Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim

Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim: A Dialogue on Interpretation
Author(s): Joan Hart

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Spring, 1993), pp. 534-566
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim:
A Dialogue on Interpretation
Joan Hart
Erwin Panofsky is the most influential art historian of the twentieth

century. The basis of his fame is the theory of iconology that generated a
reorientation in art history toward the search for meaning instead of the
categorization of characteristics of style. Karl Mannheim was instrumental
in formulating the new subdiscipline of the sociology of knowledge that
found its most controversial exposition in his book Ideology and Utopia
(1929). The book has been celebrated and vilified but is undeniably a
crucial text in sociology. Panofsky and Mannheim may never have met,
but, in the 1920s, at a crucial period in the development of their theories
for interpreting their respective subjects, they read each other's work and
made significant contributions to each other's increasingly similar theo-
I am grateful to Gerda Panofsky for her generosity in granting me access to the

Panofsky Papers in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, where I exam-
ined the correspondence. I thank Richard Murray, then director of the archives, and his
assistants for their gracious help. I thank Frau Klaiber at Freiburg Universitaits-Archiv for
her courtesy. At Hamburg University's Art Historical Seminar, Martin Warnke, Karen
Michels, and Ulrike Wendland gave me unusual access to their materials concerning all
aspects of the history of the seminar. My scholarly debts are many. I am grateful for
advice and information from Mirella Levi D'Ancona, Peter Boerner, Hugo Buchthal,
Geoffrey Giles, E. H. Gombrich, Charles Haxthausen, William Heckscher, Martin Jay,
Robert Nelson, David Pace, Wolfgang Panofsky, Linda Seidel, Joel Snyder, Susan Stirling,
and students in the University of Chicago Workshop on the History and Theory of Art
History.
All translations from German are mine unless otherwise noted.
Critical Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993)

? 1993 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/93/1903-0004$01.00. All rights reserved.
534
Critical Inquiry Spring 1993 535
ries of interpretation. In Germany before the Third Reich, it was not

unusual for art historians and social scientists to read each other's essays
and books when the theories and practices of the cultural studies, par-
ticularly philology, were valued over those of the natural sciences.'
Philological practice was the primary but not the only connection between
Panofsky and Mannheim. Their lives and work were shaped by the partic-
ular ecology of the German university system and, later, by the environ-
ment of the academies to which they escaped during the Third Reich.
Even more decisive for their careers were the cataclysmic events from
which they sought refuge.
There were connections and divergences between the theories of
interpretation Panofsky and Mannheim developed. Art historians remem-
ber the anecdote with which Panofsky introduced his theory of iconology
for the first time in 1939: a man greets Panofsky in the street by removing
his hat.2 From this brief encounter, Panofsky divulged the whole of his
interpretive strategy that became the art historian's most important tool
for recovering meaning from the art of the past. In dissecting this decep-
tively simple event, Panofsky revealed the tripartite, hierarchical but cir-
cular structure of iconological interpretation. First, we extract the basic
factual and formal meaning of the two gentlemen and the action of hat
removing, then we discern the expressional meaning that gives nuance to
the action-the friendliness, hostility, or neutrality of the hat remover-
and, finally, we delve more deeply into the philosophical meaning of the
event by examining the context of the greeting in terms of the hat
remover's class, nationality, intellectual traditions, and so on. The anec-
dote is a useful and successful heuristic device because it is disarmingly
1. See Jeffrey Herf, ReactionaryModernism: Technology,Culture, and Politics in Weimar

and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984). In his chapter "Engineers as Ideologues" (pp. 152-
88), Herf demonstrates how this peculiarly German phenomenon of the deprecation of the
physical sciences and the elevation of the humanities was prevalent even among the promi-
nent engineers. They thought technology should be in the service of the Kulturnation, the
cultural sphere, not the capitalist state.
The classic discussion of the German academic system in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries is Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The GermanAca-
demic Community, 1890-1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969). In chapter 1, "The Social and
Institutional Background," Ringer describes the entrenchment of the classical education in
the German system and its entanglement with political conservatism and the social struc-
ture. See also E. M. Butler, The Tyrannyof Greeceover Germany(Cambridge, Mass., 1935).
2. See Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology:Humanistic Themesin the Art of the Renais-
sance (1939; New York, 1967), p. 3.
Joan Hart has a Ph. D. from the Universityof California,Berkeley,in

the history of art. She is currentlyworkingon a Ph. D. in history at Indi-
ana University and on a book on Erwin Panofsky.Her book, Heinrich
Wilfflin:Antinomiesof Experiencein Art, is forthcoming.
536 Joan Hart Panofsky and Mannheim
simple and becomes increasingly complex as Panofsky traces the history of

the gesture and considers the personality of the greeter.
In 1923, sixteen years earlier, Karl Mannheim created a similar inci-
dent to explicate his three-tiered method of interpretation: "I am walking
down the street with a friend; a beggar stands at a corner; my friend gives
him an alms."3 Mannheim created the distinctions between factual,
expressional, and philosophical (or personal) meanings that Panofsky bor-
rowed. While Panofsky's theory of iconology, as derived from this anec-
dote, became the dominant paradigm of postwar American art history,
Mannheim's theory has languished in relative obscurity.4
The differences between the two anecdotes reveal two scholars
possessed of an identical interpretive strategy with divergent goals.
Mannheim's example survived the test of time better than Panofsky's: we
often see beggars today, but we rarely see men tipping their hats. The sub-
jects of the stories and the interpretations of them illuminate the different
purposes and obsessions of the two scholars. Mannheim's story is about
injustice. His interpretation emphasized the differences in social class and
power between the beggar, himself as observer, and his friend, and
turned, at the third level of interpretation, on the motivations and person-
ality of his friend who gave alms. His friend's motive was impure and "hyp-
ocritical." His essential character was immoral, which he communicated in
his body language when he gave charity. Panofsky's example involved men
of a higher social status with no grievance or difference between them.
Mannheim's interpretation focussed on social differences and personality,
while Panofsky's revolved around the historical meaning of a gesture that
was dependent on culture and period-the hat raising. It was "aresidue of
mediaeval chivalry: armed men used to remove their helmets to make
clear their peaceful intentions and their confidence in the peaceful inten-
tions of others." Panofsky stressed the change in the meaning of the ges-
ture over time and the fact that it was meaningful only in a particular
cultural setting with distinctive traditions that would be unfamiliar to "an
Australian bushman" and an ancient Greek.5 Determination of the rela-
tive meaning of gestures and objects, and changes in meaning over time,
resulting from cultural developments, were the aims of Panofsky's inter-
pretive art history. Mannheim's theory of interpretation arose partly from
3. Karl Mannheim, "On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung,"From Karl Mannheim,

trans. Paul Kecskemeti, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York, 1971), p. 20; hereafter abbrevi-
ated "IW." The German original is "Beitr~ige zur Theorie der Weltanschauungs-
Interpretation," Jahrbuch fir Kunstgeschichte 1 (1921-22): 236-74; actual publication in
1923.
4. See A. P. Simonds, Karl Mannheim's Sociologyof Knowledge(Oxford, 1978). Simonds
focussed on the German period of Mannheim's career and the specific qualities of his early
theory of interpretation. In general, however, other recent scholars writing on Mannheim
have ignored this aspect of his work.
5. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, p. 4.
his interest in theories of art, but his objective was to create a sociology of
meaning or knowledge. His anecdote revealed his concern that world-
views (discerned through personalities and social situations) served as a
summary of social knowledge and his awareness of the practical social
value of interpreting human interrelationships. He focussed on the
human and social rather than the aesthetic treatment of weltanschauung.
As we shall see, Panofsky's theory of interpretation arose from a rather
rarefied consideration of Alois Riegl's theory of art, and his desire to pur-
ify it, remove its psychological aspects, and eliminate the genetic fallacy
implicit in historical interpretations that are based on the scientific
method. Mannheim's and Panofsky's theories of interpretation were very
similar, but their objectives were very different.
My goal in this paper is twofold. I want to explore the interrela-
tionship of Panofsky's and Mannheim's theories of interpretation prior to
their migration from Germany in 1933. In seeking a synoptic view of the
context in which these theories evolved, I consider the parallels in their
lives that enrich our understanding of their work. My second objective is
to consider the fate of their early theories in their new environments
after 1933.
Background
In the 1920s, Panofsky and Mannheim were unusually productive,
publishing some of their best substantive and theoretical work. During
that decade they were both interested in similar approaches to the study
of cultural artifacts and the exchange began that would create a major
transformation in Panofsky's approach, and probably in Mannheim's
also. A number of similarities in their lives united them. Both men were
non-Marxist, Jewish, bourgeois intellectuals. Panofsky was born in 1892
to a wealthy German family of bankers and merchants.6 Mannheim was
6. This according to the Panofsky family tree provided by Wolfgang Panofsky and
compiled by Adele Irene Panofsky. In a letter to Walter Schuchardt (18 Apr. 1966),
Panofsky remembers in passing, "I myself come from a family which was well established in
Hannover for more than one hundred years when I was born. So I remember an enormous
number of people in all ways of life, from the Almighty 'Stadtdirektor' Tramm who was a
personal friend of my parents and my uncle (whose bank, Carl Solling and Co., you may
conceivably remember) to the proprietor of the 'uniibertreffliche' Hotel Kasten in whose
beautiful summer place in Harzburg I spent many a summer when I was a boy." Panofsky's
mother's name was Solling. The Panofsky family bank was in Berlin. Both banks probably
failed in the post-World War I period. Panofsky listed his father, Arnold Panofsky, as a
"Rentner," a person of private means, in the Matrikelbuchfor summer semester 1914 at
Freiburg University (Freiburg University Archive). He listed his address as Landhausst-
rasse 6 (in the Wilmersdorf section of Berlin), which is one street over from the
Bundesallee where he attended the Joachimsthal Gymnasium.
born in 1893 to a middle-class Hungarian family. Approximately the

