materiality itself, as has been suggested by Adrian
Stokes, who claims that the art of carving distinguishes the matter from
which the figure is being carved: ‘Whatever its plastic value, a figure carved in
stone is fine carving when one feels that not the figure, but the stone through
the medium of the figure, has come to life.’28 In a still purer hylomorphic
vocabulary, emphasizing the intermingling of matter and form, Henri Focillon
stated that:
These materials [which are] well characterized, suggestive and even demanding
in relation to the forms of art, on which they exercise a sort of attraction, find
themselves in the forms of art, in return, profoundly modified […] the life of
matter is being metamorphosed.29
Through figuration, pictorial production transfigures material reality, and in

this case it is matter itself that carries the ‘meaning’ of the figure. The capacity
to refer to matter as meaning is, for us here, considered as figural, in the sense
that the basic function of the figure is to issue, to push forward or outwards, to
extricate or to deliver matter in a bounded way, as distinguished and delineated.
Therefore, our thesis is that ‘Figuraldeutung’ refers, in the most basic sense, to
the matter out of which and upon which the figure is delineated.
One can conclude from the discussion so far that the figural situation is a
split one, consisting of a movement between the form that is delineated and the
material reality of that delineated segment. It is this movement between the two
figural members, a movement between two synchronically existing realities,
that we refer to as figural dynamics. The figural situation is, thus, not expressive
of ‘formal values’, nor is it an incorporation of an explicitly lingual meaning
‘in’ the material or visual signs. Rather, as Pierre Francastel has suggested, ‘The
figurative sign is a meeting-place of values that are infinitely richer than we
imagine when we insist on considering them as equivalents to other forms of
signs or of images which are capable of replacing them.’30 The meaning of the
figural situation does not evolve from the fact that it signifies equivalent or
analogous signs. Rather, the suggestion here is that the meaning of the figural
situation is as material as it is historical, and, more explicitly, that this meaning
has to do with the past reality of the work.
Forms and figures
We are now in a position to distinguish more clearly between a form and a

figure. The notion of form, as we know, returns us to Plato’s ‘Forms’ (Eide), and
their function as prototypes for the existence of the world of phenomena. In his
1924 book, Idea,31 Panofsky emphasized the decisive importance of the notion
of the eidos in the development of artistic theory from ancient times at least
until the seventeenth century. Auerbach in turn stressed that the Latin figura
has to be distinguished from the Greek notion of the eidos. Several traits of the
figura are important and helpful in differentiating the figure from both ‘form’
and ‘idea.’ First, the figure is bound up with material reality, which means that
one can always find something concrete and identifiable as that to which the
figure points. The figure results from an adherence to a concrete fragment of
reality; as such it has always some connection, however minimal, with what
one regularly calls the figurative. Deleuze used the term ‘figurative’ to refer to
literal representations of specific identifiable ‘themes’, while the ‘figure’ happens,
according to Deleuze, when one surpasses the literal thematic representation
and moves towards painterly reality, towards the painterly fact.32 This, for
Deleuze, is what happens in Francis Bacon’s paintings, in which the figure erupts
from the carrying surface. But also earlier, in El Greco’s paintings, Deleuze finds
a situation in which figural plastics overcome the figurative tendency to depict
particular persons and events.
Second, unlike the eidos, the figure necessarily entails a dynamics, movement
and change, and it is therefore better to talk of figural dynamics, or figural
mechanics, rather than of the ‘figure’ as such. Figura has a special relation to
the Greek notion of plasis, or change of form. Third, though the figure is based
on a gesture of delineation, it implies some three-dimensional situation and
corporeality. Finally, a figure is a serial creature; the isolation of a figure on a
surface must be performed as a successive drawing of some line of duration and
continuation. Thus, a figure can be transfigured and configured in time, through
eras, mediums, traditions, etc. As such, the best Greek parallels to the Latin
figura are morphe and typos. And the discussion of the figure is best located in
a hylomorphic domain in which change of form makes for the reality of things.
Hence, one can differentiate between two basic pictorial ‘modes’: form and
figure. Where the form would be equivalent to a schematic prototype, to what
Riegl referred to as a grammar of the visual arts, the figure functions rather
as a serial manufacture of forms within a certain continuous field (matter,
territory, space, culture, language, tradition, etc.). Where an eidetic transcen-
dental platform includes abstract plastic categories, working as grammatical
prototypes (as for example the golden section, the ancient structure of the
Basilica, perspectival construction, the Holy Cross, pyramidal composition, or
indeed any other iconographical type), a figure expresses rather the deviation
between such a prototype and a specific work or monument, a deviation
embodying a movement back and forth from the supposed prototypical
schema. This figural movement cannot be registered except as a mutation in
an underlying eidos.
Francastel offers a precise definition of form in the plastic arts:
What constitutes the form of a work is not the details, but the ensemble […]
the form is not the sum of the details integrated in the ensemble which consti-
tutes the work, it does not pertain to the level of elements and of contents,
but to the level of principles, that is to say structures. It is identified with the
organizing scheme that suggests the assemblage of the elements, being chosen
as significatives not because of their conformity with heteroclite models, taken
from the outside, but in consideration of their relation with the specific rules
of the organizing scheme. The form is related not to the pulses coming from
the exterior world – the domain of perception – but to the principles of the
cohesion of the system – to a problematics of the imaginary.33
To paraphrase: the form of the work of art is its cohesive construction, acting as
an imaginary ‘totality’. At the same time, the figure embodies not the cohesive
construction of the work (which Francastel sees as ‘imaginary’), but rather is

fabricated into a series of various partial parts and elements. It may be that the
figure relates better to Aristotelian understanding of the notion of biological
genos (γένος), in the sense of a series or serial order of elements that are related
to each other by some shared traits or forms.34
A figure consists of at least two different realities, in which one of the
realities is considered as a formatted foundation, or surface, the carrying type
(proto-type), and the other is considered as the ‘theme’ or ‘subject-matter’ of the
picture, a type or a character. When the two realities are presented as pertaining
to a same common ground, to a same genos or genre, a figural situation is estab-
lished. Hence, a figural philology is essentially a history of genres, rather than of
styles. On the other hand, the eidetic prototype needs the figural series in order
to be realized, as Francastel explains:
Only the series enables the prototype to exist, without the series the prototype
will rest a ‘chef-d’oeuvre inconnu’. We do not propose to limit the history of art to
the (study of) prototypes, creators of forms. The recognition of the role and of the
history of the arts demands, at the same time, the study of series and of models.35
The figure registers the survival and mutation of forms from medium to
medium, age to age, ‘generation’ to ‘generation’, but also from a mind into a
matter and back again. It is the passage, or transmission itself, that a figure
captures. A few decades before Francastel, Henri Focillon dedicated a chapter
of his Vie des forms to the life of forms in the realm of spirit or mind.36 Focillon
writes: ‘to have consciousness, is to have a form’,37 and ‘To a certain order of
forms corresponds a certain order of spirits.’38 An elaboration of Focillon’s
terminology would suggest that to any figural series there corresponds a certain
formal order.
A work of art registers within itself not only a prototype or a model, like
schemes of harmony or of the presentation of space, but also a movement of
deviation from this model. A work of art is a result of the integration of subse-
quent and supplementary factors (those that are not known in advance and
are not declaratively or literally announced in manifestos or artists’ manuals)
into a process of the repetition and variation of a formal prototype. It is only
in a retrospective view of the artistic process that a figural structure can be
unearthed; and this structure relates not only to the engendering form but also
to the process of realization.
In the pictorial domain, where a form has the status of a model or a genre (a
‘grammar’ in the Rieglian sense) which is actualized and realized in the artwork,
a figure is determined a posteriori, after a form has been distinguished on a

platform. So, according to this definition, a figure is always formed in a process
of transfiguration, as a coexistence of different dimensions, entailing the passage
and survival of a form. For example, Riegl’s Spätromische Kunstindustrie should
be read as manifesting a figural form of rationality, as it deals precisely with
the continuity of basic formal relations of cohesiveness working to establish
relations between figures and their grounds, from architecture to relief, sculpture
to industrial objects. Indeed, Riegl’s formalism never separates form from space,
nor does it ever disentangle artistic form from concrete physical reality.
Following on from this, one can define figural space as a continuum of
dimensions overlapping and interpenetrating yet distinguishable. What is
usually referred to as ‘Riegl’s formalism’39 may be understood as essentialy
related to the issue of figuration. Figuration in Riegl’s writings relates to the
manner in which a form is distinguished from its surroundings or from its
carrying surface, a distinction made as a result of the encounter with things-
of-nature, mediated and regulated by the dynamics of haptic-seeing and
optic-seeing, of surface and depth. Figuration in Riegl is related to nature and
to art’s connection to reality,40 parallel to the figurative element included in
the figural situation, which designates the fact that figuration adheres first and
foremost to corporeal concrete reality. According to Riegl, it is because nature
is found in constant movement, is never as a priori eidetically organized as the
human mind wishes it to be, that man has recourse to his productive plastic
capacities, arranging nature according to forms and borders that appease his
senses, according to his needs and goals. And the figure, at its core, is a border,
a separation of a place, a movement of distinction, in which an object is located
within its surroundings.
What Focillon called ‘the world of forms’ can then be understood as
embodying a figural web, encompassing the plastic passage from two-dimen-
sionality to three-dimensionality and back again, building up the complex of
dimensionalities into historical reality itself, built out of forms and deployed
and explicated into space and time. In Focillon’s account, forms are inherently
attached both to matter and to movement. As he says, ‘Forms, in their various
states, are in no way suspended in an abstract zone, above the earth, above man.
They mingle in life, from which they come, translating movements of the spirit
into space.’41 Forms are then, in Focillon’s view, intermingled with life, and they
necessarily participate in a dynamics of transference. In other words, by and
through the process of the translation and transmission of the model into its
concrete manifestation, figures are created.
In his Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei
und Bildhauerkunst (1755),42 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, mentioned in the
first chapter as one of the pioneers of the relation between philology and art
history, discussed Michelangelo’s technique of transferring a small model into a
full ‘Figur’.43 In this process, which Winckelmann reconstructs by following the
writings of Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo used a quadrate container of water with
a scale of heights of the water level, in which a small model, the prototype, was
set; then, level by level, water was poured on the model, allowing Michelangelo
to capture and transfer, slice by slice, as in a topographical map, the exact
extension of his model and its inner variations, thus transferring, gradually, the
relation between the model and the container to the full-size sculpture. Here
Winckelmann describes a process of the transmission of forms, from one matter
to another and from one scale to another, in a process performed through
the delineation of silhouettes and their relation to the frame of the container.
According to this reconstruction, what enabled Michelangelo to make the trans-
ference of a model from scale to scale and from matter to matter was a figural
situation: a delineated surface within an encompassing frame.
From the plastic to the pictorial
The domain of pictorial production not only forms part of the domain of
human production at large, but also participates in the plastic domain, a domain
that was recently underlined most notably by Catherine Malabou.44 Human
production includes modes of production that are neither pictorial nor plastic,
for example literature or music. Yet art of any media engages with the plastic
mutation of reality and the ways in which things are distinguished from that
which surrounds them. It is necessary then to say a few words about what is
understood here by ‘plastic’. Plastic production is a production of space through
space; as Pierre Francastel wrote in 1965: ‘All the plastic arts are the arts of
space […] every plastic sign is, as a consequence, spatial […] it is therefore
important to study the plastic form in the function of the notion of space.’45
In the German tradition of art theory, at least from Herder’s in the eighteenth
century up to Badt’s ‘Wesen der Plastik’, ‘Plastik’ is used in a more limited
manner denoting specifically sculptural, three-dimensional works. The present
work, however, refers to the ‘plastic’ in the more general sense pertaining to the
extensive (spatial) dimension of creation. In this sense plastic things are the
spatial foundation of optical perception. This was also the opinion of Kurt Badt’s
‘Wesen der Plastik’ from 1962.46 In this essay, Badt concentrated on the place of
sculpture, the creation of ‘stereometric bodies’ (stereometrische Grundkörper47),
as fundamentally decisive for ‘plastic life’ (plastischces Leben); nevertheless he
emphasizes that the discussion regarding the plastic domain pertains also to
painting and to the other ‘visual’ arts. The word ‘plastic’ is derived from the
Greek word πλάξ, meaning surface, plate or level; πλασις comes from the verb
‘to form’ or the noun ‘figure’, and πλάστός means ‘formed’ or ‘fabricated’, mostly
in soft or elastic matter like clay.48 Plastic action means causing a change in a
given material capable of receiving and absorbing that change. It is a movement
(performed or initiated usually by a hand or an arm of some sort, as Focillon
emphasized49) by which a piece of material acquires a shape, a form, through its
movement with other or more material. In Roman times, Pliny the Elder in his
Parva Naturalia, book 35,50 discussed the invention of the plastic art (plasticen,
plastae) based on moulding in clay. His story goes back to Butades, a potter
from Sicyon, at Corinth, who had a daughter,
who was in love with a young man; and she, when he was going abroad, drew in
outline on the wall the shadow of his face thrown by a lamp. Her father pressed
clay on this and made a relief, which he hardened by exposure to fire with the
rest of his pottery […] because of Butades modelers get their Greek name of
plastae.51
This gives us a useful hint as to what is at stake in plastic figuration. If one

follows Pliny’s text, then the plastic arts appear, as was suggested above, in the
process of passage between two-dimensional drawing and three-dimensional
sculpture: from the drawing of the silhouette of the departing young man to
the making of the relief by the Corinthian father; from the manner in which
the hand traces the borderlines of the thing to the three-dimensional sculpture.
Herder’s Plastik, as mentioned above, gives sculpture precedence over painting,
because it is based on touch and therefore on truth rather than on superficial
appearances. For Herder, form is connected to the sense of touch and to
rounded things, more than to surfaces and the sense of sight:
Sight reveals merely shapes, but touch alone reveals bodies […] What is light
able to paint upon our eyes? That which can be painted: pictures [Bilder] […]
But they can only draw what is there – a surface, the most diverse visible objects
ranged alongside one another. Things lying behind each other, solid, heavy
objects can no more be given to the eye than the lover concealed behind a
hanging or the miller singing away in his windmill can be painted on a canvas
[…] Every object reveals just so much of itself to me as the mirror before me
reveals of myself. That is, the figure, the frontal aspect. In order to know that I
am more than this I must employ my other senses, or deduce that there is more
by means of ideas.52
What interests us here is the passage between the figure and the body; the
manner in which the flat delineated surface receives its reason and meaning.
Further on in Plastik, Herder asks: ‘Is it not our plastic sense that enables us
to transform the line back into a body, the flat figure back into a rounded and
living form?’53 Therefore, according to Herder, and similarly to Pliny, it is the
assignment of the plastic arts to ‘return’ that which is perceived as a flat image
into a full, tangible bodily figure.
Adrian Stokes suggested a similar differentiation between moulded and flat
plasticity in the twentieth century. He distinguished between moulding, aligned
with plasticity, and carving. Where moulding consists basically of adding,
pushing and squeezing a material, carving consists of severing, by a cutting
gesture, from a given surface, accentuating and realizing the matter’s own spatial
existence. As Stokes writes:
One can say at once of modeling forms (as opposed to carving forms) in the
widest sense, that they are without restraint: I mean that they can well be
the perfect embodiment of conception: whereas, in the process of carving,
conception is all the time adjusted to the life that the sculptor feels beneath
his tool. The mind that is intent on plasticity often expresses in sculpture the
sense of rhythm, the mental pulse. Plastic objects, though they are objects,
often betray a tempo. Carving conception, on the other hand, causes its object,
the solid bit of space, to be more spatial still. Temporal significance, instead
of being incorporated in space, is here turned into space and thus is shown in
immediate form, deprived of rhythm. Modeling conception, untrammeled by
the restraint that reverence for objects as solid space inspires, may turn to many
kinds of extreme.54
Stokes expresses an opposite position to that of Herder quoted above: whereas

Herder affiliated spatiality with rounded sculpture, Stokes affiliates spatiality
with carving, which always retains some connection with frontal surfaces. Is
Stokes’s distinction between moulding and carving, which allows only the
former to be considered as ‘plastic’, acceptable? And can one, indeed, accept
the separatism of Herder regarding painting and sculpture? The aim of the
present work is to articulate by means of figuration the meeting point of these
two plastic procedures: moulding and carving – which is also the meeting point
of a technique of working with lines and surfaces (carving) and a technique of
working with lumps and stains (modelling). Plastic reality is a ‘well’, piercing its
way deep into corporeal matter, from which one may draw the pictorial potion,
quenching the thirst of thought. In the present work, it is less the sheer possi-
bility of the matter to be formed and more the manner in which figural activity
produces both things and meanings that lies at the heart of the discussion. In
other words, at issue here is the pictorial domain of production. But can a plastic
pictorial figural dynamics be integrated into the sciences of history, into the
humanities? The next chapter explores the ways in which plasticity and pictures
inform and shape historical meaning.
48
4
Pictorial validities in art and history
The present inquiry proceeds now to a comparative reading of two relatively

early essays by Erwin Panofsky and Erich Auerbach: Panofsky’s Idea,1 published
in 1924, and Auerbach’s ‘Figura’,2 published in 1938. Both essays are experiments
in constructing an apology for the pictorial and its epistemological capacities,
thereby posing iconophilic agendas to the humanities. While the last chapter
of this book will address the relation of iconology to iconoclasm and iconism,
this chapter examines the relationship between two concepts, idea and figura, in
terms of the different kinds of realism to which both point. Both Panofsky’s and
Auerbach’s texts can be understood as engaging in an implicit semi-iconoclastic
debate regarding the validity of the pictorial, and the manner in which the
pictorial domain is related to truth on the one hand, and to (historical) reality
on the other.
Michael Kelly has noted the dominance of iconoclastic arguments in
twentieth-century aesthetics.3 He shows how the source of twentieth-century
aesthetic iconoclasm is rooted in its uneasy relationship with truth, and argues
that ‘it thus seems that we must consider the option of dispensing with the
notion of truth when we think philosophically about art’.4 Panofsky’s starting
point in Idea was exactly the problem of the relation between truth and the
artistic image. And Auerbach’s ‘Figura’, as will be shown below, gives yet another
version of this relation. The issue of the relation of the artwork with truth can
be articulated in terms of the realist capacity of the image, i.e. in what sense do
pictures depict, represent, or present that which is real, not necessarily exterior
reality, but also the reality of ideas? One is bound to talk here about a crisis of
representation occurring throughout the twentieth century, not only in the arts
but across the humanities. Around the beginning of the century, theories of
art as well as the historical sciences found their depictions and representations
weakened by a historicist relativism lacking sound criteria of truth and reality.5
Jacques Rancière6 has argued that it was the ‘aesthetic regime’ created by
eighteenth-century German thought that led to the iconoclastic tendencies of
the twentieth century, in the following sequence: as the artwork was gradually
identified with the synthetic sensual viewing experience, the validity of the
affinity between a synthetic cohesiveness of impressions and the truth (either of
external things or of ideas) was weakened, being superseded by an accentuation
of the inner qualities of artistic products themeselves. Martin Jay has shown
that throughout the twentieth century an explicit unease (up to a ‘denigration’)
was expressed regarding the act of vision, widely defined.7 As part of this traced
narrative, Idea and ‘Figura’ both indeed examined the relationship between
pictures and truth, and while Idea reconstructed a genealogy of the problem,
‘Figura’ suggested a possible resolution. If in Panofsky’s Idea truth is presented
as the carrier of the value of the picture, then in Auerbach’s ‘Figura’ it is historical
reality which is presented as an instrument of validation.
Being based on a lingual practice, a philological understanding of the history
of art should entail a certain amount of suspicion regarding the image. As such,
it will be to some extent iconoclastic, in the sense that images are a necessary
yet not sufficient instrument to articulate truth. Byzantine iconoclasm, which
issued from the Hebraic prohibition on the production of images in the Ten
Commandments, was active mostly between the eighth and tenth centuries.
Within it one finds elaborate discussions of the status and the legitimacy of
the use of imagery, notably in religious practice.8 The second council of Nicea
(787) declared a renewed confidence in the religious icon, though iconoclast
controversies continued well into the tenth century.9 While the iconoclasts
condemned the production and the usage of imagery in religious liturgy, the
‘iconophiles’ (sometimes referred to as ‘iconodules’), among them John of
Damascus (645–749)10 and Theodor of Studion (759–826),11 produced written
defences of religious icons and images in general. The iconophiles insisted on
the pious character of the reverence of icons, and even declared iconoclasm
itself as heretical.12 The iconophile authors were careful not to argue for the
picture’s self-validity; instead, they examined and shaped the mechanics of
icon usage, enabling the icon to serve as a liturgical instrument, embodying
a distance between man and the divine.13 It was by way of a realist argument
of hierarchical distance between the prototype and the type that the icon was
re-evaluated and legitimized. A similar, balanced and cautious attitude to the
use of pictures can also serve a philological approach to the history of art.
An earlier ancient view of art exhibiting an iconoclastic tendency was, of
course, that of Plato. Panofsky opens his Idea with the Platonic disqualification
of produced mimesis,14 and goes on to examine the way in which this archaic
rejection actually established the history of the western theory of art and was
Pictorial validities in art and history 51
conserved by it. The tradition of art theory thus can be regarded as icono-
philic in nature, in the sense that it tried to come to terms with the Platonic
iconoclastic position. Panofsky’s Idea articulates the problem of the European
pictorial tradition in iconophilic terms, relevant to the discussion regarding the
heretical danger that is to be found in the image.
Based on the Platonic hiatus between image and truth and its neo-Platonic
healing, the iconophilic western theory of art insisted on the eidetic content of
artistic images. The discussion in Auerbach’s ‘Figura’, a decade later, displaced
the question of the eidetic contents of pictures onto the question of the plastic
mechanics of historical reality (geschichtliche Wirklichkeit).15 The figure, as
Auerbach describes its transmutations, has its reality neither in the εἶδος nor
in a schematic unity of possible experience and the transcendental ideas that
regulate it, but rather in the extension of the past itself, construed in terms of
rehearsal, restoration, narration and realization (Erfüllung).16
Panofsky’s Idea and the disclosure of the

iconoclastic structure
Michael Podro has referred to Idea as ‘a book which should perhaps be seen
as both a reflection upon [Panofsky’s] own thought and upon the past’.17 As
just mentioned, Panofsky organized the book around the Platonic iconoclastic
rejection of the produced picture, grounded in the transcendent status of the
εἶδος. According to Panofsky, Platonic truth is foreign to art (Kunstfremde),18
yet it is exactly this foreignness, according to his narrative, that served as the
subject matter for the entire history of the theory of art, from the Roman period
to the Baroque and up to the nineteenth century. Panofsky demonstrated that
throughout the history of the western theory of art, from Plotinus (c. 205–70)
to Gian Pietro Bellori (1613–96), the artwork has been valued as a mimesis of
eidetic truth by the (artistic) Idea. The question as to whether truth is located
in the soul of the artist, in objective reality, or in the art of the past, was
secondary to the central consistent argument underlying the development of
the European theory of art: what gives the work of art its value is its capacity to
imitate truth, via eidetic forms. Panofsky’s essay is concerned with the unending
task of reconciling art with truth, and the assumption of a Platonic schism
between the two is also the kernel for the Panofskyan iconophile argument.
Panofsky traces the historical transmutations of the relation between the plastic
picture (plastisches Bild) and truth, incorporated by the artistic Idea. European
theory of art used the concept of the Idea as the bearer of the original Platonic
cohesiveness-of-strangers between art and truth. One should note that the
Greek language differentiates between eidos (εἶδος) and idea (ιδέα), and this
difference marks the same foreignness that Panofsky discussed: where eidos
denotes absolute and eternal forms, ‘idea’ denotes apparent manifestations of
these forms, for example in beautiful harmonic relations. Next in this etymo-
logico-ontological chain lies Eydolon (εἴδωλον), which denotes the illusionist,
imaginary, deceiving, idolatrous appearance.19 The development of this Platonic
topos in the western theory of art, in Panofsky’s version, culminated in the possi-
bility of a Kantian categorical set of plastic values, constituting the fundamental
concepts (Grundbegriffe) of the science of art, and replacing the function of the
classical artistic Idea.20 The Idea gives an artwork its value, even its ‘truth’ value,
but it also bestows value on the picture’s depicted reality. As we will see, this
truth-value of pictures also continued to interest Panofsky in his later writings.
Indeed, the rift between truth and art, exemplified by the problem of the
truth-value of art, serves as one of the central foundations of the history of the
theory of artistic production. But this rift is only the preamble to another crisis
Panofsky exposes, that between truth and reality.
Ideas between truth and reality in Idea
Panofsky’s Idea traces the process by which the ‘Idea’ became a validating
instrument for pictures: when artworks imitate an Idea, their relation to truth
is guaranteed. Gradually, during the sixteenth century, it had become clear that
the agent responsible for the imitation of the Idea was the creative artist himself
and that the Idea was immanent to the mind of this artistic creative subject. The
Idea, then, in Panofsky’s story, does not belong to ‘reality’ but to the creative
agent, be it the divine creator or the human artist.
An evident general theme of Idea, and of Panofsky’s earlier works in general,
is the ambiguous status of reality, or of historical reality to use Auerbach’s term,
in the process of researching works of art. Even when discussing the realist
tendencies of the Renaissance theory of art, Panofsky is interested more in the
way the schematization of reality finds its seat in the inner ideas of the artist, and
with the subject–object copula that is achieved through it, than in the notion of
reality itself and its relation to the creative act.
As is well known and will be elaborated upon later, Panofsky’s method had
strong connections with the neo-Kantian school. One of the typical traits of
neo-Kantianism is its positing of a schism between value and reality, which

also haunts Panofsky’s Idea. This schism is present in the work of numerous
neo-Kantian thinkers, for example in Heinrich Rickert, who was one of
Panofsky’s teachers in Freiburg,21 and in Bruno Bauch (1877–1942),22 who
was Rickert’s student in Freiburg, a decade before Panofsky.23 Both considered
values to be equivalent to Ideas. Rickert defined values as the subject matter of
philosophy,24 as well as of the cultural sciences (Kulturwissenschaften) at large.25
In 1926, shortly after Panofsky’s Idea, Bauch published a study of the notion of
the Idea in which he presented values as practically synonymous to Ideas in the
Platonic sense. The idea, according to Bauch, is a never-ending task (unendlicher
Aufgabe) of reaching the absolute value, the truth-value.26 Generally, one can find
in Panofsky’s, Rickert’s and Bauch’s writings a Platonic neo-Kantianism, whose
origin is to be found in the work the Marburgian neo-Kantian philosopher
Paul Natorp (1854–1924).27 From within the framework of this Platonic
neo-Kantianism Rickert, Bauch and the early Panofsky posited a rift between
truth, ideas and values on the one hand, and reality and things on the other.
This neo-Kantian dichotomy entrusted the humanities with the task of
describing the values that organize cultural entities by revealing their answer-
ability to underlying schemas and concepts of the ‘true’. In a similar manner,
in his neo-Kantian period Panofsky staked his claim for the establishment of
a critical system of judgement for the plastic arts, according to an autonomous
system of values.28 Art, as well as the science of art, in Panofsky’s view, has,
thanks to the work of Alois Riegl, finally given up the claim to represent exterior
reality, whether of things or of the ideas. The task, as the early Panofsky sees
it, is therefore to work through the epiphany of the transcendental categories
intrinsic to artistic production itself. For Panofsky at this stage, the history
of artistic production is a documented epiphany of the establishment of the
subjective (and nevertheless universal) schemes of plastic values. His early
project is thus bound up with the antinomy between the need to conserve the
generic problem of the relation between artistic production and truth, and the
demand to understand and evaluate artistic production in terms of its own
conditions of possibility, where also artistic ideas are to be relocated.
Idea should be considered as an iconophilic essay in two senses: first, it
effected a restoration of the history of art theory issuing from the Platonic
condemnation of the artistic mimesis of Ideas; second, it effected a primary
condensation of an ‘iconic’ approach to the humanities, in the sense that it
offered a narrative of the development of the relationship between images,
history and truth. Indeed, Panofsky’s overall project should be viewed as an
iconophilic one, leading to the iconological method, and fully manifesting

an iconophilic method for the humanities. But Idea is also a philological
experiment in the narration of the movement back and forth from the basic
prohibition, performed by the historical plasticity of the development of the
concept of the Idea. It is with the assumption of a neo-Kantian ‘redemption’,
achieved through a transcendental scheme of plastic values, that the iconophilic
gesture is achieved, and the philological process of the Korrektur of monuments
can be activated.
Auerbach’s ‘Figura’: Plasticity and history
Written by Auerbach during his exile in Istanbul, ‘Figura’ is similar in style and
scope to Panofsky’s Idea. Indeed, Auerbach refers to the latter work in a footnote
to the second part of his essay.29 Yet ‘Figura’ could be seen as implicitly standing
in a polemical relation with Panofsky’s Idea. The polemic has implications for
the understanding of antiquity, regarding the way to read neo-Platonism, as
well as for the problem of meaning in the humanities. ‘Figura’ undertakes both
a genealogical and an etymological survey of the unit of the figure. While both
Panofsky and Auerbach begin their inquiries with classical texts from Greco-
Roman late antiquity, the chronological borders of ‘Figura’ are narrower than
those of Idea: they extend from the first century bce to the late middle ages (the
so-called ‘proto-Renaissance’, taking place in fourteenth-century Italy), while
Idea continues into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, whereas
Idea preserves a problem originating in the Greek texts, Auerbach’s ‘Figura’
explores a conceptual scheme issuing from and essentially pertaining to Latin
civilization, the terrain defining Romance philology. Elsewhere in Auerbach’s
writings, especially in Mimesis,30 it is apparent that the realist impulse inherent
in the figura as he presents it already existed in the Old Testament, and that
the figure continued to play a central role in western art after the fourteenth
century, especially in the nineteenth century.31
If in Idea it is the topos of the ‘Idea’ that conserves through the ages the
‘eidetic’ status of beauty, then in ‘Figura’ the Idea of beauty is laid aside and
the εἶδος is replaced by the Latin figura.32 Figura is the etymological source
for the word Fictor, engendering also the terms factum, pictorial, factory and
fiction.33 The figura carries heretical connotations, as from the beginnings of
its deployment it was related to historical, dynamic material reality. Yet as
Giambatista Vico,34 Auerbach’s influential ancestor, had argued, in Latin the
words truth (verum) and fact (factum) are very close, if not synonyms.35 Human
truth, in Vico, as well as in Auerbach, refers to what man has made, and the
figura is the vessel in which the fact has been realized and has endured through
the ages. Otherwise put, the figure relates to a manufactured past, presented as
a series of historical realities. Thus, the term figura entails the restoration of the
alliance between the domain of plastic reality and truth, the same alliance whose
crisis Panofsky uncovered in Idea.
Auerbach argues that the essence of the shift between the Greek and the
Roman paradigms consists in the fact that the Latin word figura was used as
a translation for the numerous terms used to describe ‘forms’ in the Greek
language, and therefore does not have one single Greek source. It could be
used as a synonym for terms as schema (σχῆμα), plasis (πλάσις), morphe
(μορϕή), eydolon (εἴδωλον), eidos and tupos (τύπος).36 Therefore, the Latin figura
combined a plurality of Greek notions that differentiated between the versions
and nuances of ‘having a form’. The figure denotes that mobility of forms. In
its early manifestations the word figura, according to Auerbach, carried the
following meanings and connotations: sensuality, carnality, variation of form,
ornament, manner, aspect, corporality and transmutability. Notably, the early
usages of the word are dated to the same historical moment as the appearance
of philology itself, the first century bce of the Roman Empire, which witnessed
the passage from the Latin into Greek and back again. Auerbach begins by
exploring the ways in which the term figura appeared in the writings of Varro
(116–27 bce), Cicero (106–43 bce) and Lucretius (c. 97–55 bce) around the
first century bce, referring to the physical, concrete aspect of things.37 In Cicero,
one also finds the use of the term in the vocabulary of oratory and rhetoric.38 In
Quintilian’s writings (35–c. 96 ce), a substantial theory of the rhetorical figure
was developed.39 But according to Auerbach it was in the writings of the Church
Fathers that the full figural structure came into being. In the texts of Paulus and
Augustine the figural structure referred to the affinity between the New and the
Old Testaments.40 The New Testament rehearses scenes and elements of the Old
Testament, and the old is a ‘real prophecy’ of the new one. The use of figural
dynamics was a central tool for the clarification of this affinity and continu-
ation between the old and the new. For example, the biblical figure of Joshua is
considered a (pre-)figuration of Christ, but symmetrically Christ can become a
figurative couple of Joshua only if both are considered as historical figures, as
historical realities; therefore, even if there might be doubt regarding the reality
of the historical ‘person’ of Joshua, there is no doubt as to the past reality of the
historical figure of Joshua, which is validated by the figural realization. Thus,
Auerbach’s figura engages questions of the validating capacities of pictorial

reality: the validation of the reality of the past through the ‘Realprophetie’ of
figures.
In the full-blown version of the figural structure, then, historical reality is
understood as carrying a latent figurality, which can be recognized as such only
retroactively and as taking part in a series. As such, history is conceived as the
consistent realization (Erfüllung) of the synthesis between truth and the past.41
In so far as for Panofsky the past exists mainly as the place of the eruption and
survival of a generic question, for Auerbach the past exists as a pre-established
certitude, supporting the dynamics of history. When pictured as a series of
figural realizations, historical reality is portrayed as a point on an extensive
network of space and time (this spatial aspect of history was also important
for Panofsky). Drawing the connecting lines between the figural elements then
becomes comparable to the synthetic method as Vico understood it in relation
to his philology: ‘physical things will be true only for whoever has made them,
just as geometrical things are true for men because they make them’.42 And
therefore:
This Science [i.e. Vico’s New Science] proceeds exactly like geometry, which,
as it contemplates the world of dimensions or constructs it from its elements,
makes that world for itself, but the reality of our Science is as much greater [than
that of geometry] as is that of the orders which pertain to the affair of men than
that of points, lines, planes and shapes.43
In this sense, philology, employing a figural mechanics, portrays the past as a

res extensa, i.e. as physical extensive space. But where the science of geometry
analyses forms, Vico’s ‘new science’ synthesizes them.44 Vico’s new science and
Auerbach’s philology both conceive of the extended reality of the past with the
aid of synthetic operations.45 (The synthetic nature of iconology will be analysed
more thoroughly in Chapter 7.) The figure is located between the reality of the
past and the non-temporal truth. As such, the figure offers an alternative to the
terms symbol, allegory, image and representation, none of which is synonymous
with the figure, notwithstanding the fact that it can include elements from any
one of them. Auerbach explains that the figure is different from allegory, since
the referent of allegory is primarily an abstract moral dictum, deduced from the
allegorical relation, while the figure does not denote any moral deduction, but
merely a sequential affinity between two concrete historical realities.46 Likewise,
the figure is not identical with the symbol, because it does not manifest, express
or incarnate the presence of (sacred) truth. In that sense the figure is also to
be distinguished from the icon, as the figure is devoid of the magical and/or
divine force with which the symbol and the icon are endowed in their tradi-
tional definitions.47 In short, the distinguishing mark of the figure is its realist
character, which is neither strictly indexical nor symbolical.
‘Real and historical’: The figural mechanics of validation
As just noted, the full figural structure is first encountered in the texts of the
Church Fathers, wherein the figure receives its explicit historical sense: ‘Figura
is something real and historical which announces something else that is also
real and historical.’48 The figure is a plastic entity that remains real, specific and
concrete even when it is integrated into serial classifications. Its two elements
(the ‘pre-figure’ and the figure) always retain their specific ‘real’ character.
Furthermore, figures do not consist of one singular element, rather the figure
participates in a figural series, quasi-synthesizing at least two historical realities,
but not achieving a full comprehensive, organic synthesis, unity or Aufhebung.
As mentioned earlier, in Panofsky’s essay the concept of the Idea itself
behaves much like an Auerbachian figure: it is a plastic form, existing in
a dynamic of variation, anticipation and retroaction throughout the ages.
Panofsky’s philological excavation in Idea consists of a regression towards and
a restoration of a generic problem to be located in the past of the genealogical
story. The Auerbachian figural narrative, in its turn, adds to the conservation
of the generic problem the effective factuality of past reality. This fuller figural
mode appears a little later on Panofsky’s works.
Panofsky’s Idea implies a problematic attitude towards the notion of reality,
a notion that is one of the chief concerns of Auerbach’s ‘Figura’. For Auerbach,
real means first and foremost historical. This leads to the question of the realist
impulse in both essays, serving as their iconophilic kernel. The reading of
Auerbach suggested here differs from standard interpretations of his realism,
which see it as representational. The last (2003) English translation of the
subtitle of Auerbach’s Mimesis gives it as: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature.49 But the translation of ‘Darstellung’ as ‘representation’ is not the only
one possible; it would be better translated as presentation; and the translation of
dargestellte Wirkclichkeit as ‘representation of reality’, rather than as ‘presented
reality’ is questionable as well. The alternative translation of ‘Darstellung’ as
presentation would emphasize the dimension of production, design or display,
which, taking into account Auerbach’s Viconian attitude towards history, may
be more appropriate. By considering a produced or a displayed reality, one

emphasizes qualities of realization and putting into action, rather than those of
a testimony or the signification of a source external to the presentation itself.
Auerbach’s realism, we contend here, refers to the production of a transmission
of the reality of the past and not to its representation. One could say that, in
this framework, historical (and most certainly philological) knowledge is an
enactment of the past. Though Auerbach treated the figure mainly as a medieval
phenomenon, the history of the theories and deployments of figuration extends
well beyond the medieval period. This wider scope of the meaning of figuration
will be explored in the next chapter.
Reality, value and truth: Two versions of realist argumentation
Both Idea and ‘Figura’ employ realist argumentation in their restorative narration
of the legitimacy of pictorial signs. For Panofsky, Platonic realism paves the
way for a neo-Kantian reconstruction of the transcendental subject of artistic
experience; Auerbachs’ realism,50 on the other hand, is more Aristotelian in
emphasizing a relation between capacity (dynamis) and realization (energia) in
which the reality of the past has a pre-established validity that the figure realizes
and validates. In Auerbach’s method, historical reality behaves similarly to
Aristotelian nature, in which the τέλος (aim, end) of things comes to be realized
by the dynamics of change of place.51 This nature consists of the durational
movement between occurrence and rehearsal, consisting in a spatialization of
the historical temporal flow.
Michael Holquist has Auerbach’s realism as representational, but as argued
above this is does not fit well with Auerbach’s presentational motivation.52
Perhaps it would be better to describe Auerbach’s realism as a methodical
realism, to borrow a term from the neo-Thomist philosopher Étienne Gilson
(1844–1978).53 It is a methodical realism in the sense that it postulates the past
reality of a work as necessary for a specific philological inquiry; and this postu-
lated reality of the past is confirmed and validated through historical reality,
apprehended and maintained by the researcher. It is a realism whose reference
is the past reality of works, enacted, presented and realized by historical
reality. The methodic bias also points to the fact that it is a realism regarding a
specific problem, encountered by the researcher, demanding a certain amount
of regulation in order for the inquiry to proceed.54 Within the confines of the
examination of a specific problem, the reality of the past transmutations of a
work is validated by the very fact that a philological investigation is enabled.

