Erwin Panofsky

• 1. Introduction

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  Erwin Panofsky looked at a fifteenth-century Flemish painting of a man and a woman in a dim room and saw something no one else had seen: a legal contract. The year was 1934, and the painting was Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait. Panofsky argued it was not simply a wedding scene but a visual document, crowded with hidden symbols all pointing to the sacrament of marriage. That reading changed how scholars understood Northern Renaissance art.

  Panofsky was born on the 30th of March 1892 in Hanover. By the time he died on the 14th of March 1968, he had written books that reshaped the modern study of iconography and left his name on a university lane, a professorship in Munich, and decades of scholarship he had never intended to produce in English. His journey from a cultured Jewish family in Upper Silesia to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, ran through the ruins of Weimar Germany and the improvised academic circuits of the American East Coast. The questions worth sitting with are these: how did a man trained in German humanist scholarship remake himself so thoroughly in a foreign language, and what did he discover about art along the way?

• 2. A Humanist Education

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  Arnold and Caecilie Panofsky raised their son in a household that ran on Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Lessing. The family were rentiers from a mining background in Upper Silesia, Jewish by heritage though not by religious practice. Panofsky did not observe Jewish religious customs as an adult, yet he remained proud of his roots and often recalled his grandfather, a renowned Talmud scholar.

  He received his Abitur in 1910 at the Joachimsthal Gymnasium, and he would later describe the humanistic education he received there as fundamental to everything that followed. He entered Berlin University as a law student. In his first semester, a lecture by Wilhelm Vöge on Albrecht Durer redirected him entirely toward art history. He then studied under Heinrich Wolfflin, Edmund Hildebrandt, Karl Voll, Carl Frey, Werner Weisbach, and Adolph Goldschmidt.

  At nineteen, Panofsky entered a competition held by the Grimm Foundation, with the subject set by Wolfflin and Goldschmidt themselves. His winning essay was titled Durer's Theory of Art, Primarily as it Relates to Italian Theory. A portion of that essay became his doctoral dissertation at the University of Freiburg, published in 1915 as Die theoretische Kunstlehre Albrecht Durers. A riding accident exempted him from active military service during World War I, and he spent a stretch of 1917 distributing coal to civilians in Kassel and Berlin before being demobilized in January 1919.

• 3. Hamburg and Habilitation

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  Gustav Pauli invited Panofsky in December 1919 to teach art history at the University of Hamburg, and Panofsky accepted on one condition: that he could pursue his habilitation at the same time. By the 11th of March 1920, he had formally submitted the first section of a study on Michelangelo's stylistic development to the Faculty of Philosophy. The committee members Max Lenz, Ernst Cassirer, and Otto Lauffer approved the application unanimously on the 3rd of June. The Faculty ratified the outcome on the 19th of June, and Panofsky delivered his Probevorlesung, or trial lecture, on the 3rd of July 1920. Its title, Die Entwicklung der Proportionslehre als Abbild der Stilentwicklung, earned him the venia legendi and secured his Hamburg post.

  That same period produced one of his early theoretical works, Idea: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der alteren Kunstheorie, published in 1924 and drawing on the ideas of Ernst Cassirer.

  The habilitation thesis itself then disappeared. Panofsky apparently planned to revise it, as a letter to his wife Dora written on the very day of the lecture shows. But when art historian Egon Verheyen tracked down a citation of the thesis in 1964, Panofsky replied simply: "The original manuscript is lost." He suspected it had gone missing after he moved his remaining belongings out of Germany in 1943-44. The manuscript was eventually found in August 2012 by art historian Stephan Klingen in the basement of the Zentralinstitut fur Kunstgeschichte in Munich. Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich, who had studied under Panofsky, had apparently kept it there from 1946 to 1970. A 2014 book edition with Gerda Panofsky as editor finally brought the text to print.

• 4. Exile and Reinvention

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  Panofsky had expressed interest in visiting America as early as 1929 in correspondence with Fritz Saxl. In 1930, New York University invited him as a Visiting Professor on Adolph Goldschmidt's recommendation. NYU's College of Fine Arts was just then building America's first graduate department for art-historical research, and Panofsky helped Richard Offner and Walter William Spencer Cook shape it. He delivered graduate courses and public lectures in English during the Fall term of 1931-32.

  His social footing in America was unusual. Josephine Porter Boardman Crane hosted weekly salons where Panofsky met the Rockefellers and the Straus family of Macy's Department Store. He reconnected with Paul Sachs at Harvard and gave a lecture at the Fogg Museum. He had first met Sachs in 1927, when Sachs visited Hamburg to inspect Aby Warburg's Institute.

