Panofsky

Erwin Panofsky and the Renascence of the Renaissance
Author(s): Carl Landauer

Source: Renaissance Quarterly , Summer, 1994, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), pp. 255-
281
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of
America
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2862914
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RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY
Edited by
MICHAEL J. B. ALLEN ALBERT RABIL, JR.
Associate Editors
RONA GOFFEN BRIDGET GELLERT LYONS COLIN EISLER GENE A. BRUCKER
Erwin Panofsky and the Ren

of the Renaissance*
by CARL LANDAUER
T HAS LONG BEEN understood that historians,

art historians who write about past cultures u
present purposes, whether by turning Periclean
for present-day America or the fall of the
an ominous signal for modern empires. Ger
sought refuge from Nazi Germany had, how
to use their cultural studies as a strategy of esc
in exile in Istanbul and Ernst Robert Curtius in "inner exile" in
Bonn provided narratives of European literary history that m
mized the contribution of their native culture, and in so reworkin
the narrative of Western literature, they were able to reshape the
own identities. Their reconstructions of past cultures can thus
read as attempts at self-reconstruction. Ultimately, however,
attempt by such scholars to distance themselves from German cul
ture often faltered on the very Germanness of their cultural reco
structions. These constructions meant to symbolize un-Germ
essences--whether Curtius's Latinity or Auerbach's tradition
Western realism-were assembled from rather German elements.
For those German scholars who emigrated to the United State
such as Erwin Panofsky, another paradox emerged: they foun
*For their help on this essay, the author would like to thank R. Howard Bloch, J
Hart, Martin Jay, and Fred H. Matthews.
'I have attempted to provide a model for this self-mythologizing through cultur
construction in the case of Erich Auerbach. See Landauer.
[255]

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256 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY
themselves in an academy that was beginning to revere cu

much the same way as the Germans had traditionally do
mid-century American university witnessed a growing ef
produce an American version of Bildung, and arriving G
scholars were welcomed in some quarters specifically for
man style of their cultivation and erudition. It is in this con
the art historian Erwin Panofsky is particularly interesti
Panofsky playing the part of the model humanist for Ameri
ademic audiences often meant cultivating rather than esca
Germanness. Although his vision of the Renaissance init
volved some of the same cultural distancing from Hitler's Ge
that Curtius's Latin Middle Ages did, that vision played a mo
nificant role within American cultural politics, essentially
ating with the American academia's own efforts at cultur
distancing. Panofsky's American work on the Renaissance
not only an example of self-construction but is also woven in
story of an academic ideology that has been faltering unde
for the last two or three decades. The faltering of that a
ideology, its move from the "hackneyed" to the "irrelevan
present place as an easy object in the canon wars is part
post-history of Panofsky's participation. The fact that the id
to which Panofsky contributed so much has been under s
creasing attack makes Panofsky's role in its creation all t
interesting.
For many American historians of art the name Erwin Panofsky
represents an important phase not so much in the ideological his-
tory of the humanities but in the history of their own discipline.
There have been attempts to modernize Panofsky, to link his name
to contemporary developments in the humanities, such as Christine
Hasenmueller's comparison of Panofsky's iconology to the semi-
otics of the structural anthropologist Edmund Leach2 or Michael
Ann Holly's comparison at the end of her excellent study of Panof-
sky's early theoretical essays of Panofsky's work with that of
Michel Foucault.3 Nevertheless, Panofsky's many iconological
studies are associated with a specific stage in the history of art his-
tory in the United States, and his books have acquired the patina
2Hasenmueller.
3Holly, esp. 185-87.

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THE RENASCENCE OF THE RENAISSANCE 257
of the "classic." They are venerated and often us

art history classes. But they are venerated and
a past master, and Panofsky has come to be used
art historians, a symbol of a past to be left be
Whatever justification for the present imag
should recognize that his writings from his firs
United States were written in a very specific his
with a high degree of self-consciousness about
both for the development of art history in the U
the development of the humanities as a whole. In
writings, especially Studies in Iconology and M
Arts, had the air of the manifesto about them.5
ductory" to Studies in Iconology, with its theoret
layers of meaning in art and consequently in the
that art history should be done with an eye to t
ings" of art.6 The art historian had to go beyond
the identification of the "images, stories and a
of the past, and engage in a hermeneutical ef
"'symbolical' values," essentially the cultur
Studies in Iconology was indeed a manifesto in
to the English-speaking art historical world.
short period Panofsky succeeded in bringing h
ogy to the forefront of art historical research
The very nature of Panofsky's highly interd
ology suggested that he was less concerned wi
logue of his own discipline as with its place in
of the humanities as a whole. The title of the int
Meaning in the Visual Arts, "The History of Art
cipline," was meant to suggest the broader co
4See, for example, Alpers, esp. xxiv.

5Panofsky, 1939 and I955.
6Panofsky, 1939, esp. 14.
7Ibid., I4-I5.
8Although he had a good deal of help in this-whether fr
Edgar Wind, William Heckscher and H. W.Janson, or from ot
kower and E. H. Gombrich-iconology would be associated
rians with the name of Erwin Panofsky. Only recently has A
recognition as the founder oficonology, but often his work is r
with work of Panofsky, so that the understanding of War
Panofsky's. This is ironically also the case in Germany. See

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historians should work.9 And read within the context of the de-
velopment of the humanities in the United States, Panofsky
methodological program was closely tied to a particular ideal o
learning in the humanities. As is evident from the essay's origin
publication in 1940 in a book edited by T. M. Greene, The Meanin
of the Humanities, Panofsky's methodological efforts fed into an on
going discussion of the nature of the humanities in America. T
essay was part of a highly polemical interchange on the importance
of the humanities, the nature of learning, and the function of the
university in the United States. That interchange, fought withi
the context of the great books courses at Columbia and Chicag
various proclamations by cultural Cassandras, and worries abou
the rise of a technological culture, was highly charged. And Panof-
sky's writings evidenced a self-awareness of the author's de
engagement in the political culture of the American educator.
Much of Panofsky's energies were funneled into another debate,
a debate over the meaning of the Renaissance, which in many ways
became a figure for the broader discussion over the meaning of the
humanities. In the United States debate over the nature of the Re-
naissance was mostly a mid-century affair, but it drew from the de-
bate on the Renaissance that had opened in Europe with the pub-
lication in 860 of Jacob Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance.
As chronicled by Wallace Ferguson, the concept of the Renaissance,
popularized at the turn of the century, came under attack by schol-
ars who felt that the Renaissance did not produce all that much that
was novel. 10 A number of historians tried to give priority to the
several medieval Renaissances, which they claimed did much of
the work of the Italian Renaissance. C. H. Haskins, for example,
almost single-handedly introduced the "twelfth-century Renais-
sance" with The Twelfth-Century Renaissance in 1927, while other
scholars brought attention to the Carolingian and Ottonian Renais-
sances.II Concurrently, neo-Thomists, led by Etienne Gilson, in-
sisted that the century of their patron saint represented the height
of Western culture, a height from which the rest of Western history
meant only decline, and consequently, the dawn of the Renaissanc
was not a dawn at all.
9"The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline" was originally published i

Greene, 89-118.
'°See the chapter on the "Revolt of the Medievalists" in Ferguson.
IHaskins.