Philological methodical realism asserts a certainty (certum) regarding the work
of past which is not an outcome of the latter’s representation, but rather of the
fact of its having been made. And, as suggested above, that sort of certainty,
according to Vico, supports the application of the geometrical method, i.e. of
conceiving of the past as a res extensa.55 Thus far, the Viconian and possibly
Aristotelian qualifications of the realism of the figural dynamics has been
suggested. It is a realism that may support an understanding of the iconological
method in art history.
Panofsky and Auerbach differ in the realisms guiding their work, a difference
exemplified in their relation to the Renaissance. Both scholars viewed Italian
humanism as establishing a liaison between picture and reality. Panofsky
emphasized the importance of early Renaissance culture in the fifteenth century,
in which authors such as Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) and Marsilio Ficino
(1433–99) theorized the procedures of the depiction of reality.56 For Auerbach,
it was during the fourteenth-century proto-Renaissance that figural realism
reached its apogee, most notably in the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri
(1265–1321).57 Auerbach and Panofsky shared an interest in the formation of
the Renaissance and its contribution to shaping the terms for the relationship
between art and reality. Panofsky analysed the ways in which the Renaissance
writers understood the picture as an imitation of reality (Nachahmung der
Wirklichkeit).58 He also argued that it was during the Renaissance that the
subject–object structure and the ‘Idea’ serving as its copula was established.
If Panofsky demonstrates how the Renaissance planted the seeds of a Kantian
transcendental dyad of subject and object, for Auerbach it is in the age of
the proto-Renaissance that one finds the seeds of modern realism. In Dante’s
Divine Comedy Auerbach finds the paradigmatic apogee of figural dynamics. In
the Divine Comedy the antique figure of Virgil appears in Florence, and leads
Dante into the depths of the moral-theological cosmos, populated with specific
historical figures. Auerbach observed that the ‘realist’ traits of Renaissance art
were not exclusively based on the depiction of the reality of the exterior world,
as Panofsky thought, but rather based on a certitude regarding the past reality
of figures, a certitude that served as the support for artistic production. Thus,
it is not pace Panofsky, the reality of worldly appearances or the truthfulness of
Ideas that is underlined by the Renaissance authors, but rather the validity of
the past reality of human works. Figural dynamics does not lead the artist to the
world through the picture; instead, it leads him to the produced past through
the figural series. Whereas Panofsky placed the Idea as a copula between
subject and object, Auerbach’s figura is a copula between two separate historical
realities, being both subjects and objects, to be read a posteriori as chained in
a series. The question of reality in Auerbach is first and foremost of a historio-
graphical nature.
Finally, Panofsky’s and Auerbach’s interest in the Renaissance also stemmed
from the philological tendency they shared with Aby Warburg, as will be
shown in the Chapter 6. Both were intrigued by the Renaissance rehearsal and
restoration of antiquity. The Renaissance itself, then, is examined as a figural
phenomenon, establishing a figural series between itself, Roman antiquity,
classical antiquity and, for Auerbach, also the Old Testament and nineteenth-
century literature. Notwithstanding the emphasis on Renaissance themes, the
long duration of the medieval age and its terms haunts the history of both the
figure and of philological rationality.
Iconophilic method
The readings in Panofsky’s Idea and Auerbach’s ‘Figura’ amount to the restor
ation of a latent iconoclastic debate within the humanities during the first half of
the twentieth century. Both express a concern regarding the pictorial, and take
upon themselves the task of justifying the use of pictures as cognitive agents. In
neither case, however, does the picture stand as a sovereign entity. In Panofsky,
the iconoclast rift between image and truth lies at the base of the western theory
of art; while Auerbach suggested an iconophilic alternative in which the figure
stands for the validity of past realities. In the Panofskyan version, we encounter
an approach to the plastic domain that is inherently epistemological: the work
of art is considered an agent of knowing. In Auerbach’s version, the structure
of remembrance and restoration is presented as preceding any knowledge. A
synthesis of the methods of Panofsky and Auerbach, and especially of their
approaches to the plastic domain, may pave the way for an iconophilic method
that promotes the possibility of that domain serving as a vessel for dealing with
the past.
In Idea, Panofsky deploys the iconophilic efforts of the history of the theory
of art, leading to a transcendental schematization of artistic production itself.
Auerbach, in his turn, suggests exchanging truth for factum and beauty for
character. Instead of opposing truth to reality, in Auerbach’s ‘Figura’ reality is
truth, inasmuch as we consider reality as that which has been made. Therefore,
the Auerbachian concept of the figura can be regarded as a response to
the iconoclast problem animating Panofsky’s reconstruction of the concept

of the ‘Idea’. The iconic tendency, originating in the Platonic-neo-Kantian
foundations of Panofsky’s early work, continued to be present in his later icono-
logical writings. Where Panofsky highlighted the eidetic in thought and in art,
Auerbach, for his part, was absorbed in the generic nature of history.
Finally, since throughout this chapter we have explored the possibility of
capturing truth from a picture, it will be worthwhile considering a model of
intuition, in so far as it relates to the kind of philological rationality elaborated
here. Intuition is here understood in its original meaning, as a mode of appre-
hension of the most basic, full and certain kind. Its first formulations were
those concerning the νοῦς in Greek philosophy.59 Every method interested
in reality must posit some kind of intuition that stands as its foundation of
knowledge. In the case of the present study, what is required is a concept of
philological intuition. To this end, we will work towards a synthesis of Idea
and figura. As will be discussed in Chapter 6, Panofsky used the notion of
‘synthetic intuition’ to refer to the basic gesture of the iconological operation.
In ancient philosophy, most notably in Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, intuition
(νοῦς) was understood as a pure, certain and replete kind of knowledge, the
knowledge of the forms.60 Based on the models of Idea and figura, we can
now identify two basic types of intuition acting in synthesis in philological
rationality, and thus sustaining philological truth: archaeological intuition and
historical intuition.
Archaeological intuition, whose basic type is to be found in Panofsky’s Idea,
digs out and conserves a generative problem: it aspires to contract a certain
chain of events and situations into a sole figure (such as the ‘Idea’ in Panofsky’s
essay), which it demonstrates can be found at the ground or origin – or better
still, as the cause – of the plural material. Panofsky’s intuition is archaeological
in as much as it is interested in the conservation of an arche (ἀρχή), a principle,
or a generative problem (for example the problem of the relation between
mimesis and truth). In this manner, for Panofsky (in Idea but also in his later
writings), the artwork has the character of a vera icona, embodying and thus
preserving an ‘Idea’. In this sense, archaeological intuition regresses towards a
generating truth.
Auerbach’s intuition, on the other hand, can be understood as primarily
historical, apprehending in the first place a synthesis between the past reality
of works and a truth that is ahistorical or radically exterior to history. Thus,
the artwork, for Auerbach, is not so much an icon as a relic, forming part of a
narrative series of realization that must be restored by the philologist.
A synthesis between archeological and historical intuition, conservation and

restoration, will take in the durational trail of a work. Archeological intuition
contracts and consumes an entire historical narrative into a sole generative form;
historical intuition, on the other hand, deploys a series of recollected characters,
figuring the variations and nuances residing in the philological series. The
synthesis of these two kinds of intuition produces a full philological intuition.
Philological intuition simultaneously compresses and deploys the past reality
of things made by man. Philology regresses backwards from an encountered
problem or detail in a work, in search of an articulation of the archaic moment
of generation. The following chapter will outline a unified theory of the notion
of the figure, which will account for both its philological and its plastic qualities.
5
Sub figuralitate historiæ1
Before continuing to explore Panofsky’s writings, we will attempt in this chapter

to draw up some guidelines for a conceptual model of figuration. The task is to
merge the two separate aspects discussed in the previous two chapters: on the
one hand, the plastic understanding of the figure, as found in the theories of
twentieth-century writers, such as Jean-François Lyotard2 and Gilles Deleuze,3
as well as in the work of art historians and theorists such as André Lhote,4 Pierre
Francastel,5 Louis Marin,6 Rosalind Krauss7 and Georges Didi-Huberman;8 on
the other hand, the literary-oriented understanding of the figure, as presented
mainly in Erich Auerbach’s essay of 1938, as discussed in the previous chapter.9
The lineage of the discussion regarding the plastic aspect of the figure, as we
have already seen, is rather scattered and unsystematic in comparison with that
occupied with the lingual figure and there is no single comprehensive study
on the genealogy of the figure as a plastic term. This chapter thus opens with
a summing up of what can be generally determined regarding the figure as an
atom of the pictorial domain, before proceeding to reconsider the lingual figure,
and finally trying to synthesize the two aspects of the figure into one compre-
hensive model that will further our understanding of philological rationality.
To begin then with the initial question: What is a plastic figure? As we have
seen, when one uses the term ‘figure’, or when one says ‘the figure of x’, or
‘y has a figure’, one in most cases refers to a situation in which there exists a
synchronous delineation of two surfaces, one containing, surrounding, envel-
oping or carrying the other.
Indeed, the determining factor in the figural situation is not so much the
similarity between the form of the background and the form that is drawn
in some manner within it, but rather the fact that one form encompasses and
contains within its borders another form. The special relation established
between the (at least) two delineated surfaces determines the figural situation.
As Rosalind Krauss has demonstrated,10 a figural situation involves a gesture
of framing, cutting-out, distinguishing an outline of a surface or a platform, a
form within a form,11 a form around a form; the ‘figure’ is always established in
a relation to that which is ‘not figure’, or ground. Therefore, figural dynamics
contains a bilateral movement from a form to a platform and back again.
Deleuze also emphasized the importance of the platform, which he called
‘l’aplat’ (translated into English as ‘field’), to the dynamics of the figure. For
Deleuze, writing about the paintings of Francis Bacon, the platform is one of
‘uniform and motionless color’.12 But in the version proposed here, the platform
includes essentially also the matter from which the work, and hence the figure,
is made.
In the figural kinetics, a ‘matching’ between a type and a prototype takes
place. In this process both parties, both contoured forms, can be considered
as each other’s beginnings (ἀρχή), in the sense that they mutually support
and generate each other. As was suggested earlier, this figural situation has
an affinity with the well-known fable regarding the invention of painting or
drawing related in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, which actually concerned
the origin of moulded figures.13 In this fable, a young Corinthian girl draws on
a wall the silhouette of her departing beloved, after which her father moulds a
relief of the young man’s figure in clay. Figural kinetics is a regressive, retrograde
motion of serial delineation. It is regressive, since its starting point is an image,
a reflection, a form, a picture, and the figural dynamics delineate the form’s
position, i.e. supply the form with a support and a place. The figural movement
is thus two-way: from the platform to the form, and from the form back to the
platform. For Deleuze, again referring to Bacon, ‘the movement of the figure
going towards the structure […] at the limit, tends to dissipate into the fields of
color’.14 The figure dissipates not only into the fields of colour, but also into the
material reality of the platform. This complements the neo-Platonic paradigm of
the form which is found within matter, being revealed, released and uncovered
by the artist.15 In the figural model, by contrast, that which is uncovered also
returns to that which carries it. The figural prototype is not the departing young
man himself, but the gesture of drawing his contours on the wall. The figural
series occurs when an affinity is formed between at least two delineated surfaces,
for example between the wall-painted silhouette and the moulded figure. This
iteration itself, when distinguished as such, generates a figural situation.
The figural dynamics produce a plastic definition in the sense of a distin-
guishing border (ὁρισμός), grasping the thing’s reality (ουσία), by supplying
it with a definition (λόγος). The plastic definition relates to moving bodies,
and delineates their outline (πέρας)16 at a given moment, isolating them from
their surroundings.17 In this way, the figural situation denotes the place (τόπος)
Sub figuralitate historiæ 65
of a thing. In his Physics, Aristotle defined the place as the inner surface of a
thing that contains another moving thing.18 The figure occurs at the borderline
between a moving thing and another thing through which the former passes.
The support, the ground or the platform could be considered a place of passage
for the moving body.
The distinction, the ‘isolation’, of the figured slice from its carrying surface
necessarily produces the effect of depth, involving a differentiation between a
front and a back, a stage and a back-stage, as we saw in the previous chapter.
Being involved in the production of material things, the figure is essentially
linked to corporeality (as Deleuze also emphasized19). This could consist in
gestures of production (drawing a line on a wall, cutting a material, etc.) or
other bodily movements that the figural gesture captures and registers. A third
material aspect of the figural plastic situation is the matter of the surface upon
or from which the figure is made: wall, paper, linen, etc. The figure’s corporeality
operates on the line of the contour, where the limits of a body or a thing are
drawn. Therefore, the figural place is the meeting place of at least two corpo-
realities: the body of the producer (e.g. the Corinthian girl) and the produced
thing (the line on the wall).
Rather than being an image, the figure is the surface upon which the
formation of images in enabled.20 The figure is the actual elementary gesture
of the production of an image and of imagination (Einbildungskraft). It is
therefore a concrete material reality, enabling and supporting the synthesis of
the imagination. Because it exists primarily as corporeal and only subsequently
as a sensed image, the figure itself does not have to be actually seen in order for
it to be real; hence approaches to art that base the figure on sensual experience
are not pertinent to our inquiry. Note also that in the Auerbachian under-
standing of the figure, the figural relation (like that between Joshua and Jesus)
exists hidden in the womb of history; it is the task of man to uncover the figural
message and make it distinct.
The figure is posited where the synthetic possibility of the imagination is
enabled: where Descartes located the sensus communis and Kant what he called
the ‘figural synthesis’ (figürliche Synthesis);21 this will be discussed further in
Chapter 7. Both Descartes and Kant isolated this figural surface upon which
the primary inscription of the contact between humans and things is registered
before it becomes a differentiated sense-perception phenomenon. The figure’s
matter is an inscription of an elementary, corporeal memory.
Though it involves separations, distinctions and delineations, in order to
conceive of a figure one must also effect a synthetic operation, binding and
holding together both separated forms. The centrality of this synthetic intuition
to the practice of iconology will also be discussed in Chapter 7.22 Synthetic
intuition conceives simultaneously the identifiable form and the surface upon
which it rests. It is a delineated territory within and upon a certain surface.
The figural line portrays the inner boundary of a surface. In the case of the
silhouette, the presence of the projected thing or body is denoted by the figure,
though this thing or body is not entirely present in the delineated figure itself.
As Pascal put it in his Pensées, ‘Figure porte absence et presence’:23 Figure carries
both presence and absence. Even when it contains reality, some part of this
reality is missing or covered, that is to say not directly attainable. Indeed, figural
realism is a partial realism, in the sense that only a part of the reality of the thing
is maintained by the figure. The intuition that captures the figure works in retro-
spect, after a body has moved, and after this movement has caused something
else to move; it is an anamnesic process, a mnemonic operation whose task is to
discover a certain movement occurring in the past.24
The figure is not exactly an image then, but, as suggested in Chapter 2,
neither is it exactly a form. A figure is not a form in the sense of an Idea or an
εἶδος; rather, the figure is the condensation of a transmission of a form. A figure
is produced when a form is transfigured, that is to say moved, transferred, from
carrier to carrier, from vessel to vessel, as in the transfiguration episode in the
New Testament, when Christ is transfigured into a vision in the sky before the
eyes of his followers (Mt. 17.1-9; Mk 9.2-8; Lk. 9.28-36). Returning again to the
Aristotelian terminology, the figure pertains more to the genre (γένος) than
to the form (εἶδος) of a thing or a work and also to genre in its most general
Aristotelian definition,25 as a continuous series of realizations of a certain form.
It is closer to the morphe, more than to an eternal Eidos, as it is always bound
up with matter and can, therefore, cohere within a hylomorphistic framework.26
To return to Pliny’s fable: when the amorous girl draws the line on the wall,
what is retained is the past reality of her departing beloved. The girl’s father,
according to the legend, then moulds in clay the young man’s figure after the
outline or the contour on the wall. While passing from platform to platform,
from place to place, the figural delineation proceeds not only forwards in time,
but also backwards, not only extending, but also contracting and not only
expanding, but also sinking downwards into the depth of that which was, that
is to say into the reality of the past. The figure testifies to the shape of a past
action. A bodily movement acted and changed a thing (a wall, clay, etc.), thereby
producing a work. It is this productive bodily movement, this gesture, that the
figure captures: the outlines of a movement.
The figure and the reality of the past
We turn now to consider the ‘lingual’ understanding of the figure, a field that,
at first glance, seems quite distant from the discussion revolving around the
plastic figure. But only if it proves possible to merge the two poles of the figural
structure, the plastic and the lingual, can we begin to conceive of a figural
philology that would synthesize thought, history and plasticity and the other
name, which could be iconology.
As mentioned earlier, Auerbach returns to first-century bce Rome in order
to deploy his genealogy of figura. In the Roman texts, figura appeared for the
most part as a rhetorical term, attesting to language’s capacity to persuade and to
claim validity.27 From Roman times to the twentieth century, we find a consistent
affiliation of figural persuasion with the formal mechanics of language, such as
repetition, metaphor and phrasing, i.e. linguistic style, as distinguished from
the literal, semantic meaning of a linguistic articulation.28 These are the famous
rhetorical tropes, among which the figure is central.29 This non-literal, but rather
dynamizing character of the figure appears in seventeenth-century French
theory of rhetoric and linguistics, as well as in the twentieth century in the
elaborations of Gérard Genette (b. 1930).30 Along with its rhetorical character,
the figure also assumed theological meaning in Christianity. To revisit what was
presented in previous chapters, in the figuration principle of Christian theology,
two separate and concrete historical realities are connected retroactively as
realizing the same truth.31 The figural regression enables one to read the past as a
‘Realprophetie’, in which an ancient historical reality is considered as analogical
in some way to a later historical reality. This post-factum repetition supports
and validates a theologically acclaimed truth, for example, Christian salvation.
Yet the analogy between Joshua and Jesus, for instance, involves neither a
similarity in their concrete appearances, nor in their ‘inner forms’ (e.g. the fact
that both were human beings); rather, what binds them together into a figure is
an aspect of their character, related to their actions. Auerbach insisted that the
figural unit preserves the difference of the two concrete realities connected. The
figure repeats a manner of action (a modus operandi) in two realities separated
in time and space. The figural kinetics are a repetition of a gesture, like writing
or drawing on a wall, for example. What is figural is not the repetition of that
which is drawn (or represented), but the drawing-gesture itself, i.e. it is not the
repetition of a depicted theme (which will become the subject of iconography),
but rather of a set of gestures regarding a theme. The delineation of the figural
movement is possible only in retrospect. The next step, therefore, is to examine
what this figural kinesis, as a regressive delineation, has to do with historical

reality, in order to understand how the plastic and the lingual aspects of the
figure might be unified.
Figural and historical meaning
What then might be a synthetic model of the figure that would account for both
its aspects? The relationship between the two surfaces existing in the plastic
figure, the form and the platform, is analogous to the dual structure of the figure
as Auerbach presented it. Both cases involve an affinity between two realities,
an affinity that sustains a bilateral causation. In this causal relation both the
respective parties can be viewed as prior to and also subsequent to each other.
In order to conceive of the relationship between the two realities one should
proceed in a regressive movement, in which one reality is considered as the
cause or the beginning and the other as a result or a product. It is similar to
the relation existing between a body and clothing: at the same time as a body
is a carrier of clothing, that clothing also ‘defines’ the borders of the body. The
platform in the plastic figural structure, also designated above as the prototype
(or arché), is analogical to the past historical reality in Auerbach’s account of
the figural structure. Retroactively, this historical platform is registered and
realized as the carrier of the mark of the type. The form (or the type in the
plastic model of the figure) is analogical to the later object, which is usually what
the researcher (the philologist, iconologist or art historian) encounters: a text, a
work of art, a monument, etc.
When engaging in a philological inquiry, one starts from the type, seeking to
read it, name it, define it. Analogically to the paradigm of the Corinthian girl,
the desire to read originates in the possessive impulse, the wish to protect the
work from sinking into the depths of forgetfulness.32 But in order for the work
to remain, a regressive procedure of determining a prototype is required – a
prototype that will serve as the work’s cause, surface, platform or arché. The
prototype functions as a background, carrying the type and and making it
meaningful. Figural meaning is, therefore, to be found in the form of a making-
gesture that is repeated in history. The figural procedure begins with a detail,33
isolated within an encountered work. In order for the researcher to read a
text or a work regressively, she has to encounter some problem or detail that
demands to be defined (or better defined). Auerbach referred to this detail as
the philological Ansatz,34 an element that serves as the starting point, initiating
the philological restoration, but which also serves as the Archimedean point of
the inquiry. As will be examined in the next chapter, Aby Warburg’s art history
was highly focused on the demands posed by the incomprehensible details
of artworks, such as floating garments or background allegorical elements in
paintings.35 Without the detail as a starting point, there could be no philological
thought process. It may be a part, a corner of the image, which somehow appears
as unreadable and, therefore, demands the activation of the ‘philological gaze’. It
is the detail that is not entirely ‘in its right place’. Something that must be better
located, better placed, better defined, better read. In order to be able to read it,
the philologist must discover the affinity between the fragment and a former
historical reality, giving them a redefinition or an outline, a place in history.
Indeed, for Pascal,36 but also in the canonical Christian structure, the figure was
understood as a message or a code, which can be read only retroactively, with
the aid of another historical reality. History then could read itself backwards
through the figural structure. In this sense, the later historical reality is read by
the older one, at the same time as the older serves as the delineator of the later.
Just as the historical reality of Jesus helps us to read anew the figure of Joshua,
so, too, does the reality of Joshua affirm the arrival of Christ, as if to say ‘the
truth was already there, although we did not yet see it clearly’.37 Thus, in history,
nothing is hidden; everything is revealed, reachable, a ‘donnée immediate de
la conscience’38 as Henri Bergson would have called it, only that one must,
in response to the shame of a certain detail, reforge the instruments that will
be proper and especially adjusted to its reading. It is because of the inherent
partiality of the human reading ability that the figure appears in the first place.
The elastical pictoriality of the res extensa, arriving for us, retrospectively, in the
figural mode, suggests the principle of a philological rationality and method.39
Yet one has to bear in mind that the two realities never unite completely in the
figural situation. As Genette observed, the figure always includes a gap between
the letter and the sense (‘entre le lettre et le sense’)40 or between the signifier and
the signified (‘entre le signifiant et le signifié’).41
One of Auerbach’s important arguments is that the realism of the figure
is related to the presentation of the past. The realism of the figural dynamics
appears when a certain fragment of the past is heightened and sustained
by a non-temporal dogma, treated as a truth for as long as it can sustain a
tenable thesis in the course of a certain inquiry. A methodical realism such
as is attempted in the present study is one in which the past reality of a work
is assumed as certain and real, as a factum, but only in so far as it is part of a
certain line of inquiry. Methodical realism would refer first and foremost to the
reality of the Ansatz: the specific detail of the work that demands definition,
inaugurating the methodical process. It is an element of a work that may appear
to be part of something else, to belong to another work, and that, therefore,
needs be researched and distinguished in the depths of historical space. Earlier,
we mentioned Étienne Gilson’s 1935 notion of ‘methodical realism’,42 which
posits the apprehension of things together with the problems pertaining to them
as prior to any reflective process. Methodical realism has a Thomist, Aristotelian
origin, assuming not only the reality of things and their movements, but also
the ability of the mind to figure and formulate these moving things, even if not
to ‘represent’ them to their fullest extent. Gilson describes his realist position
thus: reality is, only when things are known. Or, when a mind knows a thing,
there is reality. With regard to the historical inquiry into produced things, we
could say: only from within the limits of a certain problem, question or inquiry,
can truth – historical, philological truth – be distilled. The reality contained
in the figural procedure is the reality of the knowledge of a work’s principle
of production or modus operandi, which is immediately given to us when we
encounter the work. The truth that the figure entails is that which is contained
in the very act of distinguishing a detail from a work. Methodical realism then
possesses, validates and affirms the reality of works.
The ‘matter’ (hyle) from which the figure is made, according to Auerbach,
is ‘historical reality’ (Geschichtliche Wirklichkeit);43 and in a complementary
manner, historical reality possesses figural reference (Figuraldeutung).44 The
realism that is to be found in the figure is historical in nature.45 But what is the
nature of the affinity between the reality to which the figure points and the truth
for which it is supposed to stand? And how should we understand the term
‘historical reality’?
In regard to the figural dynamics we can differentiate between three terms:
historical reality, historical meaning and past reality. What Auerbach calls
‘historical reality’ can be understood as a synthesis of the historical meaning
and the past reality of the work under discussion. Historical reality is to be
distinguished from historical meaning, which can be understood as the return
of a mode of action. Historical meaning is a realization (Erfüllung, in Auerbach’s
terms) of that mode of action. Better, historical meaning is a re-realization
– a repeating realization. If, in an Aristotelian hylomorphist sense, every
production is a realization, then we can return again to the terms of nineteenth-
century philology and say, after Boeckh and Usener, that ‘Philologie ist […]
Reproduktion des Produzierten’,46 and determine historical meaning as retro-
poiesis. It is the realization of a knowledge that has been latent in the action of
a certain character, a realization that is the outcome of the fact that an action
is identified as repeated in two distinct realities that together form the figure.
Historical meaning presupposes the past reality of works, the fact of their
having been produced in the past and of their endurance through the ages.
The figure takes its validity from the assumption that at least two works were
produced. Joshua and Jesus both already were, that is the status of both is a past
status.
Figuraldeutung refers to reality as a past reality and is based on an intuition of
this past reality. The past reality of the work is that which permanently enables
a return and rehearsal, enduring through the different presentations that have
returned to it and restored it. Following the Viconian principle adopted by
Auerbach – that man can know only what he has himself made47 – it is the past
reality of works that sustains the certainty that can be achieved in the figural
practice of philology. The repeating activity that is distinguished in being
rehearsed is the historical meaning of the work; and the past reality of the
work is the durational sequence of rehearsals of the prototype upon the grid
of historical reality. Finally, the philologist himself rehearses what repeats in
history, continuing the dynamics of realization.
Aristotelian terminologies can also help in trying to pinpoint the realism
of the figure. The latter is a result of a search for definition and delineation,
a classification of a thing or a work. Its best parallel is the morphe (μορϕή),
which is defined as that which limits the moving matter (ὕλη). Things or bodies
are cohesive, hylomorphic units of morphe and matter.48 The two historical
realities in the figure serve as each other’s definition: the later historical reality is
considered as the essence, as that which entails the important part of the earlier
reality, just as the earlier is considered as a partial presentation of the later. Both,
then, should be considered as standing in an analogous relation to one another.
But what is the precise nature of this analogy?
It is difficult to determine exactly the nature of the definition that the figure
gives: certainly, it is not a definition at the level of the Eidos. Sometimes, it
contains an analogy in the name (such as Jehoshua–Jeshua), which will point us
in the direction of a paronyme (an analogy between two terms resulting from
an irregular change of a trait);49 indeed, many philological inquiries are actually
based on the structure of paronyme. Certainly, the figural analogy always refers
to specific cases from the textual history, but it seems to me that in most cases
what is repeating in the figure is a mode of action, a form of comportment,
which is presented as similar or comparable. The two realities that combine in
the figural unit are often personal characters, and what establishes the figural
sequence between them is the structure of the example: as a X […] so b X: as

Joshua ushered the people of Israel to the promised land, so Jesus will bring his
followers to the gates of celestial Jerusalem. In any case, figural reading should
supply clarity and simplicity, helping to introduce order into the chaotic hyle of
history. Descartes, in his Regulæ, recommended the use of figures in his method
for reaching the truth of things, since: ‘Nothing is more readily perceivable
by the senses than shape [figura], for it can be touched as well as seen […]
[T]he concept of shape is so simple and common [communis & simplex] that
it is involved in everything perceivable by the senses.’50 Descartes thought
that figures could also account for non-geometric or non-quantitative things,
for example the difference between colours. He concluded that ‘It is certain
[certum] that the infinite multiplicity of figures is sufficient for the expression of
all the differences in perceptible things [rerum sensibilum].’51
Figural realism is twofold: on the one hand, there is historical meaning,
coming from the direction of the doxa (the philologist’s preconceived thesis);
historical meaning, thus, makes distinct the rehearsal of traits in history that the
figural structure weaves. On the other hand, there is the past reality of works
which one must suppose in order to be able to activate the figural philological
process. Figuraldeutung construes a historical reality synthesizing historical
meaning and the past reality of works.
Although there is some similarity between the figural mechanics and
the Hegelian dialectic, the figure does not perform a Hegelian sublation
(Aufhebung) of the two matched realities. This is because: (a) the figure does
not refer to a situation in which ‘spirit’ confronts an ‘other’ in an anti-thetic,
agonistic, complementary, negating or differentiating manner; the two realities
in the figure are indifferent towards each other; they are separate, and from
the point of view of their consciousness they are unrelated; they are not simul-
taneous and there is no suggested continuity between them. Furthermore,
(b) figural-binding is not part of a gradual process of self-knowledge; rather,
knowledge, in the figural mechanics, is separate from the two members of the
figural pair, is always partial, and, in a way, is always erroneous. Finally, (c) the
two realities are different and separate ‘subjects’ in history; they do not produce
an absolute subject or represent the gradual coming to self-knowledge of some
version of the latter.
Likewise, Auerbach’s figura is not to be identified with Walter Benjamin’s
dialectical image and may even be contrasted with it. Benjamin says explicitly
that dialectical images are not archaic,52 but the figure’s mechanics are certainly
oriented towards the archaic origin of a certain work. If not dialectical, neither
is the relationship between the two realities a causal one: Joshua did not produce
causally the appearance of Jesus within the historical narrative; rather, figural
causality is a retroactive process internal to the writing of history. The later
member of the figural couple produces the figurality of its former member. And
the figure results from a situation in which a certain historical reality knows
unconsciously and implicitly how to do something, without actually acknow
ledging having this knowledge. In other words, the figural series involves a
non-intented repetition: Joshua did not know that he was carrying the quality
that Jesus would carry, nor did he intend to carry that quality. Virgil did not
know Dante, yet in the figural mechanics Virgil knew something that Dante also
knew, something that enabled Virgil and Dante to ‘meet’ in the Divine Comedy
and to march together through the circles of purgatory, hell and heaven.
Finally, it must be stressed that a figure is identical neither with a ‘work’,
nor with an ‘artwork’. The figure rather begins with a detail, a fragment of a
work, which is read as a rehearsal of a former historical reality and this restor
ation declares itself to be a sort of distinguishing of the principle – the modus
operandi – of a work. This supports the establishing of a work’s definition,
localization or delineation. The figural rehearsal functions within the frames
of reference of philological and iconological inquiry and it is not certain that it
could function in any other kind of inquiry. This figural inquiry regards not the
work ‘in itself ’, but the enduring participation of a work in traditions, presen-
tations and (mis)readings. But before turning to the iconological table itself,
the relation between Panofsky’s and Warburg’s iconologies will be discussed,
focusing on the character of the space that the figure opens, as essential to both
iconology and philology.
74
6
Iconological space: Panofsky with Warburg
The previous chapter outlined the way in which the figure arranges the past,
making it readable and approachable, thereby drawing together plastic and
philological realities. Chapter 6 aims to show how the spatialization of history,
constituting historical reality at large, forms the basis of philological rationality.
We will begin with Panofsky’s examination of historical time and historical
space, before moving on to discuss what Aby Warburg referred to as the ‘philo-
logical gaze’. In so far as this gaze can be understood as laden with a spatializing
responsibility, it will allow us to establish an affinity between the two authors
regarding the spatializing character of the historical examination of the past.
Both Warburg and Panofsky were part of the Hamburg ‘Renaissance’ during
the first-quarter of the twentieth century.1 Though Panofsky worked indepen-
dently in the art history department of the newly founded University of
Hamburg, he maintained close relations with Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaftliche
Bibliothek. Panofsky’s key works from the 1920s – Dürers ‘Melencolia 1’.
Eine Quellen- und Typengeschichtliche Untersuchung (1923; co-authored with
Fritz Saxl (1890–1948)),2 Idea (1924)3 and ‘Die Perspektive als “symbolische
Form” ’ (1927)4 – were published by the Warburg Library. The often-taken-for-
granted affinity between Panofsky’s and Warburg’s art histories has rarely been
commented upon, however.5 This chapter seeks to furnish a platform for the
possibility of such a commentary.
Panofsky’s historical space-time
Panofsky published his study ‘Über die vier Meister von Reims’ in the Jahrbuch
für Kunstgeschichte, in 1927, when he was already teaching at the University of
Hamburg. In that same year, Warburg announced the initiation of the picture
atlas Mnemosyne, constructed not far away in the same city.6 At the end of his
essay, Panofsky turned his attention to the problem of defining historical time,
and this section later became known as ‘Reflections on Historical Time’.7
In this short text, referring explicitly to ‘Das Problem des historischen Zeit’ by
Georg Simmel (1858–1918),8 Panofsky was interested in the principles defining
the problem of time in the history of art. What he says about historical time can
be applied to the workings of the philological gaze, as conceived by Warburg, who
also talked about a spatial ‘widening of the borders’ of the history of art.9 Panofsky
linked the problem of historical time to that of historical space: ‘Thus it turns out
that each instance of historical time is dependent upon a specific historical space,
except that […] this historical space has as little to do with geographical space as
historical time does with astronomical time.’10 Thus, before being able to define
what historical time is, one must inquire about historical space. Historical space,
Panofsky insists, is not synonymous with natural space, and this non-natural
space is the sole possible approach to historical time. Panofsky’s general claim
is that historical space is built out of particular superpositions of frames of
reference, for which natural homogeneous time and space provide the support.
Panofsky points to the fact that the document or the work must be furnished
with a spatio-temporal framing, and that this framing is intermingled with,
yet distinguishable from, physical or natural spatio-temporality. Historical
time-space according is determined, first and foremost, by artworks. The
spatio-temporal historical fabric is therefore weaved around the Ansatzpuenkte
(starting, anchoring points) of works and artworks. This spatio-temporal
historical reality is a continuous one: a net of references extending throughout
history. Panofsky and Warburg consistently referred to a continuous historical
domain, extending from antiquity to modern times, which, for them, is the
ground of art historical inquiry.11 Though leaning on the Kantian theory of
space and time, Panofskyan historical space-time differs from it in the sense
that while for Kant space and time are a priori forms of intuition, Panofsky
says explicitly that historical space and time are a posteriori, or determined in
retrospect:
One might say that this order can only be realized after the fact, in other words,
through a reanchoring of the historically qualified frames of reference within
the course of homogeneous natural time and in the breadth of homogeneous
natural space.12
So if the ‘natural’ spatio-temporal support is a priori, the special mixture of

historical frames of reference can be established only retroactively.13 Panofsky
determined the task of the historian to be the establishment of these frames of
reference, enabling one to locate a work in historical space-time. In Kantian
terms, this would entail having an intuition (Anschauung) essentially built out
Iconological space: Panofsky with Warburg 77
of temporal and spatial parameters. Kant gave this spatio-temporal intuition a

special name: figürliche Synthesis14 – a basic synthesis supplying the platform
upon which sense experience is possible. According to Panofsky, the historian
aspires to make the frames of reference as narrow and as superimposed as
possible. This narrowing or squeezing of frames of reference creates what we
called historical intuition, involving the juxtaposition and deployment of spatial
and temporal determinations. The underlying question that stems out of this
essay could be phrased as ‘what is art historical reality’? Panofky’s suggestion
to see historical reality as constructed from a net of spatio-temporal coordi-
nates will be important in many later points on the route of the present essay,
therefore, special attention will be given to it shortly.
If frames of reference are determined on the one side by artworks and on the
other by historical time and space, then for Panofsky they are also stylistically
determined, that is to say, they are dependent upon stylistic classifications
always already operative in the history of art. The determination of relevant
frames of reference is also a function of the figure, as presented in the preceding
chapters: the figural structure is responsible for establishing a line that distin-
guishes what one may from what one may not include in the relevant context of
the examined work. According to what? According to analogical relations with
the work with which one is dealing. The figural structure thus functions as the
encompassing frame of the frames of reference.
Panofsky realizes that the endless complexities involved in integrating
historical time and natural time, historical space and natural space, may tempt
the historian into scepticism, or even nihilism.15 Resisting this, Panofsky
considers the question of how to make this quadrate structure of frames of
reference a stabilizing one. The figural dynamics we have outlined above work
at the crossroads of these four factors. Historical simultaneity is achieved by
a maximal narrowing and a compression of historical space by localization,
context and causality. Historical simultaneity, which is always relative, is created
not by a coincidence of ‘two or more isolated phenomena in a natural point in
time but rather merely by the coincidence of two or more frames of reference in
one […] stretch of time [Zeit-strecke]’.16
Simmel’s historical time
Simmel’s ‘Problem der historischen Zeit’ is the central methodological source

for Panofsky’s reflections on historical time.17 First given as a lecture in 1916,
in this essay Simmel attempted a concise exposition of his understanding of

historical reality. One should note that, similarly to Panofsky, Simmel took an
idiosyncratic position in relation to the neo-Kantian school: both authors were
trying to stretch the capacities of neo-Kantianism to cover the specific inves-
tigation of historical reality while taking the relativist ‘threat’ as a permanent,
essential ingredient of historical method. For Simmel, in order for something
to be historical, it must exist in a temporal form, within ‘our’ systems of time
(…innerhalb unseres Zeitsystems).18 However, this is not yet sufficient for a
reality to be considered historical. Within ‘our’ temporal systems, the reality
must also be understood (in the sense of the hermeneutical term Verstehen).19
Understanding, Simmel clarifies and insists, is untimely (Zeitlos). Only when
a reality both exists in time and is understood (therefore both temporally and
un-temporally) can it become a historical reality. Simmel puts it beautifully
thus:
The fact that a content is in time, does not make it historical; the fact that it
is understood, does not suffice either to make it historical. It is only when the
two cross each other, where the content is temporalized on the basis of an
un-temporal understanding, that the content is historical.20
Finally, according to Simmel, two other factors support the reading of an event
as a historical atom: First, it must be located in a sequential series.21 Second, it
must be considered as a living unity (Einheit).22
In his ‘Reflections on Historical Time’, Panofsky is attentive to Simmel’s
formulations. Nevertheless, several decisive differences are to be underlined:
what Simmel delineates as the un-timely, Panofsky delineates as spatial. This
is a difference Panofsky himself raised in a note referring to Simmel’s essay.23
Furthermore, Panofsky transports Simmel’s notions of unity (Einheit), under-
standing (Verstehen) and life to the field of art. It is artistic style and the
aesthetic resistance of a specific work that are determining for the art historical
spatio-termporal reality. Because of the primary importance of spatiality and
spatialization in Panofsky’s account, it is the question of historical simultaneity
that arises much more often in his reading. It seems that this question
became increasingly important in Panofsky’s work, up to his Gothic Architecture
and Scholasticism of 1951. On numerous occasions he deployed a model of
simultaneity in order to articulate a certain moment of change or a mark of
distinction carried by an artwork. This combination of simultaneity and tempo-
rality appeared also in the work of Aby Warburg.
Warburg’s art history and philology
As mentioned above, in late 1920s’ Hamburg, at the Kulturwissenschaftliche

Bibliothek not far from the university, Warburg’s Mnemosyne atlas was taking
shape. Around the same period that Panofsky was highlighting the question of
spatio-temporal frames of reference, Warburg was experimenting with similar
problems in an implicit manner within his specific investigations. As early as
1912, Warburg employed spatio-termporal terminology when talking about the
widening of the conception of art history beyond the ‘border-police’ separation
between antiquity, medieval and Renaissance art. ‘Iconological analysis’, in
Warburg’s terms, would be able to give an account of the encompassing duration
of the history of art.24 This widening and opening of the borders of iconological
analysis not only attests to Warburg’s need to redefine art historical frames of
reference, but also to the philological character of his work in its endeavour to
unite the duration of history in a chain of transmissions and transfigurations, as
in Erich Auerbach’s later conception of ‘Worldliteratur’ which encompasses all
human articulations.
Warburg’s art history has an evident philological character that sheds light
also on Panofsky’s iconology. Though notable differences must be acknowledged
between their usages of the term ‘iconology’, the general consensus is that both
authors belong to a school of ‘iconological’ art history.25 In his 1912 lecture
Warburg presented his notion of ‘critical iconology’ (Kritische Ikonologie).26
What relation does this critical iconology have to a philological rationality?
Martin Treml has remarked that by using the term ‘critical’ Warburg was
actually referring to the methodical procedures of the ‘philological Textkritik
of “inherited” texts, from which the inner concealed and over-scribed layers,
that became un-readable, are analysed out of that which is visible’.27 Can we
define a common philological denominator for the philological aspects of
Warburg’s and Panofsky’s iconologies? The question will be addressed here by
way of the theme of spatialization, as treated by Panofsky in his reflections on
historical time.
The Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek in Hamburg was in itself a kind of
a philological experiment. The very idea of forming a collection that would
function as a treasure trove, gathering-engine and guarding-house for data
related to classical antiquity and its survival in western culture through the
ages, as well as the dynamic division of the library according to the motifs and
issues Warburg was preoccupied with,28 both echo the philological aspiration
to preserve the life of antiquity by tracing the trails of themes, motifs and
forms in their survival and transfiguration through ages and cultures. In 1905,
Warburg presented a lecture on Dürer to a gathering of ‘German Philologists
and Educators’.29 His research on the diachronic transfigurations of atom-units
of the pathos-formulae combining meaning and form, his well-known attention
to the details and nuances of works of art, his inquiry into and criticism of the
humanist tradition and the transfiguration of the ancient world in European
culture, all reflect a clear philological disciplinary practice.30 In his student
years at Bonn, Warburg attended the lectures of Hermann Usener, an influ-
ential turn-of-the-century philologist.31 Besides examining the relation between
mythological figures and archaic moments of overwhelming experience,
which was decisive in Warburg’s formulation of the concept of the pathos
formula, Usener was also interested in drawing uniting and separating lines
between philology and history,32 a task whose traces are detectable in Warburg’s
projects. While in Bonn, Warburg was also forming friendships with his fellow
students Adolph Goldschmidt and Wilhelm Vöge, two future mentors of Erwin
Panofsky.33 In a letter to his parents, written a few weeks after arriving at Bonn
to begin his university training, Warburg wrote: ‘I get enough philosophy in
Usener’s course. Professor Justi, the chief man for art history, I shall take next
term, after having done my proper philological studies.’34 Warburg therefore
noted the philosophical character of Usener’s lessons, and the link between
philosophy and philology, both appearing to the young Warburg as necessary
preparatory knowledge for his art historical studies. Usener’s conception of the
formation of ‘God names’ as expressions resulting from physico-psychological
agitation in face of the powers of nature was decisive for Warburg’s furnishing
of the concept of the pathos formula.35 Another philological reference has been
suggested by Anna Guillemin, who demonstrated an affinity between Warburg’s
work and that of the vitalist Crocean philologist Karl Voßler.36 These are but a
few examples out of many of how Warburg’s path crossed with the philological
disciplines of his time.
By the end of the nineteenth century, philological discourse began to
develop vitalist tendencies. Warburg’s use of the notion of the Nachleben itself
corresponds with the notion of life and its survival or, better said, after-life
and the vitalist component of his art history has been well researched. Both
Usener and Voßler are to be counted among the practitioners of vitalism or
Lebensphilosophie, around 1900, a movement in which Nietzsche’s work played
a central part.37 But the Dionysian, anti-rational tendency, which appears in
Warburg, Voßler and Nietzsche,38 should be placed within the framework of
the issue of the status of antiquity and its survival in and meaning for western
culture as it was addressed by philology. Nietzsche’s vitalism stood at the
heart of one of the most important philological controversies of his time. His
Birth of Tragedy was the product of an uneasy dialogue with the discipline of
Greek philology and was criticized by the most influential Greek philologist of
the time, Ulrich von Willamowitz-Moellendorff, insinuating that Nietzsche’s
imprecise method threatened to spoil the discipline of Greek philology at
large.39 Nietzsche’s readings of antiquity are explicitly and declaratively biased;
they labour to remember what is needed and important, but also to forget that
which is not,40 an attitude that is anti-historicist (as it does not commemorate
history for its own sake), and which comes close to a figural reading that
cuts and pastes historical fragments according to a pre-established thesis,
demanding validation. Nietzsche’s view of antique art, most evident in Birth of
Tragedy, urges a return to the intensive dynamics of artistic production. Around
the time of the publication of the Birth of Tragedy, in the first half of 1870,
Nietzsche composed a draft essay, ‘Wir Philologen’.41 In this piece, he affiliated
himself with the philologist’s vocation, his critical attitude regarding the state
of philological scholarship notwithstanding. He called for a radical rethinking
and refounding of philology: it would only be capable of being born again if the
philologists added to their knowledge of the past a redetermination of their own
selves and values.42
Nietzsche, Usener, Voßler and, indeed, Warburg were all practising versions
of philological questioning imbued with Lebensphilosophie. They were all inter-
ested in the manner in which the production of signs is related to situations
of vital agitation and the survival of Urformen: Dyonisian dynamics in the
case of Nietzsche, the powers of nature in the case of Usener, and Creation
(Schöpfung) in the case of Voßler. This vitalist tendency also included notable
approaches to history and to the past and the notions of the survival and
afterlife of forms have, in themselves, a vitalist character. Philological vitalism
can hence be understood as a reaction to the crisis of historicism that shook
and re-established the foundation of the humanities throughout the nineteenth
century. The archaic origin of culture gradually came to be conceived as
having a vitalist core, establishing and forming an event (Urereignis), indeci-
pherable and never consumed and ‘temporality’ itself a sibling concept to
‘life’, time being the key to understanding the phenomenon of life. When
history dedicated itself to this vital archaism of time, it became historicism,
premised on a belief in the historical essence of human existence. In Warburg’s
work, this manifested itself in the notion of an Urbild, which is prior to and
must be distinguished from any past ‘Primary-images’ (Vorbilder), as Claudia

