Short answers, pulled from the story.
Erwin Panofsky was a German art historian born on the 30th of March 1892 in Hanover, widely regarded as the most influential art historian of the twentieth century. He was the leading figure in iconology, a method of interpreting the layered meanings of artworks, and his books including Studies in Iconology and Early Netherlandish Painting remain in print.
Panofsky outlined three levels of art-historical understanding in Studies in Iconology, published in 1939. The first is pure perception of form; the second brings iconographic and cultural knowledge to identify subjects like the Last Supper; the third, iconology, interprets a work within its full personal, technical, and cultural historical context.
Panofsky's position at the University of Hamburg was terminated in 1933 because of his Jewish background after the Nazis came to power. He had already made several visits to the United States and secured a permanent post at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in April 1935, where Abraham Flexner offered him a salary of ten thousand dollars.
In a 1934 article and later in Early Netherlandish Painting in 1953, Panofsky argued that Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, dated 1434, functioned not only as a depiction of a wedding scene but as a visual contract testifying to the act of marriage, filled with hidden symbols pointing to the sacrament.
Panofsky first visited New York University as a Visiting Professor in 1931-32, also lectured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and taught at Princeton's Department of Art and Archaeology. In April 1935 he secured a permanent position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he remained the rest of his academic career.
The manuscript of Panofsky's 1920 habilitation thesis, titled Die Gestaltungsprinzipien Michelangelos, disappeared under unclear circumstances after his habilitation at Hamburg. It was found in August 2012 by art historian Stephan Klingen in the basement of the Zentralinstitut fur Kunstgeschichte in Munich, where Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich had held it since 1946. A book edition appeared in 2014 with Gerda Panofsky as editor.