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The struggle over the meaning of the Rena

scholars over a number of decades, but one can
larly self-conscious attempt by American scholar
sues in the I940s and 950os. Whole issues of a
were given over to the debate, such as the "symp
naissance published in The Journal of the History
other cultural institutions, such as the Metrop
Art, sponsored similar symposia or provided a fo
Although some of the American debate focused
contribution to the development of the natur
questions about the new spirit ushered in by t
tained a great deal of interest. And for American
naissance, as for participants in the fin-de-siecle
sance, the Italian Quattrocento assumed the as
society. Although for some there were politi
from the Italian city-states, for others the R
symbolic meaning in the discourse on learnin
Renaissance, revered as a model, reflected their ideals.
It was largely within the context of this American reformulation
of the debate on the Renaissance that Panofsky published his
famous Kenyon Review essay of I944, "Renaissance and Rena-
scences,"l3 originally intended as a contribution to the Renaissance
symposium in the Journal of the History of Ideas. 4 Against this back-
ground Panofsky's Kenyon Review essay offered an idealized
Renaissance which could stand for certain cultural ideas.
It is important to recognize the close affinity of Panofsky's meth
odological polemics and his apology for the Renaissance, for ult
mately the art historical methodology of the iconologist and th
cultural ideals represented by the Renaissance were closely con
nected in his mind. It was no accident that in the introduction to
I2Baron. This symposium began by reprinting a paper by Durand, "Tradition an

Innovation in Fifteenth-Century Italy: 'II Primato dell'Italia' in the Field of Science
and a retort by Hans Baron at the 194I meeting of the American Historical Association
The editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas, John Hermann Randall, then asked
several other scholars-including Paul Oskar Kristeller, Lynn Thorndike, and Erns
Cassirer-to discuss the interchange between Durand and Baron. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art held a symposium on the Renaissance during I951-52 academic yea
in which papers were delivered by Wallace Ferguson, Robert Lopez, George Sarton
Roland Bainton, Leicester Bradner, and Erwin Panofsky. The talks have subsequentl
been published as The Renaissance: A Symposium.
I3Panofsky, I944, 201-36.
I4See "Author's note" in ibid., 235.

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Studies in Iconology Panofsky placed his methodological di

and his interpretation of the Renaissance in close success
first part of the introduction is devoted to methodology
the second represents an early version of "Renaissance and
scences." More explicitly, however, Panofsky began hi
"The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline" with a dis
of the concept of humanitas, with Ficino, and with Pico. T
plication of that opening was not only that Panofsky's cu
ideals but also his art historical enterprise had its genesis
Renaissance.
Before delving deeper into Panofsky's bolstering of a growin
Italian Renaissance ideology in the United States, it is important
remember his other attachments to the art of the North and the
High Gothic. Significantly, he wrote much more on Albrecht Di
rer than on any other artist, and his largest book remains the mas-
sive study of Netherlandish art with its full second volume devoted
to plates.'5 If his study of the art of the north was at times oriente
toward the south, discussing its interaction with Italian art, Panof-
sky retained a special interest in the art of the north, an important
alliance within the highly charged German polarities of north an
south. 6 Possibly, the northern culture Panofsky most admired was
seventeenth-century Holland with its unusual tolerance. 7 And ar
guably, his admiration for Dutch culture fueled his work on Neth
erlandish art, allowing him to idealize a northern culture withou
explicitly idealizing the culture from which he was exiled. But
Panofsky, unlike many German emigre scholars, did not turn away
from German culture as a subject of his study. In his war-time book
on Durer, The Life and Art ofAlbrecht Diirer, published a year before
the Kenyon Review essay, Panofsky attempted quite explicitly t
locate the missing German "voice" in the "fugue" of Western ar
The German contribution to the evolution of art, he felt, was to be
found not in a fully developed style, such as the Gothic or the
I Panofsky, I953.
'6Svetlana Alpers argues that Panofsky "ranked the southern aspirations of Durer
over his northern heritage: in Panofsky's account the Direr who depicted the nude an
was intrigued with perspective is favored over the descriptive artist of the Great Piec
of Turf." Alpers, xxiii-xxiv.
'7In a letter to Booth Tarkington on I I November 1944, Panofsky expressed his
"sympathy" with seventeenth-century Holland. Panofsky and Tarkington, 57.

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THE RENASCENCE OF THE RENAISSANCE 26I
baroque, but in the "personal 'inventions' " of

And Dtirer's achievement was to be understoo
tribution from the genius of a German artist.
find Panofsky, an exile from the Third Reich, ex
to locate the German contribution to Western
should be read as one of those attempts, comm
refugees, to resurrect "the other Germany"-
many with which the exile could still identify. I
counterpoint to Panofsky's Italian Renaissanc
personally redemptive effort.
During the very period when he wrote the
which most identify him with the Italian Ren
first two decades in America, Panofsky also d
and his emotions to medieval art. In Hamburg
taught often on medieval art, perhaps following
teacher Adolph Goldschmidt. But if his work o
Plastik des elften bis dreizehntenJahrhunderts, re
influence, Panofsky's writings of the I940s
Gothic art show an entirely different spirit. 9
Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis a
for example, depicts a man with whom Panof
great deal of sympathy.20 Panofsky may have
despite his strength as an individual, should n
a proto-Renaissance figure. But the distinction P
tablish was perhaps too subtle: "The great man
asserted his personality centripetally, so to spe
the world that surrounded him until his whole environment had
been absorbed by his own self. Suger asserted his personality cen-
trifugally: he projected his ego into the world that surrounded him
until his whole self had been absorbed by his environment."21
Panofsky's clever schema here, intended to differentiate the medi-
eval Suger from the great personalities of the Italian Renaissance,
suggests all the more Suger's proximity to the figures of the Italian
Renaissance.
I8Panofsky, 1971, 3.
I9Panofsky, 1924.
2OPanofsky, 1946.
2IPanofsky, 1955, I37.