Wedepohl has recently remarked.43
Around Warburg’s time, both Henri Bergson and Benedetto Croce can be
counted as vitalist thinkers of temporality and change and there is evidence
of Warburg’s interest in the work of both thinkers. He wanted Croce to give a
lecture in a convention on aesthetics at the Warburg Library that was planned
for 193044 and there is also evidence in Warburg’s notice-boxes (Zettelkäste) of
his interest in Bergson.45 Differently from Croce, Bergson’s conception of man’s
relation to his past emphasized the centrality of complexes of memory. And
again differently from Croce, who differentiated between philological recuper-
ation and historical (and philosophical) creation, Bergson’s formulation of man’s
relation to the past is inherently unhistorical. Instead, what ignites Bergson’s
metaphysics are the invincible depths of (sometimes mechanical, sometimes
creative) memorial procedures and dynamics.
Memory also took a very central role in Warburg’s art history. As deployed
in several of his works, the dynamics of memory are embedded in man’s
relation to nature. Warburg’s mnemonic dynamics refer primarily to a physical
memory, functioning as a manner of apprehension of the outside world, which
becomes a cultural tool for transmission and preservation.46 Although, as far
as I am aware, there is no explicit examination of Bergson’s philosophy in
Warburg’s texts, his private library did contain various editions of Bergson’s
writings, as well as commentaries on Bergson’s work. Most of this literature
dates to around 1912, which is the period when Bergson’s philosophy began to
be read outside France.47 From the various books in Warburg’s library, as well
as from his notice-boxes, one learns that he was also interested in the moral,
theological and political implications of Bergson’s work in pre-First World War
Germany.
In Chapter 1 it was suggested that both philology and art history enjoy a
position that allows them to resist historicist relativism, since both ‘disciplines’
are rooted in the survival and the transmission of the tradition of antiquity,
in which core-forms are considered as lying beyond the relativist hazards of
history. For both art history and philology the identification of human existence
with historical existence, i.e. the dictum of historicism, was at least disputed.
Both track repeating formulae in order to hold history together, configured
according to prototypes and ideals. This epistemic relation to the past, tracing
the path of the survival of antiquity, is embodied in Warburg’s notion of the
pathos formula. Warburg’s philological gaze can be understood as the capacity
to identify such history-informing formulae.
Warburg’s philological gaze
An important Warburg text from 1900, regarding Domenico Ghirlandaio’s

‘Nymfa Fiorentina’, has recently become available in a full German version, after
only being available in fragments.48 In the following fragment, regarding the
fresco in the Turnabuoni chapel in Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Warburg
and his friend the philosopher and language researcher Johannes Andreas Jolles
(1874–1946) exchange comments regarding Ghirladaio’s fresco. It is only in
passing that Warburg mentions his ‘philological gaze’, but for the purposes of the
present work his utterance has great importance. How should one understand
the meaning of this expression? How can a ‘gaze’ be philological? Furthermore,
what scopic or visual element can be considered as philological? In other words,
how can we establish an affinity between visual apprehension and literal articu-
lation (λόγος)? Notwithstanding the enormously important steps made in the
twentieth century towards establishing this alliance,49 the enigma has not been
solved. Philology may be of some help in bridging the gap, and to that end it
may be helpful to take a close look at the immediate textual context in which
Warburg used the peculiar term ‘philological gaze’ (philologischer Blick). Here
is the Gombrich translation of the paragraph in which Warburg refers to his
friend, saying:50
You feel prompted to follow her [i.e. The Nymph] like a winged idea [wie
einer geflügelten Idee] through all the spheres in a platonic frenzy of love; I feel
compelled [mich zwingt sie, literally ‘she forces me’] to turn my philologician’s
gaze to the ground [Boden] from which she rose and to ask with surprise: Is this
strangely delicate plant really rooted in the sober florentine soil [Erdboden]?51
Notably, Warburg contrasts his own philological gaze with his friend’s Platonic,
idealist one. So the gaze of philology, in Warburg’s view, is non-Platonic and
non-idealist.52 If the Platonic gaze is drawn to lofty ‘eidetic’ eroticism, the gaze of
philology tries to uncover the soil (Erdboden) of the image. Philology looks for
roots, for the ratio of a poietic thing. The philological gaze then sees through the
picture; it tries to break through its captivating allure and capture its cause, its
principle, its ἀρχή. The philologist’s gaze is not an indifferent, naive, or passive
one. It is neither the gaze of the ‘natural’ standing-point, nor of a phenomeno-
logical, descriptive, reflexive sensitivity. The philological gaze is an educated
gaze – a gaze established in a tradition; it is therefore a gaze imbued with
history, a gaze that has already seen, a gaze with a past, an ‘aged-gaze’, having a
mnemonic capacity. The philological gaze is the gaze that is assumed to know
something a priori regarding its object, perhaps not in the sense of a Kantian set
of categories, but rather in the sense of a knowledge of predecessors, precursors
and precedents, a generic knowledge. One may note that Warburg chose to use
the term ‘philological gaze’ rather than historical gaze or hermeneutical gaze to
qualify his position in relation to that of his friend.
The philologist’s gaze is, therefore, not the gaze that produces a pathos
formula, but rather the gaze that recognizes a pathos formula in a given work. In
as much as the pathos formula is the result of a more virginal gaze, unprepared
for the confrontation with a certain natural force, the philological gaze is better
protected against such traumatic encounters with a threatening exterior. It is
the gaze that is capable of identifying the danger to be found within the picture,
the archaic point incubating therein and allowing the work to be deconstructed
from within. Being prepared for the encounter with the erotic seduction of the
alluring image, it is able to return images to their roots. The philological gaze
complements the gaze that produces the pathos formula: where the former
freezes the threatening movement of the powers of nature, the philological gaze
reopens the image in order to put the frozen formula once again into motion.
If the pathos formula receives a dangerous reality, then the philological gaze
returns this received reality to its own ground, and restores pictorial reality to
its own cause. As Warburg states in the introduction to the Mnemosyne, his is
indeed the iconology of the ‘Zwischenraum’, which opens between two kinds of
‘posing-causes’ (Ursachensetzung): the pictorial (bildhafter) and the signfying
(zeichenmäßiger).53 This iconological interspace, as articulated by Warburg,
fits the basic pendulum movement of the figure, as presented in the previous
chapter. And it is by weaving around the picture a net of signified meanings that
iconology ‘rationalizes’ the image.
In the following chapter, I note the affinity between Warburg’s philological
gaze and what Panofsky, in his iconological table of 1939, called ‘synthetic
intuition’. Essentially, this gaze captures the distance between a work and its past,
a past that is remembered and ‘contracted’ by the work. To use an Aristotelian–
Thomist term that will also be discussed later, the philological gaze is produced
by a habitus (or ἕξις), an acquired capacity to see (backwards) through time.
For Warburg, the root of the image is split. On the one hand, there are
the historical material, social and economic conditions of the production of
a certain work; thus, for example, Ghirlandaio’s ‘Nymph’ is interpreted as an
expression of the non-pious mentality of the city banking families of fifteenth-
century Florence. On the other hand, the second root of the image is the pathos
formula, the archaic type that re-emerges through different ages, cultures and
mediums. Both roots of the philological gaze can be categorized as having a

material nature: on the one hand, the material conditions of some past present;
on the other, a material, natural past-reality, since according to Warburg,
following Usener’s formulations, every pathos formula is a registration of an
archaic encounter with a movement of the powers of nature. The philological
gaze is described by Warburg as the enactment of a methodical doubt, which,
while suspicious of the captivating power of pictures and ideas, nevertheless
assumes a certainty regarding the possibility of uncovering its double-ground.54
The philologist’s gaze is drawn to images that are imbued with an encrypted
intensive past. It is the task of the philologist to determine a relation between
the historical moment of the production of an image and a certain prototype
of that same image (as the girl in Ghirlandaio’s painting is identified with the
prototype of the nymph). It is in the abyss of the distance between the two that
philology works. The philological gaze captures that distance itself, working
within this opened ‘space of thought’ (Denkraum – a term used by Warburg
several times to refer to the manner in which artworks serve as a distancing
instrument between man and the forces of nature).55 It is a stereoscopic gaze,
synthesizing the two synchronous roots of a given image; as such, it supplies
a spatio-temporal simultaneity of art historical reality. The philological gaze
enables a restoration of a habitus of a work by capturing a special, important,
or pregnant detail in the work that carries a pathos formula. It then sets out to
detect the way in which this formula is transmitted from age to age, culture-to-
culture, seeking to give an account of how it can re-erupt after lying dormant
and latent inside the womb of culture.
Warburg’s idea of the pathos formula relies on movement,56 a movement
related to the quality of realism.57 In his 1893 dissertation on Botticelli’s ‘Spring’
and ‘Venus’,58 Warburg demonstrated that the depiction of movement was
understood by early Renaissance Florentine painters and writers as endowing
paintings with realist qualities. The pathos fomula in western art has been
used as an instrument for creating a realist impression, on behalf of which the
formula carries a rhetorical power of persuasion. Around 1900, it was again
Bergson who explicitly identied reality with mobility and with memory. The
realism inherent in the pathos formula remembers and conserves the reality
of movement.59 The pathos formula then carries the remembered reality, the
same reality with which philological rationality is occupied.60 The works of both
Bergson and Warburg illustrate the fact that around 1900 reality was increas-
ingly thought of as a remembered thing,61 and that the realism of remembrance
goes hand in hand with philological rationality.
Vitalisms and archaism
In the introduction to his Mnemosyne project, Warburg outlined his conception

of art history at large. His art history is deeply rooted in the relation to
the antique, and to the manner in which antique culture was itself already
distanced, one step further away both from the ideal, and from its chaotic
archaic ground. The struggle to which Warburg refers is not simply between
Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies, but rather one regarding the primacy
of both tendencies. In the Warburgain framework, the archaic is not only a
model but also a danger – the danger of the disintegration of the work back
into nature. Alexander Nigel and Christopher S. Wood have shown the extent
to which this ‘distanciation’ with regard to the archaic and classical past worked
as a validator of pictorial production in the Renaissance period, and how the
relation to the antique became a central tool in sustaining the authority of
pictures.62
In the present work, philological rationality is understood as based on a
friendship, or loyalty. The philologist adheres to the reality of the produced
past, to the things that man has made. He is interested in works, not in
signs as such; he is interested in making, producing, generating a domain of
human action, and in productive, generic mobility.63 In Warburg’s art history,
pertaining in this sense to a philological position, works are considered as
conservators, not simply of life but rather of the survival of life – of Nachleben.64
As conservators, philological things are read as pointing both to their future,
as well as to their past; hence, they inevitably establish a tradition. Philology’s
duty is to adhere to past articulations, to respond to the calling from the past,
to the pathos of the past: the philologist listens to the call of the pathos formula.
The philological body belongs to what can be called the humanist cosmos; it
communicates through ages and cultures. This extensive capacity of the philo-
logical gaze leads to the tension between the attention given by philology to
singular dialects and local characters (or the ‘details’ that Warburg was so fond
of) and the universal history in which the dialect takes its place. In Chapter
5, we noted the fragmentary character of the beginning of a figural reading,
as well as the importance of details in Auerbach’s philology. However, this
attention to detail is always complemented by some general thesis activating
the figural mechanics.
Pathos formulae are agents of the transmission of a certain formula from
nature to culture, from medium to medium, from one age to another, from
vessel to vessel: this is a process that could be referred to as a transfiguration.
Philological transfiguration is established through the restoration of habits,

when the philologist restores a tendency or a manner of conduct that is
presented as having a conatus – a duration, a longue durée.
The philological adherence to the rehearsal of formulae, enabling a
synchronous presentation of a picture and of its prototype, produces a figure,
in the sense outlined earlier. The philological gaze, identifying a specific
movement or trait transmitting a certain formula from culture to culture; the
attention given to the way cultural totalities contract traditions and habits of
conduct; and the way in which these are read into a work of art, instead of
determining an ‘idea’ as its content – all this takes us back again to Auerbach’s
‘Figura’.65 If the pathos formula points to a pathetic moment that established
a manner of conduct, then the figure, the result of the assemblage of several
such moments of contraction, shapes this manner of conduct. Warburg’s
Mnemosyne project can, therefore, also be understood as a figural operation.
Drawing on the continuity between the ancient and the actual, figural dynamics
binds historical realities by way of an analogical manner of conduct.66 Indeed,
Warburg explicitly used the term ‘prefiguration’ to talk about the relation
between antique and Renaissance art.67
In scholarship on Warburg up to the present, considerable emphasis has
been placed on his preoccupation with pathos, while less attention has been
given to the relation of his iconology with habitus and ethos. In fact, however,
there is an essential connection between pathos and ethos in Warburg’s works.68
In his diagnoses of pathos formulae Warburg restored the ethos of a certain
milieu, notably in his dealings with nineteenth-century Italian society, but
also elsewhere.69 The philological gaze enables us to go back down the ladder
of cultural memory70 and examine one habitude after another. This descent
down the ladder is by-and-by a presentation (Darstellung) of a tradition and,
in presenting a tradition, philology acts as a realization, a mise-en-scène or a
dramaturgy.71 Indeed, Warbrug’s Mnemosyne project was itself a presentation
of a tradition – a tradition of the transmission of pathos formulae in forming
the history of human production. Warburg’s ‘technique’ in that presentation
involved the construction of plastic systems of boards and collages of images,
serving as an extension of the library system itself.72
Not only, then, are there close affinities between Warburg’s art history and
philological rationality, but his work also points to the way in which philology
essentially includes a figural dimension at its core. This figural core of philology
consists of a spatialization of history, producing the art-historical time that
Panofsky was attempting to define in roughly the same period.
Iconology and philology
Warburg’s and Panofsky’s iconologies are certainly not identical. As Michael

Diers has pointed out, Warburg’s orientation was cultural and anthropological,
while Panofsky’s notion of iconology was conceptual and genuinely eidetic.73
Michael Podro has, likewise, insisted that there can ‘be no greater gap than that
between Warburg on the one hand and Panofsky on the other’, because: ‘In no
writer was the conception of art as like knowledge so elaborately developed as
by Panofsky; in no writer had art been so integrated into the sense of social
behavior as by Warburg.’74
In the terms adopted here, we could say that Warburg was more of a historian
than Panofsky, more in tune with the historicist tendencies of his time, coming
to terms with the pregnant historical reality, while Panofsky was more of a
philologist, interested in articulations, formulations and definitions of works.75
Nevertheless, despite all these genuine differences, in their iconologies both
authors drew on a philological orientation and on their engagement with the
survival of the humanist tradition, understood as always involving a retrograde
philological gaze with regard to antiquity.
For his part, Panofsky developed the retroactive superimposition of refer-
ences when trying to define historical time. In his iconology tables of 1939 and
1955 (to be discussed in the Chapter 7), he discussed not only the various levels
of frames of reference but also the factors that can be used as validating elements
in the process of establishing such frames. Likewise the figure, presented here
as a supplement to Panofsky’s general cultural history, can also be used as a
regulator of the movement of creating frames of reference. The Warburgian
philological gaze seeks out a special causality existing between a picture and
its ground, that non-direct causality between the archaic, dynamizing pathos
formula and a work, enabled by the detection of the detail that demands a more
precise positioning and definition. The philological gaze captures the distance
between the danger of disintegration found at the ground of the picture, and
the moment of the generation of the work. The philological gaze turns historical
time into historical space, by supplying images with grounds, and by putting
works into perspective. It ‘re-spatializes’ an image, turning it into a thing
belonging to a genre, a series of frames of reference, thereby giving a work a
second body, a second nature.
It is as if Panofsky’s iconology was merely supplying a missing link in
Warburg’s project, elaborating on the space opened up between a pathos
formula and the philological gaze, when the two work together to effect an
‘iconological synthesis’ (to use the title of two of Warburg’s notice-boxes).76 The
synthesis of the pathos formula and the philological gaze forms what one could
call a synthesis of art-historical spatio-temporal reality. We will now turn to
Panofsky’s 1955 version of his 1939 iconological table in order to examine what
this iconological synthesis of framing and spatializing history entails.
90
7
The figural synthesis of historical reality in

the iconology table
One of Chapter 1’s tasks was to present Panofsky’s Platonic neo-Kantianism

as exemplified in his early work Idea. Panofsky’s writings from the ‘inter-
mediary’ period of the 1930s, which are usually considered as inaugurating
his iconological phase, developed and refined this Platonic, hylomorphic
neo-Kantianism. Though it is common practice to think of a ‘first’ and a ‘second’
Panofsky, the present chapter will show that it is the same Panofsky, the one
characterized by both hylomorphism and neo-Kantianism, who struggled
consistently throughout his career with the iconically given nature of historical
knowledge.
The connection between Panofsky and Ernst Cassirer has been well noted and
commented upon. Here, I aim to show that the relationship between Panofsky
and neo-Kantianism extends to the earlier generations of neo-Kantians, in
particular the ‘middle generation’ of Wilhelm Windelband and his follower
Heinrich Rickert. This will require an elucidation of Panofsky’s iconological
model, constructed during the 1930s, but which remained valid at least until
the mid-1950s, when his ‘Iconography and Iconology’ essay was reprinted in
Meaning in the Visual Arts. This essay, containing the ‘iconological table’, was
first published in 1939 as the introduction to Studies in Iconology, and then was
revised in 1955 as ‘Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study
of Renaissance Art’.1 Though the two versions differ in various places, Panofsky
left the iconological table the same in both. There is also an earlier version of
the essay, dating back to 1932, which was inspired by the sociological method
of Karl Mannheim.2
Our analysis of the table emphasizes its synthetic character. The notion of
synthesis is central to the rationality of Panofsky’s corpus: synthetic elements
appear already in his earlier texts, but they become more evident in the ‘inter-
mediary’ writings, in particular around the construction of his iconology
table. While in the 1920s, Panofsky had explored lineages of eidetic structures
based on a transcendental foundation for the science of art in Idea, in his later
period he was occupied with specific artworks, as well as with deciphering key
moments in the history of plastic genres and schools. In his iconological period,
Panofsky tended to relax his earlier striving for a systematic Kantian epistem
ology at the same time as the philological tendencies of his work became more
clear, though he never completely abandoned his Kantian creed.
Generally, the concepts and terms that Panofsky deploys in his iconological
table originated in turn-of-the-century neo-Kantian thought regarding the
historical sciences. But his special arrangement of these terms exposed their
neo-Platonist and hylomorphist kernels. It seems as if Panofsky’s work at this
intermediary stage, while still leaning on neo-Kantian terms, launched a new
project of distilling the iconical concreteness of a historical moment, i.e. an
investigation of the way in which historical reality arrives before the researcher
in a pictured, figured mode. As with any iconophilic position, Panofsky’s project
also carries an iconoclastic shadow, in the sense that it poses an ‘idea’ (or in the
terms of the iconological table, a ‘symbolical value’) as the originating principle
of the meaning of a work. That is to say, the meaning of the picture is to be found
in its inner eidetic sense, and not, as is suggested by the Auerbachian theory of
the figure, exclusively in relation to another historical reality. In emphasizing
the synthetic character of iconology, two central elements of the table will be
highlighted: first the notion of ‘symbolical value’, recalling not only Cassirerian
but also Rickertian neo-Kantianism; second, the concept of ‘synthetic intuition’,
defined by Panofsky as the fundamental gesture of iconological inquiry.
Synthesis
Since synthesis is an essential factor in iconological rationality and lies at

the heart of Panofsky’s deployment of neo-Kantian terms, it will be useful
to consider Kant’s original definition of synthesis, on which the following
analysis will be based: ‘By synthesis in the most general sense […] I understand
the action of putting different representations together with each other and
comprehending their manifoldness in one cognition.’3 Synthesis for Kant is ‘the
mere effect of the imagination’ (Einbildungskraft),4 producing the given which
can then be analysed and explored. Human experience, for Kant, is inherently
synthetic. ‘Iconology’, says Panofsky in his turn, ‘is a method of interpretation
which arises from synthesis rather than analysis’;5 and the iconological table
can be understood as clarifying the synthetic operations that iconology entails.
The figural synthesis of historical reality in the iconology table 93
The object of iconology is the establishment of a world of ‘symbolical

values’; the subjective faculty that is a necessary requisite for this is ‘synthetic
intuition’.6 Finally, for the iconological investigation, the ‘corrective principle
of interpretation’ is the ‘history of cultural symptoms or symbols’. To under-
stand the function of the iconological table it is necessary to see these three
levels of synthesis as working in a synchronous manner; that is, they cannot
but appear in cohesion, at a moment of iconological comprehension. All three
components of the iconological method include a reference to the linguistic
Greek root Syn: symbolical values, synthetic intuition, and cultural symptoms
– symbol, synthesis, symptom. ‘Synthetic intuition’, as iconology’s subjective
mental faculty, works as a synthesis of two ‘objectives’. One is the produced
object of iconology, which Panofsky designates as symbolical values. The second
is objective in the ‘corrective’ sense: it is the general, or rather universal, history
of cultural ‘symptoms’. The synthetic dynamics of the iconological method
operate between these two ‘objectives’ and depend on a synthetic intuition
of the two, which is the ‘given’ of iconological knowledge. The iconological
model is expressed in organicist terminology, common in nineteenth-century
philosophy. The synchronic totality established by iconological inquiry is
portrayed as a cohesive whole in which there is no possibility of differentiating
private procedures from the general comprehensive activity.7
There are then three organically integrated levels of synthesis in iconological
investigation:
1. Synthetic intuition, which supplies the given upon which iconological

inquiry is activated, relates to the identification of the plastic document
or monument. As explained in Panofsky’s 1927 essay on historical time,
it affects a synthesis of space and time. Synthetic intuition is a gesture of
localizing a thing spatio-temporally, enabling us to say ‘this is X’, ‘this is
Socrates’, or ‘this is the fresco “The Triumph of Galatea” painted in 1511
by Raphael in Rome’s Villa Farnesina’. The capacity to identify the author,
date and style of a work is considered a basic requirement in art historical
procedures, and synthetic intuition is Panofsky’s attempt to articulate the
meaning of this basic capacity. Synthetic intuition captures the definition
(ὁρισμός) of the substance (οὐσία) of the work under discussion. In his
Categories, Aristotle identified the specific name of the thing (‘Socrates’),
the form (εἶδος, as ‘man’), as well as to a lesser extent the species
(γένος, as ‘living being’) as elements involved in the formation of such a
definition.8
2. The second synthetic level of iconology is manifested in the determination

of symbolical values. Determining symbolical value is the objective of
iconological investigation, and relates to the understanding (Verstehen) of
the ‘content’ (Inhalt) of an identified work or document. Symbolical value is
the result of a synthesis between a sign (Zeichen) and a concept (Begriff).
3. At the third synthetic level, art history is bound up with the humanities at
large. This is the level of ‘general history of cultural symptoms or symbols’
and it is the most comprehensive level of synthesis. The products of
iconological inquiry (i.e. symbolical values) must be integrated into this
third level. In Aristotelian terms, this level can be described as a synthesis
between the genre (γένος) and the form (εἶδος). In Aristotle, the eidos
is included within the genre, since the eidos, or type (‘man’), is more
specific than the genus (‘animal’); furthermore, the genre itself, though
more comprehensive and general, has an innate seriality and historicity of
generation. In the Metaphysics, book Delta, Aristotle explains that:
Genus (or race) is used (a) When there is a continuous generation of things
of the same type; e.g. ‘as long as the human race exists’ means ‘as long as the
generation of human being is continuous.’ (b) Of anything from which things
derive their being as the prime mover of them into being.9
This level of iconological synthesis thus refers to tradition and to the successive
dynamics of types, which depends on some determined notion of a ‘classic’ or
an ‘ideal’. It is, therefore, characterized by a permanent striving towards a renais-
sance, a striving that was to be Panofsky’s object of scrutiny in his Renaissance
and Renascences in Western Art (1960).10 This synthesis embodies the longing
for a rebirth of the source of a generic series, which, according to the methods
of Warburg, Panofsky and Auerbach (and of philological rationality in general)
lies at the root of history. (Auerbach’s discussion of the ‘figure’, as we have seen,
focused on the manner in which the history of western culture is activated by
the mechanism of the rebirth of types, with ultimate reference to a final rebirth,
a ‘second coming’ or redemption, as in the Christian structure of pre-figuration.
Can an iconological gesture be such a second coming?)
This triple iconological synthesis is not only structured according to the
requirements of art historical activity, but is also exemplified by this discipline,
its being the only historical inquiry whose objects and subjects are distinctively
formal and plastic. Nevertheless, the iconological structure can also pertain to
historical research in general, in so far as all humanities disciplines share the
gesture delineating the containment of one form by another.
Already in his Idea and in other earlier writings, Panofsky forged the tools for
understanding both ‘symbolical value’ and ‘synthetic intuition’. Symbolical value
actually parallels the notion of the idea in Idea; it supplies the eidetic element
that binds the specific work to a generating ἀρχή. Symmetrically, the artist, the
viewer or the researcher synthesizes at least two forms – the picture and the
genre to which it pertains – in order to conceive of a symbolical value.
Iconological synthesis can be viewed as the restoration of a definition of
a work. The restoration synthesizes at least two spatial locations and at least
two temporal moments (those of the work discussed and those of another
work, which is being used in order to identify the first); hence it depends on a
foundational synthesis of space and time. Panofsky describes both artistic and
iconological activities as imbued with evaluation and synthesis. The rationality
at work in Panofsky’s corpus clearly has a Kantian character, and within this
rationality the structure of the faculty of judgement (Urteilskraft) is especially
relevant. In the first introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant specifies
that reason is first and foremost an appointed judge.11 And this juridical reason
is synthetic: it establishes a relation, a ratio, between at least two elements, of
which one is considered as a particular or an example, and the other as the
universal to which the example belongs.
Symbols, ideas and values
At the heart of Panofsky’s table stands the notion of ‘symbolical values’. In

iconology, symbolical values are the carriers of meaning, functioning as an
‘idea’ inherent in the picture. Panofsky’s Platonic neo-Kantian platform draws
a parallel between idea and value. Value, at least in a neo-Kantian framework,
is essentially synthetic. It is produced by positioning a certain identifiable
object in relation to a universal. Panofsky’s term, though, is not simply ‘value’,
but ‘symbolical value’: if value is a synthetic being, then ‘symbolical value’ is
synthetic twice over, as the Greek word σύμβολον means ‘putting together’.
Panofsky’s use of the term ‘symbolical values’ echoes Cassirer’s use of ‘symbolical
forms’. Michael Ann Holly has demonstrated the undeniable importance of
Cassirer’s philosophy for Panofsky’s art history.12 They were colleagues during
their years at the University of Hamburg and Panofsky used the Cassirerian
notion of ‘symbolical form’ in the title of his essay on perspective.13 In an essay
dated 1938 (a year before Panofsky’s iconological table and the same year in
which Auerbach published ‘Figura’), Cassirer examined the logic of symbolical
forms, which he based on the notion of synthesis. He explains thus the nature
of synthesis: ‘The analytical logic of pure identity broadens itself into a synthetic
logic, at whose core stands the question regarding the possible binding, relation
and correlation of dissimilars.’14
Cassirerian synthetic logic emphasizes the judgemental structure of
synthesis, an emphasis taken from Kant. Like for Kant, the faculty of judgement
is essentially synthetic, its task being ‘the subsumption of the particular under
the general’.15 Cassirer followed Kant and linked synthetic judgement with
symbolical activity:
We are positioned here in fact in the fundamental problem of ‘synthetic

judgment’, which indeed wants to be a unity of the dissimilar, which demands
both the συμπλοχή and δίαίρεσις, unification and keeping-unattached
(Auseinanderhaltung), without either action hindering or contradicting the
other.16
Symbolical rationality leans on the synthetic structure of judgement,

producing an affinity and a distance between distinguished realities. The
differentiation between symbolical meaning and intuition is a Kantian one.
For Kant, the symbol is a non-intuitional creature; it is a hypotyposis
(Darstellung, presentation): ‘a concept which only reason can think and to
which no sensible intuition can be adequate’.17 A symbol, according to Kant,
binds a sign to a non-intuitive concept. Panofsky adopts the same approach:
in his iconological table, symbolical value is strictly differentiated from
(synthetic) intuition.
Panofsky posits ‘symbolical value’ as the object of iconological inquiry, as that
which is to be distilled by the iconological examination. It is here equivalent to
the function of the ‘idea’ in the Idea essay, where the idea is the factor bestowing
value upon the artwork, binding it with truth, such that the artistic process can
be compared to a Platonic knowledge of ideas (Ideenlehre), which works as a
value-producing procedure. In the 1932 essay, the name of this binding agent
changed, following Mannheim, to ‘Dokumentsinn (Wesensinn)’.18 The icono-
logical content-meaning (Inhaltsbedeutung) fits the structure of the Kantian
symbol, based on a synthesis between a sign and a concept: Kantian ‘symbolical’
content is a synthesis of a sign (Zeichen) with a conceptual meaning (Schema,
Begriff). Eidetic potency, then, in the Panofskyan sense, is both synthetic and
value laden. In Panofsky’s neo-Platonic neo-Kantianianism ‘value’ and ‘idea’
(formal scheme) are practically synonymous and together they form the core of
the iconological synthesis.
Around 1900, the concept of value played a major role in the redefinition
of the historical sciences, especially within neo-Kantian circles. The origins of
value-philosophy go back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, in the
philosophy of Hermann Lotze (1817–81). Lotze could be considered one of
Panofsky’s distant ancestors, since he was the teacher of Wilhelm Windelband,
the founder of the Southwest school of neo-Kantianism, who, in turn, taught
Heinrich Rickert, one of Panofsky’s teachers in Freiburg and also one of his
doctoral examiners.19 For Lotze, ‘the kingdom of Values’ (Reich des Werten)
was the object of inquiry of philosophy,20 which amounts to a ‘system of
meanings’ (System der Bedeutungen). For Lotze, value was the highest principle
of synthesis.21
Bruno Bauch was a notable neo-Kantian follower of this Lotzean tradition
and also a contemporary of Panofsky. In 1923, Bauch gave a definition of value
in his book Wahrheit, Wert und Wirklichkeit.22 Like Lotze, he saw the estab-
lishment of values as the highest philosophical task and, according to Hans
Sluga, ‘considered his own contribution […] the discovery that values, like
the objects of theoretical knowledge, were not simply a plurality but stood in
relations and were objective only in this relatedness’.23
The affinity between values and ideas – supporting that between the
Kantian conception of judgement and Platonic Ideenlehre, which had as its
founding example Paul Natorp’s Platos Ideenlhere of 1903 – characterizes the
neo-Kantianism of both Bauch and Panofsky. Already in Lotze, the idea had
been considered as an absolute value, binding a plurality of beings, turning
synthetic pluralities into totalities of values (Werttotalität).24 In his 1926 Die
Idee,25 Bauch, offering a mixture of neo-Kantianism, Lotzianism and Platonism,
again posited the responsibility of constructing values (i.e. regulative ideas) as
philosophy’s highest task – but only ‘truth’, as the highest and absolute value,
posits unending duties. Panofsky’s symbolical values, by contrast, do not obey
any such absolute truth; rather, the regulative ideas in his method function as
‘an ideal to which we try to approximate our understanding of a work of art’.26
Panofsky’s iconological meaning, like Simmel’s historical truth, is necessarily
problem related;27 it is therefore the instrument or the product of historical
method, but not its ultimate goal, which is to be found in the iconological
synthesis.
The subject of value in nineteenth-century German philosophy developed
out of the fundamental problem of the definition of reality after Kant.28 Being
the product of judgement, value’s main function is to bind a particular and a
universal. Thus the history of the concept of value during the nineteenth century
stemmed from the binding of the particular and the universal in Kant’s Kritik
der Urteilskraft. For Wilhelm Windelband writing later in his career, ‘value’ is
the subject matter of the historical sciences. For him, something has value only
inasmuch as it has occurred only once.29 He coined the term ‘idiographic’ for the
kind of rationality that has as its object the historical value of the singular event.
Exclusive to the historical sciences, idiographic rationality does not determine
universal laws but rather describes unique and singular complexes and ‘valued’
processes. In this framework, ‘value’ is as close as one gets to a general concept
or law, i.e. values are the organizing agency of historical, idiographic ration-
ality. Not only strict neo-Kantians, but also cultural historians affiliated with
neo-Kantianism, such as Georg Simmel and Ernst Troeltsch, located values as
the fundamental tool of historical inquiry. And because, as Rickert determines,
values are inherently non-real,30 the object of the historical sciences (i.e. the
work, the thing) cannot be a reality. Simmel argued similarly, in a Kantian
fashion, against ‘naiver Realismus’ in history.31 History can merely aspire to
construct a synthesis of values, Weltanschauungen,32 or, in Simmel’s elaborated
version, to give form to (Umformung) the chaotic stream of history by the
use of the unities of values. For Rickert, Simmel and Troeltsch it was obvious
that the values with which history is occupied are first and foremost cultural
values,33 Kulturwerthe being the products of the cultural sciences:34 ‘Cultural
value is the historical universal (Allgemeine), which is gradually developed only
in the individual singularity, through which it is realized.’35 Indeed, it was the
neo-Kantian Rickertian orientation that established the understanding of the
humanities as the sciences of culture (Kulturwissenschaften), rather than as the
sciences of the spirit (Geisteswissenschaften), according to the definition given
by Wilhelm Dilthey.36 On this point, Panofsky, directing his iconology to the
general history of cultural symptoms, is closer to the Southwest neo-Kantian
school than he is to any kind of idealism or Diltheyan Geistesgeschichte. Within
this framework, Panofsky’s ‘symbolical values’ should be understood as unities
of meaning. At this level, then, Panofsky does not yet achieve his humanist
ideal, which will be better accounted for in the subsequent levels of iconological
synthesis.
Thus far, Panofsky’s iconological terminology has been shown to be
continuous with the neo-Kantianism of Windelband, Rickert and Simmel,
at least to the same extent that it is continuous with the neo-Kantianism of
Cassirer. As such, any attempt to link Panofsky’s neo-Kantian agenda exclu-
sively with Cassirerian symbolical forms will offer only a partial view of the
matter.37
From symbolical value to synthetic intuition
In the iconology table, symbolical value is founded on the preliminary level

of synthetic intuition, which provides the iconological ‘given’ from which
symbolical values can be distilled. According to how the table is understood
here, synthetic intuition and symbolical value cannot but be synchronous in
iconology. Panofsky’s iconological writings frequently deal with the identifi-
cation of the subject matter or the theme of the artwork, an assignment that
is inseparable from the investigation of meaning, i.e. from valuation.38 But
this identification is always also intuitional. It is given by synthetic intuition,
just as the meaning and the ‘content’ belong to the level of symbolical values.
According to Windelband and his followers, the historical sciences are inher-
ently intuitional.39 But one has to ask which special type of historical intuition
is called for by iconology.
As noted earlier, eidos and idea are not identical, in as much as eidos is
general, abstract, simple and indivisible,40 while the idea is a synthesis consisting
of relations. Panofsky refers to the creative act, naturally, as synthetic: ‘the
artistic mind was able intuitively to transform reality into an idea, to effect
an autonomos synthesis of the objective data’.41 In Idea, he emphasized the
centrality of intuition to the artistic synthetic process. The humanist version of
artistic intuition is described in this text as a synthesis of objective givens by the
reorganization of reality; this description is identical to the one Panofsky later
gives of the task of iconological investigation. Synthesis, collecting a plurality of
givens into a general whole, is always at its basis a synthesis of two forms: one
which acts as border or contour and a second which functions as a skeleton of
relations. We can, therefore, assume that Panofskyan synthesis is related to his
earlier notion of the ‘idea’, as differentiated from the eidos. Although Panofsky
described synthetic intuition as a ‘rather discredited term’,42 it is not clear to
what accepted usage he was referring. For which of the thinkers of modernity
is intuition inherently synthetic? And in what sense? Isn’t intuition necessarily
and traditionally a simple, continuous, indivisible act? With regard to synthetic
intuition, Panofsky states that in order to carry out the task of iconological
interpretation:
We need a mental faculty comparable to that of a diagnostician – a faculty

which I cannot describe better than by the rather discredited term “synthetic
intuition”, and which may be better developed in a talented layman than in an
erudite scholar.’43
Synthetic intuition provides a ‘diagnosis’ of the document, which accommodates

the latter’s valuation through symbolical values. It is a diagnosis in the literal
sense of a knowing of difference (διάγνωση), or ‘knowing apart’, being ‘capable
of discerning’. Diagnosis distinguishes a thing, like the knowledge supplied by
Windelband’s idiographic rationality, discussed above. Thus, diagnosis has both a
‘dissecting’ and an identifying capacity. However, while it captures the precise and
distinct nature of the thing, it cannot function without the aid of a pre-established
systematic structure of the possible ‘symptoms’ that relate to possible ‘patho-
logical situations’. These are to be found in the history of cultural symptoms.44 The
diagnostic activity of synthetic intuition is carried through by the ‘familiarity with
essential tendencies of the human mind’, identifying the tendency appropriate to
the specific given. This synthesis enables the diagnostician to distinguish a given
thing and to locate it within a system of values, i.e. to diagnose the ‘pathological’
status of the object, according to cultural symptoms.45 This topic of pathological
diagnostics appeared earlier in Panofsky’s texts from the 1920s, when he discusses
the underlying ‘problems’ (künstlerische Problemen) to which every artwork is
a solution (Lösung).46 A little earlier, Panofsky contended that the task of the
science of art (Kunstwissenschaft) is to reconstruct the underlying problem,
conflict or antinomy for which the artwork supplies the solution. The underlying
problem is stated and formulated as an opposition between two plastic values,
such as ‘optische Werte’ (optic values) versus ‘haptische Werte’ (haptic values), or
the ‘Tiefenwerte’ (values of depth) versus the ‘flächenwerte’ (values of surface).47
Diagnostic distinction is thus a synthetic activity. We already know from
Kant and Cassirer that synthesis collects several elements to produce a new
cohesive unit. In iconology, what is produced is the synchronic identification
and location of a work in a series of several works, which at the same time
distinguishes its special place in the series. Iconological synthesis is accom-
plished by reaching the third level of reading, which can be identified as that of
the generic reading.
Intuition and synthesis
The core of the diagnostic activity of synthetic intuition is the location of the
given work within a comprehensive series, enabling the naming of the piece by
noting its subject, time and place of production (for example, ‘this is the fresco
“The Triumph of Galatea” which Raphael (1483–1520) painted in 1511 in Villa
Farnesina in Rome’).
Synchronically, synthetic intuition binds the document with symbolical

values. Iconological identification thus necessarily involves a procedure of
judgement, which produces symbolical values in order to carry out the task of
identification. For example, it would entail both an examination of the distin-
guishing characters of Raphael’s ‘Galatea’ and the placement of the work in the
history of Renaissance mythological and classical depictions, thereby creating
a binding between a particular and a universal. Moreover, this placement
produces a figure created of the synthesis between ‘Galatea’ and the historical
reality in which it takes place: this figure is the product of iconological research.
By placing the document in a series, we are able to distinguish its place, in a
gesture that relies on the third synthetic level of the ‘history of tradition’, or of
cultural symbols in general. This synchronic process creates a vera icona, or
even better, a figure, establishing an affinity between the type and its model
(prototype).
Iconological synthetic-intuitional diagnostics establishes the given to which
iconology refers. Kant stated in his first Critique that no ‘content’ (Inhalt) of
the understanding can be given by analysis. It must be given first as a synthetic
experience.48 This approach is concomitant with Vico’s principle of the verum
factum that man can know with certainty only what he himself has fabricated49
– just as the one who synthesized something should also know how to analyse
it. However, none of this explains why Panofsky referred to synthetic intuition
as a ‘discredited’ term. Notwithstanding this remark, I can find no reason not
to credit Panofsky himself with a special use of the term.50 As has been said,
Panofsky’s articulation of ‘synthetic intuition’ stands in problematic relation
with the traditional understanding of intuition. In Aristotle and Plotinus,
for example, the ancient term for intuition, νοῦς, referred exclusively to an
immediate conceiving of simple realities rather than to synthesized complexes.51
The simple nature of intuition had been accepted throughout the long history
of the concept, through to the twentieth century. Even its central modern
thinker, Henri Bergson, still considered intuition as simple (i.e. as unsynthe-
sized).52 Even if, as will immediately be shown, there is a relation between
‘intuition’ and ‘synthesis’ in German idealist and neo-Kantian philosophy, it
is very hard to find the specific term ‘synthetic intuition’ in the writings of the
thinkers belonging to this tradition. For example, Friedrich Schelling – in his
System der Transcendentalen Idealismus, in which Anschauung is so central and
has a synthetic nature – does not use the term ‘synthetic intuition’ but rather
‘productive intuition’ (produktive Anschauung),53 which goes back to Aristotle’s
poietic intuition (νοῦς ποιητικος).54 ‘Synthetic intuition’ is also hard to find in
Kant’s writings. Anschauung, or intuition, in Kant, is the foundational capacity

of experience, of a priori sensuality (Sinnlichkeit). The a priori forms of intuition
are space and time, which are the foundation of sensuality, rather than construc-
tions of reason or of understanding. Also around Panofsky’s time it is difficult to
find thinkers using the exact term ‘synthetic intuition’.55
Nevertheless, there is good reason for assigning a synthetic character to the
Kantian understanding of intuition. In Kant, pure intuition is the transcen-
dental foundation to which synthetic a priori determinations, as well as sheer
sensual experience, apply.56 Pure intuition is the primary manifold a priori
content57 and space and time are its pure forms, always intermingled with
each other. Therefore, even if not explicitly synthetic, pure intuition at least
involves a combination of space and time.58 As we shall see in the following
section, the synthesis enabling an acknowledgement of intuition is referred
to by Kant as ‘figural synthesis’. The synthetic intuition holding together
(Zusammenfassende, Kant’s term) space and time is the given of the general
iconological synthesis, of figural synthesis, and as a given, according to the
Kantian guidelines, it has to be synthetic. As such, synthetic intuition, as the
basic gesture of iconology, supplies the researcher with a spatio-temporal
synthesis, as it furnishes the first object of inquiry of iconology. This intui-
tional synthesis of space and time establishes art historical spatio-temporal
reality, as defined earlier in relation to Panofsky’s essay on historical time. As
Panofsky wrote in that essay: ‘every attribution of a work of art represents a
judgement process by which a temporal and spatial attribution are made all at
once, without giving the one precedence over the other’.59 By way of synthetic
intuition, iconology thus telescopes particular historical realities through the
figure of the artwork.
Figural synthesis
Even if term ‘synthetic intuition’ does not appear explicitly in Kant, the first
Critique contains another term that will support a Kantian reading of the icono-
logical table, namely, figürliche Synthesis (translated into English as ‘figurative
synthesis’),60 or synthesis speciosa, as differentiated from synthesis intellectualis.
Figural synthesis, according to Kant, has an a priori plastic capacity:
This synthesis of the manifold of sensible intuition, which is possible and

necessary a priori, can be called figurative (synthesis speciosa), as distinct from
that which would be thought in the mere category in regard to the manifold of
an intuition in general, and which is called combination of the understanding

