Erwin Panofsky and the Renascence of the Renaissance

Landauer, Carl, Renaissance Quarterly

IT HAS LONG BEEN understood that historians, literary critics, and art historians who write about past cultures use those cultures for present purposes, whether by turning Periclean Athens into an ideal for present-day America or the fall of the Roman empire into an ominous signal for modern empires. German humanists who sought refuge from Nazi Germany had, however, special reasons to use their cultural studies as a strategy of escape. Erich Auerbach in exile in Istanbul and Ernst Robert Curtius in "inner exile" in Bonn provided narratives of European literary history that minimized the contribution of their native culture, and in so reworking the narrative of Western literature, they were able to reshape their own identities. Their reconstructions of past cultures can thus be read as attempts at self-reconstruction.(1) Ultimately, however, the attempt by such scholars to distance themselves from German culture often faltered on the very Germanness of their cultural reconstructions. These constructions meant to symbolize un-German essences -- whether Curtius's Latinity or Auerbach's tradition of Western realism -- were assembled from rather German elements. For those German scholars who emigrated to the United States, such as Erwin Panofsky, another paradox emerged: they found themselves in an academy that was beginning to revere culture in much the same way as the Germans had traditionally done. The mid-century American university witnessed a growing effort to produce an American version of Bildung, and arriving German scholars were welcomed in some quarters specifically for the German style of their cultivation and erudition. It is in this context that the art historian Erwin Panofsky is particularly interesting. For Panofsky playing the part of the model humanist for American academic audiences often meant cultivating rather than escaping his Germanness. Although his vision of the Renaissance initially involved some of the same cultural distancing from Hitler's Germany that Curtius's Latin Middle Ages did, that vision played a more significant role within American cultural politics, essentially cooperating with the American academia's own efforts at cultural self-distancing. Panofsky's American work on the Renaissance is thus not only an example of self-construction but is also woven into the story of an academic ideology that has been faltering under attack for the last two or three decades. The faltering of that academic ideology, its move from the "hackneyed" to the "irrelevant" to its present place as an easy object in the canon wars is part of the post-history of Panofsky's participation. The fact that the ideology to which Panofsky contributed so much has been under such increasing attack makes Panofsky's role in its creation all the more interesting.

For many American historians of art the name Erwin Panofsky represents an important phase not so much in the ideological history 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 semiotics of the structural anthropologist Edmund Leach(2) or Michael Ann Holly's comparison at the end of her excellent study of Panofsky'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 history in the United States, and his books have acquired the patina of the "classic." They are venerated and often used in introductory art history classes. But they are venerated and used as the work of a past master, and Panofsky has come to be used as a foil for modern art historians, a symbol of a past to be left behind.(4)

Whatever justification for the present images of Panofsky, we should recognize that his writings from his first two decades in the United States were written in a very specific historical context and with a high degree of self-consciousness about their implications both for the development of art history in the United States and for the development of the humanities as a whole. Indeed, many of his writings, especially Studies in Iconology and Meaning in the Visual Arts, had the air of the manifesto about them.(5) The famous "Introductory" to Studies in Iconology, with its theoretical discussion of the layers of meaning in art and consequently in the study of art, argues that art history should be done with an eye to the "intrinsic meanings" of art.(6) The art historian had to go beyond mere iconography, the identification of the "images, stories and allegories" in the art of the past, and engage in a hermeneutical effort to understand " |symbolical' values," essentially the cultural message of art.(7) Studies in Iconology was indeed a manifesto introducing iconology to the English-speaking art historical world. And in a relatively short period Panofsky succeeded in bringing his version of iconology to the forefront of art historical research in America.(8)

The very nature of Panofsky's highly interdisciplinary methodology suggested that he was less concerned with the interior dialogue of his own discipline as with its place in the larger context of the humanities as a whole. The title of the introductory essay to Meaning in the Visual Arts, "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline," was meant to suggest the broader context in which art historians should work.(9) And read within the context of the development of the humanities in the United States, Panofsky's methodological program was closely tied to a particular ideal of learning in the humanities. As is evident from the essay's original publication in 1940 in a book edited by T. M. Greene, The Meaning of the Humanities, Panofsky's methodological efforts fed into an ongoing discussion of the nature of the humanities in America. The 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 within the context of the great books courses at Columbia and Chicago, various proclamations by cultural Cassandras, and worries about the rise of a technological culture, was highly charged. And Panofsky's writings evidenced a self-awareness of the author's deep 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 Renaissance was mostly a mid-century affair, but it drew from the debate on the Renaissance that had opened in Europe with the publication in 1860 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 scholars 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 Renaissance" with The Twelfth-Century Renaissance in 1927, while other scholars brought attention to the Carolingian and Ottonian Renaissances.(11) Concurrently, neo-Thomists, led by Etienne Gilson, insisted 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 Renaissance was not a dawn at all.

The struggle over the meaning of the Renaissance occupied scholars over a number of decades, but one can identify a particularly self-conscious attempt by American scholars to raise these issues in the 1940s and 1950s. Whole issues of academic periodicals were given over to the debate, such as the "symposium" on the Rennaissance published in The Journal of the History of Ideas in 1943. And other cultural institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sponsored similar symposia or provided a forum for debate. Although some of the American debate focused on the Renaissance contribution to the development of the natural sciences, the old questions about the new spirit ushered in by the Renaissance sustained a great deal of interest. And for American devotees of the Rennaissance, as for participants in the fin-de-siecle cult of the Renaissance, the Italian Quattrocento assumed the aspect of an idealized society. Although for some there were political lessons to learn from the Italian city-states, for others the Renaissance took on symbolic meaning in the discourse on learning and culture; the 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 1944, "Renaissance and Renascences,"(13) originally intended as a contribution to the Renaissance symposium in the Journal of the History of Ideas.(14) Against this background 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 methodological polemics and his apology for the Renaissance, for ultimately the art historical methodology of the iconologist and the cultural ideals represented by the Renaissance were closely connected in his mind. It was no accident that in the introduction to Studies …

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Publication information: Article title: Erwin Panofsky and the Renascence of the Renaissance. Contributors: Landauer, Carl - Author. Journal title: Renaissance Quarterly. Volume: 47. Issue: 2 Publication date: Summer 1994. Page number: 255+. © 1999 Renaissance Society of America. COPYRIGHT 1994 Gale Group.

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