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But if Panofsky's Abbot Suger is arguably too close to

sance ideals to be truly emblematic of the Gothic, Gothic Arch
and Scholasticism remains an unambiguous celebration of a
Indeed, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism reads as if it wer
ten by a convinced neo-Thomist, and some of Panofsky's
ments seem to have come directly from the Etienne Gilson's R
and Revelation in the Middle Ages,23 such as Panofsky's descr
of the century of Thomas as a cultural climax from which on
trace a decline into subjectivism. In a sentence that could easil
been written by Gilson, Panofsky wrote: "Both mysticis
nominalism cut the tie between reason and faith."24 In his narr
of the Renaissance, however, Panofsky discerned a cultural
between the period of High Gothic and the beginning of t
naissance, a concept which ultimately allowed him to pra
High Gothic for its structured thought while idealizing th
Renaissance in the pages of the Kenyon Review. Consequen
Renaissance studies could characterize the fourteenth century
the way Etienne Gilson or David Knowles did in their celeb
of high Scholasticism without having to abandon his devo
the Italian Quattrocento. And there is an intellectual quality h
cerned in the high Gothic that might only complement the c
values he found in the Renaissance.
Despite Panofsky's praise of high Gothic art, the burden of hi
Kenyon Review essay of 1944 was to establish a clear break between
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Essentially, his strategy w
to delegitimize the claims for the earlier Renaissances, primarily th
Carolingian and the twelfth-century Renaissances, to have antic
pated the Italian Renaissance. For Panofsky the earlier "ren
scences" differed from the Italian Renaissance not in quantity b
in quality. His argument centered on the difference between th
earlier revivals of antiquity and that produced by the quattrocento.
Panofsky was willing to grant that Carolingian artists and scrib
had brought classical materials into their own cultural work and th
twelfth-century renaissance had also been responsible for reintr
ducing classical materials into European culture. He felt, neverth
less, that the medieval renascences were marked by a disjunctur
22Panofsky, 1976.
23Gilson.
24Panofsky, 1976, 14.

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of classical content and classical form. "W

wrote, "a sculptor or painter borrows a figur
classical work of art he almost invariably in
classical, viz., Christian, meaning; conversely
rows a theme from classical poetry, mytholo
most invariably presents it in a non-classical,
form."25 This, Panofsky maintained, was the m
revival of classical material. But the Italian Rena
an entirely different approach to the classical
Italian Renaissance to reintegrate classical for
tent, and it was by this reintegration that the c
salvaged, then split asunder and finally reco
'reborn'. "26 The Italian Renaissance was able to recombine classical
form and classical content because for the first time Europeans were
able to look upon the classical past "from a fixed, unalterable dis
tance, quite comparable to the distance between the eye and the ob-
ject in that most characteristic invention of the same Renaissance
focused perspective."27 For Panofsky the Italian Renaissance
"looked upon classical Antiquity from a historical distance; there
fore, for the first time, as upon a totality removed from the present;
and therefore, for the first time, as upon an ideal to be longed for
instead of a reality to be both utilized and feared. "28 The Italian Re-
naissance thus represented the true "rinascimento dell' antichita.
This argument, focusing mainly on the visual arts with a few ges-
tures toward developments in literature, is the basic argument o
"Renaissance and Renascences." Panofsky would use a heavily
footnoted and more nuanced version of the article for the title essay
of Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art in I960.29 And the
Kenyon Review essay followed upon several other publications in
which Panofsky had made essentially the same argument, including
the introduction to Studies in Iconology in 1939 and "Classical My
thology in Medieval Art," an essay he wrote jointly with Fritz Saxl
for the Metropolitan Museum Studies in I933.30
25Panofsky, 1944, 220.

26Ibid., 222.
27Ibid., 225.
28Ibid., 228.
29Panofsky, 1972.
30°Panofsky and Saxl.

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The essay Panofsky wrote with Saxl is a particularly inte

variation of what would become a familiar theme, since that e
largely because of Saxl's closer involvement with Aby Wa
represents an attempt to blend Warburg's discussion of the
of classical figures in the Schifanoia frescoes with an early
of Panofsky's argument about the reintegration of classic
and classical content in the Renaissance. Part of the interest derives
from the fact that the article in the Metropolitan Museum Studies sug-
gests Panofsky's debt to Warburg's famous lecture of 1912 on the
Schifanoia palace in Ferrara.31 In his lecture Warburg identified the
figures in the top panels of the Schifanoia frescoes as the classical
gods presiding over the twelve months of the year who had not
quite regained their full classical form but had progressed part of
the way to that form. For him the frescoes represented a stage in
the revival of their original Olympian grandeur. According to War-
burg the Greek gods had disguised themselves during the Middle
Ages as eastern astrological figures only to return to their full clas-
sical presence in the Italian Renaissance.
In Warburg's lecture we can locate much of the argument of
Panofsky's "Renaissance and Renascences" in a nascent form. Al-
ready in Warburg's discussion of the Schifanoia frescoes one finds
the notion that classical figures were retained in medieval culture
in non-classical guises and their return was marked by the resump-
tion of classical form. If Warburg's narrative represented only half
of Panofsky's narrative of the medieval separation of classical form
and content, the notion that the reintegration of form and content
represented the rebirth of the classical past was clearly pronounced.
Warburg's lecture on the Schifanoia frescoes was an important
part of the prehistory of Panofsky's "Renaissance and Rena-
scences," but Warburg had not ascribed to the Italian Renaissance
the "historical perspective" on the classical past so important to
Panofsky.32 For Warburg the classical figures on the walls of the
Schifanoia palace had begun to re-emerge in their classical form due
3IWarburg. Warburg's lecture was originally given at the International Art Histori-
cal Society in Rome in I912 and published in 1922.
32Warburg in his lectures had also spoken often, as Panofsky did in "Renaissance
and Renascences," of the medieval moralization of classical mythological figures. The
key example for Warburg-and Panofsky learned this from Warburg-was the so-
called Ovide moralise. And Panofsky also took his discussion of the move from the style
allafrancese to the style all' antica from Warburg.