(synthesis intellectualis).
Figural synthesis in Kant is the foundation of the imagination (Einbildungskraft)61

and is characterized as productive capacity.62 Its function is to form, combine
and differentiate elements of intuition:
We cannot think of a line without drawing it in thought […] we cannot represent
the three dimensions of space at all without placing three lines perpendicular
to each other at the same point, and we cannot even represent time without, in
drawing a straight line (which is to be the external figurative representation of
time), attending to the successions of this determination in inner sense.63
Figural synthesis is therefore the basic thought-action producing a synthesis of

time and space, i.e. the pure forms of intuition.
We can now integrate this notion with the substance of the third, corrective
level of iconology, rehabilitating the history of cultural symptoms.64 The third
level involves a (re-)organization of historical reality, that is, of the encompassing
space and time within which one can activate a certain iconological inquiry.
Viewed from the perspective of figural synthesis, the third level is in fact the
one in which the iconologist-researcher conceives, in plastical terms, his own
historical spatio-temporal localization. Again, this level must be synchronized
with the other two. Synthetic intuition, requiring ‘familiarity with the essential
tendencies of the human mind’, involves the platform of the universal history
of tradition supplied by the iconological figural synthesis. It is a level producing
the apprehension of historical reality, inquiring into what relates a picture to
its past, as well as what this picture was in the past. In the iconological context,
figural synthesis also refers to the forms of sensuality (Sinnlichkeit) of the
researcher, i.e. his own spatio-temporal coordinates, enabling the researcher to
establish his own historical intuition. Again, we can recall both Nietzsche’s and
Auerbach’s demand for a bilateral relation between the philologist and the past
he investigates, a relation in which not only is the past shaped by the researcher,
but the researcher himself is also changed by the past. If we understand the third
iconological level as a level of a figural synthesis, then the iconologist is neither
merely referring to sensual receptivity, nor to a synthetic a priori strata of
artistic experience, nor to ‘symbolical values’ as figures of relative truth. Rather,
his reality is the synthesis of an εἶδος with a γένος – of an untimely form with the
series of generations and variations that this form has accumulated.
Panofsky’s oeuvre can be understood as a continuous endeavour to establish
a plastic synthetic a priori structure of history,65 and, in conformity with the
self-imposed task of Kant’s first Critique, to establish the possibility of synthetic

a priori judgements.66 Panofsky’s aspiration to the synthetic a priori of the
science of art is evident in his early writings, but it remained pertinent also
in his later work. He explored the meaning of the historical document as it is
positioned within the boundaries of art historical reality. In this framework, the
past is considered as an extended reality that must be methodically assumed in
order to enable synthetic a priori articulations necessitating the mediation and
distance created by iconology.
As we have argued throughout, Panofsky abandoned neither his Kantian
nor his neo-Platonic preoccupations in his later writings. Nevertheless, both
underwent change. In his later works, he was less concerned with excavating an
a priori basis for understanding the visual arts, and more with the way a work or
a group of works contracts a complex series related to an eidetic prototype. But
even here the Kantian aspiration to the synthetic a priori remained pertinent, in
the sense of establishing the foundation of the history of cultural symptoms. In
this way, the corrective synthetic objective shifts from the level of plastic values
in Panofsky’s early writings to thematically humanist preoccupations with
human conduct and production in his iconological works. With his iconological
method, Panofsky demonstrated that it is possible to view history as a plastic
reality. He constructed an iconophilic model for humanist inquiry, examining
the produced past with the synthetic instruments of values and intuition.
8
Philology’s recollective habitus: Panofsky with

Spitzer, Auerbach and Curtius
The scholastic philosophers could use the ideas of Aristotle and merge them
with their own system, and the medieval poets could borrow freely from the
classical authors, but no medieval mind could think of classical philology.1
Erwin Panofsky
Can the history of art be considered an integral organ of the humanities? This
is the question that animates the present chapter, addressing twentieth-century
Romance philology and the manner in which this branch of philology involves
plastic dynamics. It will be suggested that Panofsky’s iconological method can
be relocated within the school of Romance philology, drawing on similarities
in methods and objects of inquiry. Panofsky knew both Auerbach and Spitzer,
German-Jewish scholars in exile in the United States, like Panofsky himself.2
Leaving the biographical facts aside, this chapter will focus on the methodical
aspects of the work of these authors. At a secondary level, the suggestion
here is that philology and, in particular, Romance philology, entails, among
its numerous other tasks, a shaping of a habitus, or a hexis (ἕξις), to use the
Greek-Aristotelian term. The claim is that philological research operates as
a mechanism whose task is to preserve the capacity to recollect human works.
Thomas Steinfeld has demonstrated the extent to which philological practice
should be regarded as a habitus, as a structure constructing and shaping a human
character.3 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, in his 2003 book, The Powers of Philology,
outlined a rationality that one could describe as philological, offering a view
of philology as a capacity, that is to say as a dynamis.4 The modest extension
of Steinfeld’s and Gumbrecht’s proposals undertaken here will emphasize the
conception of philological practice as a habitus that is basically anamnetic –
or a habitus of recollection. As the philological recollective mechanism does
not strictly belong to personal memory, it can be seen as relating to what Jan
Assmann called ‘cultural memory’ (Das kulturelle Gedächtnis). As he explains:
One usually thinks of memory as a purely inner phenomenon, localized in the

brain of an individual, a theme for brain-psychology and neurology but not for
the historical cultural sciences. Yet the content this memory takes in, how it
organizes this content, and how long it can be viewed, are not only matters of
inner capacity and command, but of external, i.e. social and cultural, framework
conditions.5
The concept of recollection employed here of course participates in the cultural

memory Assmann is describing, but it is neither strictly an individual, nor
strictly a collective memory: it is operated by individual agents and yet it works
within a shared and accepted tradition. One can view the writings of Auerbach,
Spitzer and Panofsky as participating in a search for a model for the shaping of
man in so far as he is as a remembering being, that is to say, an animal having
a distinct relation to its past. Moreover, the recollective habitus of Romance
philology is oriented to a restoration of the beginnings of its own tradition,
that is to say antiquity, or ‘the ancient’ in its various forms and aspects. The
Romance school was preoccupied with the recollection of this antique, ‘archaic’
moment (which could be Greek, Roman or, in the case of Auerbach, also
Hebrew). This recollective habitus works mostly within the corpus of inscrip-
tions in the domain of the Romance languages, generated in the Latin sources
(with their precedents in Greek antiquity), but also generating their continu
ations, quotations, variations and elaborations in the Romance languages that
are considered ‘living languages’. Yet Romance philology is not confined to work
within the framework of Romance languages – the works of the four scholars
discussed here include ample discussions of texts and works produced within
the framework of Germanic languages. Romance philology thus sometimes
becomes tangential to German philology (Germanistik), thereby, furnishing
a comparative field of discussion. Spitzer in particular was very attentive to
questions regarding German language and mentality;6 and Panofsky’s preoccu-
pation with Albrecht Dürer should also be mentioned in this context.7 Likewise,
Auerbach’s interest in the notion of Weltliteratur 8 suggests that Romance
philology in its twentieth-century incarnation was interested in textual human
products in general.
The philological habitus that can be reconstructed from the writings of the
Romance philologists is a mechanism directed to the recollection, reminiscence
or recovery of human works. The method of this habitus is to follow a series of
repetitious formulae throughout history, in an effort to locate an origin (arché)
that will function as a key, enabling a recovery of the series’ ‘meaning’.
Philology’s recollective habitus: Panofsky with Spitzer, Auerbach and Curtius 107
The Aristotelian distinction between memory and recollection
The claim that Romance philology operates a recollective habitus underlines

the concept of recollection as differentiated from memory in the more general
sense. The distinction between memory and recollection was made by Aristotle
in his De memoria et reminiscentia, a text forming part of the Parva naturalia.9
This work establishes a relation between memory in general and habitus;10
furthermore, it presents the method of recollection. Aristotle determines
primarily that the object of memory is the past and, vice versa, that remem-
bering is the exclusive mental activity regarding the past (τὸ γενόμένον).11
Secondly, Aristotle emphasizes that memory is a hexis, in the sense of ‘having’
an image, an affection, etc.12 It is a state of possession that must be sustained and
maintained. Thirdly, Aristotle differentiates between memory (Mneme, μνήμη)
and recollection or reminiscence (Ananmneseis, ἀναμνήεσεις): ‘Recollection is
neither the recovery of memory, nor the original acquisition of it.’13
Memory (mneme, memoria) is an apprehensive capacity, while recollection
(reminiscentia) is an investigative capacity – in other words, a method, devised
to enable the localization of a certain movement which has already occurred in
the researching agent, but which is sometimes unavailable at a certain moment
when one wishes it to be so. The recollective process reconstructs a series of
movements in order to restore a missed, primary gesture: ‘When he recovers
the knowledge, sensation of some other previous experience, the having state of
which we call memory, then this is to recollect one of the named objects, and
remembering occurs and memory follows.’14 Nevertheless, says David Bloch,
‘Recollection […] is not recovery of the possessing state [ἕξις] of memory, but
the recovery of the objects which do in time form such states, e.g. sensations,
knowledge (accidentally) and generally whatever constitutes these states.’15
Recollection, therefore, recovers and enables the formation of the memorial
habitus. Recollection is a recovery of a psychic movement, and it performs the
operation that enables and generates remembering and memory. Recollection is
a search for movement by movement, rather than a search for objects. Aristotle
clarifies the workings of the recollective sequence of movement as follows:
Recollections occur when a particular movement naturally follows another

particular movement: if it happens by necessity, then it is clear that, when you
are moved by the former, you will also be moved by the latter; but if it does not
happen by necessity but by habit, you will normally be moved […] Hence, when
we recollect, we are moved by some previous movements, until we are moved to
the one, after which the one we need habitually occurs. This is also the reason
why we hunt the next in the series, starting our thoughts from the present
or from another point in time, and from something similar, from something
contrary, or from something closely connected […] In this way, then, men seek,
and, even when not seeking, they recollect in this way, when the movement
happens after another.16
A recollection, so Aristotle maintains, is a potentiality for movement that

happens in the recalling agent.17 Aristotle also states that formal relations
(analogy, contrast, similarity) are capable of arranging the series of movements.
And they are not only able to organize movement, but also to cause it in the soul.
In this formal operation within the memorial capacity, one recovers a series of
movements, a series in which a relation of contiguity also establishes the possi-
bility of connecting units that are far apart: ‘We need not inquire how we recall
that which is far apart in the series, but only how we recall that which is closely
connected in the series; for it is clear that in a way it is by the same method.’18
And, in the workings of this serial capacity of the soul, habit has a special role
to play: ‘For it is by habit that the movements follow one after another in a
particular order.’19 Aristotle emphasizes that at the beginning of any recollective
process one has to take ‘a starting point of the movement, after which the object
that he seeks will come to him. This is why recollections come fastest and best
from a starting point.’20 A starting point (ἀρχή) initiates the deployment of the
series, which may bring one subsequently to locate the element of movement
that one searches for.
The starting point is defined by Aristotle as a place:
A starting point must be taken. This is why people sometimes seem to recollect
from ‘places’. The reason is that they proceed quickly from one to the other, for
instance, from milk to white, from white to air, and from this to moist, from
which autumn is recalled, if this is the season that one is seeking.21
Two modes of memory
For Aristotle, recollection happens only when the recollector recovers the series
of movements by his own capacities; and when this does not happen, then the
case is no longer one of recollection but rather a relearning.22 Again, Assman’s
concept of cultural memory allows us to think of recollection occurring not in
the specific mind of the individual but rather through the products, records
and documents of a certain tradition. The ‘philological agent’ is in a position of

seeking to recover a segment of the distant past, registered in the tradition of
human civilization, to which the philological agent himself also belongs. And
just like the Aristotelian recollector, so, too, the philological agent must begin
with a starting point – that is to say, with a detail, a part or a fragment of some
human work. Then, the philologist must establish a series of relations that may
lead him, by habit or by nature, to the ancient segment that is sought after. From
that it follows that the philological agent is not synonymous with the individual
person performing the research, but rather is a transpersonal unity, composed
of an infinitely complex agglomeration of habits and learned or acquired capac-
ities. Within the extensive reality of tradition, the philological agent recollects.
This transpersonal agent can either remember events, or restore and recollect
specific places in the tradition to which it belongs.
A similar inner division within the memorial domain was suggested by
Bergson in his Matière et Mémoire of 1896. Bergson was probably the most
decisive thinker to take notice of the centrality of memory to human existence
and also to emphasize the necessity of thoroughly rethinking the mnemonic
capacity of the human being. Although Bergson, to my knowledge, does not
refer explicitly to Aristotle’s treatments of memory, the similarity between the
two authors in establishing an inner distinction within memorial structures is
remarkable.23 Bergson distinguished between memory as matter and memory
as intuition: memory as that which repeats mechanically and realizes events
that have already occurred, and memory as an active faculty, based on effort,
retroactively forming and bending the past, thereby recovering it:
There are, we would say, two profoundly distinct memories: the one, fixed in
the organism, is none other than the ensemble of the mechanisms, construed
intelligibly, assuring a comfortable copy with numerous possible interpellations.
[…] The other is true memory. Coexisting with consciousness, it re-takes and
aligns, one after the other, all our states according to the measure in which they
are produced, allowing any fact its place […] really moving in the definitive
past, and not, like the first [memory] in a present which permanently begins.24
In the present work, we have underlined the importance of the figural element in
the philological techniques of memory. The second, ‘real’ Bergsonian memory
and Aristotle’s recollection point to this possibility of the figuration of the past.
The latter presupposes the gap that separates the process of the inquiry itself
from its sought-after past. This differentiation is also that between memory
understood as repetition and memory understood as an activity of distinction;
or memory as homology and memory as an activity of disjunction. In both of its

aspects, memory is a learned capacity that has to be cultivated, nourished and
maintained. But it is only the second, disjunctive version of memory that can
actively figure the past. Figuring the past, one should note, does not imply fabri-
cating the past. Rather it weaves several fragments of the reality of the past into
meaningful series, grounded by a certain starting point for an inquiry.
The role of figures in recollection
Recollection includes an essential plastic element, serving as the binding

medium within the recollected series. Frances Yates, a scholar who was affiliated
with the Warburg Institute in London and whose work may be included in
the domain of Romance philology, dedicated a 1966 book, entitled The Art of
Memory, to the ways in which man, from ancient times to early modernity,
has developed recollective habitus. Yates also demonstrated to what extent
recollective typologies were part and parcel of metaphysical and theological
constructions within the humanist tradition. Yates shows that, more than
any other tool, what carries the best recollective capacity are figures: pictures,
diagrams, forms and formulae, that is to say, entities of a spatial nature. Aristotle
himself mentioned the system of place-memory25 as a main tool of recollection
and compared the work of memory to the painted picture.26 Figures are helpful
in supporting the work of recollection because they condense several affiliated
elements into a cohesive structure, through which one can move in an ordered
way. When one ‘holds’ a figure in mind, one can more easily locate a certain
segment that would otherwise quite possibly be lost in the chaotic matter of the
past. This topographic character of memory suggests that it regards not only
time but also space. The tradition of recollection by ‘places’ can be found from
ancient times through the middle ages27 up to modern times.
Auerbach noted the recollective capacity of figures, linking these with the
writings of history, a concept extensively presented in his ‘Figura’ essay of 1938.28
The mechanics of figuration help to shape the past into narrative series, which in
their turn contribute to the shaping of the present and the future according to an
historical, eschatological vector. A similar function is performed by the notion
of the ‘etymon’, as proposed by Leo Spitzer in 1948, in the introduction to his
Linguistics and Literary History. The etymon is a morphological unit, serving as
a gathering-engine for philological research. It is a lingual atom, which could
be a word or an expression, carrying and generating a tradition of usages and
passages of meanings whose deployment it is the task of the philologist to

recover.29 As Emily Apter explains:
The Spitzerian etymon emerges as the DNA of humanist humanism, the kernel
of what he calls ‘universalistic ratio.’ Characterized in ‘Linguistics and Literary
History’ as the ‘radix of the soul’, the etymon not only holds up the world of
literary work and serves as the connective tissue of theocratic unity, it also
operates as the weapon of last resort in the war against cultural barbarism.30
Finally, Ernst Robert Curtius proposed the term ‘topoi’ to refer to the
figural formulae informing human history.31 Topoi, as figures and etymons,
are elemental units, travelling, repeating and mutating through ages and
cultures, forming the spine of poetical traditions, and enabling the formation
of philological readings.32 Curtius refers to the topoi as ‘primordial-relations’
(‘Urverhältnisse’) of human existence, explicitly characterizing them as ‘form-
elements’ (‘Form-Elemente’). Curtius’s topoi are similar to Warburg’s ‘pathos
formulae’, to which Curtius himself referred in an essay from 1950.33 The
similarity lies in the fact that both express an attitude of man towards the
cosmos, and both form the consonants, or the leitmotifs, of artistic traditions.
After a topos is established and deployed, the task of philology is to preserve the
unity of its series and to articulate its meaning. The hyle, the matter from which
philology constructs its building blocs, nevertheless, is not history in general,
but rather the history of humanist tradition.
Humanism as a recollective activity
The work of Panofsky, Auerbach, Spitzer and Curtius is concerned not only
with themes belonging to the humanist tradition but also with the definition of
humanism as such. Indeed, Panofsky chose to open his Meaning in the Visual
Arts with an essay on the history of art as a humanistic discipline.34 In this
rather late essay, written in 1940, Panofsky presented his credo of integrating art
history into the humanist framework, based on a particular conception of the
human being: ‘Man is indeed the only animal to leave records behind him, for
he is the only animal whose products “recall to mind” an idea distinct from their
material existence.’35 Thus, according to Panofsky the signs of men have a recol-
lective function and this function is what makes signs human. He continues:
‘Man’s signs and structures are records because, or rather in so far as, they express
ideas separated from, yet realized by, the process of signalling and building.’ For
Panofsky then, symbols are considered a recollective tool, the object of which is
to recover an idea embodied in, yet distinct from, these very signs. Notably, this
link binds Panofsky’s conception of the symbol with that of Warburg, for whom
symbols were also considered essentially as mechanisms of memory and were
enhanced by a ‘function of memorial capacity’ (gedächtnismäßige Funktion).36
Nevertheless, the above quoted sentence also reveals the difference between
the two iconologists: if Warburg’s concept of memory is radically continuous,
Panofsky’s model is rather disjunctive. That is to say, the Panofskyan model
is one of exteriority: the eidetic origin of the series lies in an idea, which is to
be distinguished from the series of symbols itself; the Warburgian model of
the symbol, on the other hand, is continuous: it locates the beginning of the
series in an always present material moving-force. Panofsky’s method suggests
a disjunctive model of figuration, on the basis of its hylomophic starting point;
that is, the model of a form distinct from cultural matter yet shaping it.37 For
Panofsky, not only are ideas distinct from the signs carrying them, but also a
certain culture is to be inherently distinguished from the signs it recovers. That
is to say, Panofsky was very much aware of the ways in which the humanist
tradition is constructed from separate units, being bounded by the force of
artistic production. And even if the iconologist must be primarily occupied with
restoring the continuous series of formal repetitions and appropriations, she
must also take care to investigate that which separates two historical moments
at the same time. The history of art, according to Panofsky, has a recollective
character, at the beginning of which stands an idea, external to the series
itself. This idea, in Panofsky’s inquiries, but also in Spitzer’s for example, stems
from the reality of ‘antiquity’. This, or the ‘archaic’, is conceived as generating a
starting point for the tradition of human productions. In the last paragraph of
Chapter 2 of Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, Panofsky refers to the
ambivalent relation to antiquity:
The middle ages had left antiquity unburied and alternately galvanized and
exorcised its corps. The Renaissance stood weeping at its grave and tried to
resurrect its soul. […] This is why the mediaeval concept of the Antique was
so concrete and at the same time so incomplete and distorted; whereas the
modern one, gradually developed during the last three or four hundred years,
is comprehensive and consistent but, if I may say so, abstract. And permanent.
Resurrected souls are intangible but have the advantage of immortality and
omnipresence. Therefore the role of classical antiquity after the Renaissance is
somewhat elusive but, on the other hand, pervasive – and changeable only with
a change in our civilization as such.38
‘Our civilization’, as Panofsky understands it, belongs to the regime of the

Renaissance’s abstract conception of the antique, it is the culture to which
philological inquiry also belongs, and it makes antiquity into a beginning to be
resurrected as a principle, as a prototype. For Panofsky, then, humanism incor-
porates a relation to the archaic past, whose principles it seeks to preserve. And
art history, at least when practised as iconology, is invited to participate in that
same humanist commemorative habitus.
Hylomorphist humanism
One way to articulate Romance philology’s involvement with humanism is to

say that it is interested in human nature – a nature that is also the subject of
many of its recollective procedures. An exemplary instance of this can be found
in Auerbach’s celebrated chapter on Michel de Montaigne, ‘L’humaine condition’,
in Mimesis (1946).39 Montagine himself, it should be noted, is an example of a
humanist author weaving his Essais as a net of quotations and paraphrases
from the ancient sources, thereby functioning as a machine of reminiscence.
Auerbach’s chapter emphasizes the elasticity of the humanist habitus: how it
constantly changes its movements according to the thing encountered or the
work in question. It is according to the work that the philologist has to forge his
tools and his concepts, always anew. Auerbach refers to Montaigne’s ‘charmingly
elastic tenacity’ (liebenswürdig-elastische Zähigkeit),40 explaining that his ‘appar-
ently fanciful method, which obeys no preconceived plan, rather adapting itself
elastically to the changes of his own being, is basically a strictly experimental
method’.41 Montaigne’s humanist method is experimental because it is directed
by things: ‘Strictly speaking it is “things” after all that direct him – he moves
among them, he lives in them; it is in things that he can always be found.’42 An
elastic human figure, including its morals and limitations, can be found in the
works of our Romance philologist authors’ writings, like an archaic type, once
known, but now forgotten, perhaps thanks to the catastrophes of the twentieth
century: a buried human figure demanding to be redeemed through the restor
ation of trails of traces.
Panofsky’s interest in the human and its figure is already apparent in his
1921 ‘Die Entwicklung der Proportionslehre als Abblid der Stilentwicklung’,43
but the theme of the human, its figure, definitions and morals, continues to
appear throughout his work, perhaps most notably in the essays collected in
Studies in Iconology (1939), whose subtitle is ‘Humanistic Themes in the Art
of the Renaissance’. The humanist tradition forms the conceptual and material
core of the work of all three main authors discussed here.44 There is something
like a ‘human figure’ to be discerned in their methods, a figure that is constantly
portrayed, examined and sampled in their writings. And it is this human figure
that is is sought after in the philological anamnetic process.
Panofsky describes humanism as harbouring an ambivalent attitude, which
‘can be defined as the conviction of the dignity of man, based on both the
insistence on human values (rationality and freedom) and the acceptance
of human limitations (fallibility and frailty)’. He concludes: ‘The humanist,
then, rejects authority. But he respects tradition.’45 Panofsky’s understanding
of humanism thus leans primarily on a drawing of a line – a line supporting
the human figure both from above and from below. Man is limited but also
shaped by his own actions and gestures, by their extension and rehearsal; the
humanists’ habitus seeks to shape man through his relation with his past, or
with the tradition that he respects and remembers. This respect for tradition
serves also as a mark of human limitation, in the sense that the relation to the
transmitted past must be maintained and developed; it cannot be assumed
as a pre-given spontaneous capacity. Romance philology’s pedagogic method
emphasizes the partial, limited, fragile character of the philological application.
Human actions and the products that issue from them, embedded in the web
of history, produce figures that are repeated, condensed, but also hidden or
forgotten, finally to be re-excavated and re-distinguished, always only partially,
by the philological process.
Figural distinction: A model for the recollective disjunction
From the brief presentation of Aristotle’s conception of recollection at the

beginning of this chapter we learned that, within recollective rationality,
that which is close by affects that which is far away, and that a recently past
movement can also affect archaic past movements. This transition between
the recently found and the archaic past can be discerned in many philological
inquiries. Yet at least two approaches to the relation between the philological
researcher and his past are possible: disjunction or conjunction. Panofsky
and Auerbach represent the former attitude, Spitzer and Curtius the second.
Panofsky and Auerbach, it seems to me, deploy a model of figuration that holds
within itself the possibility, if not the necessity, of a disjunction between the
moment of inquiry and the archaic past. For Spitzer and Curtius, being both
more intimately influenced by vitalist thought, the organic nature of history

preserves an ever-enduring univocal continuity. Thus, if for Spitzer and Curtius
(as for Warburg) the basic formula creates a continuous series leading to an
intuition of the ‘meaning’ of the work, the trajectory of the philological inquiry
in Panofsky and Auerbach leads only so far. For Panofsky, one will always
find an idea, distinct from the philological series. For Auerbach, one will find
historical reality itself, or reality tout court, which carries the possibility of
forming differences within the historical narrative.
In fact, it was Curtius who suggested the most suitable key for understanding
the source of the disjunctive capacity of philology. In his Europäische Literatur
und lateinisches Mittelalter Curtius wrote:
For literature, all past is, or can be, present […] I can at any moment effec-
tively encounter Homer’s or Plato’s writings when their books are in my hand;
I ‘have’ them then, and I have them whole. They exist in infinite exemplars.
Yet the Pantheon and Saint Peter are only once there, and I can only partially
and vaguely see them through photographs. But the photographs give me no
marble, I cannot touch it or walk through it, as I can in the Odyssey or in the
Divine Comedy. In the book, writing is really present. Yet I don’t ‘have’ Titian,
neither in a photograph nor in a copy […] The book is more real than the image
[…] One either understands it or one does not. Perhaps it has ‘difficult’ places.
One needs a technique to decipher these: this technique is called philology […]
The science of art has for itself an easier task.46
Here, Curtius distinguishes between inquiries into texts and inquiries into
artistic works: the text has a permanent existence which can always be recon-
sulted, whereas ‘things’, owing to their plastic – and one should add, material,
historical – singularity, are much more difficult to make present within an
inquiry. Disjunction is brought up, then, by this material-historical gap, and the
gap is materialized in the plastic object. As Curtius suggests, the art-product,
indeed, makes evident and accentuates an existing gap in any encounter between
man and his ‘records’. This gap is not absent when the records are texts; rather
it remains more latent. It is the gap created between the individual researcher
in his specific historical place and the specific work he recovers. Curtius is
pointing to the fact that plastic and textual records prescribe a different recol-
lective habitus. For the written record, the past in its essential form exists
whenever a copy of the original is achieved. For the plastic record, the past is
attainable in making physical contact with the original. Texts, therefore, provide
the philologist with the possibility of establishing continuity in his processes of
recollection; while for the archaeologist or the art historian there is always a gap,
a deviation between the present and the past that copies cannot do away with.
The iconologist stands exactly between the textual philologist and the material
archaeologist, treating the artwork itself as a mediating crossing-point between
the hyle of ever-singular material histories and the eternal consistency and avail-
ability of texts.
As noted above, Panofsky’s view was that ideas are exterior to the records of
man, though they are capable of being realized by these very same records. The
realization of an exterior form, then, is central to this model of understanding
the human. Realizations of forms by matter lie at the heart of the original
antique-Aristotelian hylomorphist model.47 And realization (Erfüllung) is also
central to Auerbach’s concept of ‘Figura’. In the figural structure, history itself
functions as a retroactive engine of reminiscence, as the figure binds a certain
segment of history, or historical reality, with another previous segment – as for
example with Christ and his prefiguration in the biblical figure of Joshua. Christ
is the realization of that which was already noted in the former historical reality
of the Old Testament. Thus, Figural realization carries within itself not only the
difference between the two moments, but also an unbridgeable gap, caused by
the particularity of historical moments.
Elastic hylomorphism
Philological anamnetic habitus, as practised by Panofsky, Spitzer, Auerbach and

Curtius, is hylomorphist in character. It seeks to arrange the past under formal
and plastic units that can be repeated to form all sorts of series, across space but
also across time and between ages and cultures. The works of these authors are
machines of reminiscence, forming movements through figures, formulae and
topoi. Spitzer explains how this humanist practice leans on formal procedures:
What can be the humanistic, the spiritual value of this […] juggling with word
forms? […] [a]n etymology introduces meaning into the meaningless: in our
case, the evolution of two words in time – that is, a piece of linguistic history
– has been cleared up. What seemed an agglomeration of mere sounds now
appears motivated.48
The etymon figures out the chaotic hyletic reservoir of inscriptions and signs
inherent in historical documents. In Panofsky’s writings, the hylomorphist
thread appears in his discussions of both neo-Platonism49 and scholasticism.50
In most of his writings, Panofsky demonstrated a hylomorphic understanding
of the arts. For example, already in ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’, written in
1920, he wrote: ‘Art […] is a discussion aimed at the achievement of valid results
that objectifies and realizes a formative force, using material which has to be
mastered.’51 And in Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, about three decades
later, he broadened this hylomorphist model to include the domain of human
behaviour, by defining art as a habit-forming force.52 Panofsky’s entire corpus
may be regarded as a companion to western art, through the exploration of
the traditions preserving antique hylomorphist models in neo-Platonism and
scholasticism.
A final aspect of the hylomorphist conception of signs is its realism. Even
when a disjunction exists between the sign and its recalled thought, still, that
which is recalled is not considered to be a mere phantasy, but is understood
as referring to a specific and real referent. In ‘Art History as a Humanistic
Discipline’, discussing the records man leaves behind him, Panofsky refers
the reader to ‘Sign and Symbol’, an essay by the neo-Thomist thinker Jacques
Maritain, published in 1937 in the Journal of the Warburg Institute. Maritain
outlines a modern Thomistic understanding of signs, insisting on the reality
that is contained and shaped them:
The movement towards the sign or the image, says Saint Thomas Aquinas
following Aristotle, is exactly the same as the movement towards the object
itself […] Thus in the formal-objective order the sign is a very remarkable thing,
and it is only the routine of our culture which prevents our marvelling at it.53
The task of philological recollection is to reorganize the routine usage of signs, to

push and pull it towards the reality of the past. The art historian, as exemplified
by Panofsky and as described in ‘Art History as a Humanistic Discipline’, is
responsible, like his colleague the lingual philologist, for the exploration of the
transfiguration and transmission of ancient, archaic figures, carrying elementary
units of meaning. The authors discussed in this chapter, to whom we could also
add the older Aby Warburg, were all working with a hylomorphist conception
of the humanist habitus in which man is considered as a synthesis of matter
and form. The humanist philological creed requires a constant effort to put into
practice, to enact and re-enact, this synthesis. It is through shapes and figures,
linguistic and plastic forms, transmitted, diversified, recorded, recollected and
reshaped, that the humanist habitus and its recollective task are preserved.
The philological habitus of reminiscence is activated primarily by things
encountered: the texts or the artworks that require the philologist to engage in
recollective procedures in order to understand them. The encountered work
constitutes the first element in the recollective series. The philologist must then
rely on his habitual familiarity54 with traditions, types, usages and attitudes in
order to restore a series of movements that make it possible to distinguish the
archaic atom of the inquiry. Panofsky used the term synthetic intuition to refer
to this special gesture which grasps, in a frail and fallible gesture, a segment of
history as shaped by the work in question.55 In this way, the philological habitus
can be viewed as a self-shaping in which the philologist simultaneously figures-
out the humanity of both himself and his past.
9
Figural content and the past as a res extensa
Previous chapters have explored in depth the hylomorphic nature of Panofsky’s

iconological method and the deployment of figural mechanics in forging a philo-
logical approach to the study of artworks. The present chapter tries to tackle the
question of the content of the work of art, and to think of this content as an
Archimedean point enabling and founding a figural-philological investigation.
It does so by considering the nature of the reality of the kind of works under
investigation in a philological-iconological reading. Taking up the hylomorphist
thread of this book, the following discussion challenges – or rather enhances
– Panofskyan iconology with Byzantine conceptions of the icon, to suggest
that this orientation treats the artwork more as a figure than as an image. At
the same time, we will also try to draw to a close the specifically neo-Kantian
reading of Panofsky’s work. Early on, Panofsky questioned the history of art as
‘a pure science of things’ (reine Dingwissenschaft),1 a description in the tone of
a post-critical Kantianism that attempts to go beyond Kant’s prohibition on any
discussion of ‘things in themselves’. Alain Roger has correctly defined Panofsky’s
art history as ‘a transcendental philology’;2 that is to say, a philology governed by
the constant search to establish categories of comprehensibility. And yet, besides
this transcendental impulse, Panofsky’s inquiries also bear witness to a reality
directing and being figured by the work of art. And it is this reality, indeed, that
should be regarded as the content of the work of art.
But of course, we need to be clearer about what this reality-content actually
is. What is ‘the thing’ (Das Ding) of the history of art? Can this thing be
considered as a historical reality, or is it only outside historical reality that it
should be located? And how does a philological history of art approach this
thing? If one is after the reality of a plastic work, one has primarily to distinguish
between it and what we might call its existence as an image. This is already to
conform to a certain iconic approach to works of art, one that refuses to give
them an idolatrous status. In other words, this approach resists any consecration
of the work’s phenomenal appearance as an image. Instead, the phenomenal
appearance of the work is taken as a starting point for a process of validation

of the past reality of the work, for the construction of historical meanings, and
finally for the establishment of a historical reality. In general this suggestion
coheres with Michael Podro’s understanding of Panofsky’s work as having a dual
structure: on the one hand, the aspiration to establish synthetic a priori criteria
of validity; on the other, what Podro calls an ‘adaptive strategy’ consisting of
a process of ‘assimilation and re-interpretation which extends outwards from
what is familiar’.3
By comparing Panofsky’s Idea and Auerbach’s Figura, we have established
the relevance of the iconoclastic, image-suspecting attitude to the reading of
Panofsky’s iconology proposed here. We have also suggested that a figural
philology may set an iconophilic agenda for the humanities, where the place
of pictorial reality in the construction of the past forms the central kernal of
the inquiry, rather than a demonstration of how images represent history.4
Here, as noted above, Panofsky’s iconophilism is to be challenged by way of
a comparison with Byzantine formulations regarding the icon. Theological
iconism, as applied to the concept of the figure, may support an insistence on
the realist tenor of iconology, but retaining the notion of the reality of the work
as something that is approached and constructed gradually by the philologist. A
relatively recent examination of the concept of the icon has been undertaken
by Jean-Luc Marion: his articulation of the notion of the icon coheres with the
concept of the figure proposed here, in so far as both cases include an element
of a preliminary reality validating and enhancing the image. The question, then,
is how to define this underlying reality; and if the Christian referent is a Theos,
the suggestion of the present chapter is that, within the framework of a figural
philology, the preliminary reality of a work should be defined first and foremost
as its past reality.
Iconoclasm, iconism and the reality of the past
Around the turn of the last century an abundant literature was dedicated to
the theory and practice of Byzantine iconoclasm. Hans Belting’s Bild und
Kult (1990), Moshe Barash’s Icon (1992), Marie-José Mondzain’s, Image, icône,
économie (1996), Charles Barber’s Figure and Likeness (2002), Bruno Latour and
Peter Weibel’s Iconoclash (2002), Michael Kelly’s Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (2003),
and significant parts of William J. Thomas Mitchell’s What Do Pictures Want?
(2005),5 are several examples out of many of this return to the iconic.6 Yet, most
Figural content and the past as a res extensa 121
if not all of these inquiries highlighted the question of the image, whereas our
attempt here is rather to think about the Prototype and the manner in which
it is realized in a type. Through the prism of the Byzantine icon, a picture
subordinated to and standing for a privileged reality, we can see the outlines of
a realist basis for the theory of figuration. Byzantine iconism suggests a model
of inquiry into artworks in which no absolute sovereignty is bestowed upon
the image (or icon); rather, artworks are legitimized and validated only by a
real referent, allowing the picture to serve as a starting point for an inquiry,
eventually making possible the production of a figure.
Theories of the icon support the idea of the regulated legitimacy of pictures,
based on the legitimation of the content or meaning they carry. Here we will
examine the extent to which iconology reflects the essential structures and
premises of the theoretical comprehension of icons within an iconophilic
framework. It must be emphasized from the beginning that such a framework
does not have to promulgate the supremacy of the image; on the contrary,
iconophilic discourse was developed as an apologetic, restorative project, taking
seriously the iconoclastic suspicion regarding images, and referring to icons
first and foremost as instruments, as working tools. In the context of Byzantine
iconoclasm, iconophilic discourse should be understood as adopting an ‘even
though’ position: taking into account the dangers to be found in pictorial
practice, it tries to gauge the limits and the possible profits coming out of such
a praxis. As was suggested in the previous few chapters, iconology seeks an
understanding of the ‘content/value/meaning’ (Inhalt/Wert/Bedeutung) of an
artwork.7 For that purpose, Panofsky’s iconological model posited art history as
a humanist eruditio8 involving the realm of ideas and the history of philosophy,
traversing and mapping the extended domain of human production, at the
centre of which there are always artworks and philosophical dispositions that
meet one other. Hence, for example, in his Studies in Iconology Panofsky explored
the ways in which works by distinguished Renaissance artists such as Titian and
Michelangelo corresponded with or interpreted the philosophical tropes of their
time.9 Works demanding identification led Panofsky into the excavation of long-
standing traditions of analogies between ideas and pictorial marks.10 Most of
these iconological trails traced the survival of Greek and Roman art, mythology
and philosophy through to the modern era, thus raising issues related to the
rise of humanism. But one possible weakness of many iconological inquiries
is their tendency to present the inner meaning (symbolical value) of a work in
terms of a ‘worldview’, a philosopheme rather than a philosophical articulation,
using it as an illustrative tool for clarifying the visual cipher. In such cases both
the critical view of philosophical ideas and the singularity and specificity of the
picture may be compromised.
Many objections were raised against this Panofskyan proposition of forming
an alliance between art and thought, objections arising out of an anxiety about
the possible occlusion of the reality of the work by abstract ideas.11 Frequently,
such arguments accuse Panofsky of a sort of heresy with respect to the authentic
visual and sensual presence of artworks, in favour of an adherence to the allure
of abstract ideas. One possible response to these arguments is suggested by a
defence of the iconological method as an iconic practice, in the Byzantine sense
of the word, resting on the necessary assumption of a reality that incubates and
motivates a work and its endurance through history. In striving to define the
reality of the work, an iconological investigation participates in this reality and
affects it. Enhancing the iconological method with elements derived from the
theory of the Byzantine icon may enable a better understanding of the ‘meaning’
involved in such an iconological reading. In Warburg’s terms, one can ask in
what way could winged ideas be grounded by a philological gaze? For our
purposes, it is not ideas but rather the past reality of a work that functions as the
referent of iconology, and the figure is equivalent neither to the artwork nor to
its image, but is rather the product of an adherence to that past reality, created by
the formation of a figure between two historical realities. In this framework, the
past is to be considered as an extended reality, enabling human retrospection
and retroaction. This reality of this past can be viewed as a kind of nature:
Auerbach reminded us that ‘Vico insisted that man has no nature other than his
history.’12 Following the philological gaze with a Bergsonian eye, one can view
the human past as an extended and extending, flexible, plastic and elastic nature,
preserved, enhanced and reformed by any human work or deed. This produced,
historical, extended nature is the referent, or the ‘thing’, that is the target of the
method defended here. However, this reality of the past is not yet identical with
the particular things that are the object of art historical inquiries.
The past reality of a work versus historical meaning
A distinction still needs to be established, then, between the reality of the past as
a general res extensa and the specific work that stands before the researcher. We
must, therefore, return to the object of iconological inquiry, and to the question
of its nature and character. In the iconological table, the iconological given13 is
considered only in so far as it is capable of serving as a starting point for the
excavation of a scheme.14 In iconology, artworks are supposed to include an inner