same age, they even attended some of the same universities, and
although I have found no evidence of any personal acquaintance
between them, there may have been. Panofsky received his Promotion
from Freiburg University in 1914 but also attended Berlin University
for five semesters and returned to Berlin for a postdoctoral fellowship
after 1914.7 Mannheim was a student at the University of Budapest from
1912 to 1918 but took courses with Georg Simmel at Berlin University,
and he attended the universities of Heidelberg, Freiburg, and Paris from
1912 to 1914. Both attended courses at Freiburg with the philosopher
Heinrich Rickert.8
Mannheim spent the war years and beyond in Budapest, from 1915
to 1920. Despite the war, this was a productive time for him, especially
since he was a member of the Sunday Circle of young intellectuals in
Budapest, a pantheon of the Hungarian intelligentsia.9 Many of them
would scatter after World War I or after the establishment of the
counterrevolutionary Horthy regime in 1920, and again after 1933.
Georg Lukacs was the most promising philosopher among them,
although Mannheim, who was five years younger than Lukacs, was
thought to be close to him in intellectual charisma. Art historians Arnold
Hauser, Frederick Antal, Lajos Fiilep, and Charles de Tolnay were mem-
bers of the circle, as were composers Bela BartOkand Zoltan Kodaly, and
the poet Bela Balazs. With the exception of the younger Mannheim,
most of the Sunday Circle members were at least thirty years old, well
educated, and almost exclusively from the assimilated Jewish middle
7. These studies, along with Panofsky's dissertation, are described in the Freiburg Uni-
versity Dissertation Catalog.
8. See Simonds, Karl Mannheim'sSociologyof Knowledge,p. 4. Panofsky attended classes
at Freiburg University only during his first and last semesters, according to the Freiburg
University Library Catalog filed with his dissertation. Panofsky's Promotioncertificate for
summer semester 1914, dated 22 May 1914, lists two of Rickert's courses that he attended
in this last semester: "System der Philosophie" and "Einfiihrung in die Erkenntnistheorie
und Metaphysik" (Universitfits-Archiv Freiburg, Exmatrikel Philosophische Fakultait,
1914). Panofsky also mentions in a letter to Wilhelm VSge (12 Dec. 1947), his mentor at
Freiburg, that he attended Rickert's courses.
European students readily move from one university to another to study with other
professors, to seek out interesting courses not available at their own universities, or for any
other reason. There are many other possible direct means by which Panofsky and
Mannheim might have met. Arnold Hauser, the Hungarian art historian, was a good friend
of Mannheim and may have known Panofsky. Panofsky and Charles de Tolnay, also a Hun-
garian art historian, were good friends at Hamburg University in the early 1930s. Panofsky
was instrumental in helping Tolnay emigrate to the United States, yet they had a falling out
in the 1940s. Tolnay knew Mannheim. The German academic community was rather small
and the two men could easily have met.
9. See Mary Gluck, Georg Lukdcs and His Generation, 1900-1918 (Cambridge, Mass.,
1985), hereafter abbreviated GLG, and Lee Congdon, The YoungLukacs (Chapel Hill, N.C.,
1983).
class (see GLG, p. 20). The 1920s are often described as the period of the
Lost Generation, of increased pessimism, disenchantment, and aliena-
tion in the wake of the war; for these intellectuals, however, the war and
its immediate aftermath presented the opportunity for a major cultural
and philosophical reorientation.
This change is also evident in the work of the members of the newly
constituted Warburg Cultural Sciences Library in Hamburg during the
1920s.'0 Hamburg University was founded in 1919, directly after the
war, and Aby Warburg's private library and research center was closely
affiliated with the university from the beginning. By 1926, the library
was housed in an independent building next to Aby Warburg's home
(where the books were previously located), presided over by Fritz Saxl.
Panofsky began teaching at the university in 1920, as a lecturer and the
only art historian on the faculty. The philosopher Ernst Cassirer, the phi-
losopher and art historian Edgar Wind, and many historians and art his-
torians worked at the library. The collaborations of Panofsky with Saxl
and Cassirer were very successful. Panofsky produced a number of
purely theoretical papers and a large group of iconological essays and
books. The very constitution of Warburg's library promoted an inter-
disciplinary harmony among the scholars who used it. The library, now
in London, still has the old organization, with books united loosely by
subject matter, not narrowly by author or nation or period." Scholars
were invited to cross disciplinary boundaries by the mere juxtaposition
of the books.
What united the Hungarians of the Sunday Circle and the Germans
of the Warburg library was a mania for culture-not society, not politics,
not science, but Culture.'2 According to Mannheim, culture subsumed all
manifestations of the human spirit, including art, religion, science, and
10. In German it was the KulturwissenschaftlicheBibliothekWarburg(KBW). I note that

the library and Warburg's house survived the war, but the initials "KBW" on the library
facade were removed. See Gertrud Bing, "Fritz Saxl (1890-1948)," in Fritz Saxl, 1890-
1948: A Volume of Memorial Essays from His Friends in England, ed. Donald J. Gordon
(Edinburgh, 1957), pp. 1-46, and E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg:An Intellectual Biography,
2d ed. (Chicago, 1986).
11. In a letter to me dated 9 March 1992, William Heckscher noted that Warburg
coined the idea of "Das Gesetz des guten Nachbarn" [the law of the good neighbor]. The
book you sought was invariably missing or out on loan. Warburg wanted users to look
at the books flanking the empty space: "They were bound to be the 'good neighbors' which
were likely to be more important to your research than the book you were originally look-
ing for."
12. See Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, vol. 1 of The Civilizing Process, trans.
Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1978). Elias describes the evolution of this old German fixa-
tion on Kultur, originally opposed to French ideas of civilization. What began as concepts of
national opposition between France and Germany became concepts for internal class divi-
sions between the merely civilized aristocracy and the cultured, educated middle class
within Germany.
the state. In 1918, Mannheim described the transformation among his

group in a lecture called "Soul and Culture": "'[we] had left behind the
positivism of the nineteenth century and had once again turned toward
metaphysical idealism'" (quoted in GLG, p. 12). Culture was an objecti-
fication of that idealism, mediating between subjective self-realization and
the cultural "inheritance of the human race" in all areas. In the process of
appropriating this culture, the human spirit, history, and the self produce
meaning. The new generation believed it was involved in the production
of a new culture; Mannheim stated in "Soul and Culture" that the new
European intellectual substitutes "'the problem of transcendence for out-
worn materialism, the universal validity of principles for relativistic
impressionism, the pathos of normative ethics for an anarchic world
view"' (quoted in GLG, p. 182). Both Mannheim and Panofsky sought
transcendence, universal principles, and normative ethics in the 1920s.
While artists and intellectuals in the Weimar years experienced an
efflorescence of culture, it is important to recall at what cost.'13 The cre-
ative productivity of Panofsky and Mannheim in the 1920s must be seen
against the hardships they had already suffered and those that they were
soon to experience. Mannheim fled Budapest for Germany after the
short-lived Hungarian revolution of 1919. He spent the 1920s at
Heidelberg University and the early 1930s at Frankfurt University. The
high inflation in Germany caused Panofsky to lose his inheritance
throughout the 1920s, leaving Germany in 1934 with no money.'14 Both
men must have watched the growing nationalist, xenophobic, conserva-
tive, and anti-Semitic movements in Hungary and Germany with anxi-
ety. They were marginalized as intellectuals and Jews, and yet their
ambiguous position seems to have mobilized their creative energies.'5
But their cultural values were rooted in the past, and these roots were
the most fruitful.
13. The visual arts and music took interesting new forms during the Weimar Republic,
while literature was less adventurous in Germany. Dada, surrealism, Bauhaus, and Neue
Sachlichkeit all developed in this time.
14. In a letter to me dated 13 March 1992, Wolfgang Panofsky reports that his father
sold whatever he could during the inflationary period, beginning in 1923. When the family
left Germany, they did not have even the small amount of cash they were permitted to take.
See H. W. Janson, "Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968)," in the AmericanPhilosophicalSocietyYear-
book 1969, pp. 151-60, and a series of essays after Panofsky's death entitled "Erwin
Panofsky in Memoriam," in Record of the Art Museum of Princeton University 28 (1969),
esp. William Heckscher, "Erwin Panofsky: A Curriculum Vitae," pp. 5-21.
15. See George L. Mosse, German Jews beyondJudaism (Bloomington, Ind., 1985).
Mosse argues that in the nineteenth century German Jews adopted the Enlightenment
ideal of Bildung or cultivation, which allowed them to pursue a path independent
from Judaism that transcended ethnic divisions. Unfortunately, this path led them
largely to ignore the nationalistic and anti-Semitic fervor at the end of the nineteenth
century.
The Dialogue
One of Mannheim's earliest publications, "On the Interpretation of