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to their own dynamism. In their reassumed cla

rienced an "afterlife" rather than being the objec
tance. Although Warburg spoke often of objectiv
the upper panels of the Schifanoia frescoes seeme
their own return.
Despite his heavy debt to Warburg, Panofsky was rather un-
Warburgian in his attempt to set the Renaissance off so dramatically
from the medieval world. The Warburgian effort to trace the
"Nachleben der Antike" signified a close following of elements
from the antique world as they made their way through the cen-
turies in reworked forms. Warburg's own notes, now in the ar-
chives of the Warburg Institute in London, are filled with charts fol-
lowing bits and pieces of the culture of antiquity through medieval
Europe.33 And the labyrinthine structure of Warburg's famous li-
brary in Hamburg proclaimed the organic nature of human culture
and the continuity of cultural history. Thus, although Panofsky be-
came a master of Warburg's method, he was not as convinced of
the organic development of culture. Even in Germany, in what
might be considered the best example of the Warburgian historical
tracing of cultural types, Hercules am Scheidewege, Panofsky already
tried to establish a more dramatic divide between the Renaissance
and the medieval worlds than one could find in Warburg's work. 34
Warburg had idealized the Renaissance and praised it as a liberating
moment in the history of the West, but his work was marked by
the careful tracing of the inroads of antiquity into the modern
world.
I have argued that by focusing on the relation of the Renaissance
to the classical past, Panofsky borrowed heavily from Warburg.
However, Panofsky also defined the Renaissance by its own inno-
vation, the development of visual perspective in the arts. That this
development was decisive for Panofsky's understanding of the Re-
naissance is barely mentioned in "Renaissance and Renascences,"
but it consumes a large portion of the later Renaissance and Rena-
scences in Western Art; and he had established his interest in Renais-
sance perspective in his well-known essay of 1927, "Die Perspek-
tive als 'symbolische Form'."35 But despite the quick analogy he
33The papers of Aby M. Warburg, Archive of the Warburg Institute (London).

34Panofsky, 1930.
35Panofsky, 1927.

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offers in the Kenyon Review essay between Renaissance's visu

spective and the historical perspective on the classical past,
sky does not really integrate his discussion of perspective wit
analysis of classical form and content. That is most clear in R
sance and Renascences in Western Art, where a long discussion
naissance perspective follows in close succession a version
Kenyon Review essay. The development of Renaissance visu
spective simply cannot emerge from the reintegration of
form and content. If Panofsky tried at times to depict Renais
historical perspective itself as a subset of a more general i
in perspective, it was not perspective but the "rinascimen
antichita" that defined the Renaissance for him.
Panofsky's writing was, of course, framed by the American dis-
course on the importance of the classical heritage. His discussion
of Renaissance perspective was useful when he entered the debate
about the significance of the Renaissance for the development of the
natural sciences. In a talk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Art-
ist, Scientist, Genius: Notes on the 'Renaissance-Dammerung'," he
cleverly focused on the importance of Renaissance art to the evo
lution of the sciences: Leonardo had established the fact that a
good anatomist must have a command of draftsmanship and-of
course - perspective. 36 Although Panofsky was able to use his work
on Renaissance perspective so profitably in the debate on the Re
naissance contribution to science, the questions that were more
pressing revolved around the nature of the humanities and the place
of the classical past.
There were, of course, a range of "classical pasts" to invoke.
Warburgians from Aby Warburg and Fritz Saxl to Frances Yate
and D. P. Walker have been known for their preoccupation with
magic and the occult: astrology, Arab magic, and divination wer
constants in the publications of the Warburg Institute. Panofsky
participated in this interest in the occult, if perhaps his most im
portant engagement was in a book jointly written with Saxl on
Direr's Melencolia I. As with so many of the Warburgians, the oc
cult was certainly part of the attraction that Panofsky found in neo
Platonism. Still, the classical past in Panofsky's American writing
seemed rather tame by comparison to Warburg and Saxl's antiq
uity. He was, in fact, more often bound up with what other Amer-
ican scholars meant by the "classical." His American writings thu
36Panofsky, 1962.

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fed directly into the discourse on the Western t

in the Greek and Roman past. It is, in fact, po
sky's Studies in Iconology alongside Gilbert Hi
Tradition with a sense that these two rather differ
engaged in a similar project.
Panofsky's American writings, I would argue
American discourse on the Renaissance, a disco
the Renaissance for its classical erudition and its celebration of the
human. For many American scholars, the two were closely con-
nected, for the classical past-as opposed to medieval Chris-
tianity-itself symbolized confidence in human capability. At the
same time, the Renaissance was heralded as the fount of the liberal
arts. All of these aspects of an idealized Renaissance fit together into
a constellation of ideas that were of immense importance to Amer-
ican intellectual life in the 1930s, 1940s, and 195os. If the spectrum
from the pedestrian commencement address in praise of the liberal
arts to one of Panofsky's virtuoso performances in Renaissance er-
udition seems wide, both participated in a rising cultural ideology
that linked the humanities and the classical tradition to a definition
of humanity.
When Panofsky began his essay on art history as a humanistic
discipline by invoking the Renaissance notion of humanitas, and
when he opened the iconological exercises of Studies in Iconology by
reidentifying two paintings of Piero di Cosimo's as sequences in a
narration of the story of Vulcan-the bringer of fire and technology
to humanity-he contributed to the "man-the-measure" vision of
the Renaissance, the same vision which made so much of Pico della
Mirandola's "Oration on the Dignity of Man. " It was, I would ar-
gue, no accident that Panofsky's colleague from Hamburg, the phi-
losopher Ernst Cassirer, whose philosophy had always been writ-
ten in praise of human capability and human creativity, produced
a two-part article on Pico for the Journal of the History of Ideas in
I942.37 And there may be no better example of this agenda than the
set of readings edited by Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and
John Hermann Randall under the title The Renaissance Philosophy
of Man.38
37Cassirer, 1942.
38The book included texts from Petrarch, Valla, Ficino, and of course, Pico's "Ora-
tion on the Dignity of Man."