formal element (such as the system of human proportions, the construction of
perspective, etc.) that forms the guiding line of the inquiry. The iconological
document can belong to any medium, painting, sculpture, architecture, etc., as
long as the document is able to facilitate a continuous interpretation of various
forms and mediums representing the same type. This comprehensive territory
of iconological inquiry is pertinent to Riegl’s, Warburg’s and Panofsky’s art
histories.
For Panofsky iconological procedures seek out homologies between a work
and its genre, employing synthetic intuition, and locating an artwork in
the general history of cultural symptoms.15 These established analogies are
explicable as relations between a work and a philosophical-textual foundation.
Such procedures rely on an analogical rationality, looking for similar structures
in an artwork and its prototype, support or foundation (‘l’aplat’ in the plastic
figural jargon).
What makes this iconological procedure iconic, however, according to the
guidelines suggested here, is a figuration of the past reality of the work. In
principle, this figure should articulate the distinguishing mark of the work,
equivalent to a ‘specific difference’ in the Aristotelian framework, supplying
the formal definition of a thing within a certain genre.16 This element stands,
in the presented framework, for the mutation the specific work produced in
traditions of transmission along a certain time extension. The difficulty is that
this difference can be articulated only with the help of categories that are often
already canonized and acknowledged. The question of the individuality of
the work thus stands as the challenge for philological iconism. By examining
what is left unexplained, what remains unreadable, after the historical meaning
of a work has been established, the distinguishing mark of the past reality of
the work may become approachable. If historical meanings establish fitting
similarities between a work and other works, the explication of the past reality
of a work should proceed to a supplementary process – to the operation
of drawing a tangent, gradually getting closer to the specificity of the work
(this being, as August Boeckh deemed it, the basic gesture of philology).17 If
historical meaning is attainable through the restoration of analogies between
the work and its past, context and background, then the past reality of the
work is the product of this tracing of the traditions of the work’s transmission,
readings and presentations. But the work’s singular mark of distinction is only
approachable at a tangent: in other words, the singularity of the artwork is
practically undefinable and unattainable, even though its special reality guides
the figural restoration. This kind of reading presupposes a ratio between the
restoration of that which can be known (accepted historical habitudes and
readings) and that which one cannot know but which is the distinguishing
mark of the work.18 The approximate figuration of the latter can be performed
only as a new figure, one that has not yet been delineated by traditions of
iconography, genres, styles or habitudes, and which is, indeed, rarely to be seen
in art historical inquiries.
The iconic-figural situation thus consists of a dual structure in which one
side of the operation is restorative and comparative, and the other stands as a
cut in the extended web of historical reality. This duality between extension and
distinction is characteristic of the tradition known as French spiritualism, active
mostly in the nineteenth century.19 It involves not merely a mind–body dualism,
but rather a change–resistance dualism, in which change is correlated with the
activity of spirit (i.e. with thought), and resistance or persistence with extended
reality.20 Iconological activity, if it is to be viewed as iconic, should take charge
of working with this kind of duality.
The two unseen prototypes of the artwork
The work as examined by an iconic iconology actually has two prototypes,

which are both unseen, that is, they are both to be differentiated from the work’s
existence as an image or visual phenomenon. Jean-Luc Marion has proposed an
‘unseen’ to be found at the ground of the icon. For Marion, an exterior ‘unseen’
(invu) is that which has not yet become visible: it is the unpredictable potentially
visible, which constitutes the prototype of the icon.21 This potentially visible has
spatial characteristics: it is described by Marion as a void (un vide) and as depth
(la profondeur).22 In the history of art, it is possible to distinguish two unseens
between which the philological figure constitutes the ratio, and they are to be
considered as the two routes to the establishment of a work’s historical reality.
They are: (1) the historical meaning of the work building up an extensive map of
contextualization, and (2) the durational past reality of the work, which registers
the unexhaustible specific difference that the work has introduced into history.
The restorative iconological figure and the philological gaze capture this dual
reality of the work. In this dual framework, thought, being distinct from matter,
can restore or distinguish the outside only by following its own movements.
That is why iconological inquiry must be bound up with the histories of thought,
concepts and categories. It is only by reordering the space-time of thoughts, as
inscribed in documents and monuments, that thought can approach something

exterior to itself.
The iconological figure approaches the restoration of a work’s historical
reality, and by doing so participates in the transmission of the past reality of
the work. A relation between two moments – the moment of history including
a certain work and the moment of the generation of the work – is the ratio
that an iconic figural iconology tries to articulate. The general history of
cultural symptoms always remains a part of the iconological gesture, because
the figural ratio necessitates a rehabilitation of the history of thoughts – after
the description of a historical environment, or of its corresponding systems
of thought. As has been argued throughout this book, Panofsky, following
the legacy of Warburg, bestowed a historical nature upon the image, entailing
an essential relation between the image and its past. Most of Panofsky’s case
studies concern the ways in which artworks take upon themselves the task of the
remembrance and survival of archaic types. The task of a figure, in this kind of
iconic history, is to restore the two unseen prototypes of the work.
Vanishing point and carrying surface: Spatialities of

historical explication
Figural recollection, therefore, works like a bridge between the philologist and
the thing s/he investigates. The figure binds a certain scientific moment with
a certain productive moment in the past. It embodies, therefore, the distance
between the two moments. One should thus address the process of marking
a distance between the researcher and the thing he researches. This spatial
construction can be approached through two complementary spatial models:
the iconic and the perspectival. What would be the equivalent in historical
research? There one would treat past reality as a first and preliminary prototype,
which is unarticulable in its very essence. What can be approached, instead, is the
historical reality of works, a complex reality in itself. The historical reality of the
work is a synthesis between historical meaning and the past reality of the work.
Art historical research, understood as figuration, seeks a retroactive synthesis of
the historical reality of the work. The past reality of the work, including its distin-
guishing mark, as noted above, can only be approached approximately, it cannot
be defined in a positive manner or plainly and literally seen.23 In developing a
spatial vocabulary to discuss iconology and iconism, a comparison between
perspectival construction and iconic spatiality may support the sought-after
distinction between a fully historicist iconology and a philological, moderately

historicist one. It is generally acknowleged that Byzantine icons exhibit a spatial
character that is different from the perspectival one characteristic of western
painting from the Renaissance onwards.24 Perspective, as is well known, was
one of the central subjects in Panofsky’s investigations. He suggested that there
is a homology between perspectival construction and the humanist concept
of history, and indeed it should be made clear in what ways iconology relates
to a perspectival rationality. Perspective, as Panofsky presents it, is first and
foremost a construction locating a figure in an encompassing surrounding.
The operation of contextualizing a work is indispensable for art historical
inquiry. Contextualism thus obeys a perspectival imperative, in which the work
is located in a surrounding space. The work is literally ‘put in perspective’. A
perspectivist art history clarifies the meaning of a work by supplying it with
a background. It contextualizes the work and in doing so unearths hidden
concepts covered over by the work itself. This reading practice is rooted in the
Platonic and neo-Platonic theory of art. Neo-Platonic art theory places an idea
within a picture. In order to decipher the ‘documental sense’ (Dokumentsinn) or
the ‘essential sense’ (Wesenssinn) of the picture,25 the iconologist synthesizes his
subjective ‘primordial conducts of worldviews’ (weltanschauliches Urverhalten)
with the objective general history of spirit (allgemeine Geistesgeschichte).26 The
specific sense of the historical object in iconology is then to be constructed from
a mixture of neo-Kantian and neo-Platonist components.
The spatial character of icons is different. Here the infinite is not repre-
sented by a unifying Archimedean convergence point, but rather is present as
the abstract homogeneous surface carrying the depicted figure. As Panofsky
notes in Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, in late medieval art the
surface of painting functioned a carrying matter, as ‘an opaque and impervious
working surface’.27 Yet Marion has also noted that in the medieval icon, as in
later perspectival pictoriality, a distance exists between the supporting surface
of a painting (i.e. the canvas or the wall – ‘l’aplat’ in the figural structure) and
the painted brushstroke marks, which Marion also refers to as the ‘ectypes’.28 In
Marion’s terms, the ectypes are the delegated representatives of the prototype.
In pictorial terms, the ectypes are the coloured marks and brushstrokes; like
stigmata, they embody the emergence of a figure out of the unseen, as well
as the ascension of the unseen to the surface of the visible.29 The ‘type’ is the
depicted character or theme, figuring the hierarchical distance between the
prototype and the ectypes.30 As John of Damascus and Dionysius the Areopagite
argued, the prototype is both radically exterior to and generative of the ectypes,
the visible concrete signs that are not its mimetic replicas, but rather gestures
of distanciation and hierarchy between the prototype and the type. Between
the surface of the ground and the surface of the paint there exists a distance,
a depth, residing even in the most flat colour-filled painting, a distance that is
not illusionistic but material and historical, as it records the successive acts of
distancing that the specific work has participated in.
Where Panofsky emphasized the humanistic aspects of the construction of
perspective,31 Marion sees perspective as pertaining to a substantial subordin
ation of the human to a theological infinite. Perspective, according to Marion,
does not adhere only to the visible; rather, it acts as the paradox of the visible:
the coexistence of ideal space and real space, a coexistence existing also in the
structure of the icon. The vanishing point in perspectival painting is an empty
point, embodying no object, manifesting invisible ideal space in the midst of
the painterly real space. In this way, conical perspective spatiality, according
to Marion, is not merely an artificial formalization of seeing, but a substantial
iconic mode, defined as a procedure of distancing. If for Marion perspectival
distancing is radical and infinite in its nature and scope (as the radical distance
embodied in the icon takes one from the type to the prototype), for Panofsky the
function of perspectival construction is mainly a regulative one, embodying the
humanist equilibrium between subject and object. Panofsky observed that both
subjectivism and objectivism are opposite poles of the same tendency, which is
an empirical one:
The perspectival view [Anschauung], whether it is evaluated and interpreted

more in the sense of rationality and the objective, or more in the sense of
contingency and the subjective, rests on the will to construct pictorial space
[Bildraum], in principle, out of elements of, and according to the plan [Schema]
of, empirical visual space [empirischen Sehraum].32
If for Marion distance exists between a transcendent-infinite and finite ectypes,

then in Panofsky perspectival distance refers to a (Kantian) transcendental-
in-finite, i.e. to the finite schemes organizing human experience from within.
Correspondingly, in Panofsky’s writings, we find a strong correlation between
the presentation of the perspectival structure and the theme of humanism
and the humanist stance. Humanist perspectivism, again viewed through
the neo-Kantian prism, acts mostly as a principle of regulation. As Panofsky
explains:
Historically the word humanitas has had two clearly distinguishable meanings,
the first arising from a contrast between man and what is less than man; the
second, between man and what is more. In the first case humanitas means a
value, in the second, a limitation.33
And concluded:
It is from this ambivalent conception of Humanitas that humanism was born.

It is not so much a movement as an attitude which can be defined as the
conviction of the dignity of man, based on both the insistence on human values
(rationality and freedom) and the acceptance of human limitation (fallibility
and frailty); from this two postulates result – responsibility and tolerance.34
Humanism, then, and its modern incarnation in the humanities, are both based
on the assumption of Archimedean criteria, rationalizing between speculation
and fact, between capacity and limitation. In short, a humanist position,
according to Panofsky, is a regulative one. This Kantian trust in ‘regulative
ideas’ was already apparent in Panofsky’s ‘Der Begriff des Kunstwollens’,35 in
which the Archimedean point was introduced as the basis for an examination
of historical artistic works.36 This Archimedean point should be located outside
the chaotic and multiple hyle of historical data, and should serve as a regulative
point of reference for the relative point of view. The Archimedean point parallels
the vanishing point in perspectival construction, as Panofsky presented it. The
spatial construction of pictorial perspective requires an exterior vanishing
point, which will be the support for the concentration of the optico-spatial
cone of rays, embodying the receding of infinite, ‘ideal’ space. Panofsky
demonstrated that some centralizing factor is essential to all western models of
space-presentation, at least from ancient Greece to eighteenth-century Europe.
But even if the systematized perspectival model, at its Renaissance apex, was
an embodiment of infinite distance, it was nevertheless placed, located and
designed within the rational parameters of the conditions of this construction of
spatial experience. It is ‘infinity not only prefigured in God, but indeed actually
embodied in empirical reality’.37 And thus, perspective, on Panofsky’s account,
interiorizes and domesticates the infinite: ‘The history of perspective may be
understood with equal justice as a triumph of the distancing and objectifying
sense of the real, and as the triumph of the distance-denying human struggle
for control.’38
For Panofsky the vanishing point is an agent of the human capacity to
organize the human world both a priori and a posteriori. And as a structure of
meaning, perspectival construction situates an invisible element at the centre
of the spatial composition. Perspectival history sustains a spatial metaphorics
of ‘insideness’. The infinite is interiorized in the pictorial world-space, similarly
to the way in which the meaning of a work is ‘intrinsic’ to it. In perspectival

history, meaning (Bedeutung) dwells in the work. It is not without significance
that in 1932, when Panofsky addressed the question of description in the
history of art, preparing the ground for his later iconological table, he referred
to Martin Heidegger’s Kantbuch, regarding the question of interpretation.
From Heidegger’s approach to Kant, Panofsky derives his own hermeneutical
approach of trying to state and to determine, not what the work says explicitly
(‘sondern was sie als noch Ungesagtes vor Augen legt’), but what is unsaid or
unseen.39 Thus, the task of the art historian, parallel to that of the scholar of
philosophical systems, is to reveal what is hidden in the work, what isn’t said
explicitly, very much in tune with Marion’s approach to the unseen of the icon.
The first unseen is contained in the work as a historical meaning and it can
be made visible when the historical context is distinguished by the philologist.
It is an operative principle pertaining to a certain work, but one that is not
necessarily explicit or immediately detectable. The perspectival history resulting
from this discloses the hidden (the unseen inside the visible), and thus makes
the unseen in-visible. Panofsky’s use of the term ‘intrinsic meaning’40 further
indicates this interpretative metaphysics of the existence of the content inside
the investigated work. Leaning on this perspectival ‘in-ness’, iconology produces
a serial metonymical generic meaning, and positions the two types one beside
the other: it places an unseen beside that which is seen, and thus makes the
visible seen-again, seen-after. Perspectival iconology looks at a work as pointing
both backwards and inwards, towards an unseen idea; it locates the visible
around this idea and inside the conceptual framework issuing from it. Here
the work is conceived as an expression of the idea, and the inquiry reveals a
hidden content of a work that it locates inside (as idea) and around (as context)
the visible image. Panofsky himself articulated the perspectival dynamics
of expansion and introversion: ‘Perspective creates distance between human
beings and things […] but then in turn it abolishes this distance by, in a sense,
drawing this world of things […] into the eye’.41
On the other hand, iconic restoration claims that the Archimedean point
of a figure is not to be located ‘inside’ the work; rather, the content that the
work carries exists simultaneously with it, to its side. Iconic restoration will be
satisfied neither with discovering an eidetic core nor with a reconstruction of
the historico-cultural context of a work, but will rather seek to articulate that
which supports the work and enables its generic thematic classification. The
object of such a restoration is the unseen dual prototype of the work – historical
meaning and the past reality of the work. This comes close to Panofsky’s
delineation of a double-layered meaning: ‘a unifying principle which underlies

and explains both the visible event and its intelligible significance, and which
determines even the form in which the visible takes shape’.42 When assuming an
iconic character, iconological practice begins with the perspectival excavation
of analogies within the general history of cultural symptoms, and in a second
step continues to retroactively rehabilitate the systems of generic classification.
Past reality of works and the reality of the past
For the iconic iconologist, engaged in figuring out a work, even the most
contemporary artwork exists as a past reality, as something that has been
produced and seen already, even if only a moment ago. This past reality is
only representable as a system of coordinates. For Panofsky, historical time,
and more precisely historical moments of simultaneity, are ‘created not by the
coincidence [Zusammenfallen] of two or more isolated phenomena in a natural
point in time but rather merely by the coincidence of two or more frames of
reference [Bezugssysteme] in one […] stretch of time’.43 Again fully neo-Kantian
at this point, Panofsky posits frames of reference as an absolute condition for the
existence of the past as history. For an iconic iconologist, however, the reality of
the past permeates any set of conditions of possibility. He therefore adopts an
iconoclastic attitude, both towards considerations of artworks as self-sufficient
images and towards the schematic habitudes available for the construction of
the past. One should emphasize, as Marion does,44 that iconoclasm is an iconic
doctrine of the picture, occupied with limiting the usages of its visibility. The
icon, according to the council of Nicea II (787),45 demands respect, but not
adoration. Therefore in iconical philology, one would respect the work for its
capacity to initiate a search, but one would neither consecrate it as such, nor
consecrate the historical clarification of its meaning. Iconical philology would
employ a valuable picture or monument to produce the figure as capturing the
work’s two prototypes, instead of adoring the picture or its style in their own
right. This kind of adherence grants the past its resistance as reality.
At the end of the process, what a figural philology attempts to describe is
the historical reality of a work. Thus the object of the iconic iconologist should
no longer be identified with the artwork per se, but rather with its moment of
generation, that is to say, with the work’s realization at some point in the past.
From the point of view of the iconic iconologist, the figure restores a hitherto
unnoticed change in thought systems, generated by the production of the
researched work. And we would suggest that this historical reality can only
be positively articulated as a new thought. Human works of all kinds carry
a past, but plastic works carry this past in the most explicit manner. Figural
iconology, according to these guidelines, would view philosophy and art history
as inseparable, as it seeks to demonstrate how a certain work implies a precise
change in thought.46
The distance between the reality of the past and the historical
reality of a work
Since one of the tasks of the present inquiry is to tackle the question of
historicism, it is necessary to articulate what we understand by the historical
reality of a work of art. It should be differentiated first from the reality of the
past, which is the referent of philology. An iconic approach demands a further
acknowledgement of the distance between the two prototypes of a work, namely,
its past reality and its historical meaning. Without maintaining this distance
art history will not produce a figure but rather what could be conceived, if
somewhat severely, as an idol. The difference between icon and idol, Marion
suggests, consists in the fact that the icon sustains a distance between the
prototype and the type, while in the idolic situation this distance collapses.
An idol, according to Marion, is an image that lacks any distance separating
the unseen and the visible, unlike the icon, which is in itself a distantiating
instrument between the two. In Christian theology, the figure, though not
considered as sacred as the icon, is, nevertheless, not defined as idolatrous and
is, therefore, allowed to be used in theological procedures.47 The suggestion here
is that we think of art history as carrying such a figural task. The figural position
is respectful of the reality of the past, yet it does not amount to a full iconic
embodiment of it. Going a step further, we can suggest that the historical reality
of the work is itself synthesized by the two different elements: the historical
meaning and the past reality of a work. The past reality requires the examination
and reconsideration of the accepted narratives regarding the specific work or
regarding similar works that could be considered as participating in the same
genre. The historical reality of the work is not identical with an inaccessible
Kantian ‘thing’; rather, past reality is always subject to refiguration, eternally
given to rehabilitation and restoration. Iconical philology, presupposing the past
reality of the work, aspires to restore the work’s historical reality at a hitherto
unidentified place on the extended surface of spatio-temporal historical reality.
This kind of procedure will modestly take part in examining and re-examining
the history of philosophy, of ideas and of thoughts.
Artworks always come to us carrying a demand for restoration – above
all, a restoration of their generation. We can only begin to tackle this demand
by trying to match the artwork with some earlier or later realities by using
pre-established, habitual systems of categories or accepted histories of styles
and schools. Iconic philology’s task would be thereafter to question those
systems themselves. The figure, like the work itself, does not mimic, express or
complete an idea. Rather, it restores a hitherto unseen past reality in the history
of thoughts. The figure constructs a series of unseens, errors of interpretation or
distinctive changes, while trying to approach the generic reality of the work as
an Archimedean point. Hence we return to the following enigmatic paragraph
in which Panofsky proposes synthetic intuition as the main tool of the icono-
logical procedure:
we wish to get hold of those basic principles which underlie the choice and
presentation of motifs […] To grasp these principles we need a mental faculty
comparable to that of a diagnostician – a faculty which I cannot describe better
than by the rather discredited term ‘synthetic intuition’ and which may be better
developed in a talented layman than in an erudite scholar […] just so […] must
our synthetic intuition be corrected by an insight into the manner in which,
under varying historical conditions, the general and essential tendencies of the
human mind were expressed by specific themes and concepts […] It is in the
search for intrinsic meanings or content that the various humanistic disciplines
meet on a common plane.48
One cannot deny that there is an interpretive, hermeneutical creed to be found

in Panofsky’s iconology. Indeed, he insists that only when the identification of
pictorial themes (iconography) becomes interpretive does it also become icono-
logical.49 The present work proposes, though, that the process of understanding
(Verstehen) to which Panofsky’s iconology points is more a kind of definition
than a subjective ‘violence’ to be inflicted on the examined object.50 And we
suggest that there arises here the necessity for a fourth level of the iconological
understanding, that of systematic re-creation, which Panofsky himself raises,
if very cautiously, in an important footnote to his essay ‘On the Problem of
Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts’:
One could conceive of an approach which declares itself independent of

historical correctives on principle and only postulates that the picture it
constructs of a given phenomenon is in itself consistent and meaningful,
no matter whether it fits into any historic circumstances. Such an approach

(which neither extracts from texts what they ‘say’ nor what they ‘want to say’
but – adhering to the principle of consistency – what they ‘should have had
said’) can however no longer be defined as ‘interpretation’ but rather as creative
‘reconstruction’. Its value or nonvalue is not dependent on the standard of
historical truth or that of systematic originality and consistency. This approach
is unassailable as long as it is aware of its transhistorical or, even, extrahistorical
aims, but it must be resisted the moment when it is tempted to defend itself by
replacing history with some other aspiration.51
It is here that Panofsky points in the direction of the thesis of the present work:
the fourth level of iconology is the figural one, and iconology can become
historical only after it has been philological. In order to articulate the work’s
historical reality one has to go beyond, or rather leave behind, the historicist
creed, and propose a formula, a logos, which a work should have been saying.
This approach, finally, is iconical, in the sense that it respects and works with
pictures and images in order to catch a glimpse of a saying that is extra-
historical, to reach an Archimedean point – as Panofsky had already delineated
in his 1920 essay on Riegl, with which the trail of the present work began. This is
achieved by synthetic intuition, the epistemic gesture that Panofsky introduced
in his iconological table essay. Synthetic intuition restores the work neither as
‘seen’ nor as ‘unseen’, but rather as seen-again, re-seen. This figural philological
restoration enacts a double, simultaneous critique of the history of thought and
the history of works, by which the reality of the past is unearthed, recollected
and thought anew.
Nonseen and figured
The figure not only extends between two historical realities, it also restores two
roots or prototypes of the historical reality of a work: (1) the historical meaning
embedded in it; and (2) the work’s past reality, which is carried by the way in
which it survived following its production by affecting and leaving its mark on
other works. As we have said, the two prototypes of the work are different from
the visual existence of the work, but in two different ways: the first functions as
a background, the other as a trail of survival; and it is the task of the philological
figure to embody the distance between the two.
One might thus propose replacing the French term ‘espacement’ with a
neologism: ‘espassément’, past-spacing. Espassément denotes the existence of the
past as the res extensa, existing as matter, distinct from the res cogitans, as the
thought of the iconologist, both held together across this distance by figuration.
Espassément, the distancing ratio of figuration, is thus the central instrument of
a figural philology.
Conclusion: Towards a figural philology
Following the footprints of Erwin Panofsky, this book has explored the possi-
bility of a philological approach to the history of art, or a philology of a figural
type. In conclusion, the general, speculative lines implied by this approach will
be presented. In so doing, we must at certain points deviate from the Panofskyan
line. Moreover, we must bear in mind Panofsky’s ambivalence with regard to the
possibility of there being any kind of comprehensive method for the history
of art. As he wrote in a letter in 1958: ‘I discuss method only under extreme
provocation and believe that, while it is wholesome and at times necessary to
think about what one is trying to do, methodology should never be erected into
a discipline in its own right.’1 Hence the guidelines articulated in what follows
are not intended as a set of generally applicable rules, but rather as coordinates
for the direction of the mind in matters of figural philology.
The domain
In principle, any monument would be able to serve as the object of a figural

philology: anything made by man, originating anywhere in the constantly
expanding territory of the Kunstindustrie.2 Hence, this type of inquiry should
not be considered as a distinct discipline, but rather as a methodical approach
that can be applied to any work whatsoever, starting always, as Giulio Carlo
Argan has correctly stated, from ‘something which is not yet (or no longer)
artistic’.3 Neither should this method be considered as inter-disciplinary, but
rather as an inquiry occupied with produced things, and with the ways in which
thought lodges and articulates their reality throughout history. By binding the
historical meaning of habitudes with the past reality of works, this method
synthesizes spatio-temporal historical reality, trails made up of figural syntheses
and distinctions.
The subject of figural philology is neither spirit, nor culture, nor even history,
but rather the past. The past is not considered as a temporal entity but rather
as extended nature, made by man. Figural philology is interested in the domain
of human production, parallel to that which Auerbach called ‘Philologie
der Weltliteratur’:4 It is therefore focused on the transcultural and transtem-

poral survival of hylomorphic atoms. In this sense, a figural philology is not
concerned with the organic unities of a culture, nor with the environment or
context in which a work was produced, nor with a Zeitgeist, nor with the formal,
aesthetic experience of artworks. It is concerned, rather, with the rehearsal of
analogous relations between concepts and things.
It must be emphasized again that philological research as such does not
exclude the examination of plastic documents. On the contrary, the philological
method, as this book has tried to demonstrate, entails the plasticity of historical
reality. This plasticity includes nuances and variations, but also the consistency
of human production. As a figural philology, the discipline of art history may
be relocated at the heart of the humanities, as a practice strengthening the bond
between the history of production and the history of theories. The history of art
is an appropriate practice on which to base such a binding because its inquiries
(unlike those of aesthetics, for example) must presuppose the concrete and
specific nature of the artwork, as well as its necessary past existence (i.e. the
work, or rather the monument, always comes from the past, even if a recent
past, even if it is defined as contemporary art). In any case, the act of production
has already taken place. In the figural framework of philology history is seen as
an encoded map of valued, tacit knowledge, whose recovery it is the task of the
philologist to achieve.
The atoms of meaning within a philological art history are figures, not
artworks, forms, aesthetic experiences, ideas, artists, images or representations.
The figure is implicated in the serial reality of the repetition of productive
actions in historical space. A figure entails a relation between two distin-
guishable historical realities, drawing an analogy from the mode of operation
shared by both.
Historical meaning, past reality, historical reality
The work of philology, validating the past reality of works with the help of
the historical meanings of habitudes, manifests a presentational conception
of the past reality of works of art, in the sense that repetition, rehearsal and
restoration distinguish available trails with which it is possible to shape and
narrate this reality. The philologist’s task is to establish the historical reality of
the work, by a process of identifying and deploying historical meanings, that is
to say, essential tendencies or mental habits. To this end, the philologist must
assume the past reality of the things he investigates; that is, he adheres to the
continuous survival of things throughout history. This certainty regarding the
past duration of the investigated work (i.e. the work’s past reality) serves the
philologist as a platform upon which to read, regressively, the net of habitudes
along the figural series that he forms, striving to restore the work’s historical
reality, including and approaching, yet never positively naming, the work’s
mark of distinction.
Philological production
In so far as philology rehearses meaningful actions it has an affinity with

Aristotle’s model of tragedy. Philology would stand between history and the
poietic work, and in any case would not be identical with historical practice.5
Philology should be located at the middle point, indeed as an Archimedean
point, between tragedy and history. History, according to Aristotle, recounts
things as they happened, whereas tragedy recounts them according to necessity
or probability. This latter principle of tragedy is close to the philological
endeavour, which is to supply a proper reading of works. Many philologists,
from Vico to the present day, have identified in philology a poietic, artistic
aspect.6 For Panofsky, it was rather the other way around: without arguing for
the explicitly creative nature of his inquiry, he laboured to reveal the epistemic
models active within artistic production, and thus contributed to establishing a
community between knowledge and art. First and foremost, however, philology
is poietic in the basic sense that it is a productive activity: it produces figures,
i.e. series of historical realities and historical meanings.
Figural synthesis
Figural dynamics, embodying the plasticity of history, a posteriori binds

two historical realities, one of which is considered as a carrier of the same
knowledge later carried by the other. Both figural members, though, are
treated as past realities. Figural philology is synthetic in nature, but in place of
neo-Kantian systematization, it arranges history according to doxas that can be
validated or refuted by the historical evidence. The philologist seeks to refine
mental habits by distinguishing a conceptual territory corresponding to a given
work. A figural philology is then interested in joining together two historical
moments in order to produce a situation of simultaneity, an affinity existing in

a retrospective reading, creating ‘series, not classes’.7
The gesture of the figural philologist is thus one of matchmaking, but he
also acts, as Panofsky claimed, as a diagnostician.8 He seeks to locate a worthy
companion for a work, in order to distinguish a habitude. He looks to diagnose
the repetition of symptoms (historical meanings) in the past reality of works,
and thereby to participate in historical reality. The synthesis at work in figural
philology is inherently analogical, sometimes turning in the direction of
paralogy (a similarity of terms or elements issuing from an erroneous change),
but most often in the direction of homology (a similarity of terms or elements
issuing from a shared origin).
The dynamics of homological seriality mean that iconology, and in any case
figural philology, must be primarily interested in genres and only thereafter in
styles. Nevertheless, Panofsky (similarly to Spitzer) did not give up on the notion
of style, at least until his very late works.9 For the philologist, a style would be
considered an organic unity, pertaining to some synchronic historical punctu-
ation; it is a holistic unity that figural philology will analyse and dissect, and from
which it selects its material. A genre, on the other hand, would be embodied in a
figuration that results from the tracing of a history of styles; it is a lineage of subject
matter, only that this subject matter is not identical with the history of motives (i.e.
iconography), but would rather pertain to habitual lineages, connecting together
similarities between things and concepts. Indeed, Karen Lang, working through
Panofsky’s early theoretical writings, poignantly described the mega-history of the
concept of style in art history as an ‘ideal world’ and a ‘hall of mirrors’.10
Distinctive realism
Philology endeavours to distinguish the past reality of a work. Distinction, in

its Cartesian sense, perceives a thing as long as it holds only to that which is
particular to this thing. In the process of distinction, the researcher tries to
place his own mental habits on the grid of prepared concepts; a place that is not
yet registered as such, i.e. that is not registered as shared by the specific thing
and other things, a place that has not yet been distinguished. It is by checking
accepted habits and separating what conforms with the work’s reality from what
does not that this process of distinction takes place.
Auerbach emphasized that the figure, unlike the symbol, retains the speci-
ficity, the concreteness, i.e. the historical reality, of each one of its (at least) two
components. The philological method, based on figural dynamics, produces

a presentation binding two such components, a presentation without which
nothing would prevent the two from existing entirely independently from each
other, in the wilderness of history. In Viconian terms, the truth (verum) of
figural philology is a synthesis between certainty (certum) about the reality of
the past and the factuality (factum), the fact of having been made, of monuments
and works.11 The irreducible condition for the philological method is the logos,
understood as definition.
Untemporal history
Time is not an inherent ingredient of a figural philology. Duration, however, is.

The figure’s truth lies in the non-temporal reality of the past, in the fact of its
constant enduring by and through the work. Moreover, to a certain extent the
philologist must be a speculator, and his speculation must be conducted from
a point that is untimely – as Simmel argued, and Auerbach, Spitzer, as well as
Panofsky endorsed. This corresponds with the figural structure in which, for
example, the pair Joshua and Jesus rests on a dogma regarding the manner in
which history ought to be told. Without some dogma, some theoretical model,
there could be no figural matching. And the authority of the dogma comes
from a figural, philological gaze. The other basis of the figural series lies in the
reality of past, which figural philology validates from the depth of history. The
philologist seeks to clarify, retrospectively, patterns in the reality of the past that
have not been previously clarified or distinguished.
The figural sequence relies on historical reality’s constant mutation. This
plastic capacity is the matter of figuration. The dynamic structure found
in figurality does not imply that a figural philology amounts to a game of
arbitrary combinations and inter-textualities, as there are several corrective and
restrictive factors effecting it: (1) universal history is always taken into account
as a corrective factor; (2) some un-temporal idea or concept (or dogma, or doxa)
must be assumed in order for the inquiry to begin; and (3) the original text
stands at the basis of philological inquiry: with the help of original documents,
with their precise terms and concepts, the philologist aspires to restore some
Urtext, identifying the way it should have been read. The philological obligation
is to do everything possible in order to be able to read a work properly. The
philologist is interested in originals, but only in so far as they are considered
as works (hence not as documents). For philology, the difference between a
primary and a secondary source is a complex one. Every source is secondary

and primary to the same extent: secondary in so far as it is integrated into a
figural pair; primary in the sense that every work can, in principle, be a source
for everything that is inscribed, produced, generated from it. At the end of his
Mimesis, Auerbach lamented the fact that when writing the book in Istanbul he
had minimal access to secondary literature, and was forced to work with basic
primary sources, sometimes lacking up to date critical editions.12 As Auerbach
went on to note, this limitation does not necessarily hinder some satisfactory
approach to the reality of the works in question. This situation generates a sort
of a positivism, which validates the post-factum of the logos – the logos which
is read only in retrospect, as a source.
Finally, the philologist is involved and engaged in history, not in the sense
of Diltheyan empathy, or absorption in the phenomena and understanding it
through experience, but in an experimental manner in which the philologist
changes and shapes the past while and by re-recollecting it. For that purpose,
the philologist must work through and constantly rehabilitate his own mental
habits in order to reach the historical reality of the specific work.
Moderate historicism
To a certain extent then, a philological inquiry requires an ahistorical manner

of proceeding. It is not completely ahistorical, however, as it takes into consid-
eration the habitual tools of understanding available at a certain point in history,
surrounding and enabling the production of a specific work. A figural philology
may offer a means of coping with historicist relativism from within a histor-
icist framework, as the past reality of monuments is the foundation for both
historical meaning and historical reality. In Chapter 6, examining the spatial-
izing tendency in Warburg and Panofsky, it was suggested that this reality can
be considered, within the framework suggested here, as a res extensa, as a kind
of atlas upon which the philologist can literally proceed and move in order to
locate his monument. The monument’s past reality holds together its durational
existence in history, and the figure, which restores the operative principle of a
monument, inserts intermissions in what is seen as the flow of historical time.
The figural sequence locks temporality within the presentation of the habitude
sustaining the relation of the two realities.
Figural philology would neither restore a monument ‘as it really came about’
(wie es eigentlich gewesen) to employ Leopold von Ranke’s dictum,13 nor stage
the past through the free play of the imagination. Instead, figural philology’s
double restoration would include: (1) the restoration of the ‘having been’ of the
work; its past reality, following trails of homologies, representations, copies,
citations and moments of transmission; and (2) the restoration of monuments as
they deserve to be read, with their proper reading, and their distinctive marks.
This proper manner is the mode in which thought can distinguish a
monument as forming a figure together with a certain theoretical work. Hence,
in Aristotelian terms, a figural philology is located not only between history
and tragedy but also between history and philosophy. One could say that
philology is more philosophical than history, in the same sense that poetry is
more philosophical than history: both seek to present processes in reasonably
readable terms, not necessarily as they were. The working of figural philology
conforms to Windelband’s guidelines for ‘idiographic’ sciences,14 describing
valuable singularities. But, according to Panofsky’s iconology, an understanding
of the singularity is only achieved when a thing pertains to a certain series, to
a certain genre. This is enabled when a monument is rewarded with a proper
match, and thereby endowed with a moral affirmation, an affirmation of ‘so it
would be proper’, supported by the deployment of the work’s past reality and its
historical meaning.
Panofsky
Though Panofsky himself wished only to be affiliated with teachers who were
art historians (Vöge, Goldschmidt, Riegl, Dvořák and Schlosser), we have
here gone further in attempting to diagnose Panofsky’s peculiar ‘mental habit’.
This, according to the argument presented above, would definitely qualify as
philological, and in terms of the general history of concepts, would consist of
a mixture of hylomorphism and neo-Kantian value-based historicism. This
mixture, we have argued, describes best Panofsky’s method throughout its
various mutations. It produced a genuine philological enterprise, tracing the
passages of meaningful forms in history. In general terms, Panofsky can indeed
be placed among the later generation of Romance philologists (Auerbach,
Spitzer and Curtius), for several reasons, but most centrally because of this
generation’s combination of the ‘positivist morphological’ and the ‘historical-
cultural’ schools of nineteenth-century philology.
On this basis, we can view Panofsky’s endeavour, perhaps like any philo-
logical project, as inherently educational and edifying. Working on a moral
platform, he persisted not only in his respect for tradition,15 but also in his
maintenance of a bond between the history of poiesis and the history of theory.
This may supply a basis for understanding Panofsky’s various studies of specific
historical characters, such as Abbot Suger, Galileo Galilei and Erasmus,16 who
were, in themselves, embodying the link between theory and poiesis. These
authors tipped their respective theological, scientific and philosophical hats
to works of art, in a gesture of courtesy at a distance. As did Panofsky himself.
Notes
Chapter 1
1 Ernst Renan, L’avenir de la science: Pensées de 1848 (Paris, 1890), 141, quoted in
Edward W. Said, ‘Renan’s Philological Laboratory’, in Hellmut Flashar, Mayotte
Bollack and Heinz Wismann (eds), Philologie et herméneutique au 19ieme siècle II
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1983), 195.
2 See: Jan Ziolkowski (ed.), On Philology (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1990); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Powers of Philology:
Dynamics of Textual Scholarship (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003);
Pascal Hummel, Philologus auctor: le philologue et son œuvre (Bern, Berlin
and Brussels: P. Lang, 2003); A. Gurd, Iphigenias at Aulis: Textual Multiplicity,
Radical Philology (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005); Jürgen
Paul Schwindt (ed.), Was ist eine philologische Frage? Beiträge zu Erkundung
einer theoretischen Einstellung (Frankfut am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009); Kai
Bremer and Uwe Wirth (eds), Texte zur modernen Philologie (Ditzingen:
Reclam, 2010); Karlheinz Barck and Martin Treml (eds), Erich Auerbach –
Geschichte und Aktualität eines europäischen Philologen (Berlin: Kulturverlag
Kadmos, 2007).
3 Paul de Man, ‘The Return to Philology’, in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 3–26.
4 Most notably by Friedrich Nietzsche. On this see Said, ‘Renans’s Philological
Laboratory’, 194–5.
5 August Boeckh, ‘Die Idee der Philologie oder ihr Begriff, Umfang und höchster
Zweck’, in Enzyklopädie und Methodenlehre der philologischen Wissenchaften
[c. 1877], vol. 1 (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1966), 23–5; Ulrich von Wilamowitz-
Moellendorff, Geschichte der Philologie [1921] (Stuttgart and Leipzig:
B. G. Teubner, 1998), 1–6; John Glucker, From Sylvester to the Elders of Zion:
Introduction to Philology [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2011), 75–6.
6 Boeckh, ‘Idee der Philologie’, 3–33; Pierre Swiggers, ‘Les debuts et l’évolution de
la philologie romane, surtout en Allemagne’, in Sylvain Auroux (ed.), History of
the Language Sciences: An International Handbook on the Evolution of the Study
of Language from the Beginnings to the Present, vol. 2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001),
1272–86.
7 See: Richard Walzer, ‘New Light on the Arabic Translations of Aristotle’, Oriens 6:1
144 Notes
(June 1953): 91–142; Alexandra Liameri and Vanda Zajko (eds), Translation and
the Classic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
8 Boeckh, ‘Idee der Philologie’, 12, 24; Georg Curtius, ‘Über die Geschichte und
Aufgabe der Philologie’ [1862], in Ausgewählte Reden und Vorträge (Leipzig:
Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1886), 117–21.
9 An elaborated account of the relationship between painting and humanist
scholarship can be found in Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist
Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition,
1350–1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
10 See Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm:
Almqvist & Wiksell, 1972 [1960]).
11 Michael Podro has remarked on the trans-cultural potential of Panofsky’s
iconology. See his The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1982), 186.
12 Erwin Panofsky, ‘The Neoplatonic Movement in Florence and North Italy
(Bandinelli and Titian)’, and ‘The Neoplatonic Movement and Michelangelo’, in
Studies in Iconology (New York and London: Icon, Harper and Row, 1962 [1939]),
129–230.
13 See: Robert S. Leventhal, ‘The Emergence of Philological Discourse in the German
States 1770–1810’, in The Disciplines of Interpretation: Lessing, Herder, Schlegel and
Hermeneutics in Germany 1750–1800 (Berlin and Amsterdam: Walter de Gruyter,
1994), 235–55; Ingo Gildenhard, ‘Philologia Perennis? Classical Scholarship
and Functional Differentiation’, in I. Gildenhard and M. Ruehl (eds), Out of
Arcadia: Classics and Politics in Germany in the Age of Burckhardt, Nietzsche and
Wilamowitz (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2003), 161–204.
14 See Thora Ilin Bayer and Donald Phillip Verene, Keys to the New Science:
Translations, Commentaries and Essays (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009),
30–1, 45–6. See also Auerbach’s translation and commentaries: Giambattista Vico,
Die Neue Wissenschaft – über die gemeinschaftliche Natur der Völke (München:
Allgemeine Verlagsanstalt, 1924).
15 For Auerbach’s main writings concerning Vico, see: Erich Auerbach, ‘Giambattista
Vico und die Idee der Philologie’ [1936], in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen
Philologie, ed. F. Schalk (Bern: Francke, 1967), 233–41; ‘Vico and Aesthetic
Historism’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 8:2 (December 1949): 110–18;
‘Vico und der Volksgeist’ [1955], in Gesammelte Aufsätze, 242–50.
16 Karl Löwith, Vicos Grundsatz: verum et factum convertuntur – Seine theologische
Prämisse und deren säkulare Konsequenzen (Heidelberg: Carl Winter
Universitätsverlag, 1968); James C. Morrison, ‘Vico’s Principle of Verum is Factum
and the Problem of Historicism’, Journal of the History of Ideas 39:4 (October
1978), 579–95; David Marshall has argued for the need to differentiate better
Notes 145
between factum and certum in Vico’s oeuvre; according to Marshall, in as much as