Weltanschauung"appeared in an art historical journal in 1923. In it he
cited two essays by Panofsky, "The Problem of Style in the Fine Arts"
(1915) and "The Concept of Artistic Volition" (1920). In two essays of
1925 and 1932, Panofsky cited Mannheim's essay on weltanschauung.16
He also recommended that students in his courses read it.17 In Panofsky's
formulation of his theory of art in 1939 (the introduction to Studies in
Iconology)there is an unmistakable similarity to Mannheim's essay, begin-
ning with the anecdote of the meeting of gentlemen in the street that leads
to the interpretation of the meaning of the story using a tripartite, hierar-
chical schema. Panofsky elaborated on this theory of iconology in his final
theoretical statement, "Art History as a Humanistic Discipline" (1940).
The dialogue consisted in Mannheim's reflections on Panofsky's two early
essays and Panofsky's gradual absorption of Mannheim's interpretive the-
ory. Panofsky's early theoretical writings are interdependent and each
essay builds on the previous one, as if he were engaging in a monologue
with himself, as well as in a dialogue primarily with Mannheim.
The first article Mannheim cited, "The Problem of Style in the Fine
Arts," was the one with which Panofsky began his publishing career; it was
a belligerent article directed against Heinrich W61fflin's history of vision,
which Panofsky felt was opposed to the study of content. It was also his
first theoretical essay. Panofsky was already staking out his territory,
although it took him some time to figure out what theory and method
would be most fruitful for the history of art. In 1965, he recalled his early
article on W1olfflinand said, "What gives me some satisfaction is only the
fact that even as a mere beginner, in 1915, I clearly saw the flaws in an
essential separation between 'form' and 'content.''"18 He was kinder to
16. All four of these essays by Panofsky are reprinted in Panofsky, Aufsdtze zu
Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft,ed. Hariolf Oberer and Egon Verheyen (Berlin, 1985).
The original German titles are "Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst" (1915), pp.
19-28; "Der Begriff des Kunstwollens" (1920), pp. 29-44; "Uber das Verhiltnis der
Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie: Ein Beitrag zu der Er6rterung fiber die Miglichkeit
'kunstwissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe"' (1925), pp. 49-76; and "Zum Problem der
Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst" (1932), pp. 85-98.
17. This according to lecture notes by Willi Meyne from summer semester 1928, for
Panofsky and Noack's course "Ubungen fiber Methodenfragen der Kunstwissenschaft" in
the Archiv zur Wissenschaftsemigration in der Kunstgeschichte, Hamburg. Of the
assigned or recommended books and articles for this course, Mannheim's was one of the
few recent ones.
18. Panofsky, letter to E. H. Gombrich, 15 Nov. 1965. Panofsky probably read or
heard Heinrich W6lfflin's brief lecture to the Royal Prussian Academy of Science of 1912
"Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst," Sitzungsberichteder K3niglich preussischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften31 [Jan.-June 1912]: 572-78), which was published prior to
W6lfflin's full treatment of his ideas on art and vision in KunstgeschichtlicheGrundbegriffe
Wolfflin in later reflections on his contribution to the history of art, realiz-

ing that Wolfflin's concentration on the formal aspects of a work of art was
useful and necessary although inadequate unless supplemented by other
perspectives.
However, among art historians Alois Riegl exercised an incredible
influence on Panofsky until 1924 when he published Die deutschePlastik
des elften bis dreizehntenJahrhunderts[GermanSculpturefrom theEleventhto
the Thirteenth Centuries] in which he practiced a Rieglian formalism not
actually visible in most of the earlier essays. "The Concept of Artistic Voli-
tion" was devoted entirely to Riegl's concept of Kunstwollen [artistic voli-
tion]. Panofsky's intent in this article was to establish the independence of
the visual arts from all other objects in the world. To accomplish this goal,
he defined Riegl's "artistic volition" as the unity of all creative forces of an
immanent nature in art. His overarching interest was to create an imma-
nent, autonomous, and transcendental philosophy of art, based on deduc-
tive a priori categories. His primary aim was to eliminate psychological
factors from Kunstwollen in three areas: the artist's intent, collective his-
tory, and the spectator. In each of these domains, Panofsky found a
"vicious circle" at work, since the psychology of the work of art was often
derived from the psychology of the artist and vice versa, and this circular
explanation was repeated with the collectivity and the spectator.'19To
avoid the vicious circle in explaining artistic phenomena, Panofsky
believed that documents relevant to the artist's intention or the psychol-
ogy of the period had to be examined independent of the work of art, an
idea he later termed the "correctives" to interpretation-the autonomous
checks to achieve a valid meaning. The idea was to view the work of art as
given and then interpret it from historical, grammatical, logical, and
transcendental-philosophical points of view.20
Panofsky thought Riegl's categories for understanding Kunstwollen
revealed a meaning immanent in artistic phenomena. Descriptive terms
became transcendent, ideal concepts of a Platonic nature.21 Thus,
(1915); trans. M. D. Hottinger, under the title Principles of Art History: The Problem of the
Developmentof Style in Later Art (New York, 1932).
19. It is possible that Panofsky recognized this vicious circle in W6lfflin's theory and
wanted to discredit it on that basis. Most formalist theories are subject to this criticism,
because they define their subject narrowly. W6lfflin tried to compensate for the vicious cir-
cle by including external factors in his schema. This issue is discussed in my forthcoming
book, Heinrich Wdlfflin:Antinomies of Experience in Art.
20. These categories are similar to those found in many hermeneutic models of
philological interpretation. See August Bockh, Encyclopddie und Methodologie der
philologischenWissenschaften,ed. Ernst Bratuschek (Leipzig, 1877), intro. and chap. 1; trans.
John Paul Pritchard, under the title On Interpretationand Criticism,ed. Pritchard (Norman,
Okla., 1968).
21. See Silvia Ferretti, Cassirer,Panofsky,and Warburg:Symbol,Art, and History, trans.
Richard Pierce (New Haven, Conn., 1989). Ferretti usefully describes a relationship
Panofsky believed that Riegl's contrasting terms for Egyptian and Hellen-
istic works of art, such as "haptic"or tactile versus "optic,"and "objective"
versus "subjective," removed them from historical-genetic consideration
into an ideal, a priori sphere.22 The sum of all descriptive categories of this
nature could be epitomized by an axis or scale of polar concepts that could
completely characterize all art, since every work would fall somewhere on
the axis. Ultimately, Panofsky's goal was to establish a transcendental, aes-
thetic mode of looking at art that would not supplant but would comple-
ment previous writings in art history. "Assuming the concept of artistic
volition to be methodologically justified, the 'necessity' which it, too,
determines in a particular historical process consists not in determining a
causally dependent relationship between individual phenomena which
succeed each other in time but in discovering in them (just as in an artistic
phenomenon) a unified sense." He believed that the history of meaning
would complement Riegl's theory and replace psychologizing history
that confused "art and artist, subject and object, reality and idea" in a
vicious circle.23
In creating this transcendental philosophy of art, Panofsky ignored
Riegl's own convictions about his theory of art. While Riegl was convinced
that art should be examined independent of other cultural enterprises
and worldviews, he was also a strong supporter of Adolf von Hildebrand's
perceptual psychological interpretation of art, presented in TheProblemof
Form in the Fine Arts (1893)-so strong a supporter, in fact, that he
believed only Hildebrand had come close to his intent of constructing a
pure "positivist theory of Kunstwollen."24The descriptive terms of Riegl's
and Hildebrand's formal oppositions-such as tactile, optical, and "dis-
tant" and "near"views-were closely linked to the sensationist psychology
popular at the end of the nineteenth century.25
between Platonism and the three Warburgians, though somewhat convolutedly.

