Panofsky’s Invention of Iconology Considering His Biography as a German-Jew Scholar by Jonathan Harel

Erwin Panofsky’s widely known book Studies in Iconology, published in 1939, laid out the foundations for his methodology, one which enjoyed prominence throughout the 20th century, and which is claimed to be the one that established art history as a discipline and as a science of its own. The book saw light in English, about six years after Panofsky’s departure from Germany, where he served as a professor at the University of Hamburg and, also, seven years after his methodology was already presented in the German language in an article entitled “Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst.”

The 1932 article was only translated into English in 2012 by Jaś Elsner and Katharina Lorenz that claimed, in the translated article’s introduction, that conceptually the 1932 and 1939 publications are aligned. Nevertheless, one major difference still comes forward while examining the relationship between both publications – Panofsky omitted in 1939 a discussion that was held in the previous article, one which criticized Martin Heidegger’s aesthetics.

Heidegger put forward a new formulation of the notion of truth, claiming that truth is concealed within the world, while a genuine encounter with it may release the truth from its state of concealment. The quality he assigns to a work of art is that of A-letheia, meaning, in ancient Greek, the negation of concealment. For him, if one lets the world, or the work of art, ‘speak’ to him, the truth which is concealed within it reveals itself to him. Thus, the work of art is distinguished by Heidegger as the site of truth’s appearance. This truth, in its nature, is invariable, and the viewer has no effect on it, for he apprehends the genuine being of himself, within the world, through his encounter with it.

Panofsky’s criticism is, to the least, strange, for he does not disqualify Heidegger’s argument, claiming rather that he, as an art historian, lacks the tools to judge either way. He then claims that the entire debate over the notion of truth in artworks goes beyond the discipline he practices, that of art history. He, however, aspires to reach the most correct description of the social world in which the work was made, thus searching for the contingent truths, or worldview (Weltanschauung), the work expressed for its social world, which is one of many distinct societies with distinct worldviews. There is no one truth for an art historian, and he seeks none, for he, as Panofsky consciously phrased it, is not a philosopher.

It is at that point, in 1932, that Panofsky breaks free from the philosophical discourse and sketches the borders between it and the discipline of art history. Prior to that, all discussions in aesthetics were soaked within philosophical reasoning, also those made by Panofsky himself, which, prior to 1932, tried to reconcile between Alois Riegl’s notion of Kunstwollen, a development of the Hegelian line of thinking, and Ernst Cassirer’s neo-Kantian Philosophy.

As Panofsky immigrated to the U.S. he neglected this critique, but one may deduce that he no longer needed it, for he was not up against Heidegger anymore, the same Heidegger who claimed in 1933 that the German Universities were going through a Verjudung process. Therefore, we may deduce that in 1932 Panofsky, as a German-Jew intellectual, needed to tailor for himself a new field of study, one in which he could be independent. So, one may also think that if he was not up against Heidegger at the time, he may not have invented Iconology, thus grounding art history as a new discipline.

Jonathan Harel is a doctoral fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History.

 

 

 

 

 

image_jonathanImage: Marc Chagall, St Stephan Glass Window, 1978-1985. Photo by “Erge”.