factum regards human deeds, certum ‘denotes that which is free from doubt and
particularized […] the particular judgments of the law’. See David L. Marshall,
Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 65–6.
17 See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham (London and Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1956 [1934]), 334–7 (1140a).
18 See Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der
griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Stuttgart: Reclam Verlag,
1995 [1755]).
19 Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Zur Philologie I, Zur Philologie II’ [c. 1797], in Ernst Behler
(ed.), Kritische Ausgabe, vol. 16 (Paderborn, München, Wien: Schönigh, 1959–90),
37, 39, 42, 44, 61, 81.
20 See, for example, Hermann Usener, ‘Philologie und Geschichtswissenschaft’
[1882], in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1907),
6: ‘Johann Joachim Winckelmanns Geschichte der alten Kunst (1764)
ist der Ausgangpunkt nicht nur der Archäologie, sondern auch unserer
deutschen Philologie, in gewissem Sinne darf man sagen der modernen
Geschichtswissenschaft.’
21 See Wolfgang Beyrodt (ed.), Kunsttheorie und Kunstgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts
in Deutschland, Texte und Dokumente, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982).
22 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Der Begriff des Kunstwollens’, in Hariolf Oberer and Egon
Verhezen (eds), Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft (Berlin: Verlag
Bruno Hessling, 1964), 33; ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’, trans. Kenneth J.
Northcott and Joel Snyder, Critical Inquiry 8:1 (Autumn 1981): 18.
23 On the influence of Renaissance art on the formation of the history of art see
Michael Ann Holly, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the
Image (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
24 Hellmut Flashar, ‘Die methodisch-hermeneutischen Ansätze von Friedrich
August Wolf und Friedrich Ast – traditionelle und neue Begründung’, in Hellmut
Flashar, Karlfried Gründer Axel Horstmann (eds), Philologie und Hermeneutik
um 19. Jahrhundert – Zur Geschichte und Methodologie der Geisteswissenschaften
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979), 21–31; Heinz Wissmann, ‘Les
études platoniciennes au 19ème siècle’, Mayotte Bollack and Heinz Wissman (eds),
Philologie et herméneutique au 19ème siècle II, (Göttingen: Wandenhöck and
Ruprecht, 1983), 497.
25 Flashar, ‘Wolf und Ast’, 26.
26 Karlheinz Stierle, ‘Altertumswissenschaftliche Hermeneutik und die Entstehung
der Neuphilologie’, Philologie und Hermeneutik II, 260.
27 ‘Philologie ist das Studium der classischen Welt in ihrem gesamten, künstlerischen
146 Notes
und wissenschaftlichen, öffentlichen und besonderen Leben.’ Quoted in Stierle,

‘Altertumswissenschaftliche Hermeneutik’, 266.
28 See Manfred Landfester, ‘Ulrich von Willamowitz-Moellendorff und die
hermeneutische Tradition des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Philologie und Hermeneutik um
19. Jahrhundert, 156–80.
29 Ibid., 176.
30 Bernard Cerquiglini, ‘Gaston Paris et les dinosaures’, in Éloge de la variante –
Histoire critique de la philologie (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 72–101.
31 Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses, une archéologie des sciences humaines
(Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1966), 316–17.
32 See Karlfried Gründer (ed.), Der Streit um Nietzsches ‘Geburt der Tragödie’: Die
Schriften von E. Rohde, R. Wagner, U. v. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (Hildesheim:
Olms, 1989).
33 De Man, ‘The Return to Philology’; Edward W. Said, ‘Erich Auerbach, Critic of
the Earthly World’, Boundary 2 31:2 (Summer 2004): 11–34; Emily Apter, ‘The
Human in the Humanities’, October 96 (Spring 2001): 71–85; Geoffrey Harpham,
‘Roots, Races and the Return to Philology’, Representations 106 (Spring 2009):
34–62.
34 English translation in James I. Porter, ‘Erich Auerbach and the Judaizing of
Philology’, Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008): 146. Original in Auerbach,
‘Giambattista Vico und die Idee der Philologie’, 241: ‘Das ist seine [Vico’s]
Humanität; etwas weit tieferes und gefährlicheres als das, was man zumeist unter
diesen Worte versteht.’
35 Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1948), 6.
36 Ibid., 18–19.
37 Foucault, Les mots et les choses, 314–15: ‘Pour les philologues, les mots sont
comme autant d’objets constitués et déposés par l’histoire.’
38 See Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante; François Hartog ‘The Double Fate of the
Classics’, Critical Inquiry 35 (Summer 2009): 964–79.
39 Auerbach, ‘Giambattista Vico und die Idee der Philologie’.
40 Examples are too abundant to list in full, but see for instance Curtius, ‘Über die
Geschichte und Aufgabe der Philologie’, 129: ‘Der Philologe sucht mit dem Volk
zu leben, das er studiert’. See also Harpham, ‘Roots, Races and the Return to
Philology.’
41 Erwin Panofsky, ‘The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline’, in Meaning in the
Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), 1–25.
42 Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura’, Archivum Romanicum 22 (1938): 451; ‘Figura’, in Scenes
from the Drama of European Literature. Six Essays (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984), 29.
Notes 147
43 As Auerbach suggested in ‘Philologie der Weltliterature’, Gesammelte Aufsätze

(Winter 1969): 301–10.
44 See F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon (New York: New
York University Press, 1967), 110–12.
45 Aristotle, Metaphysics: Books I–IX, trans. Hugh Tredennick (London and
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 284–5 (1024a).
46 Many philologists, among them Boeckh and Usener, held to that view. For
example see Schlegel, ‘Zur Philologie I’, 42 [fragment 98]: ‘Die Philologie ist jetzt
eine bloß formelle Wissenschaft d.h. Kunst.’
47 See Frithjof Rodi, ‘“Erkenntnis der Erkannten” – August Boeckhs Grundformel
der hermeneutischen Wissenschaften’, in Philologie und Hermeneutik um 19.
Jahrhundert, 68–73; Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History, 23.
48 Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire. Essai sur la relation du corps á l’esprit [1896]
in Œuvres, Annotés par André Robinet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1959), 159–379.
49 Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History, 23.
50 See John Edward Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public
Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004).
51 Panofsky, ‘Der Begriff des Kunstwollens’, 33–4; ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’,
esp. 18: ‘It is the curse and the blessing of the academic study of art that its objects
necessarily demand consideration from other than a purely historical point of
view.’
52 For the fiercest anti-historicist philological manifesto see Servais Étienne,
Défense de la philologie et autres écrits [c. 1933] (Bruxelles: La renaissance du livre,
1965).
53 This concept is developed in Alois Riegl, ‘Wesen und Entstehung des modernen
Denkmalskultus’ [c. 1903], in Ernst Bacher (ed.), Kunstwerk oder Denkmal? Alois
Riegls Schriften zur Denkmalpflege (Vienna: Böhlau, 1995), 52–97. The essay
was published earlier as ‘Der Moderne Denkmalskultus sein Wesen und seine
Entstehung’, in Alois Riegl, Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Karl M. Swoboda (Augsburg
and Wien: Filser Verlag, 1928), 144–93.
54 On the relationship between hermeneutics and philology, see: Hellmut Flashar,
‘Die methodisch-hermeneutischen Ansätze von Wolf und Ast – Traditionelle und
neue Begründung’, in Philologie und Hermeneutik um 19. Jahrhundert, 21–32;
Reiner Wiehl, ‘Schleiermachers Hermeneutik – Ihre Bedeutung für die Philologie
in Theorie und Praxis’, in Philologie und Hermeneutik um 19. Jahrhundert, 32–68;
Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs, ‘Textauslegung und hermeneutischer Zirkel – zur
Innovation der Interpretationsbegriffes von August Boeckh’, in Philologie und
Hermeneutik um 19. Jahrhundert, 84–102; Kristin Gjesdal, ‘Hermeneutics and
148 Notes
Philology: A Reconsideration of Gadamer’s Critique of Schleiermacher’, Journal of

the History of Philosophy 14:1 (2006): 133–56.
55 See Erich Auerbach, ‘Introduction: Purpose and Method’, in Literary Language
and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1965), 12.
56 Leopold Waizbort, ‘Erich Auerbach im Kontext der Historismus debatt’, in Erich
Auerbach – Geschichte und Aktualität, 294–6.
57 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Wir Philologen’, in Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta
(München: Hanser Verlag, 1954), vol. 3, 323–32.
58 See Helmut Holzhey, ‘Vom Nutzen und Nachteil des Wertbegriffs in der
Kulturphilosophie’, in Peter-Ulrich Merz-Benz and Ursula Benz (eds), Ethik
oder Ästhetik? Zur Aktualität der neukantianischen Kulturphilologie (Würzburg:
Königshausern und Neumann, 2004), 71–86.
59 Ernst Vogt, ‘Der Methodenstreit zwischen Hermann und Boeckh und seine
Bedeutung für die Geschichte der Philologie’, in Philologie und Hermeneutik um
19. Jahrhundert, 103–21.
60 Holzhey, ‘Vom Nutzen und Nachteil des Wertbegriffs’. See also: Heinrich Rickert,
Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft (Freiburg, Leipzig and Tübingen: Verlag
von J. C. B Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1899); and Hermann Seidel, ‘Wirklichkeit als
Alternative zum Wert’, in his Wert und Wirklichkeit in der Philosophie Heinrich
Rickerts (Bonn: H. Bouvier Verlag, 1968), 65–79; Guy Oaks, Die Grenzen
kultuwissenschaftlicher Begriffsbildung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990).
61 These three borders were objects of scrutiny in Nietzsche’s reformulations of
philology. See Viktor Pöschl, ‘Nietzsche und die klassische Philologie’, Philologie
und Hermeneutik um 19. Jahrhundert, 141–55.
62 Julius von Schlosser, Die Kunstliteratur: ein Handbuch zur Quellenkunde der
neueren Kunstgeschichte (Wien: Schroll, 1924); Stilgeschichte und Sprachgeschichte
der bildenden Kunst. Ein Rückblick (München: Verlag d. Bayerische Akademie
den Wissenschaften, 1935). See also: Ricardo Di Mambro Santos, ‘The
Concentric Critique: Schlosser’s Kunstliteratur and the Paradigm of Style in
Croce and Voßler’, Journal of Art Historiography 1 (December 2009), http://
arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/media_139129_en.pdf (accessed
14 July 2016); Ricardo Di Mambro Santos, ‘Words of Suspension: The
Definition of ‘Written Sources’ in Julius von Schlosser’s Kunstliteratur’, Journal
of Art Historiography 2 (June 2010), http://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.
com/2011/02/media_152491_en.pdf (accessed 14 July 2016).
63 Mostly in Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London: Faber &
Faber, 1958).
64 See Henri Focillon, Vie des forms [1934] (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1995); see also Willibald Sauerländer, ‘En face des barbares et à écart des dévots.
Notes 149
L’humanisme médiéval d’Henri Focillon’, in Mathias Waschek (ed.), Relire Focillon

(Paris: Louvre et Ensb-A, 1995), 53–74.
65 Especially in Ernst Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the
Renaissance 2 (London: Phaidon Press, 1972). Gombrich’s philology is marked
both with scepticism and an interest in communication and pragmatics.
66 On Panofsky as a ‘frustrated philologist’, see Joan Hart, ‘Erwin Panofsky and
Karl Mannheim: A Dialogue on Interpretation’, Critical Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993):
551–4.
67 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition’, in Meaning
in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1955), 295–320. See
also on this essay: Oskar Bätschmann, ‘ “Pan deus Arcadiæ venit”. Panofsky und
Poussin’, in Erwin Panofsky – Beiträge des Symposions Hamburg 1992, ed. Bruno
Reudenbach (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994), 71–82.
68 See Louis Marin, ‘Panofsky et Poussin en Arcadie’, in Erwin Panofsky, Cahiers pour
un temps (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1983), 151–66.
69 Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, 296–7. This process of achieving truth by translation
errors fits the method of ‘Supplation’ in the Warburg-Voßelr sense, or the working
with the ‘variante’ in the French branch of philological research. See Cerquiglini,
Éloge de la variante, passim.
70 Oskar Bätschmann wrote: ‘Die Insel, auf die Panofsky 1932 vor Hakenkreuz
und Kunstgeschichte flüchtete, um sich mit Arkadien zu beschäftugen, war die
Philologie. Im Aufsatz Et in Arcadia Ego von 1936 präsentierte sich Panofsky als
Philologe und beanspruchte ein philologisches Ziel.’ ‘Pan deus Arcadiæ’, 75.
71 Erwin Panofsky, ‘The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline’, in Meaning in the
Visual Arts, 1–25.
72 Notably, most letters exchanged with these philologists are dated to the 1950s. I
also found though, in the Deutsche Literaturarchiv in Marbach, an earlier letter
from Auerbach to Panofsky dated to 1948, and the style of this letter implied
that the two were already on friendly terms. For the published letters see: Erwin
Panofsky, Korrespondenz, ed. Dieter Wuttke, vol. 3 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz
Verlag, 2001), 64–5, 159, 223–9, 1495 (letters exchanged between Panofsky
and Spitzer); 116–17, 162–3, 208 (letters exchanged between Panofsky and
Auerbach).
73 Giulio Carlo Argan, ‘Ideology and Iconology’, trans. Rebecca West, Critical Inquiry
2:2 (Winter 1975): 297–305; Michael Ann Holly, ‘Later Work: An Iconological
Perspective’, in Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1984), 158–93.
74 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Über das Verhältnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie’,
Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 18 (1925): 132.
Elsner and Lorenz translated ‘Fülle’ into ‘Volume’. See Erwin Panofsky, ‘On
150 Notes
the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory: Towards the Possibility of a
Fundamental System of Concepts for a Science of Art’, trans. Katharina Lorenz
and Jas Elsner, Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008): 47.
75 For a criticism of hylomorphism in nature and in human production and
technics, developed in France at about the same time as Panofsky was bringing
his iconology to fruition, see Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des
notions de forme et d’information [1957] (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1964).
Chapter 2
1 For several examples out of many possible others, see Erwin Panofsky,
Korrespondenz 1910–1968. Eine kommentierte Auswahl in fünf Bänden, ed. Dieter
Wuttke (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2001), vol. 3, 664 (25 January 1955);
860–1 (23 November 1955); 965 (26 April 1956); vol. 4, 396–7 (19 December
1958).
2 Erwin Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. 5, 639 (Letter to Robert Marichal, 22 March
1965).
3 On Focillon and morphology, see Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis, Forma come destino,
Henri Focillon et il pensiero morfologico nell’estetica francese della prima metà del
Novecento (Florence: Alinea Editrice, 1998). I am thankful to Kerstin Thomas for
pointing out the relevance of this work.
4 David Summers, ‘Meaning in the Visual Arts as a Humanistic Discipline’, in Irvin
Lavin (ed.), Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views From Outside (Princeton: The
Institute for Advanced Study, 1995), 12–13.
5 Panofsky, Korrespondenz, vol. 3, 664 (Panofsky to J. de Coo, Museum Mayer van
den Bergh, Antwerpen, 25 January 1955).
6 Panofsky, Die deutsche Plastik des elften bis dreizehnten Jahrhunderts, 2 vols
(Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1924).
7 Panofsky, ‘Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst’ [1915], Deutschprachige
Aufsätze II, ed. Martin Warnke and Karen Michels (Berlin: Akademie Verlag,
1998), 1109–18.
8 Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1982), 179–85; Michael Ann Holly, ‘Panofsky and Riegl’, in Erwin
Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1984), 69–96; Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1993), 152ff; Allister Neher, ‘ “The Concept of the Kunstwollen”:
Neo-Kantianism and Erwin Panofsky’s Early Art Theoretical Essays’, Word and
Image 20:1 (January–March 2004), 41–51; Frederic J. Schwartz, ‘Panofsky and
Notes 151
Sedlmayr: The Options’, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in
Twentieth-century Germany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2005), 146–51.
9 Neher, ‘The Concept of the Kunstwollen’, 44–6.
10 This issue was discussed in Erwin Panofsky, ‘Über das Verhältnis der
Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie. Ein Beitrag zu der Erörtung über die Möglichkeit
kunstwissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe’ [1924], Deutschsprachige Aufstätze II,
1035–63; ‘On the Relationship Between Art History and Art Theory: Towards
the Possibility of a Fundamental System of Concepts of a Science of Art’, trans.
Katharina Lorenz and Jas Elsner, Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008): 43–71.
11 Panofsky, ‘Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der
bildenden Kunste’, Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed. Hariolf
Oberer and Egon Verhezen (Berlin: B. Hessling, 1964), 93.
12 Panofsky, ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’, trans. Kenneth J. Northcott and Joel
Snyder, Critical Inquiry 8:1 (Autumn 1981): 33.
13 Panofsky, ‘Der Begriff des Kunstwollens (1920)’, Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der
Kunstwissenschaft, 44.
14 Panofsky discusses hylomorphism in his Habilitationsschrift, Die
Gestaltungsprinzipien Michelangelos (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter,
2014), 197–219.
15 Adi Efal, ‘Reality as the Cause of Art: Alois Riegl and Neo-Kantian Realism’,
Journal of Art Historiography 3 (December 2010), http://arthistoriography.files.
wordpress.com/2011/02/media_183171_en.pdf (accessed 14 July 2016).
16 For example Henri Zerner, ‘L’histoire de l’art d’Alois Riegl: un formalism tactique’,
Critique 339–40 (August–September 1975), 941.
17 Michael Gubser, ‘Theodor von Sickel and the Institute for Austrian Historical
Research’, Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and
Temporality in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006),
77–88.
18 Ibid., 82–3.
19 See Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, trans. Glenn W.
Most (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005).
20 Alois Riegl, Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste, ed. Karl M. Swoboda
and Otto Pächt (Graz: Böhlau, 1996); Alois Riegl, Historical Grammar of the
Visual Arts, trans. Jacqueline E. Jung (New York: Zone Books, 2004).
21 Theodor Lewandowski, Linguistishces Wörterbuch (Heidelberg: Quelle und Meyer,
1984), 388–9.
22 R. Meringer et al. (eds), Wörter und Sachen: Kulturhistorische Zeitschrift für Sprach
und Sachforschung, vol. 1 (Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung,
1909); Spitzer contributed an essay in the third issue of this journal, in 1912;
152 Notes
Dorothee Heller, Wörter und Sachen: Grundlagen einer Historiographie der

Fachsprache Forschung (Tübingen: Gunther Narr Verlag, 1998).
23 ‘Sprachforschung, der ich anhänge und von der ich ausgehe, hat mich doch nie
in der Weise befriedigen können, daß nicht immer gern von den Wörtern zu den
Sachen gelangt werden.’ Jacob Grimm, Geschichte der deutsche Sprache [1848]
(Leipzig: Hirzel, 1880), XI. This moto from Grimm appeared until 1938 on all the
title pages of the journal.
24 Julius von Schlosser, Die Kunstliteratur: Ein Handbuch zur Quellenkunde der
neueren Kunstgeschichte (Wien: Schroll, 1924), 2: ‘Im Grunde handelt es sich also
um philologische Aufgaben, und so wird die Gliederung der kunsthistorischen
Quellenkunde auch durch jene Richtpunkte bestimmt sein, die den vorbildlichen
Charakter jener wunderbar fein ausgebildeten Disziplin, der klassischen
Philologie, ausmachen. Heuristik, Kritik und Hermeneutik der Quellen werden
auch hier ebenso viele sich übereinander erhebende Stufen ausmachen wie dort.’
25 Julius von Schlosser, Stilgeschichte und Sprachgeschichte der bildenden Kunst. Ein
Rückblick (München: Verlag d. Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1935).
26 Ibid., 33, 37.
27 Ibid., 18.
28 See Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels, vol. 3
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 371.
29 Schwartz, ‘Panofsky and Sedlmayr’, 148–50.
30 Panofsky, ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’, 18; ‘Begriff des Kunstwollens’, 33.
31 Ibid.
32 Podro, Critical Historians, 179.
33 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Probleme der Kunstgeschichte’ [1927], Idea VII (1988), 7–14.
34 Ibid., 8.
36 Servais Étienne, Défense de la philologie et autres écrits [c. 1933] (Bruxelles, La
renaissance du livre, 1965), 36: ‘Le métier du philologue […] son principe est de
faire de la littérature un usage normal.’
37 Panofsky, ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’, 30–1; ‘Begriff des Kunstwollens’, 42.
38 Panofsky, ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’, 31–2; ‘Begriff des Kunstwollens’, 43–4.
39 Pierre Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante. Histoire critique de la philologie (Paris:
Éditions du Seuil, 1989), 76; Pascale Hummel, ‘Déviations, inversions et
perversions’, in Philologus auctor. le philologue et son œuvre (Bern: Peter Lang:
2003), 111–20.
40 Giulio Carlo Argan, ‘Ideology and Iconology’, trans. Rebecca West, Critical inquiry
2:2 (Winter 1975): 300.
41 Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1948), 2.
Notes 153
42 Alois Riegl, ‘Der Moderne Denkmalskultus sein Wesen und seine Entstehung,
(1903)’, Gesammelte Aufsätze (Augsburg-Wien: Benno Filser Verlag, 1928),
144–93. On this essay, see: Gubser, ‘History and the Perception of Monuments’,
Time’s Visible Surface, 141–50; Diana Reynolds Cordilione, ‘The Advantages and
Disadvantages of Art history for Life: Alois Riegl and Historicism’, Journal of
Art Historiography 3 (December 2010), http://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.
com/2011/02/media_183170_en.pdf (accessed 14 July 2016); Adi Efal, ‘Riegl’s
Concept of Age-value and the Challenge of Historicism in Art History’, Art
History Supplement 5 (December 2011), https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=
0B3m6FPZNWpExfl9JSjkwRzlxa3hzR043amlSSVJmWWhGQzZjZXpwTl96WEZ
fZ0szTlF1aWM&usp=sharing (accessed 14 July 2016).
43 Efal, ‘Riegl’s Concept of Age-value’.
44 Karen A. Lang, ‘The Experience of Time and the Time of History: Riegl’s
Age-value and Benjamin’s Aura’, in Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics
and Art History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 135–78.
45 Alois Riegl, ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Essence and its Developments’,
trans. Karin Bruckner and Karen Williams, in Nicholas Stanley Price
(ed.), Historical Philosophical issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage
(Harvard: Paul Getty Trust, 1996), 77.
46 Riegl, ‘Der Moderne Denkmalkultus’, Gesammelte Aufsätze, 172.
47 See, for example: Georg Dehio, Alois Riegl and Georg Mörsch, Konservieren, nicht
Restaurieren: Streitschriften zur Denkmalpflege um 1900 (Braunschweig: Vieweg,
1988); Ernst Bacher (ed.), Kunstwerk oder Denkmal? Alois Riegls Schriften zu
Denkmalphlege (Köln and Weimar: Böhlau, 1995).
48 Efal, ‘Reality as the Cause of Art’, 6–7, 13.
49 Riegl, ‘Kunstgeschichte und Universalgeschichte’, in Gesammelte Aufsätze, 9:
‘Zwishen Wellenberg und Wellental liegt ein toter Punkt, in welchem die Extreme
sich berühren.’
50 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Das Mittelmaß’, Die theoretische Kunstlehre Albrecht Dürers
(Dürers Ästhetik), Dissertation (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1914), 21–3.
51 Panofsky, ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’, 30.
52 Panofsky, ‘Begriff des Kunstwollens’, 42.
53 Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York: Meridian
Publishing, 1957 [1951]).
54 Riegl, ‘Naturwerk und Kunstwert I’, Gesammelte Aufsätze, 63.
55 Efal, ‘Reality as the Cause of Art’; Efal, ‘Riegl’s Concept of Age-value’.
56 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Original und Faksimilerreproduktion’ [1930], Deutschsprachige
Aufstäze II, 1078–91.
57 Ibid., 1080.
58 Riegl, ‘Der moderne Denkmalkultus’, Gesammelte Aufsätze, 172.
154 Notes
Chapter 3
1 Pierre Francastel, La réalité figurative. Éléments structurels de sociologie de l’art

(Paris: Gonthier, 1965), 105.
2 René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, in Philosophical Writings of Descartes,
vol. 1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), I, §60, 27.
Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 18 (1925): 129–61; ‘On
the Relationship of Art history and Art Theory: Towards the Possibility of a
Fundamental System of Concepts for a Science of Art’, trans. Katharina Lorenz
and Jas Elsner, Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008): 43–71.
4 Alois Riegl, Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste (Graz-Köln: Boehlau,
1966), 53; Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, trans. Jacqueline E. Jung (New
York: Zone Books, 2004), 9, 187.
5 Erwin Panofky, Idea – Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie
(Berlin: Volker Spiess, 1975 [1924]); Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, trans. Joseph
J. S. Peake (New York and London: Icon Editions, 1968).
6 Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Das Problem der
Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst [1915] (Basel: Schwabe, 1979); Clement
Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ [1940], in The Collected Essays and
Criticism, vol. 1, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London: Chicago University
Press, 1988), 23–37.
7 Pierre Francastel, La figure et le lieu. L’ordre visuel du Quatrocento (Paris:
Gallimard, 1967), 66.
8 Johann Gottfried von Herder, Plastik (Riga: Hartknoch, 1778); Johann Gottfried
von Herder, Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s
Creative Dread, trans. Jason Gaiger (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2002).
9 Adolf von Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst [1901]
(Strassburg: Heitz & Mündel, 1918) (4 Aufl.).
10 Alois Riegl, ‘Naturwerk und Kunstwerk II’, Gesammelte Aufsätze (Augsburg-Wien:
Benno Filser Verlag, 1928 [1901]), 63–8.
11 Alois Riegl, Spätromische Kunstindustrie (Vienna: Der Österr. Staatsdruckerei,
1926 [1901]), 23–38. Riegl refers to the distinction between close-seeing and
far-seeing already in his 1899 version of the course: Riegl, Historical Grammar of
the Visual Arts, 187–93; Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste, 129–33.
12 On the competition between painting and sculpture in the Renaissance and the
seventeenth century, see Jacqueline Lichtenstein, La tache aveugle: Essai sur les
relations de la peinture et de la sculpture à l’âge moderne (Paris: Gallimard, 2003).
Notes 155
13 Henri Focillon, Vie des formes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1943).
14 Riegl, Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, 187; Historische Grammatik der
bildenden Künste, 129: ‘Alle Dinge in der Natur sind geformt, d.h. sie erstrecken
sich nach den drei Dimensionen der Höhe, Breite und Tiefe.’
15 Panofsky, ‘Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie’, 132; ‘Art History and Art Theory’, 47.
16 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon. Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie
[1766] (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1964); Wölfflin, Grundbegriffe, 1979; Greenberg,
‘Towards a Newer Laocoon.’
17 Adrian Stokes, ‘Stones of Rimini’ [1935], in Critical Writings, vol. 1 (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1978), 228–59.
18 Kurt Badt, Raumphantasien und Raumillusionen. Das Wesen der Plastik (Köln:
Dumont, 1963).
19 Descartes, ‘Rules for the Direction of the Mind’, in Philosophical Writings, 64.
20 Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura’, Archivum Romanicum 22 (1938): 436–89; ‘Figura’,
in Scenes From the Drama of European Literature. Six Essays (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984). It is telling, and supportive of the thesis of
the present book, that Auerbach intended ‘Figura’ to be published in the journal
of the Warburg Institute, meaning that he himself saw his essay as belonging to
the iconological tradition of inquiry. The editors of the journal, though, finding
the essay fitting in style and topic, declined to publish it since it was too long
and written in German. See Elizabeth Sears, ‘Warburg Institute Archive: General
Correspondence’, Common Knowledge, eds A. Grafton and J. F. Hamburger, 18:1
Special issue (Winter 2012): 47–8.
21 Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993),
13–17.
22 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation, 2 vols (Paris: La Vue le
Texte, 1981); Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. D. W. Smith (New York
and London: Continuum, 2004). In further quotations from this source, I cite the
French pagination first, followed by the English.
23 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 65–71/99–110.
24 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 71/110.
26 Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, Figure (Paris: Klinsieck, 1971).
27 Sabine Hiebsch, Auerbachs Figura ecclesiae: Lea und Rachel in Luthers
Genesispredigten (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2002), 49–51.
28 Stokes, ‘Stones’, 230.
29 My translation. Focillon, Vie, 52, 53: ‘ces matières si bien caractérisées, si
suggestives et même si exigeante à l’égard des formes de l’art, sur lesquelles elles
exercent une sorte d’attrait, s’en trouvent, par un retour, profondément modifiées
[…] la vie apparente de la matière s’est métamorphosée.’
156 Notes
30 Francastel, Réalité figurative, 97–8: ‘Le signe figuratif est un lieu où se rencontrent
des valeurs infiniment plus riches qu’on ne l’imagine lorsqu’on se borne à le
considérer comme un équivalent sous d’autres formes de signes ou d’images
susceptible de le remplacer.’
31 Panofsky, Idea – Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie.
32 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 9–10/2–3.
33 Francastel, Réalité figurative, 105. ‘Ce qui constitue la forme d’une ouvrage, ce ne
sont pas les détails, c’est l’ensemble […] Cependent la forme n’est pas la somme
des détails intégrés dans l’ensemble qui constitue l’œuvre, elle n’appartient pas au
niveau des éléments et des contenus mais au niveau des principes, c’est-à-dire
des structures. Elles s’identifient avec le schème d’organisation qui suggère
l’assemblage des éléments, choisis comme significatifs non pas en raison de leur
conformité à des modèles hétéroclites, tirés du dehors, mais en considération de
leur liaison avec les lois propres du schème organisateur. La forme est donc liée
non aux impulsions venues du monde extérieur – au domaine de la perception –
mais aux principes de cohésion du système – à une problématique de l’imaginaire.’
34 Aristotle, Metaphysics V, The Metaphysics Books I–IX. trans. Hugh Tredennick
(London and Cambdridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 284–7
(1024a30–1024b16).
35 Francastel, Réalite figurative, 105. ‘La série seule fait exister le prototype, qui sans
cela demeurerait le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu. On ne propose pas de limiter l’histoire
des arts à celle des prototypes créatuers de formes. La connaissance du role et de
l’histoire des arts exige, à la fois, l’étude des séries et des modeles.’
36 Focillon, Vie, 67–100.
37 Ibid., 68: ‘Prendre conscience, c’est prendre forme.’
38 Ibid., 75: ‘à un certain ordre des formes correspond un certain ordre des esprits’.
39 Richard Woodfield (ed.), Framing Formalism: Riegl’s Work (New York and
London: Routledge, 2001).
40 See Adi Efal, ‘Reality as the Cause of Art: Alois Riegl and Neo-Kantian Realism’,
Journal of Art Historiography 3 (December 2010), http://arthistoriography.files.
wordpress.com/2011/02/media_183171_en.pdf (accessed 14 July 2016).
41 Focillon, Vie, 22–3: ‘Les formes, en leurs divers états, ne sont certes pas
suspendues dans une zone abstraite, au-desus de la terre, au-dessus de l’homme.
Elles se mêlent à la vie, d’où elles viennet, traduissant dans l’espace certains
mouvements de l’esprit.’
42 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen
Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1969 [1755]), 29–31.
43 Ibid.
44 Catharine Malabou (ed.), Plasticité (Paris: Léo Scheer, 2000).
45 Francastel, Réalité figurative, 127: ‘Tous les arts plastiques sont des arts de l’espace.
Notes 157
[…] Tout signe plastique est par conséquent spatial. […] Il est donc capital
d’étudier la Forme plastique en fonction de la notion d’espace.’
46 The original text was given as a lecture in the Warburg Institute London, in 1940.
Badt, Raumphantasien und Raumillusionen, 135–64.
47 Ibid., 140.
48 Hermann Menge-Güthling, Enzyklopädisches Wörterbuch der griechischen und
deutschen Sprache, Band I (Berlin: Langescheid, 1962), 558.
49 Focillon, ‘Éloge de la main’, Vie, 103–28.
50 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, books 33–5, trans. H. Rackham (London and
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 370–3.
51 Ibid., 373.
52 Herder, Plastik, 9–10; Herder, Sculpture, 35–6.
53 Herder, Sculpture, 65; Herder, Plastik, 65: ‘… gehört nun nicht noch immer der
plastische Sinn dazu, die Linie wieder in Körper, die platte Figur in eine runde
lebende Gestalt zu verwandeln?’
54 Stokes, ‘Stones’, 235.
Chapter 4
1 Erwin Panofsky, Idea – Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie
(Berlin: Verlag Bruno Hessling GMBH, 1975 [1924]); Idea: A Concept in Art
Theory, trans. Joseph J. S. Peake (New York and London: Icon Editions, 1968).
2 Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura’, Archivum Romanicum 22 (1938): 436–89; ‘Figura’, in
Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Six Essays (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11–76. When referring below to both Panofsky’s and
Auerbach’s essays, I give the German pagination first, followed by the English.
3 Michael Kelly, Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003).
4 Ibid., 96.
5 See Otto Gerhard Oexle (ed.), Krise des Historismus – Krise der Wirklichkeit.
Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur 1880–1932 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and
Ruprecht, 2007).
6 See: Jacques Rancière, Le partag e du sensible-esthétique et politique (Paris: La
fabrique-éditions, 2000); Le destin des images (Paris: La fabrique-éditions, 2003);
Malaise dans l’esthétique (Paris: Galilée, 2004).
7 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French
Thought (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
8 For a study of Byzantine iconoclasm see Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon,
Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. R. Franses
158 Notes
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). For an exquisite and concise

presentation of the iconophilic position and its inner reason, see Gerhart B.
Ladner, ‘The Concept of the Image in the Greek Fathers and the Byzantine
Iconoclastic Controversy’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 7 (1953): 1–34.
9 Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 5.
10 See for example Moshe Barasch, Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea (New York
and London: New York University Press, 1992), 183–253.
11 Ibid., 254–89.
12 See Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 233–45: ‘Extracts from the Antirrhetics, by
Nichephoros, Patriarch of Constantinopole’.
13 See Jean-Luc Marion, L’idole et la distance. Cinq études (Paris : Bernard Grasset
1977); The Idol and Distance. Five Studies, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York:
Fordham University Press 2001).
14 Panofsky, Idea, 1–4/3–6.
15 Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 451/29: ‘figura ist etwas Wirkliches, Geschichtliches welches
etwas anderes, ebenfalls Wirkliches und Geschichtliches darstellt und ankündigt’;
‘figura is something real and historical that announces something else that is also
real and historical’.
16 See Hayden White, ‘Auerbach’s Literary History: Figural Causation and Modernist
Historicism’, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore and London:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 88–94.
18 Panofsky, Idea, 2/4 (the English translation converts ‘Kunstfremde’ to ‘Indifferent
to or unfamiliar with art’.)
19 See for example Ernst Cassirer, ‘Eidos und Eidolon. Das Problem das Schönen
und der Kunst in Platons Dialogen’ [1924], in Ernst Cassirer, Gesammelte Werke
Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Brigit Recki, vol. 16, Aufsätze und Kleine Schriften (1922–
1926) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2003). The essay first appeared in Vorträge
der Bibliothek Warburg (1924), 135–64.
20 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Über das Verhältnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie’
[1925], Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed. Hariolf Oberer and
Egon Verhezen (Berlin: B. Hessling, 1964), 51.
21 See Joan Hart, ‘Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim: A Dialogue on
Interpretation’, Critical Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993): 538.
22 Bruno Bauch, Wahrheit, Wert und Wirklichkeit (Leipzig: Felix Meiner Verlag,
1923).
23 Bauch completed his doctoral Promotion under Rickert’s supervision in Freiburg
in 1901. Panofsky was studying in Freiburg between 1912 and 1914; he received
his doctorate (Promotion) there in 1914 under Wilhelm Vöge.
Notes 159
24 Heinrich Rickert, ‘Die Philosophie als Wertlehre’, Allgemeine Grundlegung der