22. See Alois Riegl, SpdtromischeKunstindustrie (Vienna, 1901). This is the principal
text in which Riegl introduced the concept of Kunstwollen and the development of art in
the ancient world, from tactile to a balance of tactile and optical to purely optical art-
following the progression from Egyptian to classical Greek to Hellenistic art.
23. Panofsky, "The Concept of Artistic Volition," trans. KennethJ. Northcott andJoel
Snyder, Critical Inquiry 8 (Autumn 1981): 30-31.
24. Riegl, "Naturwerk und Kunstwerk II," Gesammelte Aufsiitze (Augsburg-Wien,
1929), p. 64. See Adolf von Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst
(Strassburg, 1893). For a lengthier description of the interrelationship of Riegl and the
sculptor Hildebrand, see Joan Hart, "Some Reflections on W61lfflin and the Vienna
School," in Wien und die Entwicklung der kunsthistorischen Methode, Akten des XXV.
Internationalen Kongresses ffir Kunstgeschichte (Vienna, 1984), pp. 53-64.
25 Hermann Helmholtz was widely read by artists and art historians at the end of the
nineteenth century; see Hermann Helmholtz, "On the Relation of Optics to Painting"
(1876), Popular Lectureson ScientificSubjects,trans. E. Atkinson (New York, 1881), chap. 3. I
hesitate to call Helmholtz's theory of perception by any name, since I have seen so many
Panofsky's primary intent was to depsychologize Riegl's theory, just

as Edmund Husserl and Heinrich Rickert had argued against those who
claimed that psychology was the foundation for philosophical inquiry.
Rickert was one of Panofsky's (and Mannheim's) philosophy professors at
Freiburg, but it was clearly Husserl's phenomenology that had the great-
est impact on Panofsky's thought.26 Husserl's great contribution to philos-
ophy was to refocus attention on the content of consciousness, what he
called its "intentionality" (and later "transcendental subjectivity"). Rather
than reflecting on psychological processes or acts, we actually reflect on
the content of those processes. When we consider Husserl's philosophy,
we think about the content of his ideas; we do not attempt to replicate a set
of psychological acts or events that went on in his head. Earlier psycholo-
gizing philosophy had been concerned with understanding the mental
acts of consciousness. When Panofsky referred to the given nature of the
work of art, he meant its content, just as Husserl redirected attention to
the objects of consciousness.
Husserl thought psychological and historical accounts were often
guilty of the genetic fallacy, against which Panofsky also argued in his arti-
cle on Kunstwollen and his later defense of that article, "Uber das
Verhiltnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie" ["Concerning the Rela-
tionship of Art History to Art Theory"]. Husserl meant by geneticfallacy
the false belief that the empirical circumstances in which a judgment
occurs decide its truth or falsity.27 He argued against psychological and
historical methods and for logical and transcendental ones. For Husserl,
as for Panofsky at this time, the realm of empirical facts could never lead
to the realm of truth and essences.
However, Panofsky regarded traditional historical documents to be
essential "heuristic aids" in the interpretation of meaning. The immanent
meaning of art revealed in Riegl's artistic volition through the axes of
a priori categories such as haptic and optic required outside validation. He
believed that documents can alter our immanent interpretation of a work
offered. "Sensationist" seems appropriate, since his theory is not completely nativist but
insistent on sensation as a basis. See Kurt Danziger, Constructingthe Subject:Historical Ori-
gins of PsychologicalResearch(Cambridge, 1990), p. 29. In the first three chapters, Danziger
provides an excellent overview of German psychological practice in the nineteenth
century.
26. Both Mannheim and Panofsky referred to Husserl as a primary source for their
work. See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, 2 vols. (1900; Lon-
don, 1970). This book was most influential in debunking psychologism. See also Heinrich
Rickert, Science and History: A Critique of Positivist Epistemology, trans. George Reisman
(1921; Princeton, N.J., 1962), and Die Philosophie des Lebens: Darstellung und Kritik der
philosophischenModestromungenunserer Zeit (Tiibingen, 1920). Georg G. Iggers, The German
Conceptionof History: The National Tradition of Historical Thoughtfrom Herder to the Present
(Middletown, Conn., 1968) contains a valuable introduction to Rickert's thought.
27. See Husserl, "Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft," Logos 1 (1910-11): 289-341.
of art by providing a reconstruction of a lost work or part of a work, or an

exegetic correction demonstrating alterations in formal aspects of the
work, or, more generally, any error in interpretation of a work. Panofsky's
essay on artistic volition was an attempt to balance the historical project of
the art historian with the abstract and absolute meaning of a work of art,
attained by considering a work's immanent meaning. The seeds of his
later theory of iconology were clearly in the harmonizing of levels of inter-
pretation, although his main objective was to validate a pure aesthetic
meaning in art, devoid of psychological or historical "genetic" errors.
Mannheim's essay "On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung"(1923)
must have changed Panofsky's view of his theory almost immediately. For
Mannheim, by misinterpreting Panofsky's interpretation of Kunstwollen
and putting it into a larger interpretive theory, suggested a method for
deriving meaning from any cultural object, which could be used by the art
historian and sociologist as well as the literary historian, philosopher, and
others. Mannheim directed his attention to the visual arts. The question
he wished to answer was, "Can I give a methodological analysis of the
concept of Weltanschauung and determine its logical place within the
conceptual framework of the historical cultural disciplines?" ("IW,"p. 8).
Weltanschauung was not exactly equivalent to Kunstwollen but a "global
outlook," nonrational, germinal, unformed, deeper, and prior to but
inherent in cultural objectifications. It should be stated at the outset that
Mannheim's objective in this essay was a totalizing hermeneutic interpre-
tation of the social world and art. He regarded the eclipse of a Hegelian
universal history as a necessary phase in which to regain scholarly stan-
dards and investigate the details, but this analytic period led back to an
understanding of the global historical process, a new synoptical approach.
Furthermore, this global outlook was atheoretical and nonrational.
Wilhelm Dilthey was Mannheim's forerunner in recognizing "that theo-
retical philosophy is neither the creator nor the principle vehicle of the
Weltanschauungof an epoch; in reality, it is merely only one of the chan-
nels through which a global factor-to be conceived as transcending the
various cultural fields, its emanations-manifests itself" ("IW,"p. 13). Phi-
losophy was merely one among many objectifications of weltanschauung.
Crucial for Mannheim was his intuition that the craving for theoretical
knowledge is inconsistent with the direct experience already wholly pos-
sessed of weltanschauung. However, theorizing opens up new possibilities.
Authentic experience demands repatterning, demands theorizing; the very
basis of knowledge is the reciprocity of experience and rational operations.
Mannheim provided a framework for graduating the atheoretical
into the theoretical, for manipulating that unmediated and authentic
experience to achieve a new understanding: "Every cultural product in its
entirety will ... display three distinct 'strata of meaning': (a) its objective
meaning, (b) its expressive meaning, (c) its documentary or evidential
meaning" ("IW,"p. 19). To illustrate his theory, Mannheim described the
street encounter and its interpretation that was the exemplar for
Panofsky's interpretive strategy in the introduction to Studies in Iconology
(see "IW,"p. 20). The lower level objective meaning was the visual data
alone. At this level of interpretation, one grasped the structural character-
istics of the visual field, without further knowledge. To attain the expres-
sive meaning one must have understood the gestures of the individuals in
space and time; in art, an understanding of the artist's stream of psychic
experience and an empathy with it led to expressive meaning. Factual his-
torical research could also illuminate expressive meaning. The final, doc-
umentary meaning was like Kunstwollen in its result: "this search ... for an
identical, homologous pattern underlying a vast variety of totally differ-
ent realizations of meaning" ("IW," p. 32). Mannheim associated the
synoptic, documentary meaning with Riegl's interpretation of Roman
decorative arts in which Riegl found a pervasive cultural characteristic
immanent in all of them.28
After a comprehensive examination of the three levels of interpreta-
tion, Mannheim declared that the divisions between them were false
because each unit of meaning "isalready encased in a universe of interpre-
tation (Auffassungsganzheit)"("IW,"p. 44). A face is not patched together
from a mosaic of features but is whole and unique on first glance, and so
the weltanschauung is like a gestalt. The theory created to understand the
global outlook is distinct from the unitary nature of it. In other words, the
objective, expressive, and documentary meanings are given simultane-
ously, and it requires a "scientific" analysis to separate them, to stabilize
them, to give them a firm outline.
The simultaneity and circularity of the part and the whole in the cul-
tural sciences is the paradox implicit in giving a theoretical and scientific
account of weltanschauung or cultural meaning. Mannheim selected biog-
raphy as a model for this paradox, as Dilthey had before him. "We derive
the 'spirit of the epoch' from its individual documentary manifestations-
and we interpret the individual documentary manifestations on the basis
of what we know about the spirit of the epoch" ("IW, p. 49).29 This sounds
like the vicious circle. However, Mannheim suggested that we can use
scientific terms to control and verify the unity of cultural endeavors in a
given period by creating a coordinate system of concepts. In his next arti-
cle of 1925, Panofsky presented Riegl's categories as such a coordinate
system while expanding his theory.
Mannheim surveyed the failure of various authors to create a thor-
28. The Riegl text is Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik
(Berlin, 1893).
29. See Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung: Lessing, Goethe, Novalis,
H'lderin (Stuttgart, 1957). This collection of essays has sometimes been interpreted as
Dilthey's proposal to replace his earlier descriptive psychological foundation by an individ-
ual psychology expressed through individual creative artists or biographies of them.
ough synthesis of cultural meaning-Dilthey with his three types of