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In part, there was a political message in this apotheosis of t

ative individual envisioned by the American scholars of th
Renaissance, for faith in the capability of the individual was
nerstone of liberalism. The Renaissance individual could be mus-
tered in defense of a liberalism threatened by Hitler, Stalin, and t
regimentation of the war. But there was, I would argue, a good dea
more involved in the idealization of the Renaissance in mid-centur
America than this simple political message, for finally the Rena
sance was appropriated for cultural-political rather than for strict
ly political purposes. Ultimately, the apotheosis of Renaissance c
ture should be understood as part of an effort to apotheosize cultu
itself.
It was, in an important sense, appropriate that Panofsky's "Re-
naissance and Renascences" was published in the Kenyon Review,
the organ of the New Criticism edited by the dean of the New Crit-
ics, John Crowe Ransom. New Criticism, with its textual empha-
sis, programmatically avoided the influence of society and politics
on the creation of the great monuments of Western literature.39
Certainly, the isolation of literary works was distant from the cul-
tural embedding involved in Panofsky's iconology; in its formal-
ism, the New Criticism had more in common with more formalist
art historical methodologies. And yet, one of the central implica-
tions of the New Criticism was the emphasis on the cultural arti-
fact. One should see the New Critics not merely as a response to
other sorts of readings in literary criticism but as part of a devel-
opment in American culture to isolate and praise culture itself. 40 In
an important sense, the New Critics were heir to the American neo-
Humanists of the 1920s.41 My purpose here, however, is not to link
Panofsky's name with that ofJohn Crowe Ransom or Allen Tate,
39Although Wellek in his sixth volume of A History of Modern Criticism rejected the
characterizations - accusations he felt-that the New Criticism was formalist and ahis-
torical, it is difficult not to see the New Critical methodology as essentially formalist
and ahistorical. Wellek, 144 ff.
4°One of the best expressions of this New Critical commitment can be found in
Tate's Hudson Review essay of I95I, "The Man of Letters in the Modern World," in
which he articulated the centrality of high culture: "By these arts, one means the arts
without which men can live, but without which they cannot live well, or live as men."
Tate, I.
4'The New Humanists, like Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, were antagoni
to any purely aestheticizing criticism, whether it be that of Walter Pater or that la
developed by the New Critics. Despite this, the New Humanists and the New Cr
had much in common. For a comparison of the New Critics, see Hoeveler.

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or to compare their fascination with the sevente

physical poets with the subjects of his art hist
like to link Panofsky's name to a broader phenom
culture of which the New Criticism formed a
At a time when American scholars were bei
portance of culture by Franz Boas's studen
anthropologists like Ruth Benedict, Alfred Kr
Mead-culture itself assumed a special value. An
lumbia anthropologists tended to teach a form
ism, the curriculum began to focus more self
texts of Western culture.43 Not all of the propon
cus on Western culture found in the Renaissan
own aspirations. Robert Maynard Hutchins an
who developed the Great Books course at the
cago, had Thomistic inclinations. And there w
influenced by the medievalism ofT. S. Eliot's c
Still, many American scholars found in the It
important symbol not only for the role that the
in the developing ideal of individual creativity b
development of the humanities. The promotion
was ultimately a self-legitimizing act for hum
ingly technological land, for they could remai
a realm set aside for culture.45
In this context, the interest in Ernst Cassirer's An Essay on Man:
An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture, which appeared in
42Although Graff places the New Criticism in the context of the struggle between
critics and scholars, and between criticism and history, which might seem to set New
Criticism at odds with the sort of close historical work represented by Panofsky's War-
burgian scholarship, it is New Criticism's extreme reverence for cultural forms, with
poetry as the archetype, that is important in our context. But more than that, Graff
points out that R. P. Blackmur, with his sponsorship of the Gauss Lectures at Prince-
ton, was deeply convinced of the special place of the humanities.
43On the general education movement in the American university, see Graff,
I62-79.
44T. S. Eliot's other side-his modernism-was championed by still others. Thus,
for example, Greenberg's famous essay of I939, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," was one
expression of a celebration of modernism as high culture.
4sIn this context, Panofsky's talk, "Artist, Scientist, Genius: Notes on the
'Renaissance-Dammerung'," can be read as an argument for the importance of the arts
for scientific advancement, feeling no threat from the scientific. For others, the tech-
nological dovetailed with the threat of mass culture, so that Tate wrote about the chal-
lenge to the man of letters "at our own critical moment, when all languages are being
debased by the techniques of mass-control." Tate, I I.

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1944, is quite suggestive.46 Cassirer's book was an economic

mation of his philosophical project in praise of human creativ
its symbol-making capacity. Creativity for Cassirer entered in
human activity, even the exercise of human memory: "S
memory is the process by which man not only repeats his
perience but also reconstructs this experience. Imaginatio
comes a necessary element of true recollection. "47 Since the h
ities can be identified as the study and interpretation of
symbols, Cassirer's essay on humans as symbol producers c
read by humanists as a case for the humanities. Even his di
of myth and religion prefacing his discussion of subjects like
history had an appeal, for within an increasingly anthropolog
oriented academy the anthropological study of culture was
legitimize the creations of higher culture. But finally, the cr
of culture were self-legitimizing even for Cassirer, despite hi
on myth. There was in An Essay on Man-and in Cassirer'
as a whole-a profound reverence for high culture, the tra
preserve of the humanist.
I have mentioned Cassirer's book in part because it beca
important, but also because Cassirer, like his former colle
Hamburg, Erwin Panofsky, was among the German schola
seemed almost upon their arrival in America to embody th
ing of the humanities and the cultural tradition of the West.
pact of refugee scholars such as Erich Auerbach and Leo S
Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt, Leo Olschki and Walter Fr
laender, Werner Jaeger and Ernst Kantorowicz, Edgar W
RudolfWittkower was so immense that ajustifiable mythol
emerged about the German emigres who so often became the
of their disciplines.48 That German scholars made such an
was in part due to the advanced development of disciplines
history, sociology, and art history in Germany. But it was als
nificant that these immensely erudite scholars arrived on the
46Cassirer, I944.
47Ibid., 52.
480ne of the greatest tributes to the impact of the refugee scholars in Am
the Fleming and Bailyn volume. Especially important in the context of Pa
Colin Eisler's contribution to "Kunstgeschichte American Style: A Study in Mi
Eisler's essay provides a rich and colorful analysis of the impact that the ref
historians-like Erwin Panofsky, Richard Krautheimer, H. W. Janson an
Friedlaender-had on the American discipline of art history.