Philosophie (Tübingen: Verlag von J. C. B Mohr [Paul Siebeck, 1921], 142–55.
25 Heinrich Rickert, Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft (Freiburg, Leipzig
und Tübingen: Verlag von J. C. B Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1899), 24ff.; Die
Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie – Eine Einführung (Heidelberg: Carl Winters
Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1924 [1904]), 54–67; Allgemeine Grundlegung der
Philosophie (Tübingen: Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1921), 112–29,
142–66.
26 Bruno Bauch, Die Idee (Leipzig: Verlag Emmanuel Reinicke, 1926), 152–74.
27 Paul Natorp, Platos Ideenlehre. Eine Einführung in den Idealismus (Hamburg: Felix
Meiner Verlag, 2004 [1903]).
28 Panofsky, Idea, 71–2; Panofsky, Idea, 126; see also Erwin Panofsky, ‘Der Begriff des
Kunstwollens’ [1920], ‘Über das Verhältnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie’
[1925], in Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, 40–1, 51.
29 Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 477/236 n. 44. For his part, Panofsky refers to the notion of
‘figura’ towards the end of Idea, when discussing Dürer and Michelangelo (Idea,
65, 70/116, 123–5), without exploring its conceptual etymology.
30 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der Abendländischen
Literature (1946), 2nd edn (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1959), 11–27; Mimesis: The
Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. W. R. Trask (Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 9–23.
31 Ibid., Chs 18 and 19, 422–87/454–523. See also Hayden White, ‘Auerbach’s
Literary History’, 96–9.
32 The Latin word figura does not have one definitive source in the Greek Language.
The Greek εἰδος and μορφή were usually translated into the Latin forma. See
Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 438–40/13–16.
33 Ibid., 437/12–13.
34 Auerbach translated Vico’s New Science into German, and referred to Vico many
times in his writings. See: Giambattista Vico, Die Neue Wissenschaft – über die
gemeinschaftliche Natur der Völker, trans. Erich Auerbach (München: Allgemeine
Verlagsanstallt, 1924); Erich Auerbach, ‘Vico and Aesthetic Historism’, Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 8:2 (December 1949), 110–18; Auerbach, ‘Introduction:
Purpose and Method’, in Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity
and in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 5–24. On
Auerbach and Vico see: Claus Uhlig, ‘Auerbach’s “hidden” (?) Theory of History’, in
Seth Lerer (ed.), Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich
Auerbach (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 36–9; Diane Meur, ‘Auerbach
und Vico: Die unausgesprochene Auseinandersetzung’, in Karlheinz Barck and
Martin Treml (eds), Erich Auerbach – Geschitchte und Aktualität eines europäischen
Philologen (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2007), 57–70.
160 Notes
35 Giambatistta Vico, ‘On Verum and Factum’, Selected Writings, ed. and trans.
Leon Pompa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 50–6. See
also Karl Löwith, Vicos Grundsatz:verum et factum convertuntur – Seine
theologische Prämisse und deren säkulare Konsequenzen (Heidelberg: Carl Winter
Universitätsverlag, 1968).
36 Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 438–39/14–16.
37 Ibid., 437–44/11–21.
38 Ibid., 442–4/18–21.
39 Ibid., 447–50/25–8.
40 Ibid., 450–64/28–49.
41 White, ‘Auerbach’s Literary History’, 88–9.
42 Vico, Selected Writings, 75–6. For a quasi-realist (known as anti-realist) conception
of the past, leaning on a geometrical grid, reminding one of Descartes’ res extensa,
see Michael Dummett, Truth and the Past (New York: Columbia University Press,
2004), 46–52.
43 Vico, Selected Writings, 206; Vico, Die Neue Wissenschaft, 139.
44 Vico, Selected Writings, 61, 75: ‘We might demonstrate by synthesis, i.e. we should
make truths rather than discover them.’
45 Auerbach himself notes the important part synthesis plays in his philological
method, see Auerbach, ‘Introduction: Purpose and Method’, Literary Language
and its Public, 17–18. See also Leopold Waizbort, ‘Erich Auerbach im Kontext der
Historismus debatt’, in Erich Auerbach – Geschichte und Aktualität, 17–18.
46 Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 469–70, 478/54–5; Auerbach, ‘Typological Symbolism in
Medieval Literature’, Yale French Studies 9 – Symbol and Symbolism (New York:
Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1965), 6–7; Jesse M. Gellrich, ‘Figura, Allegory
and the Question of History’, in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology,
107–23.
47 Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 471–2/56–7.
48 Ibid., 451/29.
49 Auerbach, Mimesis.
50 On Auerbach’s Realism see: Ernst Müller, ‘Auerbachs Realismus’, in Erich Auerbach
– Geschichte und Aktualität, 268–71; Luiz Costa Lima, ‘Zwischen Realismus und
Figuration: Auerbachs dezentrierter Realismus’, in Erich Auerbach – Geschichte
und Aktualität, 255–67.
51 On place see Aristotle, The Physics, vol. 1, trans. Philip H. Wicksteed and Francis
Cornford (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957 [1929]),
276–315 (208a27–212a30).
52 Michael Holquist, ‘The Last European: Erich Auerbach as Precursor in the History
of Cultural Criticism’, Modern Language Quarterly 54:3 (September 1993): 374–9.
Barry Maine has suggested a more plausible interpretation of Auerbach’s realism,
Notes 161
which relates Auerbach’s concept of historical reality to Nelson Goodman’s

nominalist constructionism. See Barry Maine, ‘Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and
Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking: A Nominal(ist) Revision’, Poetics
Today 20:1 (Spring 1999), 41–52. Hayden White’s presentation of Auerbach (in
his ‘Auerbach’s Literary History’) is closest to the one I propose here, but as much
as he emphasizes the aesthetic parameters of Auerbach’s realism, I emphasize the
very reality of history and the certainty of the past itself.
53 Étienne Gilson, Le réalisme méthodique [1935] (Paris: Pierre Téqui éditeur, 2007).
54 See Ferdinand Alquié, Leçons sur Descartes. Science et métaphysique chez Descartes
(Paris: Le table ronde, 2005), 11–68.
55 Vico, Selected Writings, 61: ‘Geometry, which is taught by the synthetic method,
i.e. by forms, is completely certain both in result and in procedure. For by
proceeding from the smallest to the infinite by means of its own postulates,
it shows how to synthesize the elements from which the truths which it
demonstrates are formed.’
56 Panofsky, Idea, 23–33/47–59.
57 Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 477–89/62–76. See also Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Auerbach und Dante:
eine Verlaufbahn’, in Erich Auerbach – Geschichte und Aktualität, 33–45.
58 Panofsky, Idea, 23/47.
59 F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon (New York: New York
University Press, 1967), 121–8; Otfried Höffe (ed.), Aristoteles-Lexikon (Stuttgart:
Alfred Kröner Verlag, 2005), 381–5.
60 See Travis Butler and Eric Rubenstein, ‘Aristotle on Nous of Simples’, Canadian
Journal of Philosophy 34:3 (September 2004): 327–54.
Chapter 5
1 ‘Under the figure of history’, an expression that Auerbach quotes, is taken

from Fulgentius, Continentia Vergiliana, in Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura’, Archivum
Romanicum 22 (1938), 463; ‘Figura’, in Scenes from the Drama of European
Literature. Six Essays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 47.
2 Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, Figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971).
3 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation, vol. I (Paris: La Vue le
Texte, 1981); Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans, D. W. Smith (New York
and London: Continuum, 2004). In further quotations from this source, I cite the
French pagination first, followed by the English.
4 André Lhote, Traités du paysage et de la figure, (Paris: Bernard Grasset Éditeur,
1958).
5 Pierre Francastel, La figure et le lieu. L’ordre visuel du Quattrocento (Paris:
162 Notes
Gallimard, 1967); La réalité figurative. Éléments structurels de sociologie de l’art

(Paris: Gonthier, 1968); La figure et le lieu. L’ordre visuel du Quattrocento (Paris:
Gallimard, 1967).
6 Louis Marin, ‘La figurabilité du visuel: la Véronique ou la question du Portrait à
Port Royal’, Nouvelle Revue de la psychanalyse 35 (1987): 51–65; ‘Figurability of the
Visual: The Veronica or the Question of the Portrait at Port Royal’, New Literary
History 22:2 (Spring 1991): 281–96.
7 Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994),
13–17.
8 Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico. Dissemblance et Figuration [1990] (Paris:
Flammarion, 1995).
9 Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 436–89/11–76.
10 Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 13–15.
11 The existence of the figure on and as a borderline or frame echoes Jacques
Derrida’s reading of the ‘parergon’ as the truth of painting. See Jacques Derrida,
‘Parergon’, La vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), 19–168.
12 See Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 5–6/11: ‘de grandes aplats de coleur vive, uniforme et
immobile’.
13 Pliny the Elder, Natural History IX (LCL 394), books 33–5, trans. H. Rackham
(London and Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 371–5 (book
35, XLIV). On the fact that the myth of the origin of painting did not appear as
such before the early Romantic era, as well as for a meticulous examination of
the etymology of this theme, see Robert Rosenblum, ‘The Origin of Painting: A
Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Classicism’, Art Bulletin 39:4 (December
1957): 279–90.
14 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 18/16: ‘de la figure vers la structure […] vers l’aplat’.
15 See Erwin Panofsky, Idea – Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren
Kunsttheorie (Berlin: Verlag Bruno Hessling GMBH, 1975), 65.
16 Aristotle, The Physics, vol. 1, trans. Philip H. Wicksteed and Francis Cornford,
2nd edn (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 286–7
(209b1–4).
18 Aristotle, Physics, 312–25 (212a5–212b29). Deleuze also discusses the relation of
the figure to the place (Lieu). See Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 15/12.
19 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 19/20: ‘Le corps, c’est la figure, ou plutôt le matériau de la
Figure.’
20 Lyotard draws up a typology of three types of figures, of which the first is the
‘figure image’. This first figural level for Lyotard disrupts the line of the contour or
the silhouette. The third type of figure, the ‘figure-matrice’, generates the mise-en-
scène, upon which the image can appear. Lyotard, Discours, Figure, 277–9.
Notes 163
21 Renatus Descartes, Regulæ ad directionem ingenii, Œuvres, vol X, 414 (Regula

XII); René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. John
Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), 41; Immanuel Kant, Kritk der reinen Vernunft (Hamburg:
Felix Meiner Verlag, 2003 [1790]), 192 (B151).
22 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study
of Renaissance Art’ [1939], in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday Anchor, 1955), 38.
23 Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2000), 199 (§296);
Nancy Forgione, ‘ “The Shadow Only”: Shadow and Silhouette in Late Nineteenth-
Century Paris’, Art Bulletin 81:3 (September 1999): 490–512.
24 As Aristotle described the difference between remembering and recollection in his
‘On Memory and Recollection’, in On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, on Breath, trans.
W. S. Hett (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957 [1936]),
298–313 (451a20–453b10).
25 Aristotle, Metaphysics V (Δ), Books I–IX, trans. Hugh Tredennick (London and
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 284–5 (1024a).
26 Lexically, μορϕή is the equivalent of the Latin figura, see Otfried Höffe (ed.),
Aristoteles-Lexikon (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 2005), 369.
27 Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 442–50/11–28.
28 It is interesting to note here the relation between the notion of style and its origin
in the notion of stilus, the ink pen. See on this Willibald Sauerlander, ‘From Stilus
to Style: Reflections on the Fate of a Notion’, Art History 6:3 (September 1983):
253–70.
29 See Pierre Fontanier, Des Figures du discours autres que les tropes (Paris:
Maire-Nyon, 1827), reprinted in Pierre Fontanier, Les figures du discours (Paris:
Flammarion, 1968).
30 Gérard Genette, ‘Figures’, Figures I (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 205–22.
31 Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 450–64/28–49.
32 Georges Didi-Huberman emphasized the commemorative essence of Vasari’s Vite;
see his Devant L’image (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1990), 65–104.
33 On art history and details, see Daniel Arasse, Le détail. Pour une histoire
rapprochée de la peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1996 [1992]), and Georges
Didi-Huberman, ‘Question de détail, question de pan’, in Devant L’image, 273–318.
34 See W. Wolfgang Holdheim, ‘The Hermeneutic Significance of Auerbach’s Ansatz’,
New Literary History 16:3 (Spring 1985): 627–31.
35 On the importance of the detail to Warburg, see Roland Kany, Mnemosyne als
Programm. Geschichte, Erinnerung und die Andacht zum Unbedeutenden im Werk
von Usener, Warburg und Benjamin (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1987),
168–74: ‘Das Pathos der Details’.
164 Notes
36 Pascal, Pensées, 442 (§299): ‘La figure a été faite sur la vérité, et la vérité a été
reconnue sur la figure’; 200 (§299): ‘La lettre tue. Tout arrivait en figures.’
37 Deleuze has noted that the operation of the figure is to render visible invisible
forces. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 40/58: ‘Il semble que, dans l’histoire de la
peinture, les Figures de Bacon soient une de réponses le plus merveilleuses à la
question: comment rendre visible des forces invisible? C’est même la fonction
primordiale des Figures’; ‘Bacon’s Figures seem to be one of the most marvelous
responses of the history of painting to the question, how can one make invisible
forces visible?’
38 Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience [1888], Œuvres,
ed. André Robinet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 1–157.
39 On the plasticity of Auerbach’s philology, see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, ‘Was Erich
Auerbach für eine „Philologische Frage“ hielt’, in Jürgen Paul Schwindt (ed.), Was
ist eine philologische Frage? Beiträge zu Erkundung einer theoretischen Einstellung
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009), 282–3.
40 Genette, ‘Figures’, 207.
41 Ibid., 209.
42 Étienne Gilson, Le réalisme méthodique (Paris: Pierre Téqui Éditeur, 2007
[1935]).
43 Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 451/29.
44 Ibid., 465–6/50–1. In the English translation, the expression is ‘figural
interpretation’.
45 See: Frankt Ankersmit, ‘Why Realism? Auerbach on the Representation of Reality’,
Poetics Today 20:1 (Spring 1999): 59–62; Hayden White, ‘Auerbach’s Literary
History: Figural Casuation and Modernism Historicism’, Figural Realism: Studies
in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1999), 87–100.
46 Hermann Usener, ‘Philologie und Geschichtswissenschaft’, Vorträge und Aufsätze
(Leipzig und Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1907), 9.
47 Erich Auerbach, ‘Introduction: Purpose and Method’, in Literary Language and
its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1965), 7.
48 Charlotte Witt, ‘Hylomorphism in Aristotle’, Journal of Philosophy 84:11
(November 1987): 673–9; Höffe, Aristoteles-Lexikon, 369–70.
49 Höffe, Aristoteles-Lexikon, 425–6.
50 Descartes, Regulæ, 413; ‘Rules’, 40.
51 Descartes, Regulæ, 413; ‘Rules’, 41.
52 Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedman, vol. 1 (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 578 (N3, I): ‘Nur dialektische Bilder sind echt
geschichtliche, d.h. nicht archaische Bilder.’
Notes 165
Chapter 6
1 Emily J. Levine, ‘Sokrates an der Elbe? Erwin Panofsky und die Hamburger Schule
der Kunstgeschichte in den 1920er Jahren’, Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg Nachrichten
aus der Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg (Hamburg: Forschungsstelle
für Zeitgeschichte, 2008), 27–40.
2 Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Dürers ‘Melencolia I’. Eine Quellen- und
Typengeschichliche Untersuchung (Berlin: Studien der Bibliothek Warburg (2),
1923).
3 First appeared in the series Studien der Bibliothek Warburg (Leipzig and Berlin,
1924).
4 First appeared as ‘Die Perspektive als „symbolische Form“ ‘, in the Vorträge der
Bibliothek Waburg 1924–1925 (Leipzig and Berlin, 1927), 258–33.
5 Michael Ann Holly’s seminal book on the intellectual contexts of Panofsky’s
work does not include a chapter on Panofsky’s affinity with Warburg (Michael
Ann Holly, Erwin Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History [Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1984]). For available discussions see Audrey Rieber, ‘L’oeuvre
d’art comme symptôme: Panofsky et Warburg’, in Art, histoire et signification
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012), 61–105; Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer, Panofsky and Warburg.
Symbol, Art and History, trans. Richard Pierce (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1989); Peter Schmidt, Aby M. Warburg und die Ikonologie
(Bamberg: Stefen Wendel Verlag, 1989); Erik Frossmann, ‘Ikonologie und
allgemeine Kunstgeschichte (1966)’, in Ekkehard Kaemmerling (ed.), Ikonographie
und Ikonologie. Theorien. Entwicklung. Probleme (Köln: Dumont Buchverlag,
1973), 257–300.
6 See Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: Warburg
Institute, 1970), 283.
7 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Reflections on Historical Time’, trans. Johanna Bauman, Critical
Inquiry 30 (Summer 2004): 691–701; ‘Zum Problem der historischen Zeit’, in
Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed. Hariolf Oberer and Egon
Verheyen (Berlin: B. Hessling, 1985), 77–83.
8 Georg Simmel, ‘Das Probelm des hitorischen Zeit’, in Brücke und Tür. Essays
des Philosophischen zur Geschichte, Religion, Kunst und Gesellschaft [1903], ed.
Michael Landmann (Stuttgart: Koehler, 1957), 43–58.
9 Aby Warburg, Werke in einem Band, ed. Martin Treml, Sgrid Weigel and Perdita
Ladwig (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010), 396: ‘… wollte ich mir ein
Plädoyer erlauben zugunsten einer methodischen Grenzerweiterung unserer
Kunstwissenschaft in stofflicher und räumlicher Beziehung’.
10 Panofsky, ‘Historical Time’, 695; ‘historischen Zeit’, 78.
11 Warburg, Werke, 636: ‘Die Kunsthistorie ist freilich nicht gewohnt, die
166 Notes
orientalische-praktische, die nordisch-höfische und die italienisch-humanistische

Auffassung der Antike als gleichstrebige Komponenten im Prozess der neuen
Stilbildung zusammenzusehen.’
12 Panofsky, ‘Historical Time’, 697; ‘historischen Zeit’, 79.
13 This attitude was expressed also by Henri Bergson, notably in his ‘Le possible et le
réel’. Bergson argues against looking for historical conditions of possibility for the
productions of artworks. See Bergson, ‘Le possible et le réel’, Œuvres, ed. André
Robinet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 1331–45.
14 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2003),
192–5.
15 Panofsky, ‘Historical Time’, 699; ‘Historischen Zeit’, 80.
16 Panofsky, ‘Historical Time’, 699; ‘Historischen Zeit’, 81.
17 In a letter from 12 February 1958 to Kurt H. Wolff of the Ohio State University,
Panofsky attests to having heard lectures by Simmel as a student, most probably
according to the editor of the letter, in Berlin. Erwin Panofsky, Korrespondenz
1910–1968. Eine kommentierte Auswahl in fünf Bänden, ed. Dieter Wuttke
(Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2001), vol. 4, 217.
18 Simmel, ‘Das Problem der historischen Zeit’, 43.
19 Ibid., 44.
20 Ibid., 48 (my translation): ‘Also: daß ein Inhalt in der Zeit ist, macht ihn nicht
historisch; daß er verstanden wird, macht ihn nicht historisch. Erst wo beides
sich schneidet, wo er auf Grund des zeitlosen Verstehens verzeitlicht wird, ist er
historisch.’
21 Ibid., 52.
22 Ibid., 54.
23 Panofsky, ‘Historical Time’, 697 (n. 13); ‘historischen Zeit’, 83 (n. 3): ‘Our
conception touches in many ways upon that of Simmel without, however, covering
all of the same issues, to begin with because Simmel does not see that the problem
of historical time is connected to the problem of historical space.’
24 Warburg, Werke, 396: ‘dass eine ikonologische Analyse, die sich durch
grenzpolizeiliche Befangenheit weder davon abschrecken lässt, Antike, Mittelalter
und Neuzeit als zusammenhängende Epoche anzusehen, noch davon, die
Werke freiester und angewandtester Kunst als gleichberechtigte Dokumente
des Ausdrucks zu befragen, dass diese Methode, indem sie sorgfältigt sich um
die Aufhellung einer einzelnen Dunkelheit bemüht, die großen allgemeinen
Entwicklungsvorgänge in ihrem Zusammenhange beleuchtet.’
25 See Michael Diers, ‘Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition of Cultural History’,
trans. Thomas Girst and Dorothea von Moltke, New German Critique 65 (Spring–
Summer, 1995): 59–73, 62: ‘In terms of their power of abstraction, Panofsky’s
exemplarily systematical and theoretical explications of the term “iconology”
Notes 167
surpass Warburg’s definition.’ A comprehensive presentation of the Warburgian

lineage can be found in Carlo Ginzburg, ‘From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich:
A Problem of Method’, in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method [1989]
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 17–59.
26 See Martin Treml, ‘Vorbemerkung der Herausgeber’, in Warburg, Werke in einem
Band, 323–4.
27 Ibid. (my translation): ‘philologische Textkritik in der ein “verderbter” Text auf die
darin sichtbaren, die unlesbar gewordenen, die überschreibenen und verborgenen
Schichten hin analysiert wird.’
28 On the Warburg Bibliolthek in Hamburg, see: Philippe-Alain Michaud,
‘Hambourg. Le scène de l’histoire de l’art’, Aby Warburg et l’image en mouvement
(Paris: Macula, 1998), 244–67; ‘Hamburg: The Art History Scene’, Aby Warburg
and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2004),
229–50; Hans-Michael Schäfer, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg:
Geschichte und Persönlichkeiten der Bibliothek Warburg (Berlin: Logos Verlag,
2005).
29 See Marcus Andrew Hurttig, ‘Warburg und die 48. Verssammlung deutscher
Philologen und Schlmänner in Hamburg 1905’, in Die entfesselte Antike. Aby
Warburg und die Geburt der Pathosformel in Hamburg (Hamburg: Hamburg
Kunsthalle, 2011), 15–19.
30 In a short essay written in 1975 after working at the Warburg Library in London,
Giorgio Agamben attempted to define the peculiar nature of Warburg’s approach
to art history. He suggests that this ‘nameless science’ exhibits a clear philological
character, and could be referred to as a figural philology. See Giorgio Agamben,
‘Warburg and the Nameless Science’, in Potentialities: Collected Papers in
Philosophy, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
Agamben also points to an affinity between Warburg’s and Leo Spitzer’s works.
31 See Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 26.
32 See Hermann Usener, ‘Philologie und Geschichtswissenschaft’ [1882], Vorträge
und Aufsätze (Leipzig und Berlin: Druck und Verlag von B. G. Teubner, 1907),
1–36.
33 See: Kathryn Brush, The Shaping of Art History: Wilhelm Vöge, Adolph
Goldschmidt, and the Study of Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 1–38; Christine Kreft, Adolph Goldschmidt und Aby M. Warburg.
Freundschaft und Kunstwissenschaftliches Engagement (Weimar: VDG, 2010).
34 Gombrich, Aby Warbug, 28–30: ‘Philosophie bekomme ich in dem Colleg von
Usener genug. Professor Justi, den Haupt-Mann für Kunstgeschichte, werde
ich im nächsten Semester hören, nachdem ich mich genauer mit eigentlich
philologischen Studien beschäftigt habe.’
35 Roland Kany, Mnemosyne als Programm. Geschichte, Errinerung und die Andacht
168 Notes
zum Unbedeutenden uim Werk von Usener, Warburg und Benjamin (Tübingen:
Max Niemezer Verlag, 1987), 67–113.
36 Anna Guillemin, ‘The Style of Linguistics: Aby Warburg, Karl Voßler, and
Hermann Osthoff ’, Journal of the History of Ideas 69:4 (October 2008): 605–26.
37 Matthew Rampley, ‘From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg’s Theory of Art’, The
Art Bulletin 79 (March 1997): 46–7. See also Aby Warbrug, ‘Schlussitzung der
Burckhardt Uebung’, Werke, 695–9.
38 James I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000); Christian Benne, Nietzsche und die historisch-kritische
Philologie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005).
39 See Karlfried Gründer (ed.), Der Streit um Nietzsches ‘Geburt der Tragödie’: Die
Schriften von E. Rohde, R. Wagner, U. v. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (Hildesheim:
Olms, 1989).
40 As Nietzsche argued in his famous Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das
Leben [1874] (Stuttgart: Reclam Verlag, 2005).
41 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Wir Philologen’, Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta,
vol. 3 (München & Wien: Hanser, 1999 [1956]), 323–32.
42 Ibid., 330–2.
43 Claudia Wedepohl, ‘Von der „Pathosformel“ zum Gebärdensprachatls. Dürers Tod
des Orpheus und Warburgs Arbeit an einer ausdruckstheoretisch begründeten
Kulturgeschichte’, Die Entfesselte Antike, Aby Warburg und die Geburt der
Pathosformel, ed. Marcus A. Hurttig and Thomas Ketelsen (Köln: Wallraf-
Richartz-Museum and Fondation Corboud, 2012), 45–6.
44 See Paolo D’Angelo, ‘Aby Warburg e Benedetto Croce’, Aby Warburg e la cultura
italiana, ed. Claudia Cieri Via and Micol Forti (Roma e Milano: Sapienza
Università di Roma, 2009), 15–26.
45 The boxes are to be found in the Warburg archive of the Warburg Institute,
London, noted as WIA III.2.1.2k/51/5. Important to note: Warburg located
Bergson within the rubric of ‘pragmatic philosophy’. The material to be found in
the specific location in the box is mostly related either to the general reception
of Bergson, or to the moral and political consequences of his philosophy.
Remarkably, it seems that Warburg was not compelled to investigate Bergson’s
notions of duration, the virtual, or even his conception of memory.
46 On Warburg and physiological aspects of memory, see Stefan Rieger, ‘Richard
Semon und/oder Aby Warburg. Mneme und/oder Mnemosyne’, in Deutsche
Vierteljahren Schrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte (Stuttgart und
Weimar, 1998), 245–63.
47 I noted the following items in Warburg’s private ex libris: Frank Grandjean, Une
révolution dans la philosophie, la doctrine de M. Henri Bergson (Genève: Librairie
Atar, 1913), purchased 1913; Hans Driesch, Henri Bergson, der biologische
Notes 169
Philosoph (Stuttgart: Verlag des Kosmos, Gesellschaft der Naturfreunde, 1908);

Edouard LeRoy, Une philosophie nouvelle (Paris: Alcan 1912), purchased 1912;
Julien Benda, Le bergsonisme ou la philosophie de la mobilité, 3rd edn (Paris:
Mercure de France, 1912); Mircea Florian, Der Begriff der Zeit bei Henri Bergson,
eine kritische Untersuchung (Greifswald: Abel, 1914), purchased 1914; Baron
Cay von Brockdorff, Die Wahrheit über Bergson (Berlin: Verlag von Karl Curtius
Berlin 1916), purchased 1916. And Bergson’s writings: Zeit und Freiheit (1911);
Schöpferische Entwicklung (1912), purchased 1914; Durée et simultanéité (1923),
purchased 1923; L’énérgie spirituelle (1920), purchased 1921; A Contribution to
a Bibliography of Henri Bergson (New York: Colombia University Press, 1913),
purchased 1913.
48 Domenico Ghirlandaio 1449–94. Aby Warburg, ‘Nimfa Fiorentina’ [1900], Werke,
198–209.
49 For example in W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Beyond Comparison: Picture, Text, and Method’,
in Picture Theory (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), 83–110.
50 Warburg, ‘Nimfa Fiorentina’, 203: ‘Es lockt Dich, ihr wie einer geflügelten Idee
durch alle Sphären im platonischen Liebesrausche zu folgen, mich zwingt sie, den
philologischen Blick auf den Boden zu richten, dem sie entstieg, und staunend zu
fragen: wurzelt denn dieses seltsam zierliche Gewächs wirklich in dem nüchternen
florentinischen Erdboden?’
51 Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 113.
52 The issue of idealism vs. reality interested Warburg on several occasions. See Aby
Warburg, ‘Florentinisnce Wirklichkeit und antikisirender Idealismus’ [1901],
Werke, 211–31.
53 Warburg, Werke, 643: ‘Ikonologie des Zwischenraums. Kunsthistorisches Material
zu einer Entwicklungsphysiologie des Pendelganges zwischen bildhafter und
zeichenmässiger Ursachensetzung.’
54 On the relation between philology and scepticism see: Christian Benne,
‘Philologie und Skepsis’, in Jürgen Paul Schwindt (ed.), Was ist eine philologische
Frage? (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Tachenbuch, 2009), 192–210; Thomas
Stienfeld, ‘Skepsis. Über August Boeckh, die Wissenschaft der unendlichen
Approximation und das Glück der mangelden Vollendung’, in Was ist eine
philologische Frage, 211–25.
55 Most notably in his lecture on the ‘Snake ritual’ (‘Schlangenritual’) of 1923.
Relevant quotes are to be found in Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 224–7.
56 Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (New York: Zone
Books, 2007); Aby Warburg et l’image en mouvement (Paris: Macula, 1998). See
also Ulrich Raulff, ‘Die Nymphe und der Dynamo. Warburg aus dem Judendstil’,
Wilde Energien. Vier Versuche zu Aby Warburg (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag,
2003), 17–47.
170 Notes
57 Henri Bergson, La pensée et le mouvant [1934], in Œuvres, 1420: ‘Il y a une réalité
extérieure et pourtant donnée immédiatement à notre esprit […] Cette réalité est
mobilité.’
58 Aby Warburg, ‘Sandro Botticellis Geburt der Venus und Frühling [1893]‘, Werke,
39: ‘In der vorligenden Arbeit wird der Versuch gemacht, zum Vergleiche mit
den bekannten mythologischen Bildern des Sandro Botticelli, der „Geburt der
Venus“ und de „Frühling“ die entsprechenden Vorstellungen der gleichzeitigen
kunsttheoretischen und poetischen Litteratur heranzuziehen um auf diese
Weise das, was die Kümstler des Quattrocento an de Antike „interessierte“,
klarzulegen. Es lässt sich nämlich hierbei Schritt bei Schritt verfolgen, wie die
Künstler und deren Berather in „der Antike“ ein gesteigetrte äussere Bewegung
verlangendes Vorbild sahen und sich an antike Vorbilder anlehnten, wenn es
sich um Darstellung äusserlich bewegten Beiwerks – der Gewandung und der
Harre – handelte.’ Aby Warburg, ‘Sandro Boticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring: An
Examination of Concepts of Antiquity in the Italian Early Renaissance’ [1893],
in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, ed. and trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty
Research Institute, 1999), 89: ‘This work sets out to adduce, for purposes of
comparison with Sandro Boticelli’s celebrated mythological painting, the Birth of
Venus and Spring, the analogous ideas that appear in contemporary art theory
and poetic literature, and thus to exemplify what it was about antiquity that
“interested” the artists of the Quatrocento. It is possible to trace, step by step, how
the artists and their advisers recognized “the antique” as a model that demanded
an intensification of outward movement, and how they turned to antique
sources whenever accessory forms – those of garments and of hair – were to be
represented in motion.’
59 See Rieger, ‘Richard Semon und/oder Aby Warburg’.
60 On the relationship between figuration and movement, see Gottfried Boehm,
Gabriele Brandtstetter and Achatz von Müller (eds), Figur und Figuration: Studien
zu Wahrnehmung und Wissen (Munich: Fink Verlag, 2007).
61 On this see Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
62 Alexander Nigel and Christopher S. Wood, ‘Interventions: Toward a New Model
of Renaissance Anachronism’, The Art Bulletin 87:3 (Summer 2005): 403–15.
63 On philology and generic mobility see Bernard Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante:
Histoire critique de la philologie (Paris: Seuil, 1989).
64 See Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des
fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2002), 82–96.
65 Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura’ [1938], Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie
(Bern: Francke, 1967), 55–92; ‘Figura’, in Scenes from the Drama of European
Literature. Six Essays (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11–78.
Notes 171
66 Auerbach, ‘Figura’, 65–74; ‘Figura’, 28–49. See also Karlfried Gründer, Figur und
Geschichte: Johann Georg Hamanns ‘Biblische Betrachtungen’ als Ansatz einer
Geschichtsphilosophie (Freiburg and Munich: Albert, 1958).
67 Warburg, Werke, 631 (‘Präfiguriert’).
68 See Salvatore Settis, ‘Pathos ed Ethos, morfologia e funzione’, Moderna. Semestrale
di Teoria e Critica della Letteratura 6:2 (2004): 23–34.
69 As in Aby Warburg, ‘Francesco Sassettis Letztwillige Verfügung’ [1907], Werke,
234–80.
70 See: Edgar Wind, ‘Warburg’s Begriff der Kulturwissenschaft und seine Bedeutung
für Ästhetik’, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 25
(Beilagehaft) (1931): 163–79; ‘Warburg’s Concept of Kulturwissenschaft and its
Meaning for Aesthetics’, in The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 21–35; Matthew Rampley, The Remembrance
of Things Past: On Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz
Verlag, 2000).
71 Auerbach referred to his philological project as deploying a drama. See Erich
Auerbach, Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the
Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 7; Literatursprache und
Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter (Bern: Francke, 1958),
10.
72 See also Martin Jesinghausen-Lauster, ‘Die Warburg Bibliothek als Problem’,
Die Suche nach der symbolischen Form. Der Kreis um die Kulturwissenschaftliche
Bibliothek Warburg (Baden-Baden: Verlag Valentin Koerner, 1985), 151–217.
73 Diers, ‘Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition’, 63, 67.
75 Warburg noted: ‘Art history must remain a history’, diary entry of 12 February
1917, Tagebuch 3.1 (London: The Warburg Institue), 885, as quoted in Diers,
‘Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition’, 66.
76 ‘Ikonologie – Synthese’, Warburg Institute Archive, WIA III 2.1.2k/6 and WIA III
2.1.2k/7.
Chapter 7

of Renaissance Art’ [1939], in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY:
Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), 26–54.
2 See Joan Hart, ‘Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim: A Dialogue on
Interpretation’, Critical Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993): 552–9.
172 Notes
3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 210; Kritik der reinen Vernunft
[1781] (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2003), 154 (B103): ‘Ich verstehe aber
unter Synthesis in der allgemeinsten Bedeutung die Handlung, verschiedene
Vorstellungen zu einander hinzuzuthun und ihre Mannigfaltigkeit in einer
Erkenntniß zu begreifen.’
4 Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 154; Critique of Pure Reason, 211: ‘die bloße
Wirkung der Einbildungskraft.’
5 Panofsky, ‘Iconography and Iconology’, 32.
6 Ibid., 38.
7 See Margit Atz, Organische Kunstbetrachtung bei Schelling (Würzburg-Aumühle:
Konrad Triltsch Verlag 1940); Judith Schlanger, Les métaphores de l’organisme
(Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 1971).
8 Aristotle, The Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, trans. Harold P. Cooke
and Hugh Tredennick (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1967), 22–5 (2b6–2b36).
9 Aristotle, Metaphysics V(Δ) The Metaphysics Books I–IX, trans. Hugh Tredennick
(London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), 284–5 (1024a).
10 Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art [1960] (New York
and London: Harper & Row Publishers, 1969).
11 Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 19 (BXIII): ‘bestallten Richters’.
12 Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1984), 114–57. See also Sylvia Ferretti, Cassirer,
Panofsky, Warburg: Symbol, Art and History, trans. R. Pierce (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1989).
13 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Perspektive als symbolische Form’ [1927], in Aufsätze zu
Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed. Hariolf Oberer und Egon Verhezen
(Berlin: B. Hessling, 1964), 99–167; Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans.
Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991 [1972]).
14 My translation. ‘Die analytische Logik der reinen Identität hat sich damit zu einer
synthetischen Logik erweitert, in deren Mittelpunkt die Frage nach der möglichen
Verbindung, der Relation und Korrelation der Verschiedenen steht.’ Ernst Cassirer,
‘Zur Logik des Symbolbegriff ’, Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs (Oxford and
Darmstadt: Bruno Cassirer, 1956), first published in Theoria 4–2 (August 1938):
145–75, 206.
15 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and
Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 8; Kritik der
Urteilskraft [1790] (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2003), 16 (BXXI): ‘Urteilskraft
überhaupt ist das Vermögen, das Besondere als enthalten unter dem Allgemeinen
zu denken.’
Notes 173
16 My translation. Cassirer, ‘Logik des Symbolbegriff ’, 221.

17 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 225 (5: 351); Kritik der Urteilskraft, 253
(B 255).
18 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung con Werken
der bildenden Kunst’ [1932], Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, 95.
19 Richard Falkenberg, Hermann Lotze, sein Verhaltnis zu Kant und Hegel und zu den
Problemen der Gegenwart (Leipzig: Verlag von Johann Abrosius Barth, 1913), 19.
See also Erwin Panofsky, Korrespondenz 1910–1968. Eine kommentierte Auswahl
in fünf Bänden, ed. Dieter Wuttke (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2001), vol. 1,
10 (letter of 26 May 1914 to the authorities of the philosophical faculty of the
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg, in which he requested Rickert as his
examiner in philosophy).
20 Fritz Bamberger, Untersuchungen zur Entstehung des Wertproblems in der
Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts, I – Lotze (Halle a.s.: Niemeyer Verlag, 1924),
55–6.
21 Ibid., 56.
22 Bruno Bauch, Wahrheit, Wert und Wirklichkeit (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1923).
23 Hans Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (London
and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 93.
24 Bamberger, Untersuchungen zur Entstehung des Wertproblems, 25: ‘Die Gesamtheit
des wirklichen wird durch die Idee begrenzt, zusammengehalten und bezeichnet;
die Idee ist absoluter Wert, sie macht den komplex, der durch sie bestimmt ist, zur
Werttotalität.’
25 Bruno Bauch, Die Idee (Leipzig: E. Reinicke, 1926).
27 Georg Simmel, ‘Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie’ [1905/7], in
Gesamtausgabe, Band 9, eds Guy Oaks and Kurt Röttgers (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1997), 346–54.
28 Bamberger, Untersuchungen zur Entstehung des Wertproblems, 4–27: ‘Der
Deutsche Idealismus und das Problem der Wirklichkeit’.
29 Wilhelm Windelband, ‘Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft (Straßburger
Rektoratsrede 1894)’, in Hans Ludwig Ollig (ed.), Neukantisniamus. Texte
(Stuttgart: Phillip Reclam, 1982), 167; Wilhelm Windelband, ‘Rectoral Address:
History and Natural Science’, trans. Guy Oakes, History and Theory 19:2 (February
1980): 176.
30 Heinrich Rickert, Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft (Freiburg, Leipzig und
Tübingen: Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], [1899]), 20ff.; Die Probleme
der Geischichtsphilosophie – Eine Einführung [1904] (Heidelberg: Carl Winters
Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1924), 13–53.
31 Simmel, ‘Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie’, 275.
174 Notes
32 Guy Oaks, Die Grenzen kulturwissenschaftlicher Begriffsbildung (Heidelberger Max

Weber – Vorlesungen 1982) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 101.
33 Rickert, Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft, 61–8; Die Probleme der
Geischichtsphilosophie, 54–8; Wilhelm Dilthey, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt
in den Geisteswissenschaften [c. 1910] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag,
1970), 248–9, 316–18, 362–3.
34 Rickert, Kulturwissenchaft und Naturwissenshcaft, 49.
35 My translation. ‘… der Kulturwerth is das geschichtlich Allgemeine, der nur in
dem Einmaligen und Individuellen sich allmählich entwickelt und dadurch allein
wirklich wird’. Rickert, Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft, 51.
36 On this see Rudolf A. Makreell, ‘Wilhelm Dilthey and the neo-Kantians: The
Distinction of the Geisteswissenschaften and the Kulturwissenschaften’, Journal of
the History of Philosophy 7 (October 1969): 423–40.
37 For an examination of Panofsky’s neo-Kantianism, especially in his early writings,
see Allister Neher, ‘“The Concept of the Kunstwollen”, Neo-Kantianism, and Erwin
Panofsky’s Early Art Theoretical Writings’, Word and Image 20:1 (January–March
2004): 41–51.
38 This was pointed out by Edgar Wind in his doctoral dissertation, written in
1922 under Panofsky and Cassirer in Hamburg. See Edgar Wind, Ästhetischer
und Kunstwissenschaftlicher Gegendstand. Ein Beitrag zur Methodologie der
Kunstgeschichte, ed. Pablo Schneider (Hamburg: Philo Fine Art, 2011), 137–8.
39 Windelband, ‘Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft’, 172: ‘Hieraus folgt, daß in dem
naturwissenchaftlichen Denken die Neigung zur Abstraktion vorwiegt, in dem
historischen dagegen diejenige zur Anschaulichkeit.’; Windelband, ‘History and
Natural Science’, 178.
40 For a short discussion of the difference between Eidos and Idea see Jean-Luc
Marion, Sur L’ontologie grise de Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 1975), 116–31.
41 Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, trans. Joseph J. S. Peake (New
York and London: Icon Editions, 1968), 67; Erwin Panofsky, Idea – Ein Beitrag
zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie (Berlin: Verlag Bruno Hessling
GMBH, 1, 38: ‘der künstlerische Geist, dem die Fähigkeit beigemessen wird, von
sich aus intuitiv die Wirklichkeit zur Idee umzubilden, von sich aus eine Synthesis
der objektiv Gegebenen zu vollziehen’.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid., 41.
45 Ibid.
46 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Über das Verhältnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie’
[1925], Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, 49; ‘On the Relationship
of Art History and Art Theory: Towards the Possibility of a Fundamental System
Notes 175
of Concepts for a Science of art’, trans. Katharina Lorenz and Jas Elsner, Critical
Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008): 45. See also Panofsky’s conclusion of Idea 71–2/126.
47 Panofsky, ‘Verhältnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie’, 51; ‘Relationship of
Art History and Art Theory’, 47.
48 Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 153–5 (B102–104); Critique of Pure Reason,
210–11.
49 Erich Auerbach, ‘Introduction: Purpose and Method’, Literary Language and its
Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 7.
50 Actually, already in Idea Panofsky had made use, passim, of a very similar
term – not synthetic intuition, but rather ‘intuitional synthesis’; Panofsky, Idea
36/65.
51 Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (Z), The Metaphysics Books I–IX, trans. Hugh Tredennick
(London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956); 470–3 (1051b17–
1052a4); Aristotle, On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, trans. W. S. Hett
(London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 164–77 (III 4–5,
429a10–430a25).
52 Henri Bergson, ‘Introduction à la métaphysique’, La pensée et le mouvant, in
his Œuvres, ed. André Robinet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959),
1432: ‘Mais l’intuition métaphysique, quoiqu’on n’y puisse arriver qu’à force de
connaissances matérielles, est tout autre chose que le résumé ou la synthèse de ces
connaissances.’
53 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854), ‘System des
transcendentalen Idealismus’ [1800], in Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1985), 500–8.
54 Otfried Höffe (ed.), Aristoteles-Lexikon (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 2005),
384.
55 A close equivalent is to be found in Martin Buber’s dialogical philosophy, where
he uses in German the term ‘synthetische Anschauung’: Martin Buber, Urdistanz
und Beziehung (Heidelberg: Lambert Schnieder 1978), 16–17. There is more work
to be done regarding the relation of this peculiar term with the neo-Thomistic
school as well as with the work of Croce and his followers.
56 Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 116–22 (B59–B66); Critique of Pure Reason,
168–71.
57 Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 155 (B104); Critique of Pure Reason, 211.
59 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Reflections on Historical Time’, trans. Johanna Bauman, Critical
Inquiry 30 (Summer 2004): 696; ‘Zum Problem der historischen Zeit’ [1927],
Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, 78.
60 Kant, Kritk der reinen Vernunft, 192 (B151); Critique of Pure Reason, 256.
176 Notes
61 See Yaron M. Senderowicz, ‘Figurative Synthesis and Synthetic a-priori

Knowledge’, The Review of Metaphysics 57 (June 2004): 755–85.
64 Panofsky, ‘Iconography and Iconology’, 54–8.
65 Panofsky, ‘Über das Verhältnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie’, 56–8;
Panofsky, ‘On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory’, 55–6.
Chapter 8
1 Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York and London: Icon, Harper and
Row, 1962 [1939]), 27; Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Doubleday
Anchor, 1955), 51.
2 Panofsky immigrated permanently to the United States in 1934, Spitzer in 1936
and Auerbach in 1947.
3 Thomas Steinfeld, Der leidenschaftliche Buchhalter, Philologie als Lebensform
(Wien: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2004).
4 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Powers of Philology: Dynamics of Textual Scholarship
(Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003).
5 My translation. Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und
politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen [1992] (Munich: Beck, 2013), 19–20.
6 Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History. Essays in Stylistics (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1948), 15–66, 147–69: ‘Muttersprache und
Muttererziehung’, ‘Ratio > Race’.
7 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Dürers Stellung zur Antike’, Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der
Kunstwissenschaft, ed. Hariolf Oberer and Egon Verhezen (Berlin: B. Hessling,
1964), 247–311; ‘Albrecht Dürer and Classical Antiquity’, in Meaning in the Visual
Arts, 236–94.
8 Erich Auerbach, ‘Philologie der Weltliteratur’ [1955], Gesammelte Aufsätze zur
romanischen Philologie (Bern and Munich: Franke Verlag, 1967), 301–10.
9 Aristotle and David Bloch, Aristotle on Memory and Recollection: Text, Translation,
Interpretation and Reception in Western Scholasticism (Leiden and Boston: Brill,
2007), 1–19.
10 Ibid., 80–2.
11 Ibid., 24–7, 43 [449b10–15; 449b26–8]; Richard Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory
(Providence: Brown University Press, 1972), 13–14.
12 Aristotle and Bloch, Memory and Recollection, 80 (449b24–25, 451a14–16).
13 Ibid., 36–7 (451a20).
Notes 177
14 Ibid., 36–7 (451b1–5).