weltanschauung, Hermann Nohl who found a weak correspondence
between Dilthey's three types and visual forms, and Riegl's project.
Mannheim criticized Riegl for the rigidity of his approach because it
led to a strict rationalizing of art forms at their lowest common denomi-
nator or "germinal" patterns. Mannheim believed it was impossible to
achieve a synoptic interpretation incorporating the wealth of meaning
available in any given culture by using Riegl's reductionist and unimagi-
native theory.
He did, however, offer two hopeful models in the work of synthesiz-
ing historians Max Dvoiak and Max Weber, an art historian and a social
scientist. These two took a historical approach and analyzed individual
cultural phenomena in detail "to re-create the essence of a past epoch in
all its multiform variety" ("IW,"p. 55). However, this hermeneutic method
for finding meaning of a global nature had the problem of how to express
the interrelatedness of different cultural fields. Should the unity be
expressed by means of "causality," "correspondence," "function," "reci-
procity"? According to Mannheim, Dvoiak favored correspondence and
parallelism, while Weber proposed a mutual causal dependence with one
cultural domain sometimes explaining another. Partial determination of
historical processes was the result. For Mannheim, this methodological
problem was critical for distinguishing the cultural sciences from the
natural sciences. When a cultural phenomenon was traced back to a
weltanschauung instead of another phenomenon, the result was an inter-
pretation that did not posit a causal relationship.s0 Meaning could not
be explained causally or genetically, it could only be understood or inter-
preted. Science was explanatory. Thus, Mannheim avoided the genetic
fallacy against which Panofsky argued, and distinguished the cultural
sphere from the scientific one. In his article on artistic volition, Panofsky
had already suggested eschewing causal progression in favor of a "unified
sense."
Perhaps Panofsky was encouraged by Mannheim's suggestion of a
coordinate system of concepts to understand and verify the unity of a
period, for he had already suggested such a system using Riegl's dichoto-
mies. But, gradually, in later essays, he followed the interpretive paths of
Mannheim and Weber. Their totalizing interpretive frameworks derived
from the nineteenth-century philological method of hermeneutics.31 A
30. New Historicists should take note of this prefiguring of their current concerns.
Shying away from causal models in philological methodology goes back to the eighteenth
century, at least.
31. Mannheim pursued a hermeneutic approach early in his German period, which
became more like Max Weber's approach. Weber proposed an amalgam of hermeneutics
and empiricism in his early theoretical essays, Roscherand Knies: TheLogical ProblemsofHis-
torical Economics, trans. Guy Oakes (1903-6; New York, 1975), p. 8. The essays are a cri-
tique of economic theory from this new perspective. Later his concept of the ideal type was
summary of a hermeneutic theory of this sort includes the following ideas:

The goals of such a theory are meaning and understanding, not explana-
tion, and are attained through "interpretation," which is usually a multi-
level process; the theory utilizes a circular method of explication; it is
empirical in that objective elements are compared in an attempt to verify
the interpretation; the theory assumes the relativity in space and time of
the interpreter and object of interpretation; it emphasizes the reconstruc-
tive process of understanding and, therefore, the subjectivity of the inter-
preter.32 Panofsky gradually implemented Mannheim's explication of his
hermeneutic method, but its full adoption and revision took sixteen
years.3 The philology of the past crystallized in modern art history and
sociology.
Panofsky footnoted Mannheim's essay in his methodological article of
1925, "Concerning the Relationship of Art History to Art Theory." He
agreed with Mannheim that it made sense to consider artistic styles as cor-
related, not causally related. He continued to stress the immanent and
transcendental character of Kunstwollen. But pressed by his critic,
Alexander Dorner, to whom he addressed the essay, he responded by
taking the programmatic statements of his Kunstwollen article further to
illuminate the relationship of art theory to art history.34
a heuristic device that allowed for an overall structure of hypotheses that could then be
tested. However, the process of understanding was hermeneutic. Max Dvoriakseemed rela-
tively uninterested in methodological considerations, although he was concerned with the
social history of medieval art in Idealismus und Naturalismus in der gotischen Skulptur und
Malerei (Munich, 1918).
32. The history of hermeneutics is cogently presented in Richard E. Palmer,
Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer
(Evanston, Ill., 1969). The best nineteenth-century source is still B6ckh, On Interpretation
and Criticism.See also David Couzens Hoy, The Critical Circle:Literature, History, and Philo-
sophical Hermeneutics(Berkeley, 1978); Jiirgen Habermas, Knowledgeand Human Interests,
trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, 1971); and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method,
trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, rev. ed. (1960; New York, 1989). The lit-
erature on hermeneutics is growing exponentially. However, it is helpful to distinguish
between philological and philosophical hermeneutics. For the purposes of this paper, I am
discussing philological hermeneutics.
33. See Simonds, "Mannheim's Sociology of Knowledge as a Hermeneutic Method,"
Cultural Hermeneutics 3 (May 1975): 81-104. Simonds correctly identifies Mannheim's
method as hermeneutic but prefers to discuss its opposite-the New Criticism of I. A.
Richards and others-rather than to explore Mannheim's theory in detail.
34. Alexander Dorner (1893-1957) received his degree in art history at Berlin Uni-
versity in 1919; Adolph Goldschmidt was his mentor, as well as Panofsky's. Dorner was a
lecturer when he wrote "Die Erkenntnis des Kunstwollens durch die Kunstgeschichte,"
Zeitschriftfiir Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 16 (1922): 216-22, a rebuttal to
Panofsky's essay. In 1925, Dorner became director of the Landesmuseum in Hannover, for
which he acquired modern art. Many works of art in the "Entartete Kunst" exhibition of
1937 came from the Hannover collection. Dorner left Germany in 1936 for the United
States and became director of the museum at the Rhode Island School of Design.
By 1925, he must have realized, like Mannheim, the limitations of

Riegl's project, for he transformed it substantially. In his article on
Kunstwollen of 1920, he had offered two pages on how to reconcile tran-
scendental artistic volition with the historical understanding of works of
art, but the whole object of this later article was to argue for the reci-
procity of philosophy and history, in response to the critics of the earlier
essay.35 He reiterated the phenomenological argument but with a new
respect for the knowledge imparted by the history of art. The claim in
this article was that art theory and art history fulfilled different but
interrelated projects: in art theory, problems were formulated by means
of a system of basic concepts that were deduced from an Urproblem.Art
history, consciously or not, oriented its solutions around these problems;
art history was empirical and created style criteria out of the sensuous
qualities of works of art. Finally, art history was an interpretivescience at
the transcendental level of Kunstwollen. At this level, art theory and art
history joined to create a principle of formation or structure, a
Gestaltung. In this manner Panofsky described three levels of interpreta-
tion, familiar to us from his later, less philosophical descriptions: the
Urproblemof art theory with its conceptual framework, empirical art his-
tory, and interpretation [Kunstwollen] through the union of art history
and art theory.
Panofsky adopted Mannheim's explication of Kunstwollen as the uni-
fying, synoptic, and formative interpretation, encompassing theory and
history. In this essay of 1925, he united theory and practice, integrating
what had been merely suggested in his earlier article. The three-level divi-
sion of the interpretation of art recalls Mannheim's three interrelated
kinds of meaning, although there is still no organic correspondence
between the levels.
The unusual part of his 1925 theory was the sliding scale or axis of
antithetical concepts that he illustrated to show the continuity and divi-
sion of art theory and art history. He presented a table with five vertical
divisions (table 1): at the far left is the extreme set of antithetical art the-
oretical concepts of an ontological nature-fullness opposed form, and
on the far right is the extreme set of antithetical art historical concepts of
a methodological nature-space and time. The antitheses are corre-
lated, for fullness and form are the a priori hypotheses for the essence of
the artistic problem, and space and time are the a priori conditions of its
solution. Between these two poles of contrasting concepts are three pairs
of opposites within the phenomenal and visual sphere that are graded in
value from elementary to figurative to compositional, a three-part hier-
archical progression: from optic versus haptic, to depth versus plane,
35. The argument for the complementarity of history and philosophy was common
among nineteenth-century philologists. See the introduction to B*ckh, On Interpretation
and Criticism.
and, finally, to fusion versus independence. These contrasting pairs con-