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just as the veneration of culture was occurring i

versity. Scholars like Auerbach, Panofsky, Ca
who seemed to command the entire of Western culture and could
write on almost any corner of it, not only awed their American stu
dents, but they also provided models of culture-bearers in an intel-
lectual environment in which the humanist-as-culture-bearer was
becoming increasingly important. The notion of the scholar as
culture-bearer was, of course, no novelty to these German academ-
ics, for they had learned their trade in the Mandarin culture of the
German university, in which culture had its special realm protected
from the forces of politics.49 In essence, the German refugee schol-
ars offered Mandarinism for export. And their Mandarinism
seemed to fit well into the new "ivory tower" of the American uni-
versity. It was fitting, therefore, that Erwin Panofsky soon found
himself delivering a commencement address "In Defense of the
Ivory Tower," which despite its anti-McCarthy warnings di
justice to its title.s5
Panofsky adapted very well to the United States. He took so well
to his new American surroundings that elements of American pop-
ular culture soon became part of his imaginative vocabulary. In
"Renaissance and Renascences" he used a 1928 Lincoln for an anal
ogy, although the same car lost its specificity in Renaissance and Re
nascences in Western Art. 5 The man of such obvious high cultur
peppered his writing on esoteric subjects with witty allusions to
popular culture, demonstrating simultaneously his playfulness, h
love for the artifacts of popular culture, and his comfort in America,
much the way the literary critic Leo Spitzer did when he wrote on
an advertisement for Sunkist oranges. And Panofsky also learne
quickly to write elegantly in English. He was one of those Euro
pean scholars whose prose style improved when he made the tran
sition from German to English. Panofsky remarked that being
forced to write in English made European scholars write more
clearly. In mild self-mockery he wrote that "the German languag
unfortunately permits a fairly trivial thought to declaim from be-
hind a woolen curtain of apparent profundity and, conversely, a
49See Ringer.
soPanofsky, I957.
SIPanofsky, 1944, 225.

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multitude of meanings to lurk behind one term."s2 In En

"even an art historian must more or less know what he means and
mean what he says, and this compulsion was exceedingly whole-
some for all of us."53 These lines come from Panofsky's essay
"Three Decades of Art History in the United States: Impressions
of a Transplanted European. "54 Faithful to the essay's title, Panof-
sky's assumed persona was very much that of the "transplanted"
German scholar. The purpose of "Three Decades" was to suggest
what American education might learn from the German university.
The American university, Panofsky felt, was too much concerned
with examinations and "teaching loads" -"a disgusting expression
which in itself is a telling symptom of the malady I am trying to
describe."55 For Panofsky the American method of producing
scholars was ill-suited to create true humanists: "Humanists cannot
be 'trained'; they must be allowed to mature or, if I may use so
homely a simile, to marinate."56 The implication, of course, was
that he and other German scholars had been allowed to "marinate"
in the humanities. They had essentially cultivated themselves,
which was to suggest that what the American system needed mos
was a bit of the German tradition of Bildung. In "Three Decades
of Art History in the United States" Panofsky, the "transplanted
European," offered the youthful American academy the accrued
wisdom of the German university. There was a ready market for
just such advice. As one can see from the essay, Panofsky felt little
need to lose his identity as a German scholar. Ultimately, even hi
playfulness with American popular culture only highlighted his
Germanness, coming as it did in the context of exercises in German
erudition.
Panofsky's own displays of erudition could only have been daz-
zling to American audiences. In Studies in Iconology he devoted
chapters to some of the most mundane cultural items, such as "fa-
ther time" and "blind cupid," and even these everyday figures of
our calendars and advertisements could be traced back through a
s2panofsky, 1955, 329.

s3Ibid., 330.
s4The epilogue was originally published as an entry in Crawford under the title,
"The History of Art."
SSPanofsky, 1955, 34I.
s6Ibid.

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labyrinth of classical texts and medieval de

would deftly reidentify Renaissance paintings
would seem minor attributes of classical figur
sentational tradition in art and literature. To establish that a vine-
enveloped tree trunk might accompany a representation of Bac-
chus, Panofsky turned to an early seventeenth-century emblem
book for its reference to Catallus's Carmina.57 And Panofsky would
quote Mario Equicola's Di natura d'Amore to establish that the six-
teenth century cited Greek and Roman sources to the effect that an-
tiquity "knew nothing of Cupid's blindness."58 Panofsky's War-
burgian preoccupation with detail and intermingling of literary and
artistic materials made his work particularly erudite. Perhaps it was
another Warburgian predilection, the fascination with the hermetic
tradition and the occult, which intensified Panofsky's image as a
master of the obscure. If, as I have mentioned, his involvement
with hermetic materials, especially during his American years, was
less than that of many other Warburgians, there were enough as-
trological and magical references to add an esoteric side to Panof-
sky's magisterial prose.
With his Warburgian virtuoso performances and his witty ur-
banity, Panofsky was particularly well suited to assume the role o
the model humanist. If he traced his humanism to the Renaissance
itself, his work implied more than the conventional grounding of
the liberal arts in Renaissance Italy. Ultimately, Panofsky's defini-
tion of the Renaissance--that it was able to view classical antiquity
with historical distance-meant that the very essence of the Renais-
sance he described in "Renaissance and Renascences" was its own
historicism. If the growing mythologizing of the Renaissance in th
American academy identified the Renaissance with culture and
liberal arts, Panofsky took that mythology one step further by id
tifying historical vision as the fundamental aspect of Renaissa
culture. Panofsky's definition of the Renaissance implied that a
one who was working in the historical fields -which in Panofsk
own neo-Kantian definition meant anyone working in the hum
ities in general -was not only indebted to the Renaissance but w
carrying out the central work of the Renaissance.
S7Panofsky, 1939, 60.

ssIbid., 125.

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Panofsky made the Renaissance historical, but in an imp

sense he was not fully historical about the Renaissance. In
entiating the Italian Renaissance from the Carolingian an
twelfth-century renascences, Panofsky argued that "the two
aeval renascences were limited and transitory, the Italian '
mento del 'antichita' was total and permanent. "59 In a part
lively passage Panofsky asserted that due to the work of th
trocento, antiquity was recovered for good: "From the Ren
classical Antiquity is constantly with us, whether we like it o
It lives in our mathematics and natural sciences. It has built ou
atres and movie houses as opposed to the mediaeval myster
It haunts the speech of our cab driver as opposed to that of t
diaeval peasant; and it is firmly entrenched behind the thin b
far unbroken glass walls of history, philology and archaeo
From these sentences and others it is clear that we are still li
the Renaissance. In part, Panofsky is taking the old tripartite
sion of history into antique, medieval, and modern epochs qui
riously, implying that the Renaissance and the present a
parts of what the Germans called "die Neuzeit." Panofsky
cuts the basic argument of "Renaissance and Renascences"
gesting that antiquity, which was viewed with historical p
tive in the Renaissance, was somehow still alive in the present
almost unconscious way-in the "speech of our cab driver
this makes us ask whether Panofsky's cab driver looked u
classical past "from a fixed, unalterable distance"? Much m
portant than this lapse in Panofsky's argument is the chal
creates: if the Renaissance is part of the present, then the hi
of the Renaissance would be in no position to have histori
spective on it. Taken to its logical conclusion, this sug
would make Panofsky, as magnificent a historian of Ren
culture as he was, unable to perform his duties as histor
Kenyon Review essay, which is largely impelled toward a le
tion of the historical disciplines, seems here to undermine th
cation with regard to the Renaissance.
It is, of course, unlikely that Panofsky meant to underm
own calling. We are, I think, compelled to interpret this ch
to Panofsky's overriding historicism in another fashion: th
59Panofsky, I944, 223; the same argument appears in Panofsky, 1972, io

6°Panofsky, 1944, 225.

