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Erwin Panofsky (March 30, 1892 – March 14, 1968) was a German-Jewish Art history whose work represents a high point in the modern academic study of iconography, including his hugely influential Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art and his seminal Early Netherlandish Painting.Shone, Richard and Stonard, John-Paul, eds. The Books That Shaped Art History, chapter 7. London: Thames & Hudson, 2013.
Panofsky's ideas were highly influential in intellectual history in general,Chartier, Roger. Cultural History, pp. 23–24 (from Intellectual History and the History of ″Mentalités″). Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988 particularly in his use of historical ideas to interpret artworks and vice versa. Many of his books are still in print, including Studies in Iconology: Humanist Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939), Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955), and his 1943 study The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer. His academic career was pursued mostly in the U.S. after the rise of the Nazi Germany.
During his studies, he attended courses by the art historians Heinrich Wölfflin, Edmund Hildebrandt, Karl Voll, Carl Frey, Werner Weisbach and Adolph Goldschmidt. When he was 19, he joined a competition held by the Grimm Foundation and won an award from it. The subject had been set by Wölfflin and Goldschmidt, who assessed the work submitted. Panofsky's essay was entitled Dürer's Theory of Art, Primarily as it Relates to Italian Theory. A part of the paper was submitted as his doctoral dissertation at the University of Freiburg. The dissertation was published in 1915 as Die theoretische Kunstlehre Albrecht Dürers ( Dürer's Art Theory) . After a riding accident, Panofsky was exempted from military service during World War I. In the spring of 1917, he was considered fit for duty on the home front and was assigned government positions in Kassel and then Berlin, where he was responsible for distributing coal to civilians. He was Demobilization in January 1919.
However, shortly after his successful habilitation in July 1920, the manuscript vanished under unclear circumstances. Though on July 3, 1920, based on letter to Dora Panofsky, his wife at that time revealed plans to revise the text suggesting the work was still in his possession. Yet, by 1964, when Egon Verheyen inquired about the thesis after encountering its citation in an article by Gert van der Osten, Panofsky confirmed its loss, stating, “The original manuscript is lost”. It is assumed that the manuscript was lost after he moved his remaining belongings from Germany in 1943/44. Gerda Panofsky was unable to locate it, possibly because Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich, who had studied under Panofsky, was in possession of the manuscript from 1946 to 1970, and brought it to Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, where the manuscript was found in its basement. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Willibald Sauerländer shed some light on the question of whether Heydenreich shared his recovery of the manuscript or not: "Panofsky has historically distanced himself from his early writings on Michelangelo, as he tired of the subject, and," according to Sauerländer "developed a professional conflict with Austro-Hungarian art historian Johannes Wilde, who accused Panofsky of not crediting him with ideas gleaned from a conversation they had about Michelangelo drawings. Perhaps Panofsky didn't care about the whereabouts of his lost work and Heydenreich was not malicious in keeping it a secret ... but questions still remain." Then, the original 1920 manuscript of Panofsky's Habilitation, his second dissertation, which is titled Die Gestaltungsprinzipien Michelangelos, besonders in ihrem Verhältnis zu denen Raffaels ("The Composition Principles of Michelangelo, particularly in their relation to those of Raphael"), was found in August 2012 by art historian Stephan Klingen. The manuscript is published as book on 2014 with Gerda as the editor.
During this first visit, Panofsky immersed himself in the scholarly environment of the East Coast, strengthening and expanding his American connections. He reconnected with Paul Sachs at Harvard delivering a lecture at the Fogg Museum. Panofsky had previously met Sachs in 1927 when Sachs visited Hamburg to inspect Aby Warburg’s Institute. He also visited Charles Rufus Morey, Alfred Barr, William J. Ivins and was introduced by Edward Warburg to a wealthy New York elite. Panofsky usually gave lectures at weekly salons hosted by Josephine Porter Boardman Crane which acquainted him with prominent figures such as the Rockefellers and the Strauss Group of Macy’s Department Store. This network will be beneficial when he later lost his position in Hamburg.
Following the success of his initial visit, Panofsky was considered for a return to the College of Fine Arts at NYU the following year. He managed to secure two additional twelve-week lecture courses for the spring of 1933 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Upon his return to America, Panofsky worked as an itinerant art historian, delivering lectures across the East Coast. With Adolf Hitler's appointment as Chancellor shortly after his arrival in New York, Panofsky expressed to Margaret Scolari Barr his relief at being in America, rather than witnessing the unfolding political crisis in Germany.
Although initially allowed to spend alternate terms in Hamburg and New York City, Panofsky’s appointment in Hamburg was terminated in 1933 after the Nazis came to power. This dismissal was due to his Jewish background. Panofsky faced limited employment opportunities outside of Germany, and the College of Fine Arts, due to a lack of funds, had not planned to invite him back after his spring lectureship. Cook could only offer Panofsky a single lecture course for the following year. With no immediate job prospects in America, Panofsky returned to his family in Hamburg, where conditions remained relatively safe at the time. Without teaching duties, he concentrated on his research and traveled to Belgium and France, including a visit to Henri Focillon, to explore future employment possibilities. Panofsky returned to New York in January 1934 to fulfill a temporary commitment to Cook and NYU, while Dora and their two young sons stayed in Hamburg.