form to Riegl's contrasting characterizations of Egyptian versus Hellen-
istic art, or Wdlfflin's schema of Renaissance versus Baroque art.36
These were the basic concepts for the science or philosophy of art and
art history, according to Panofsky. He united the conceptual and experi-
ential aspects of artistic interpretation. These concepts seemed to oper-
ate as a heuristic device for Panofsky, to be used to compare the abstract
with the real, or to set up a dialectic between a priori concepts and real
works of art. Art itself possessed these dual qualities: it was conditioned
by time and place but also had an a priori, timeless, lawful, metahistorical
character. There was a reciprocal, not a causal, relationship between art
history and art theory, which were united in interpretation.37 Following
Mannheim, Panofsky suggested that by correlating different areas of cul-
ture one could attain a synthetic view of a single or several cultures-
that is, theoretical concepts could be compared with real objects to arrive
at immanent meaning.
In this essay of 1925, Panofsky reached a crossroad. Kunstwollen was
no longer purely a priori and transcendent, although he continued to
claim it was. Rather, Kunstwollen was now synonymous with interpreta-
tion, which united the theoretical and historical studies of art. The Pan-
dora's box of interpretation was open.
Why did Panofsky move from a transcendental philosophical defense
of Kunstwollen to a half-hearted rebuttal of arguments against it and an
increasing integration of those nasty empirical facts of art history? His
own art historical work tells the story.
Panofsky's dissertation was entitled "Diirer's Theory of Art, Particu-
larly in Relation to the Art Theory of the Italians."38It was published in
1915, after it was awarded the Grimm Prize at Berlin University. The topic
was not conceived by Panofsky but by the Grimm Committee, most likely by
Heinrich Wolfflin.39At the same time, Panofsky published the 1915 article
on W61fflin, an article on Leon Baptista Alberti's perspective that was the
first to interpret perspective construction, and an assortment of articles on
36. See Riegl, SpdtriimischeKunstindustrie, and W6lfflin, Principles of Art History and
Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Katherine Simon (1888; Ithaca, N.Y., 1966).
37. This became a central argument in Panofsky's 1940 essay "The History of Art as a
Humanistic Discipline," in Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955; Chicago, 1982); see esp.
pp. 21-22.
38. See Panofsky, Diirers Kunsttheorie, vornehmlichin ihrem Verhdltniszur Kunsttheorie
der Italiener (Berlin, 1915).
39. In a letter to Jan Bialostocki, 8 Nov. 1970, Gerda Panofsky explained the circum-
stances of the award of the Grimm Prize (as in the brothers Grimm) to Panofsky. It came
from the Grimm Stiftung at Berlin University, in honor of the best dissertation. It com-
memorated the seven professors at G6ttingen University who protested the dissolution of
the constitution in 1837 by the new King of Hannover. The topic of 1911 was probably for-
mulated by W61lfflin,who left Berlin University in 1912. W6lfflin reviewed Panofsky's dis-
sertation in Monatsheftefiir Kunstwissenschaft8 (1915): 254-55.
medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque themes.40 The newly founded Ham-

burg University recruited Panofsky in 1920, through Gustav Pauli who was
director of Hamburg's Kunsthalle.4' In 1920, the year of his arrival in
Hamburg, Panofsky began a series of studies all very similar in method on
the subjects of proportion, perspective, devoted images, and the concept of
idea, among others.42 The pattern in all these studies was to isolate one
motif out of the manifold possibilities-motifs like proportional schemas,
spatial depictions, classical themes, or a concept like idea-and attempt to
understand its particular meaning (as opposed to focussing solely on
appearance) in a given time frame that would provide an idea of the artistic
intention realized in all artistic creations in a given period. By comparing
these meanings across periods, one could chart historical developments.
Each new generation of artists utilized these motifs in a new way, transform-
ing the meaning to suit a new worldview. Panofsky took particular delight in
finding these often bizarre transformations. In most of these studies, he
used texts contemporary with the images to elucidate the artistic problem.
None of these studies were based purely on Riegl's theory of art nor on
Panofsky's 1925 exposition that juxtaposed theory and practice with only a
tentative union between them. There was clearly a disjunction between
Panofsky's theory and his actual method.
In 1931, Panofsky wrote his mentor, Wilhelm Vige, "At the corner
where we attain the meeting of the tradition of words and the tradition of
images, and with the simultaneous use of a method of historical types and
philological methods a definite form of iconological knowledge can be
40. See Panofsky, "Das perspektivische Verfahren Leone Battista Albertis,"

Kunstchronik, 6 Aug. 1915, pp. 504-16. See the bibliography in Panofsky's Aufsdtze zu
Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaftfor a listing of these essays.
41. In a letter to Magdalene Pauli, wife of Gustav Pauli, 8 Mar. 1955, Panofsky stated
that he and Dora intended to dedicate their book Pandora's Box to Gustav Pauli: "Denn wir
haben nie vergessen, dass er es war, dar einen damals ganz unbekanntenjungen Mann nach
Hamburg einlud, ihn von Anfang bis zu Ende in Treue und Freundschaft f6rderte." Pauli
tried to convince Panofsky to stay in Hamburg after the 1933 law that excluded Jews from
the universities was enacted.
42. These are the Panofsky works, cited in full: "Die Entwicklung der Propor-
tionslehre als Abbild der Stilentwicklung," Monatsheftefir Kunstwissenschaft 14 (1921):
188-219; Diirers Stellung zur Antike(Vienna, 1922) (Panofsky translated the first two essays,
and they were published as "The History of the Theory of Human Proportions as a Reflec-
tion of the History of Styles" and "Albrecht Diirer and Classical Antiquity," Meaning in the
Visual Arts, pp. 55-107, 236-94); with Fritz Saxl, Diirers "MelencoliaI": eine quellen- und
typengeschichtlicheUntersuchung (Leipzig, 1923); "Die Perspektive als 'symbolische Form,' "
Vortrdgeder Bibliothek Warburg (Leipzig, 1924-25), pp. 258-330; "'Imago Pietatis': ein
Beitrag zur Typengeschichte des 'Schmerzensmannes' und der 'Maria Mediatrix,"'
Festschriftfiir Max J. Friedlinder zum 60. Geburtstage(Leipzig, 1927), pp. 261-308; with
Saxl, "A Late Antique Religious Symbol in Works by Holbein and Titian," Burlington Maga-
zine 49 (Oct. 1926): 177-81; and Hercules am Scheidewegeund andere antike Bildstoffein der
neueren Kunst (Leipzig, 1930).
won."43 He gave equal status to images and words, always seeking meaning
in the transformations of a motif over time and relating it to a synoptic
whole. Without doubt, Panofsky practiced iconology long before he
preached it.
In 1932, Panofsky published an article in Logos entitled "Concerning
the Problem of Description and Interpretation of Meaning in Works of
the Fine Arts." The basic content of it, more lucidly organized, appeared
in 1939 in English as his introduction to Studies in Iconology, and was
reprinted with minor changes in 1955 as "Iconography and Iconology: An
Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art."44The last formulation of
iconography and iconology appeared in 1940 in "The History of Art as a
Humanistic Discipline." In these three essays, the subject of inquiry was
the interpretation of works of art. Panofsky described three interrelated
levels of interpretation: a description of forms derived from the
interpreter's practical experience that was to be corrected against the his-
tory of style; a secondary analysis of subject matter that required knowl-
edge of literary sources and was corrected by a history of types; and an
iconological synthesis of the content, requiring "synthetic intuition" or
knowledge of worldviews and corrected by a history of cultural symptoms
or symbols.45 He stressed that the three levels "refer in reality to aspects of
one phenomenon, namely, the work of art as a whole. So that, in actual
work, the methods of approach which here appear as three unrelated
operations of research merge with each other into one organic and indi-
visible process."46 Mannheim also stressed the interlocking unity of the
three theoretical levels.
Not only were all three operations unified, but each presupposed a
knowledge of the others. Panofsky used this example: an art historian
finds a contract for an altarpiece, finds records of payment for the work,
and an altarpiece in situ that corresponds to the description in the con-
tract. The historian must inquire about the authenticity of all three pieces
of evidence. In order to validate each one, the investigator must already
know what must be checked, such as the date of the script used in the con-
43. Panofsky, letter to Wilhelm V6ge, 6 Jan. 1931. The letter reads, "die Ecke, wo das
Zusammentreffen von Worttradition und Bildiiberlieferung uns erreicht, und durch die
gleichzeitige Anwendung typengeschichtlicher und philologischer Methoden eine
bestimmte Form 'ikonologischer' Erkenntnisse gewonnen werden kann." Panofsky stated
that V6ge was the one who invented this approach and Panofsky was a mere follower. I
thank Peter Boerner for his help with my transcription.
44. See Panofsky, "Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken
der bildenden Kunst," Logos 21 (1932): 103-19; repr. in Aufsiitze zu Grundfragen der
Kunstwissenschaft,pp. 85-97. See also Panofsky, "Iconography and Iconology: An Intro-
duction to the Study of Renaissance Art," Meaning in the Visual Arts, pp. 26-54.
45. See the tables that Panofsky constructed for his essays of 1932 and 1939 (tables 2
and 3). The table for the 1932 essay in Logosstill contains the philosophical verbiage of the
earlier work: "vitale Daseinserfahrung," "phainomensinn," and "Wesenssinn."
46. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, pp. 16-17.
tract, formal or iconographical oddities in the altarpiece. Thus, "the