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in Panofsky's own historical perspective was

minish the powers of the historian but rath
present. Essentially, Panofsky identified his
not so much as a world he would like to occu
world he does occupy. With a permanent Ren
sume the identity of a Renaissance humanist, th
or Ficino, whether or not 1928 Lincolns were pa
niture. To appropriate a phrase analyzed by P
in the Visual Arts, "Et in Arcadia Ego." It is clea
"I too am in Arcady."
In Panofsky's modernity the age of his belo
still breathing life. And yet, it was also the ag
ism. Panofsky, who had been denied his chair
spring of 1933 in accordance with the civil serv
Reich, did more than paint an idealized worl
assume the role of insider; at the height of the
the world he idealized was part of the prese
ironic that Panofsky expressed a distance with r
sance only in his post-war version of the Ken
Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art he
good case might be made for restricting the ter
'fourth period of history,' essentially disting
naissance, which began about 600o and seems
close right now."61 That line, delivered in a
suggested a heightened realism about the Ren
say of 1944 would rather that the past, with
intellectual brilliance, be present.
In a paper delivered in 1985 Renaissance hist
ver spoke about the theme of historical distance
naissance and Renascences."62 She focused on the sense of loss
which Panofsky located in the historical perspective of the R
sance, the disjuncture between the Renaissance and the anti
world. Whether or not Panofsky, as Struever suggested, prefigu
the post-structuralist preoccupation with disjuncture, at the
least he made absence a category. But Panofsky's work, I w
argue, not only identified the historical absence of the past for
Renaissance; it also located the historical past as a presence in
6'Panofsky, 1972, 35.

62Struever.

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twentieth century. In part, the paradox of Panofsky's

symbolized by his insistence that the very age which
historical perspective on the past represented a true "r
dell' antichita."
Ultimately, with Panofsky's permanent Renaissance not only is
the Renaissance still present, but the recovered antiquity is also
living part of our culture. At the very least, it is a vital part of Panof-
sky's own world. It is in part this aspect of Panofsky, the inveterate
historian, that fed into the ahistoricism that marked the growing
humanistic mythology of the American university, the ahistori-
cism best symbolized in the great books courses and New Critical
methodology.
I have suggested that the disjuncture between the historian and
the past in Panofsky's work is not as complete as his definition o
the historical perspective would suggest. But certainly the histori
cal imagination, which Panofsky credited the Renaissance, refused
to find disjuncture within past cultures. In their reintegration o
classical form and content, Renaissance humanists viewed the clas-
sical past as forming a cohesive whole. That holistic view of par-
ticular cultures--if not cultural development--was not merely an
aspect of Renaissance historicism. It was, for Panofsky, central to
the philosophy of Renaissance. In Panofsky's mind, Vasari's pro-
vision of his own Gothic frame for a sketch attributed to Cimabue
in his Libro was a perfect illustration of Renaissance historicism, for
despite his contempt for the Gothic, Vasari felt that the drawing
should be given a frame appropriate to its style.63 The Renaissance
did not merely acknowledge the organic cohesion of past cultures;
the culture of the Renaissance was itself deliberately organic. By lo-
cating the Renaissance artist's contribution to the history of science,
Panofsky's "Artist, Scientist, Genius: Notes on the 'Renaissance-
Dammerung' " was more than a shrewd response by an art histo-
rian to historians of science skeptical of the significance of the
Renaissance. It was also a response to the "two cultures" problem
that C. P. Snow described in his famous post-war essay. Panofsky's
lecture to the Metropolitan Museum glorified the interaction of arts
63"Das erste Blatt aus dem 'Libro' Giorgio Vasaris; eine Studie fiber der Beurteilung
der Gotik in der italienischen Renaissance mit einem Exkurs Ober zwei Fasadenprojekte
Domenico Beccafumis," Stddel-Jahrbuch 6 (1930): 25-72; reprinted as "The First Page
of Giorgio Vasari's 'Libro': A Study on the Gothic Style in the Judgment of the Italian
Renaissance" in Panofsky, 1955, I69-235.

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and sciences in the Renaissance. In his mind th

resented cultural unity, a point made explicitly
talk: "Yet the fact remains that what had been
naissance is now, again, a complex diversity;
who were not, are not, and will never be satis
of affairs. There is a type of mind, and not neces
order, which finds it impossible to accept the
a substitute for the whole. "64 The organic ties b
science with other aspects of Renaissance cultu
cant implications about the present: "The mo
of course, not think of reverting to Kepler;
sensitive to the loss entailed by what may
compartmentalization' of the seventeenth cent
the term "re-compartmentalization," Panof
modern culture was reverting to its medieval
twentieth-century isolation of science was ana
eval disassociation of classical form and classical content.
That Panofsky turned toJohannes Kepler to provide a model for
the cultural unity of the Renaissance is quite significant, for Kepler
represented not a fusion of art and science but an intermingling of
the scientific and the pre-scientific. Panofsky states that Kepler "re-
jected a perfectly plausible astronomical hypothesis because it was
inaccurate by eight minutes; but he refused to abandon astrology.
He found the three planetary laws which in sheer beauty are rivalled
only by Newton's Law of Gravity, but he would have been un-
happy had he not found a consonance between the structure of the
physical world and the Trinity. "66 It was just that blend of the sci-
entific and the magical which made Kepler an attractive figure for
Panofsky, as it did for Aby Warburg who modelled his library's
main reading room after Kepler's ellipse. Kepler served as a repre-
sentative of that special conjunction of science and the occult that
was a conscious specialty of the Bibliothek Warburg. And that con-
junction of science and the occult dovetailed for the Warburgians
with the intricate history ofneo-Platonism, a history painstakingly
followed by Warburgian scholars-including Erwin Panofsky.
64Panofsky, 1962, i82.