Overwhelmed by his teaching and administrative duties at NYU, Panofsky lamented the lack of time for his own research and the prioritization of monetary concerns over scholarly pursuits. He expressed frustration to Margaret Barr about his extensive workload, including organizing syllabi, correcting test papers, and conducting numerous lectures and consultations. Although he appreciated Walter Cook's efforts in securing his position, he was critical of Cook's scholarly status and uncomfortable relying on financial support from New York's high society. Panofsky's dissatisfaction was further highlighted in a letter to Gertrud Bing, where he criticized the use of his seminar for NYU's publicity without his consent. Panofsky's first choice after 1933 was not to settle in America but to secure a position with the Warburg Library in London, which was central to his humanistic scholarship. Despite his efforts, those involved with the Library decided to help more disadvantaged exiled scholars.
His early visits were financially motivated, as his NYU salary sustained his family’s rent in Hamburg—a fact he disclosed to Walter Friedländer. In a letter to Margaret Barr, he criticized American life as culturally “sterile” and critiqued U.S. academia: while he praised some Princeton graduate students, he derided NYU students as “stupid and ignorant.” During his 1934 return to NYU, his lectures were simplified for a paying public audience, leaving him feeling like a “workhorse.” NYU and Princeton University collaborated to provide him with paid work for two years. Cook secure a two-year Visiting Professorship for Panofsky at NYU in the fall of 1934 with a salary of $6000, while Morey arranged housing and schooling for Panofsky's family in Princeton in exchange for his teaching in the Department of Art and Archaeology. By this point, Panofsky had resolved never to return to Germany and was committed to establishing a permanent life in the United States.He finally secured a permanent position at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in April 1935. The IAS, founded by Abraham Flexner in 1930, was unique in its mission to emphasize research and advanced teaching without the burden of administrative duties or introductory teaching responsibilities, which aligned with Panofsky's needs. Panofsky was recommended for a faculty position by Morey. Flexner offered Panofsky a generous salary of $10,000, allowing him to continue his collaboration with Morey at Princeton and utilize Morey's established Index of Christian Art.
During his stay in America, he became part of the Kahler-Kreis which consisted of Erich Kahler acquaintances, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy. In 1936 he was awarded his first Honorary Doctorate, by Utrecht University in the Netherlands, which was facilitated by his friendship with the Utrecht professor Willem Vogelsang. In 1954 he became foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1962 he received the Haskins Medal of The Medieval Academy of America. In 1947–1948 Panofsky was the Charles Eliot Norton professor at Harvard University; the lectures later became Early Netherlandish Painting.
He became particularly well known for his studies of symbols and iconography in art. First in a 1934 article, then in his Early Netherlandish Painting (1953), Panofsky was the first to interpret Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait (1934) as not only a depiction of a wedding ceremony, but also a visual contract testifying to the act of marriage. Panofsky identifies a plethora of hidden symbols that all point to the sacrament of marriage. In recent years, this conclusion has been challenged, but Panofsky's work with what he called "hidden" or "disguised" symbolism is still very much influential in the study and understanding of Northern Renaissance art. Similarly, in his monograph on Dürer, Panofsky gives lengthy "symbolic" analyses of the prints Knight, Death, and the Devil and Melencolia I, the former based on Erasmus's Handbook of a Christian Knight.
Panofsky was known to be a friend with physicists Wolfgang Pauli and Albert Einstein. His younger son, Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, became a renowned physicist who specialized in particle accelerators. His elder son, Hans A. Panofsky, was "an atmospheric scientist who taught at Pennsylvania State University for 30 years and who was credited with several advances in the study of meteorology". As Wolfgang Panofsky related, his father used to call his sons "meine beiden Klempner" ("my two plumbers"). William S. Heckscher was a student, fellow emigre, and close friend. In 1973 he was succeeded at Princeton by Irving Lavin. Erwin Panofsky has been recognized as both a "highly distinguished" professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, and in Jeffrey Chipps' biography of the subject as "the most influential art historian of the twentieth century".Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Introduction in Erwin Panofsky "The Life and Art of Albrecht Durer", Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005, p.XXVII) In 1999, the new "Panofsky Lane", in that Institute's faculty housing complex, was named in his honor.
For Panofsky, it was important to consider all three strata as one examines Renaissance art. Irving Lavin says "it was this insistence on, and search for, meaning — especially in places where no one suspected there was any — that led Panofsky to understand art, as no previous historian had, as an intellectual endeavor on a par with the traditional liberal arts."Lavin, Irving. "Panofsky's History of Art" in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside. Princeton: Institute for Advanced Study, 1995. p. 6.
The method of iconology, which had developed following Erwin Panofsky, has been critically discussed since the mid-1950s, in part also strongly (Otto Pächt, Svetlana Alpers). However, among the critics, no one has found a model of interpretation that could completely replace that of Panofsky.Dieter Wuttke (2017). "Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968)". In: Colum Hourihane (ed.). The Routledge Companion to Medieval Iconography, London/New York: Routledge, pp. 105–122, here p. 119.
As regards the interpretation of Christian art, that Panofsky researched throughout his life, the Iconography interest in texts as possible sources remains important, because the meaning of Catholic art and architecture is closely linked to the content of Bible, Liturgical book and theological texts, which were usually considered authoritative by most patrons, artists and viewers.Ralf van Bühren, and Maciej Jan Jasiński (2024). The invisible divine in the history of art. Is Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) still relevant for decoding Christian iconography?, in Church, Communication and Culture 9, pp. 1-36, here pp. 1-4, 9, 23, 28.
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