beginning of our investigation always seems to presuppose the end." "We
cannot analyze what we do not understand."47 Historical interpretation is
a circular process-a methodological circle, not a vicious one. You may
recall that he asserted it was a vicious circle in the essay on Kunstwollen
because he had not yet considered independent correctives to verify the
interpretation.
Panofsky cited Mannheim in the first of his iconology papers of 1932.
He credited Mannheim as the source for his third level of interpretation,
the "documentary meaning," which Mannheim had derived partially from
Panofsky's own interpretation of Riegl's Kunstwollen.48Panofsky adopted
far more from Mannheim's theory of interpretation than he credited to
him. However, Panofsky codified Mannheim's three levels of interpreta-
tion in a far more systematic manner, suggesting the way one could vali-
date an interpretation using correctives and without referring to causal
explanations. Using Mannheim's model, Panofsky was able to shed the
overly philosophical and obscure verbiage of his earlier theory, to make it
a useful construct (tables 1-3 reveal the increasing clarity of his theory).
Panofsky's most striking adaptation from Mannheim's essay was the little
scene of the street encounter.
At last Panofsky characterized a theory that was consonant with his
actual practice, and he never theorized again.49 The interpretive theory
Panofsky delineated was, like Mannheim's, that of hermeneutics.
Hermeneutics was that part of philology concerned with the interpreta-
tion of texts. Panofsky often referred to himself as a "frustrated philolo-
gist" or "philologist after the fact."50 When Leo Spitzer, the renowned
philologist, received his copy of Panofsky's Meaning in the Visual Arts in
which the last two of the three iconology articles appeared, he sent
47. Panofsky, "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline," Meaning in the Visual
Arts, p. 9.
48. Mannheim remarked in a note that Panofsky's "analysis of Riegl's concept of the
'art motive' shows a clear understanding of what is here defined as documentary meaning"
("IW," p. 33).
49. In his correspondence, Panofsky would respond to questions about iconology, but
he increasingly refused to be concerned with theoretical questions. He asserted to all who
inquired that, with advancing age, he was unable to concentrate on such problems.
50. One among many such references in Panofsky's correspondence is in a letter to
Dr. Erich Hubala, 27 Jan. 1966: "The only thing which slightly disturbed a would-be philol-
ogist is the spelling 'Perystil.'" This letter is also interesting for Panofsky's reminiscence
about his life in Berlin from 1900 to 1920. Hubala sent him an article about the Berlin
Imperial Castle, and Panofsky recalled that "the family bank" of Eugen Panofsky was
located in "a big ugly building right opposite the Castle."
Panofsky wrote to Booth Tarkington about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "the
very style of his speeches and writings, as it hits the ear of an old philologist, seems to reveal
a genuinely humanistic attitude" (Dr. Panofsky and Mr. Tarkington:An Exchange of Letters,
1938-1946, ed. Richard M. Ludwig, [Princeton, N.J., 1974], p. 58).
Panofsky a note saying "you should have called the book 'Philology and
the Visual Arts.' "51Spitzer subscribed to a hermeneutic method also, and
must have been surprised to see how little Panofsky's method differed
from his own. Anyone educated in Germany prior to World War I would
have studied philology in depth.52 Panofsky testified to his love of his
teachers of Latin and Greek, recalling that they were both renowned
scholars in their own right, although they taught in the high school, and
both demanded literal translations of texts, which Panofsky also pre-
ferred.53 But most of all, he said he learned "method" from them, and that
method was hermeneutics.
For Panofsky, as for Mannheim, the hermeneutic circle was unavoida-
ble; there had to be an interaction between the whole and part by which
each gave the other meaning, a kind of gestalt thought process. He called
this an "organic situation."54 He extended the organic situation, or meth-
odological circle, beyond a given problem like the authenticity of the altar-
piece, to the interpenetration of the subjective and objective (or purely
archaeological) in art history, and finally to all knowledge, in both the sci-
ences and humanities. Antinomies could be resolved.
But the art historian parted company with the scientist when it came
to reconstructing all three stages of the circle, which could be done only
by the historian's reenactment or recreation of the work, its Erlebnis.
Panofsky gave special emphasis to this term by leaving it in German in his
English text.55 Dilthey used the word Erlebnis to refer to this re-
experiencing of the original conditions of a historical subject.56 Panofsky
insisted that not only was this mental act the only way to retrieve meaning,
but also the reconstruction must conform with empirical, archaeological
research and vice versa, in a historical synthesis or methodological circle.
Obviously, the more information one has about all levels of the recon-
struction, the better the interpretation and the more synthetic it will be.
Panofsky and Mannheim were not the only scholars to propose a her-
meneutic method for the cultural studies in the twentieth century. The
path they took was very similar to that of others. When philosophers, like
Dilthey, realized that psychology was not capable of providing a basis, a
51. Leo Spitzer, letter to Panofsky, 12 Oct. 1955.

52. See Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, chaps. 1 and 2.
53. Panofsky, letter to H. D. Schmidt, 17 Apr. 1961. Panofsky explained that he
attended the Joachimsthal Gymnasium and Carl Bardt taught him Latin. Panofsky
referred to his Latin and Greek instruction in "Three Decades of Art History in the United
States: Impressions of a Transplanted European," Meaning in the Visual Arts, pp. 343-44.
Adequate preparation in humanistic studies still meant to Panofsky diligent, in-depth
instruction in Latin and Greek.
54. Panofsky, "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline," Meaning in the Visual
Arts, p. 16.
55. See ibid., p. 15.
56. See Gadamer, Truth and Method. Gadamer provides an interesting discussion of
Dilthey's supposed coinage of Erlebnis and its consequences.
Table 1
Panofsky's First Schematization of an Interpretive Strategy, 1925
Specific oppositions within the phenomenal
and particularly the visual sphere
General General
antithesis antithesis
within the (1) Opposition (2) Opposition (3) Opposition within the
ontological of elementary of figurative of composition methodological
sphere values values values sphere
"Fullness" "Optical values" "depth values" "values of "Time"

versus (open space) versus interlocking" versus
"Form" versus "planar values" (fusion) "Space"
"haptic values" versus
(body) "values of
juxtaposition"
(separation)
Spezifische Gegensaitzeinnerhalb der

phainomenalen und zwar visuellen Sphlire
Allgemeine Allgemeine
Antithetik Antithetik
innerhalb der (1) Gegensatz (2) Gegensatz (3) Gegensatz innerhalb der
ontologischen der der der methodologischen
Sph~ire Elementarwerte Figurationswerte Kompositionswerte Sphaire
Die "Fulle" Die "optischen" Die Die "Werte des Die "Zeit"
steht gegeniiber Werte "Tiefenwerte" Ineinander" steht gegeniiber
der "Form" (Freiraum) stehen (Verschmelzung) dem "Raum"
stehen gegeniiber den gegeniiber den
gegeniiber den "Flichenwerten" "Werten des
"haptischen" Nebeneinander"
Werten (Zerteilung)
(K6rper)
Source: "Uber das Verh~iltnisder Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie,"in Aufsiitzezu Grundfragen

der Kunstwissenschaft,p. 51.
foundational science, for the cultural studies, then the traditional method
of studying the contents of the mind-hermeneutics-became salient
again. Husserl was influential in establishing the ground for this develop-
ment, devoting half of his Logical Investigations(1900) to refuting psycho-
logism, although he was not a hermeneuticist. Dilthey and others were
convinced by his arguments against psychologism. Dilthey realized that
psychology itself has a history and cannot provide a foundation for
history.57 As Mannheim noted, Dilthey was extremely influential in
establishing hermeneutics as the foundation for studying the humanities,
beginning with his early, monumental biography of Schleiermacher, an
early hermeneuticist. Even the most prominent psychologist in Ger-
many-Wilhelm Wundt-added the "historical-psychological" method of
hermeneutic understanding to his methods for overcoming the introspec-
tionist's dilemma: How do I understand my own thought processes?58
Wundt admitted that psychology reached its limit for explanation or
understanding just at the point when it was most needed. Closer to Ham-
burg, the participants in the Warburg circle were engaged in these issues.
Edgar Wind, the first doctoral student of Panofsky and Cassirer at Ham-
burg University, wrote a number of essays, including his Habilitations-
schrift,justifying hermeneutics by arguing that the circle of understanding
was not "vicious" but a methodological necessity.59 Panofsky often
referred to Wind's work in his articles on iconology. Fritz Saxl, who
avoided discussions of theory, must have intuitively agreed with the
57. See Dilthey, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichenWelt in den Geisteswissenschaften(1910),