  With Adolf Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in early 1933, Panofsky's Hamburg appointment was terminated because of his Jewish background. His first choice was not America but a position with the Warburg Library in London, central to his humanistic scholarship. Those involved with the Library chose to assist more disadvantaged exiled scholars instead. Walter Cook eventually secured Panofsky a two-year Visiting Professorship at NYU for the fall of 1934 at a salary of six thousand dollars. Meanwhile Charles Rufus Morey arranged housing and schooling for Panofsky's family in Princeton in exchange for teaching in the Department of Art and Archaeology.

  Panofsky found the arrangement wearing. He wrote to Margaret Scolari Barr that American life felt culturally sterile, and he derided NYU students as "stupid and ignorant" while praising some Princeton graduate students. He described his teaching load as making him feel like a workhorse. In April 1935, he finally secured a permanent post at the Institute for Advanced Study, founded by Abraham Flexner in 1930 specifically to free scholars from administrative duties. Morey had recommended him. Abraham Flexner offered Panofsky a salary of ten thousand dollars. Panofsky called it the alignment he had been looking for.

• 5. Iconology and Three Strata

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  Iconology as a formal method had been created by Aby Warburg and his disciples at the Warburg Institute in Hamburg, but it was Panofsky who became its most eminent representative. His friendship and collaboration with Fritz Saxl at that institute ran through a large portion of his career.

  In Studies in Iconology, first published in 1939, Panofsky laid out his framework of three levels of art-historical understanding. The first, primary or natural subject matter, is pure perception: thirteen men at a table, nothing more. The second, conventional subject matter or iconography, brings cultural knowledge to bear: a Western viewer recognizes the Last Supper, or identifies a haloed figure with a lion as Saint Mark. The third, tertiary or intrinsic meaning, draws personal, technical, and cultural history into the reading. It asks why an artist depicted the Last Supper in precisely this way, or why this particular patron cared about Saint Mark.

  Irving Lavin described this insistence on finding meaning where no one had looked as the engine that allowed Panofsky to understand art "as an intellectual endeavor on a par with the traditional liberal arts." The method was critically examined from the mid-1950s onward, by figures including Otto Pacht and Svetlana Alpers. Yet none of the critics produced a model of interpretation capable of fully replacing Panofsky's own.

  Panofsky applied the three strata with particular force to the study of Christian iconography, where the meaning of images and architecture is closely tied to biblical, liturgical, and theological texts that artists and patrons treated as authoritative.

• 6. Durer, Van Eyck, and Hidden Symbols

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  Albrecht Durer followed Panofsky from his student competition essay all the way to his 1943 monograph The Life and Art of Albrecht Durer. In that book, Panofsky gave extended symbolic readings of two prints in particular: Knight, Death, and the Devil and Melencolia I. His analysis of the former drew on Erasmus's Handbook of a Christian Knight, linking the visual imagery to a tradition of Christian moral allegory.

  The Arnolfini Portrait reading was equally consequential. Panofsky first set it out in a 1934 article, then extended it in Early Netherlandish Painting in 1953. He argued that Jan van Eyck's painting of a man and woman in a domestic interior was functioning as a visual contract, a record of the act of marriage, dense with what he called hidden or disguised symbolism. The painting had been dated by van Eyck himself to 1434. In recent years scholars have challenged Panofsky's conclusion, but his method for reading such symbolic layers in Northern Renaissance painting remains influential.

  Early Netherlandish Painting itself grew from a specific institutional occasion: Panofsky's appointment as Charles Eliot Norton professor at Harvard University in 1947-48. The Norton lectures he delivered there became the book's foundation.

• 7. Princeton, Friends, and Legacy

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  At Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Study, Panofsky became part of the Kahler-Kreis, the circle of acquaintances gathered around Erich Kahler. He was friends with the physicists Wolfgang Pauli and Albert Einstein. His younger son, Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, became a renowned physicist specializing in particle accelerators. His elder son, Hans A. Panofsky, taught at Pennsylvania State University for thirty years and was credited with several advances in meteorology. Panofsky called them "meine beiden Klempner" which translates as "my two plumbers."

  Honors accumulated steadily. In 1936, Utrecht University gave him his first honorary doctorate, an award facilitated by his friendship with the Utrecht professor Willem Vogelsang. In 1947-48 he held the Charles Eliot Norton professorship at Harvard. In 1954 he became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1962 he received the Haskins Medal of the Medieval Academy of America. William S. Heckscher, a student, fellow emigre, and close friend, later contributed a memoir to the posthumous collection Three Essays on Style, edited by Irving Lavin in 1995.

  In 2016, the Zentralinstitut fur Kunstgeschichte in Munich founded the Panofsky Professorship. Its first four holders were Victor Stoichita in 2016, Gauvin Alexander Bailey in 2017, Caroline van Eck in 2018, and Olivier Bonfait in 2019. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu drew on Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism when first developing his concept of habitus, later adapting it in books including The Rules of Art and Distinction. In 1999, a new street in the Institute for Advanced Study's faculty housing complex was named Panofsky Lane, nearly three decades after Irving Lavin succeeded him at Princeton in 1973.