15 Ibid., 72.
16 Ibid., 38–9 (450b10–22).
17 Ibid., 40 (452a11).
18 Ibid., 40–1 (451b25–30).
19 Ibid., 41 (451b30).
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 43 (452a12–15).
22 Ibid., 40–1 (452a5–7).
23 Paul Ricoeur has pointed to a continuity of discussion between Aristotle and
Bergson. See his La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 30–6.
24 My translation. Henri Bergson, Matière et Mémoire [1896] (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 2012), 167–8: ‘Il y a […] deux mémoires profondément
distinctes: l’une, fixée dans l’organisme, n’est point autre chose que l’ensemble des
mécanismes intelligemment montés qui assurent une réplique convenable aux
divers interpellations possibles […] L’autre est la mémoire vraie. Coextensive à la
conscience, elle retient et aligne à la suite les uns des autres tous nos états au fur et
à mesure qu’ils se produisent, laissant à chaque fait sa place […] se mouvant bien
réellement dans le passé définitif, et non pas, comme le première, dans un présent
qui recommence sans cesse.’
25 Aristotle and Bloch, Memory and Recollection, 42–3 (452a13); Frances Yates,
The Art of Memory (London: Pimlico, 1966), 6–8; Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory,
22–31.
26 Aristotle and Bloch, Memory and Recollection, 32–3 [450b20], 64–70.
27 Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of
Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press, 1998), 73.
28 Auerbach, Gesammelte Aufsätze, 55–92.
29 Emily Apter, ‘The Human in the Humanities’, October 96 (Spring 2001): 73–4.
30 Ibid., 73.
31 See Ernst Robert Curtius, ‘Antike Rhetorik und vergleichende
Literaturwissenschaft’ [1949], Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen
Philologie (Bern and München: Francke Verlag, 1960), 7–12; Ernst Ulrich
Grosse, ‘Curtius et les topoi’, in Jeanne Bem and André Guyaux, Ernst Robert
Curtius et l’idée d’Europe (Paris: Champion 1995), 91–5.
32 Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und Lateinische Mittelalter
[1948] (Bern and München: Francke Verlag, 1967), 92: ‘Liebe, Freundschaft,
Vergänglichkeit. Alle diese Themen betreffen Urverhältnisse des Daseins und
sind darum zeitlos; die einen mehr, die anderen weniger. […] zunächst ein
literaturbiologisches: wir können an ihnen das Werden neuer topoi beobachten.
So erweitert sich unsere genetische Erkenntnis literarischer Form-Elemente. Als
178 Notes
zweitens, jene topoi sind Anzeichen einer veränderten Seelenlage; Anzeichen, die
auf keine andere Weise greifbar sind.’
33 Curtius, ‘Antike Pathosformeln in der Literatur des Mittelalters’, Gesammelte
Aufsätze, 23–7. See also Dieter Wuttke (ed.), Kosmopolis der Wissenschaft, E. R.
Curtius und das Warburg Institute. Briefe und andere Dokumente (Baden-Baden:
Koerner Verlag, 1989). Curtius dedicated his Europäische Literatur und Lateinische
Mittelalter to the memory of Aby Warburg.
34 Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, 1–25.
35 Ibid., 5.
36 Aby Warburg, Werke in einem Band, eds Martin Treml, Sgrid Weigel and Perdita
Ladwig (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2010), 638.
37 Panofsky’s disjunctive method of cultural transformation is highlighted in
Hartmut Böhme et al. (eds), Transformation: Ein Konzept zur Erforschung
kulturellen Wandels (Munich: Fink, 2011), 49.
38 Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York and
London: Harper & Row Publishers, 1972 [1960]), 113.
39 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,
trans. W. R. Trask (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003),
271–96; Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der Abendländischen Literature
[1946] (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1959), 285–311. In further citations I give the
English page reference first, followed by the German.
40 Auerbach, Mimesis, 293/279.
41 Auerbach, Mimesis, 292/277: ‘so daß die […] Arbeitsweise Montaignes, die dem
Wandel seines Wesens elastisch folgt, im Grunde eine strenge experimentelle
Methode ist.’ See also Frank-Rutger Hausmann, ‘Michel de Montaigne, Erich
Auerbachs Mimesis und Erich Auerbachs literaturwissenschaftliche Methode’, in
Walter Busch and Gerfart Pickerodt (eds), Wahrnehmen, Lesen, Deuten: Erich
Auerbachs Lektüre der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Vitorio Klostermann, 1998),
224–37.
42 Auerbach, Mimesis, 292/80.
43 Panofsky, Aufsätze zu Grundfragen, 247–311; ‘The History and Theory of Human
Proportions as a Reflection of the History of Styles’, in Meaning in the Visual Arts,
55–107.
44 See: Apter, ‘The Human in the Humanities’; Alexander Gelley, ‘Robert Curtius:
Topology and Critical Method’, MLN 81:5 (December 1966), 585–6; Timothy
Hampton, ‘“Comment a nom”: Humanism and Literary Knowledge in Auerbach
and Rabelais’, Representations 119:1 (Summer 2012): 37–59; Spitzer, Linguistics and
Literary History, 24–5.
45 Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, 2–3.
46 My translation. Curtius, Europäische Literatur, 24–5; quoted also in Wuttke,
Notes 179
Kosmopolis, 368–70: ‘Für die Literatur ist alle Vergangenheit Gegenwart, oder
kann es doch werden. […] Ich kann den Homer und den Platon zu jeder Stunde
vornehmen, ich „habe“ ihn dann und hab ihn ganz. Er existiert in unzähligen
exemplaren. Der Parthenon und die Peterskirche sind nur einmal da, ich kann sie
mir durch Photographien nur partiell und schattenhaft anschaulich machen. Aber
die Photographien geben mir keinen Marmor, ich kann sich nicht abtasten und nicht
darin spazierengehen, wie ich es in der Odysee oder der Divina Commedia kann.
Im Buch ist die Dichtung real gegenwärtig. Einen Tizian „habe“ ich weder in der
Photographie noch in der vollendesten Kopie […] Das Buch ist realer als das Bild […]
Ein Buch ist, abgesehen von allem anderen, ein „Text.“ Man versteht ihn oder versteht
ihn nicht. Er enthält vielleicht „schwierige“ Stellen. Man braucht eine Technik, um sie
zu enträtseln. Sie heißt Philologie […] Die “Kunstwissenschaft” hat es leichter.’
47 In a lecture given at the University of Cologne, 11 December 2012, entitled Anima
forma corporis – der Beitrag des Hylemorphismus zum Leib-Seele-Problem, Andreas
Speer presented a concept of transformative Hylomorphism that inspired the
elaborations of hylomorphism in the present book.
48 Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History, 6.
49 Panofsky, ‘The Neoplatonic Movement in Florence and North Italy (Bandinelli
and Titian)’, and ‘The Neoplatonic Movement and Michelangelo’, in Studies in
Iconology, 171–230.
50 Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York: Meridian, 1957
[1951]).
51 Erwin Panofsky, ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’, trans. Kenneth J. Northcott
and Joel Snyder, Critical Inquiry 8:1 (Autumn 1981): 33; Aufsätze zu Grundfragen,
1034: ‘Die Kunst ist […] die auf gültige Ergebnisse abzielende, verwirklichende
und objektivierende Auseinandersetzung einer formenden Kraft mit einem zu
bewältigenden Stoff.’
52 Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, 21.
53 Jacques Maritain, ‘Sign and Symbol’, trans. Mary Morris, Journal of the Warburg
Institute 1:1 (July 1937): 7.
54 Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, 41: ‘Familiarity with objects and events,
familiarity with specific themes and concepts, familiarity with the essential
tendencies of the human mind.’
55 Ibid.
Chapter 9

Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed. Hariolf Oberer und Egon
180 Notes
Verhezen (Berlin: B. Hessling, 1964), 64; ‘On the Relationship of Art History
and Art Theory: Towards the Possibility of a Fundamental System of Concepts
for a Science of Art’, trans. Katharina Lorenz and Jas Elsner, Critical Inquiry 35
(Autumn 2008): 63.
2 Alain Roger, ‘Le schème et le symbole dans l’œuvre de Panofsky’, in Erwin
Panofsky: Cahiers pour un temps (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1983), 56.
University Press, 1982), 178, 185–6.
4 See Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
5 Hans Belting, Bild und Kult: eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst
(Munich: Beck, 1990); Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the
Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990);
Moshe Barasch, Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea (New York: New York
University Press, 1992); Marie-José Mondzain, Image, icône, économie: Les sources
byzantines de l’imaginaire contemporain (Paris: Seuil, 1996); Image, Icon, Economy:
The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico Franses
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness:
On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2002); Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Iconoclash: Beyond
the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT
Press, 2002); Michael Kelly, Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003); W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Offending Images’, and ‘Totemism,
Fetishism, Idolatry’, in What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 125–44, 188–96.
6 See also Antony Eastmond and Liz James (eds), Icon and Word: The Power of
Images in Byzantium. Studies presented to Robin Cormack (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2003); Jeff Johnson and Anne McClanan (eds), Negating the Image: Case Studies in
Iconoclasm (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
of Renaissance Art’, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Doubleday
Anchor, 1955), 38–41; W. S. Heckscher, ‘Die Genesis der Ikonologie’, in Ekkehard
Kammerling (ed.), Ikonographie und Ikonologie – Theorien-Entwicklung-Probleme
(Köln: Dumont Buchverlag 1973), 112–64.
8 See Panofsky, ‘History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline’, Meaning in the Visual
Arts, 25.
9 Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York and London: Icon, Harper and
Row, 1962 [1939]).
10 André Chastel, ‘Erwin Panofsky: Rigueur et Système’, in Louis Marin, Erwin
Panofsky: Cahiers pour un temps, 19.
Notes 181
11 See, for example: Michael Ann Holly, ‘Later Work: An Iconological Perspective’,
in Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press 1984), 159–93; Otto Pächt, ‘Kritik der Ikonologie’ [1977], in
Ikonographie und Ikonologie, 353–77.
12 Erich Auerbach, ‘Introduction: Purpose and Method’, Literary Language and its
Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1965), 9.
13 On the art historical given, see Johannes Eichner, Das Problem des Gegebenen in
der Kunstgeschichte (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1914).
14 Central examples of this tendency can be found throughout Panofsky’s Meaning in
the Visual Arts, as well as in his earlier ‘Die Perspektive als “symbolische Form” ’,
Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg 1924–1925 (Leipzig und Berlin: Bibliothek
Warburg, 1927), reprinted in Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft,
99–168, translated into English as Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. C. S. Wood
(New York: Zone Books, 1991).
15 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsbedeutung
von Werken der bildenden Kunst’ [1932], Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der
Kunstwissenschaft, 93–5; Panofsky, ‘Iconography and Iconology’, 41.
16 F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon (New York: New York
University Press, 1967), 37–8.
17 See Thomas Steinfeld, ‘Skepsis. Über August Boeckh, die Wissenschaft der
unendlichen Approximation und das Glück der mangelnden Vollendung’, in Jürgen
Paul Schwindt (ed.), Was ist eine philologische Frage? Beiträge zur Erkundung einer
theoretischen Einstellung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009), 211–26.
18 René Descartes, ‘Regulæ Ad Directionem Ingenii’, Œuvres de Descartes, eds
Ch. Adam and P. Tannery (Paris: Vrin, 1964), vol. X, 468 (Regula XIX).
19 See Dominique Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique. Une généalogie du
spiritualisme française [1969] (Paris: Vrin, 1997).
20 On dualism in the French spiritualist tradition, see, for example: Janicaud,
Ravaisson et la métaphysique, 201–4; Pierre Montebello, La décomposition de la
pensée – dualité et empirisme transcendantal chez Maine de Biran (Grenoble: Du
Levant, 1994); Frédéric Worms, Bergson et les deux sens de la vie (Paris: Presses
Universitaries de France, 2004).
21 Jean-Luc Marion, De surcroît: Études sur les phénomenes saturés (Paris: Presses
Universitaries de France, 2001), 131; In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena,
trans. Robert Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press,
2004), 105.
22 Jean-Luc Marion, La croisée du visible (Paris: Presses Universitaries de France,
1996), 16; The Crossing of the Visible, trans. James K. A. Smith (Stanford: Stanford
182 Notes
23 See Jean-Luc Marion, L’idole et la distance. Cinq études (Paris: Bernard Grasset
1977), 180–253; The Idol and Distance. Five Studies, trans. Thomas A. Carlson
(New York: Fordham University Press 2001), 137–95.
24 Marion, La croisée, 12–13, 19, 26–7; Crossing, 2, 6, 11–12. On this point Marion’s
views stand in one line with those of Hubert Damisch in his L’origine de la
perspective (Paris: Flammarion, 1987); The Origin of Perspective, trans. John
Goodman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
25 These two notions are taken from Karl Mannheim. See Panofsky, ‘Zum Problem
der Beschreibung und Inhaltsbedeutung’, 93.
26 Ibid., 95.
27 Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York and
London: Harper & Row Publishers, 1972 [1960]), 120.
28 Marion, La croisée, 75; Crossing, 41.
29 Marion, La croisée, 68–73; Crossing, 37–9.
31 Panofsky, ‘Perspektive als „symbolische Form”’, 123–4; Perspective as Symbolic
Form, 67–8.
32 Panofsky, ‘Perspektive als «symbolische Form’, 125–6; Perspective as Symbolic
Form, 71.
33 Panofsky, ‘History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline’, 1.
34 Ibid., 2.
35 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Der Begriff des Kunstwollens’ [1920], Aufsätze zu Grundfragen
der Kunstwissenschaft, 29–43; ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’, trans. Kenneth J.
Northcott and Joel Snyder, Critical Inquiry 8:1 (Autumn 1981): 17–33.
36 See also Allister Neher, ‘“The Concept of Kunstwollen”, Neo-Kantianism, and
Erwin Panofsky’s Early Art Theoretical Essays’, Word and Image 20:1 (January–
March 2004): 41–51.
37 Panofsky, ‘Perspektive als „symbolische Form” ’, 122; Perspective as Symbolic Form,
65.
38 Panofsky, ‘Perspektive als „symbolische Form” ’, 123; Perspective as Symbolic Form,
67.
39 Panofsky, ‘Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsbedeutung’, 92. Panofsky’s
reference to Heidegger is to the latter’s Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (1929).
41 Panofsky, ‘Perspektive als “symbolische Form” ’, 123; Perspective as Symbolic Form,
67.
43 Panofsky, ‘Reflections on Historical Time’ [c. 1927], trans. J. Baumann, Critical
Inquiry 30 (Summer 2004): 699; ‘Zum Problem der historischen Zeit’, Aufsätze zur
Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, 81.
Notes 183

46 See Henri Bergson, La pensée et le mouvant [1934], Œuvres, ed. André Robinet
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 1253: ‘ce qui a le plus manqué à la
philosophie, c’est la précision’.
47 On icon and figure see my ‘Figural Habitus in Angela Kline’s Tablets’, in Angela
Kline, Exh. Cat., Curator Doron Rabina, Tel-Aviv: University of Tel-Aviv Gallery
of Art, 122–12.
48 Panofsky, ‘Iconography and Iconology’, 38–9.
49 Ibid., 32.
50 Panofsky, ‘On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual
Arts’, trans. Jas Elsner and Katharina Lorenz, Critical Inquiry 38:3 (Spring 2012):
476–81.
51 English translation was slightly changed. Ibid., 481, n. 22.
Conclusion
1 Erwin Panofsky, Korrespondenz 1910–1968. Eine kommentierte Auswahl in fünf

Bänden, ed. Dieter Wuttke, vol. 4 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2001), 358–9
(Letter to William H. Woody, Jr., Connecticut, 13 November 1958).
2 Giulio Carlo Argan, ‘Ideology and Iconology’, trans. Rebecca West, Critical Inquiry
2:2 (Winter 1975): 305.
3 Ibid., 299.
4 Erich Auerbach, ‘Philologie der Weltliteratur’, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur
romanischen Philologie (Bern and Munich: Franke Verlag, 1967), 301–10;
‘Philology and Weltliterature’, trans. Edward Said, The Centennial Review 8:1
(Winter 1969): 1–17.
5 Aristotle, Poetics (with ‘Longinus’ on the Sublime and Semetrius on Style), trans.
W. Hamilton Fyfe (London and New York: Heinemann and Putnam’s, 1953), 34–5
(1451a36–1451b5).
6 For example see Werner Hamacher, ‘Für – die Philologie’, Was ist eine philologische
Frage, ed. Jürgen Paul Schwindt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009), 21–60.
7 Argan, ‘Ideology and Iconology’, 298.
8 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of
Renaissance Art’ [1939], Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Doubleday
Anchor Books, 1955), 38.
9 As exemplified in Erwin Panofsky, Three Essays on Style, ed. Irvin Lavin
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
184 Notes
10 Karen A. Lang, Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 35–8.
11 Giambatistta Vico, ‘On Verum and Factum’, in Selected Writings, ed. and trans.
Leon Pompa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 50–6.
12 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der Abendländischen
Literature (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1946), 497; Mimesis: The Representation of Reality
in Western Literature, trans. W. R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2003), 557. On Auerbach’s relation to historicism, see Leopold Waizbort, ‘Erich
Auerbach im Kontext der Historismusdebatte’, in Karlheinz Barck and Martin
Treml eds, Erich Auerbach – Geschichte und Aktualität (Berlin: Kulturverlag
Kadmos, 2007), 281–97.
13 Leopold von Ranke, Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von
1494 bis 1514 [1824] (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot 1874), VII.
14 Wilhelm Windelband, ‘Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft (Straßburger
Rektoratsrede 1894)’, in Hans Ludwig Ollig (ed.), Neukantisniamus. Texte
(Stuttgart: Phillip Reclam, 1982), 167; ‘Rectoral Address: History and Natural
Science’, trans. Guy Oakes, History and Theory 19:2 (February 1980): 176.
15 Panofsky, ‘The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline’, in Meaning in the Visual
Arts, 3.
16 Erwin Panofsky, ‘Abbot Suger of St.-Denis’ [1946], in Meaning in the Visual Arts,
108–45; ‘Galileo as a Critic of the Arts: Aesthetic Attitude and Scientific Thought’,
Isis 47:1 (March 1956): 3–15; ‘Erasmus and the Visual Arts’, Journal of the Warburg
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Index
aesthetic experience 136 canon 2, 5, 8–9, 27, 69, 123

age-value (Alterswert) 17, 26–8, 31 carving 39, 46
Alberti, Leon Battista 59 Cassirer, Ernst 91–2, 95–6, 98, 100
Alterswert see age-value causality 28–9, 68, 73, 77, 88
ancient manner 3 certum 4, 10–11, 59, 72, 139
Ansatz 68, 70 Christianity 39, 67, 69, 94, 120, 131
Anschauung see intuition Cicero 55
archaeology 2, 5, 61, 115–16 creation 4, 10, 20, 44–5, 82
archaism 13, 50, 62, 72, 80–81, 84–8, 106, Croce, Benedetto 20, 80, 82
112–14, 117–18, 125 Curtius, Ernst Robert 3, 6, 8–9, 13,
arché 61, 68, 106 105–18, 141
Archimedean point, Ansatzpunkt 5, Curtius, Georg 6
15–31, 69, 119, 126, 128–9, 132–3,
137 Damascus, John of see John of Damascus
Argan, Giulio Carlo 25, 135 Dante Allighieri 59, 73
argumentation 58–60 Darstellung see presentation
Aristotle 3–4, 9–10, 17, 42, 58–9, 61, De Man, Paul 1, 7
65–6, 70–71, 84, 93–4, 101, 105, Deleuze, Gilles 38, 40, 63–5
107–10, 114, 116–17, 123, 137, 141 Descartes, René 4, 36, 65, 72, 138
art history 1, 5, 7–8, 12–14, 15–16, 19–25, diagnosis 87, 100–101, 132, 138, 141
28–30, 44, 59, 69, 75, 79–82, 86–7, Diez, Friedrich Christian 6
94–5, 111, 113, 119, 121, 126, 131, Dilthey, Wilhelm 98, 140
136, 138 disjunction 110, 112, 114–17
Assman, Jan 105–6, 108 distance, distanciation 2, 50, 84–6, 88, 96,
Ast, Anton Freidrich 6 104, 125–9, 131–4
atom 11, 14, 17–18, 63, 78, 80, 110, 118, dogma 9, 69, 139
136 drama 87
Auerbach, Erich 3–4, 7–9, 12–13, 19, 36, duration 10, 15–31, 41, 58, 60, 62, 71, 79,
39–40, 49–52, 54–61, 63, 65, 67–72, 87, 124, 137, 140
79, 86–7, 92, 94–5, 103, 105–18, Dürer, Albrecht 28, 80, 106
120, 122, 135, 138–41
education (Bildung) 8, 18, 141
Badt, Kurt 36, 44–5 eidos 40–41, 52, 55, 66, 71, 94, 99
Bauch, Bruno 53, 97 Etienne, Servais 23
Bellori, Gian Pietro 51 etymology 8, 20, 25, 52, 54, 116
Benjamin, Walter 20, 72 etymon 110–11, 116
Bergson, Henri 10, 69, 82, 85, 101, 109, 122 explication, historical 123, 125–30
Bildung see education exterior world, exterior reality 41, 49, 53,
Boeckh, August 6, 10, 19, 70, 123 59
204 Index
factum 4, 10–11, 54–5, 60, 67, 69, 101, historicism 11–12, 17, 21, 49, 81–2, 88,
139–40 126, 131, 133, 140–41
Ficino, Marsilio 59 history, historical reality (geschichtliche
figural dynamics 29, 35–6, 38, 40–41, 47, Wirklichkeit) 9, 27, 30, 43, 49–52,
55, 59, 64, 69–70, 77, 87, 137, 139 56, 58, 67–73, 75–8, 85, 88, 91–104,
figural situation 37–40, 42–4, 63–4, 69, 124 115–16, 119–20, 124–5, 130–31,
figural synthesis 65, 77, 91–104, 137–8 133, 135–40
figurative 40, 55 Holly, Michael Ann 16, 95
Focillon, Henri 13, 15, 35–6, 39, 42–3, 45 humanism 3–5, 7–9, 13–14, 59, 80, 86, 88,
form, forms 2, 5, 8–11, 14, 16–17, 21, 98–9, 104, 110–14, 116–17, 121,
23–4, 27, 29, 33–47, 51–2, 55–7, 126–8, 132
61–4, 66–7, 68, 71, 75, 78, 80–82, hylomorphism 3, 7, 10, 14, 17–18, 39, 41,
93–6, 98–9, 102–3, 106–7, 110–12, 66, 70–71, 91–2, 113–14, 116–18,
115–17, 123, 130, 136–7, 141 119, 136, 141
formalism 15–16, 33–6, 38, 43
Foucault, Michel 8 iconism 49, 120–23, 125
Francastel, Pierre 33, 36, 40–42, 44, 63 iconoclasm 49–52, 60–61, 92, 120–22,
fundamental concepts (Grundbegriffe) 52 130
iconology 4, 12–15, 17–21, 23, 25–6, 28,
gaze 11, 69, 75–6, 82–9, 122, 124, 139 30, 36, 49, 54, 56, 59, 61, 66–8, 73,
Genette, Gérard 67, 69 75–89, 91–104, 105, 112–13, 116,
genus, genre 3, 7, 9–10, 28, 33, 42, 66, 88, 119–26, 129–34, 138, 141
92, 94–5, 123–4, 131, 138, 141 iconophiles, iconodules 49–51, 53–4, 57,
geschichtliche Wirklichkeit see history, 60–62, 92, 104, 120–21
historical reality Idea 51–4, 57, 59, 61, 66, 120
gesture 25, 30, 36, 41, 46, 54, 61–8, 92–4, ideal 5, 8–9, 82–3, 86, 94, 97–8, 127–8,
123–7, 138 138
Ghirlandaio, Domenico 83–5 idiographic 98, 100, 141
Gilson, Etienne 58, 70 idol 52, 119, 131
Goldschmidt, Adolph 15, 80, 141 image 13, 37, 40, 46, 49–51, 53, 56, 64–6,
Gombrich, Ernst 13, 83 69, 72, 82–5, 87–8, 107, 115, 117,
grammar 5, 7, 13, 16–20, 25–6, 30, 34–5, 119–22, 124–5, 129–31, 133, 136
41–2 imaginary 41–2, 52
Greenberg, Clement 34–8 imitation (Nachahmung) 5, 51–2, 59,
Grimm, Jakob 6, 18–20 113–14, 128, 140
ground 16, 37–9, 43, 61, 64–5, 76, 83–6, interpretation 10–13, 17, 23–4, 27, 33, 57,
88, 124, 127 84, 92–3, 99, 120–21, 123, 127, 129,
Grundbegriffe, see fundamental concepts 132–3
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich 105 intuition (Anschauung) 6, 33, 61–2, 66, 71,
76–7, 84, 92–3, 95–6, 99–104, 109,
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 72 115, 118, 123, 132–3
Herder, Johann Gottfried von 34–5, 44–6
heresy 122 Jay, Martin 50
Hermann, Jakob 5, 12 Jesus 65, 67, 69, 71–3, 139
hermeneutics 8, 11–12, 18, 78, 84, 129, 132 John of Damascus 50, 126
Heyne, Christian Gottlob 5 Jolles, Johannes Andreas 83
hierarchical distance 50, 126 Joshua 55, 65, 67, 69, 71–3, 116, 139
Hildebrand, Adolf von 34 judgement 8, 53, 95–7, 101–2, 104
Index 205
Kant, Immanuel 5, 12–13, 16, 52, 59, 65, Nachahmung see imitation
76–7, 84, 92, 95, 97–8, 100–104, narrative 27, 39, 50–51, 53–4, 57–8, 61–2,
119, 127–9, 131 73, 110, 115, 131
Krauss, Rosalind 36–8, 63 Natorp, Paul 53, 97
Kulturgeschichte 8–9 neo-Kantianism 11–12, 14, 16, 18, 25, 27,
Kulturwissenschaft 9, 30, 53, 98 30, 52–4, 58, 61, 78, 91–2, 95–8,
Kunstwollen 15–18, 21–2, 27–31, 128 101, 119, 126–7, 130, 137, 141
neo-Platonism 3, 51, 54, 64, 92, 96, 104,
Lachmann, Karl 5, 18, 20 116–17, 126
Lebensphilosophie see vitalism Neuphilologie 6–7
Lhote, André 63 Nicea, Council of 50, 130
Lotze, Rudolf Hermann 97 Nietzsche, Friedrich 7, 12, 80–81, 103
Lucretius 55 nonseen 133–4
Lyotard, Jean-François 38, 63
object 2, 4, 7–8, 10, 12, 21, 22–4, 28, 30,
Malabou, Catherine 44 37, 43, 45–6, 52, 59–60, 68, 84,
Mannheim, Karl 17, 91, 96 93–7, 100, 107–8, 115, 117, 126–7,
Marin, Louis 63 132, 135
Marion, Jean-Luc 120, 124, 126–7, 129–31 Old Testament 54–5, 60, 116
matter 14, 17, 34–5, 39, 41–7, 64–6, ontology 14, 52
70–71, 109, 111–12, 116–17, 124,
126, 134, 139 Paris, Gaston 6
meaning 5, 8, 10–12, 14, 16–17, 22–4, Pascal, Blaise 66, 69
26–30, 38–40, 45–7, 54–5, 58, 61, pathos-formulae 30, 80, 82, 84–9, 111
67–73, 80–81, 83–4, 91–3, 95–9, perspective 88, 95, 123, 126–9
104, 106, 111, 115, 116–17, 120–33, pictorial 1, 12–13, 24, 33–47, 49–63, 69,
135–8, 140–41 84, 86, 120–21, 126–8, 132
memory, mnemonic 10, 24, 26–7, 65, 66, place 27–8, 37, 43, 45, 56, 58, 64–6, 69,
82–3, 85, 87, 105–10, 112 86, 100–101, 108–10, 115, 120, 131,
metaphysics 4, 27, 82, 110, 129 138
method 1, 2, 4–5, 8–10, 14, 15–22, 24, plastics 1, 3, 8, 14, 15–19, 24–5, 28, 31,
27–8, 30–31, 36, 52, 54, 56, 58–62, 33–9, 41, 43–7, 51–5, 57, 60, 62,
69–70, 72, 78, 81, 91–4, 97, 104, 63–5, 67–8, 75, 87, 92–4, 100,
105–8, 112–14, 119, 122, 135–6, 102–5, 110, 115–17, 119, 122–3,
139, 141 131, 136, 139
mimesis 50–51, 53, 61, 127 Plato 3, 6, 18, 40, 50–53, 58, 61, 83, 91,
mistranslation 13 95–6, 115, 126
modeling 46 plenitude 14
modus operandi 12, 67, 70, 73 Pliny the Elder 45–6, 64, 66
monuments 1, 15–31, 41, 54, 68, 93, 125, Plotinus 51, 61, 101
130, 135–6, 139–41 Podro, Michael 16, 51, 88, 120
morphe 41, 55, 66, 71 poiesis 4, 9–12, 70, 83, 101, 137, 142
movement, dynamics 2, 6–7, 17, 28, 34–7, Poussin, Nicolas 13
40–43, 45, 54, 58, 64–8, 70, 84–5, presentation (Darstellung) 42, 57–8, 71,
87–8, 107–8, 113–14, 116–18, 124, 73, 87, 96, 123, 127–8, 136, 139–40
128 production see poiesis
mutation 19, 26, 34, 41–2, 44, 111, 123, prototype 9–12, 40–42, 44, 50, 64, 68,
139, 141 71, 82, 85, 87, 101, 104, 113, 121,
mythology 3, 7, 80, 101, 121 123–7, 129–31, 133
206 Index
Quintilian 55 spatio-temporal 30, 76–7, 79, 85, 89, 93,

102–3, 131, 135
Rancière, Jacques 49 Spitzer, Leo 3, 7–10, 13, 19, 25, 105–18,
Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) 93, 100–101 138–9, 141
rationality, philological rationality 1–14, Stokes, Adrian 36, 39, 46
18, 36, 43, 60–61, 63, 69, 75, 79, Studion, Theodore of see Theodore of
85–7, 91–2, 94–6, 98, 100, 105, 114, Studion
123, 126–8 style 16–17, 27, 42, 54, 67, 78, 93, 124,
realism 25, 28, 30–31, 49–50, 52, 54, 130, 132, 138
57–60, 66, 69–72, 85, 117, 120–21, symbol, symbolism 26, 56–7, 92–101, 103,
138–9 112, 121, 138
reality 9, 10–11, 15–18, 20–21, 23, 25, syncretism 3
27–30, 33–6, 39–41, 43–4, 47, synthesis 4, 8, 10, 16, 18, 20, 25, 50, 56–7,
49–62, 64–73, 75–8, 84–6, 88–9, 60–63, 65–8, 70, 72, 77, 84–5, 89,
91–104, 109–110, 112, 115–17, 91–104, 117–18, 120, 123, 125–6,
119–25, 128–33, 135–41 131–3, 135, 137–9
realization 6, 42, 51, 55–6, 58, 61, 66, system 18, 20, 36, 41, 53, 78, 87, 92, 97,
70–71, 87, 116, 130 102, 105, 110, 123, 125, 128–30,
Realprophetie 56, 67 132–3, 137
recollection 62, 105–18, 125, 133, 140
rehearsal 5, 10, 51, 55, 58, 60, 71–3, 87, Ten Commandments 50
114, 136 thing 3–4, 8–12, 17, 19, 25–7, 30–31,
relativism, radical 12 33–7, 41, 43–5, 47, 50, 53, 55–6, 58,
Renaissance 3, 5, 52, 59–60, 79, 85–7, 91, 62, 64–6, 70, 72, 76–7, 83, 85–6, 88,
94, 101, 112–14, 121, 126, 128 93–4, 98, 100, 113, 115, 117, 119,
reproduction 5, 24–5, 30–31 122–3, 125, 129, 131, 135–9, 141
retrospection 66–7, 69, 76, 122, 138–40 time, temporality 11–12, 27–8, 30, 41, 43,
Rickert, Heinrich 12, 30, 53, 91–2, 97–8 46, 56, 58, 66–7, 75–9, 81–2, 84–5,
Riegl, Alois 13, 15–22, 25–31, 33–6, 41–3, 88–9, 93, 95, 100, 102–3, 107–8,
53, 123, 133, 141 110, 116, 123–4, 130–31, 135–6,
Romance philology 6–7, 54, 105–7, 110, 139–40
113–14, 141 tradition 3, 5–6, 8–13, 15, 18, 20, 23, 25,
29–30, 33–5, 41, 44, 51, 57, 73, 80,
Said, Edward 7 82–3, 86–8, 94, 97, 101, 103, 106,
Schlegel, Friedrich 5 109–12, 114, 117–18, 121, 123–4,
Schlosser, Julius von 13, 15, 19–20, 141 142
scholasticism 2, 17, 105, 116–17 transfiguration 2, 8, 13, 39, 41, 43, 66,
sensuality 34, 50, 55, 65, 102–3, 122 79–80, 86–7, 117
series 10, 12, 14, 19, 42, 55–7, 59–62, translation 2–4, 7–8, 13, 43, 55, 57
64, 66, 73, 104, 106–12, 115, 132, transmission 2–3, 5–6, 9–11, 13, 18, 20,
137–9, 141 23–5, 27–31, 42–4, 58, 66, 79, 82,
Sickel, Theodore von 18, 27 85–7, 114, 117, 123, 125, 141
Simmel, Georg 76–8, 97–8, 139 transmutation 8, 18–19, 51, 58–9
space 16, 36, 41–4, 56, 67, 70, 73, 75–89, truth 13, 45, 49–53, 55–6, 58–61, 67,
93, 95, 102–3, 110, 116, 124, 126–8, 69–70, 72, 96–7, 103, 133, 139
136 type 10, 13, 21, 33, 41–2, 50, 61, 64, 68,
space-time 75–7, 124 84, 94, 101, 113, 118, 121, 123,
spatiality 46, 78, 125, 127 125–7, 129, 131, 135
Index 207
unconscious 37–8, 73 Warburg, Aby 6–8, 10, 13, 15–16, 19, 30,
understanding 4, 6, 10, 17, 23–4, 33, 35, 36, 60, 69, 73, 75–89, 94, 110–12,
37, 42, 50, 54, 59, 63, 65, 67, 78, 81, 115, 117, 122–3, 125, 140
94–5, 97–8, 101–4, 114–17, 120–22, Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von 6–7
132, 140–42 Winckelmann, Johan Joachim 5, 44
Usener, Hermann 7, 19, 70, 80–81, 85 Wind, Edgar 13, 36
Windelband, Wilhelm 12, 30, 91, 97–100,
validation 50, 52, 55–9, 67, 70, 81, 86, 88, 141
120–21, 136–7, 139–40 Wolf, Friedrich Augustus 5–6
value 7, 12, 26–8, 30–31, 35, 39–40, Wölfflin, Henrich 15–17, 36
50–53, 58–60, 92, 94–100, 121, 141 work 2, 4, 9–10, 12, 16, 18, 20, 22–4,
vanishing point 125–30 26–31, 34, 36, 40–42, 51, 58–62, 64,
Varro 55 66, 68–73, 76–8, 84–8, 92–5, 97–8,
verum 4, 11, 55, 101, 139 100–102, 104, 109–110, 113, 115,
Vico, Giambattista 4, 9–11, 54–7, 59, 71, 117–18, 119–27, 129–33, 135–41
101, 122, 137, 139 worldview 121, 126
vitalism (Lebensphilosophie) 80–81, 86–7 Wörter und Sachen 19–20, 25
Vöge, Wilhelm 15, 80, 141
Volk 6 Yates, Frances 110
Voßler, Karl 8, 20, 80–81

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Figural Philology

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Thinking in Film, Mieke Bal

Panofsky and the Science of Things

50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway

First published 2016

© Adi Efal, 2016

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining

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1 Philological rationality and the constitution of the history of art 1

2 Archimedean points: Monuments as duration reservoirs 15

3 Forms and figures: Two fundamental modes of pictorial production 33

4 Pictorial validities in art and history 49

5 Sub figuralitate historiæ 63

6 Iconological space: Panofsky with Warburg 75

7 The figural synthesis of historical reality in the iconology table 91

8 Philology’s recollective habitus: Panofsky with Spitzer, Auerbach

9 Figural content and the past as a res extensa 119

Conclusion: Towards a figural philology 135

Figural synthesis 137

This work began in 2007 as a research project at the Rosenzweig-Minerva

Philological rationality and the constitution

‘La philologie est la science exacte des choses de l’esprit.’

a manner as possible what will understood here by a philological framework,

sometimes referred to as the second philological revival, occurred in Italian

In the first half of the eighteenth century, a major contribution to the

In examining the formation stages of the third philological revival, and

later members of this school was Georg Curtius (1820–85; to be distinguished

The second main objective of the neo-philologists was to return, in part, to

humanist tradition, while re-shaping the sense of humanism into something

transmits the canonical material. The latter belongs to a tradition, extending

While a full picture of the place of philology within the nineteenth-century

1. Historicism. Though it played its part in the nineteenth-century

rationality, on the other hand, includes a hermeneutic aspect, in the sense

Archimedean points: Monuments as

as well as other typically Rieglian concepts such as cohesiveness, unity, optic

interpretative method regarding specific artworks. At stake here is the status

Art is not a subjective expression of feeling or the confirmation of the existence

This formulation is an expression of a hylomorphic structure, in which the soul

Philological imperatives in Riegl’s methods

questions of historical linguistics,26 and declared this relation to be the prelim-

The curse and the blessing in the study of artworks

As Frederic Schwartz has noted, Panofsky’s anti-psychologist reading of the

the artwork ‘itself ’, independently of the contexts in which it is embedded, or,

The aesthetic object is effectively, as long as it is an aesthetic object, just as

Der ästhetische Gegenstand ist in der Tat – solange er einen ästhetischen

So, if the ‘aesthetic object’ is in itself indivisible and non-contextualizable,

Art history as Korrektur of monuments

through and sifting layers of mistakes and misunderstandings formed by tradi-

This understanding [Verständnis] can […] be rendered opaque or hindered

In approaching the positive sense of a work, one has to give an account,

Working with documents, applying the methods of correcting and determining

What should be added is that the reconstructive or corrective emendation of

when I attended the classes of French linguistics of my great teacher Meyer-

Kunstwollen and meaning

It now becomes possible to draw a line of continuity between Panofsky’s

oriented towards the maintenance of regularity in the human organism.48 It is

Properly understood, a method of the sort which Riegl introduced does no

In his later essay, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism,53 Panofsky regarded