6sIbid.
66Ibid., 18I.

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For Panofsky neo-Platonism represented the best of Rena

thought. In a culture that emphasized harmony and the wh
culture that stood for "decompartmentalization," neo-Plat
offered a philosophy of harmony and a brief for decompartm
ization. Renaissance neo-Platonism combined the classic and the
Christian, as well as the esoteric and the scientific, into a coheren
philosophy. And as Panofsky argued in "The Neo-Platonic Mo
ment and Michelangelo," it tried to fuse the vita activa and the v
contemplativa.67 Much of Panofsky's essay on Michelangelo n
rates the artist's movement away from neo-Platonism toward
unalloyed Christian piety and traces Michelangelo's spiritual od
sey through his work: "Thus in Michelangelo's last works the
alism between the Christian and the classical was solved. But it was
a solution by way of surrender. "68 The neo-Platonist had surren-
dered to the Counter-Reformation. The narrative suggested a cul-
tural tragedy. Indeed, Panofsky ended the essay-and his book-
on a tragic note. The modern solution to the dualism of Christianity
and the classical was "a solution by way of subjective deliverance.
But this subjective deliverance naturally tended towards a gradual
disintegration both of Christian faith and classical humanity, the re-
sults of which are very much in evidence in the world of today. "69
In thus closing a book for publication in 1939, Panofsky ushered
the threatening darkness of world events into his essay on Michel-
angelo, heightening the sense of cultural tragedy which he invoked
at the end of his essay. What more powerful brief for neo-Platonism
could he have provided than this tale of declension?
Without question, Panofsky had an emotional commitment to
Renaissance neo-Platonism, a philosophy which gave priority to
harmony, even combining a magical vision with the scientific.
Panofsky was, of course, not the only German who had found
neo-Platonism so attractive. 70 Many acquired a fascination of neo-
Platonism through the intermediary of Goethe, who in turn had
learned his neo-Platonism largely through the mediation of
Shaftesbury. Many important German cultural elements that are
67Panofsky, 1939, esp. 208 ff.

68Ibid., 229.
69Ibid., 230.
70In addition to the Warburgians concerned with neo-Platonism, including Kliban-
sky, Cassirer, Warburg, Wittkower, and Panofsky, one can add a long list of other
names, including Karl Reinhardt, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and Leo Spitzer.

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identified with Weimar classicism, including a

and the shaping of the self, can be traced back t
Renaissance neo-Platonists. It is likely, then, th
tion to Renaissance neo-Platonism was ground
in Weimar classicism. Thus, at the end of "Ar
nius," when Panofsky praises Johannes Kepler
arises, as it must, although not in the same h
"And we may smile, respectfully, at Goethe, who
the results of Newton's optical experiments an
of microscopes merely 'confuses the mind'."7I
not be entirely flattering, but as one reads the l
sky's talk, the shadow of Goethe looms large e
is mentioned; for a German scholar extolling a h
expense of a more positivistic science can do s
in mind.
Much of what Panofsky found in Renaissance neo-Platonism
can be found in aspects of Goethe which had by the turn of the cen-
tury become codified elements of German culture. Thus, whether
or not one interprets Kepler in the Metropolitan Museum talk as
a figure for Goethe, one can read Panofsky's preoccupation with
neo-Platonism in general as a surrogate for German culture. And
one might go further in decoding Panofsky's rich tribute to the
Italian Renaissance. If the classical past became the "object of a
passionate nostalgia which found its symbolic expression in the
re-emergence--after fifteen centuries--of that enchanting vision,
Arcady, "72 the Renaissance past assumed for Panofsky-despite his
insistence on the permanence of the Renaissance-a similar object
of nostalgia, a similar Arcady. Almost all of those things which
Panofsky most prized, with the exception of Thomistic rationality,
were embodied by the Renaissance. His very profession, that of his-
torian, was the calling of an entire age. But Panofsky's Arcady was
fashioned of rather German elements. And even the centrality he
gave to the historical imagination was a fully German occupation.
Panofsky's nostalgic enterprise, his glorification of the Quattro-
cento, was finally a self-mirroring. Or rather, the idealized world
of his Italian Renaissance was largely a projection of his idealized
German self. The past, which Panofsky paints with such vibrant
7IPanofsky, 1962, i8i.

72Panofsky, 1960, I13.

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colors, with wit and elegance, has as much to say about the
Panofsky lost in 1933 as it has to say about the cultural life
Italian city-states. And yet, that past, as much as it provided a
for an idealized German self, was at the same time constru
play a part in the cultural politics of the American academ
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
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Panofsky

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Panofsky

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Erwin Panofsky and the Renascence of the Renaissance

Author(s): Carl Landauer

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2862914

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Erwin Panofsky and the Ren

T HAS LONG BEEN understood that historians,

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themselves in an academy that was beginning to revere cu

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of the "classic." They are venerated and often us

4See, for example, Alpers, esp. xxiv.

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9"The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline" was originally published i

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The struggle over the meaning of the Rena

I2Baron. This symposium began by reprinting a paper by Durand, "Tradition an

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Studies in Iconology Panofsky placed his methodological di

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baroque, but in the "personal 'inventions' " of

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But if Panofsky's Abbot Suger is arguably too close to

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of classical content and classical form. "W

25Panofsky, 1944, 220.

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The essay Panofsky wrote with Saxl is a particularly inte

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to their own dynamism. In their reassumed cla

33The papers of Aby M. Warburg, Archive of the Warburg Institute (London).

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offers in the Kenyon Review essay between Renaissance's visu

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fed directly into the discourse on the Western t

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In part, there was a political message in this apotheosis of t

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or to compare their fascination with the sevente

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1944, is quite suggestive.46 Cassirer's book was an economic

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just as the veneration of culture was occurring i

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multitude of meanings to lurk behind one term."s2 In En

s2panofsky, 1955, 329.

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labyrinth of classical texts and medieval de

S7Panofsky, 1939, 60.

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Panofsky made the Renaissance historical, but in an imp

59Panofsky, I944, 223; the same argument appears in Panofsky, 1972, io

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in Panofsky's own historical perspective was

6'Panofsky, 1972, 35.

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twentieth century. In part, the paradox of Panofsky's

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and sciences in the Renaissance. In his mind th

64Panofsky, 1962, i82.

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For Panofsky neo-Platonism represented the best of Rena

67Panofsky, 1939, esp. 208 ff.