GesammelteSchriften, 12 vols. (Stuttgart, 1957-60), 7: 143-44, 200. Dilthey did not com-
pletely eliminate psychology from his theory, but hermeneutics became the means of under-
standing and, because it is a theory that has no unquestionable "ground," it became the basis
for rethinking the nature of cultural studies. Michael Ermarth, WilhelmDilthey:TheCritiqueof
Historical Reason (Chicago, 1978), pp. 232-45, is an excellent source for understanding this
change in Dilthey's construct. Dilthey was not alone in being influenced by Husserl. Max
Weber's early theoretical writings were also influenced by Husserl. Even in Roscherand Knies,
Weber offered a synthesis of hermeneutics and empiricism, while rejecting psychologism
(the view that all critical problems in philosophy could be resolved by psychology).
Mannheim followed Weber's approach, and sociology has probably been more affected by
this solution than any of the other social sciences. Panofsky's path was not unique.
58. Wilhelm Wundt, Logik, 3 vols. (Stuttgart, 1906-8), 3: 8, 164-69. See Ermarth,
Wilhelm Dilthey, p. 212; Ermarth recognized the similarity of Wundt's late theorizing to
Dilthey's hermeneutics.
59. See Edgar Wind, "Aesthetischer und kunstwissenschaftlicher Gegenstand: ein
Beitrag zur Methodologie der Kunstgeschichte" (Ph. D. diss., Hamburg University, 1924).
Part of the dissertation appeared as "Zur Systematik der kiinstlerischen Probleme,"
Zeitschriftfiir Aesthetikund allgemeineKunstwissenschaft18 (1925): 438-86. The dissertation
was never published in full, due to the inflation in Germany at the time, but a full version
can be found in the Hamburg University Library. Wind's Habilitationsschriftwas Das Experi-
ment und die Metaphysik:zur Aufli'sung der kosmologischenAntinomien (Tiibingen, 1934).
According to a letter from Wind to William Heckscher, 3 Nov. 1968, Wind studied with
Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg before 1920. (Access to this letter was granted by the
kind permission of Margaret Wind.)
Table 2
Panofsky's Second Schematization of an Interpretive Strategy, 1932
Object of Subjective Sources Objective Correctives
Interpretation of Interpretation of Interpretation
1. Phenomenon sense Vital experience of History of formal configu-

(divide into factual existence rations (sum of repre-
and expressive senses) sentational possibilities)
2. Meaning sense Literary knowledge History of types (including

imaginative possibilities)
3. Documentary sense Original condition of General history of ideas

worldview (including ideological
possibilities)
Gegenstand der Subjektive Quelle der Objectives Korrective der

Interpretation Interpretation Interpretation
1. Phainomensinn (zu Vitale Daseinserfahrung Gestaltungsgeschichte

teilen in Sach- und (Inbegriff des Darstel-
Ausdrucksinn) lungsmiglichen)
2. Bedeutungssinn Literarisches Wissen Typengeschichte (Inbegriff

des Vorstellungs-
m6glichen)
3. Dokumentsinn Weltanschauliches Allgemeine Geistes-

(Wesenssinn) Urverhalten geschichte (Inbegriff des
weltanschaulich
Miglichen)
Source: "Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden
Kunst," in Aufsdtze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft,p. 95.
Table 3
Panofsky's Final Schematization of an Interpretive Strateg
OBJECT OF ACT OF EQUIPMENT FOR
INTERPRETATION INTERPRETATION INTERPRETATION
I-Primary or natural subject Pre-iconographical description (and Practical experience (familiar

matter-(A) factual, pseudo-formal analysis). with objects and events).
(B) expressional-, constituting
the world of artistic motifs.
II-Secondary or conventional sub- Iconographical analysis in the nar- Knowledge of literary sources
ject matter, constituting the rower sense of the word. (familiarity with specific
world of images, stories and and concepts).
allegories.
III-Intrinsic meaning or content, Iconographical interpretation in a Synthetic intuition (familiar

constituting the world of deeper sense (Iconographical with the essential tendenc
'symbolical'values. synthesis). the human mind), conditio
by personal psychology a
'Weltenschauung.'
Source: Panofsky, Studies in Iconology:Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939; New Y
method, for his collaborative work with Panofsky produced iconological

interpretations. Cassirer has often been viewed as a source of Panofsky's
thought, and he, too, perhaps after the others, pointed out that "the rules
of semantics, not the laws of nature, are the general principles of historical
thought. History is included in the field of hermeneutics, not in that of
natural science."60
What were Mannheim's and Panofsky's reasons for adopting this phi-
lological method? Consider the ecology of the German university system
in the 1920s, which predisposed them to this method. Both sociology and
art history were still consolidating their professional statuses and inde-
pendence. Weber had given his imprimatur to a quasi-hermeneutic
method. Panofsky could build on several theories in art history, each of
which had potential, but none was a totalizing interpretive schema. Thus,
at this stage of professionalization, Mannheim and Panofsky could still
make their mark by creating innovative theories. Philology was the most
valued and privileged discipline in Germany. Unlike the situation in
America or England, in Germany the humanities were more highly
esteemed than the natural sciences. Jeffrey Herf has shown in Reactionary
Modernism that German academic engineers throughout the Weimar
Republic and until the end of the Third Reich attempted to acquire the
high status of the humanities, not the natural sciences, by using its lan-
guage and ideas.6' Thus, by developing and refining the philological
method for use in their disciplines, Mannheim and Panofsky could appro-
priate its aura and prestige. This adoption would make these newer disci-
plines more credible to the established groups in academia.
The cash value for selecting this strategy was very high. Mannheim
began teaching at Heidelberg, one of the most prestigious universities in
Germany, and received the only full professorship in sociology in Ger-
many when he went to Frankfurt University in 1930.62 He was one of the
very few Social Democrats teaching at a university in Germany. At Ham-
burg University, Panofsky became a full professor very rapidly and
attracted the most brilliant students in art history.63
60. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophyof Human Culture

(New Haven, Conn., 1944), p. 195. The influence may actually be reversed. Panofsky may
have influenced Cassirer.
Freud's psychoanalytic method also presumes an ongoing and open-ended dialogue
between the analyst and the analysand, a method that Habermas celebrated as
hermeneutic, although neither Mannheim nor Panofsky recognized it as such. See
Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, chap. 10.
61. See Herf, Reactionary Modernism, chap. 7.
62. See Simonds, Karl Mannheim's Sociology of Knowledge, pp. 4-5.
63. See Panofsky, "Three Decades of Art History in the United States," p. 336n.
Panofsky joined the faculty of Hamburg University in 1920 as a Privatdozent (non-civil ser-
vant, unsalaried position, paid through student fees) and became a professor in 1926. Soon
after his arrival at Hamburg, Panofsky was in the unusual position of being director of the
art historical seminar (a position usually held by a professor), by which means he paid him-
The seeming unconsciousness of their appropriation of hermeneutics

is a puzzle. Why did neither Mannheim nor Panofsky simply state the
nature of their theory instead of reinventing the wheel? Weber had
been very self-conscious in creating a method that balanced the scientific
method with hermeneutics. Despite the great prestige of philology and
the cultural studies, there was a lingering doubt that they should acquire
the methods of the natural sciences. Both Mannheim and Panofsky
wanted to avoid using the scientific method.64 They hoped to eliminate
any doubts about their interpretive strategy by using correctives outside
the object of interpretation to validate it. They rejected the scientific
grounding that earlier theorists had thought was essential. Perhaps the
prestige of philology was so great that stating that their method was
hermeneutics would have been unnecessary. However, neither Mannheim
nor Panofsky ever stated that their theory was equivalent to hermeneutics.
Panofsky did not synthesize all the elements of his theory until the 1930s,
and the conflict between maintaining some vestige of his earlier Rieglian
project and the new theory of Mannheim was present until 1932, and
probably longer, when he was no longer in the same cultural matrix or tra-
dition, but in Princeton.65
The goal of the theories concerning Kunstwollenand weltanschauung
was a totalizing, harmonizing, and comprehensive whole, unified in mean-
ing. These aims resembled God. In discussing their theories, Mannheim
and Panofsky produced images of an organic, self-contained universe
laden with meaning. That both men adopted hermeneutics to attain this
godlike totalizing whole is not surprising, since hermeneutics was devel-
self, as lecturer, a salary. From 1921 on, he was courted by other universities, and Gustav
Pauli and other friends continually urged the Hamburg University administration to make
him a professor before they lost him (Hochschulwesen Dozenten und Personalakten IV
1204, Staatsarchiv Hamburg).
64. I am referring only to Mannheim's 1923 "On the Interpretation of Weltan-
schauung" essay. Later, in Ideologyand Utopia, Mannheim attempted to harmonize science
and the circle of understanding.
65. Robert Klein, "Thoughts on Iconography" (1963), Formand Meaning: Essays on the
Renaissance and Modern Art, trans. Madeline Jay and Leon Wieseltier (Princeton, N.J.,
1979), pp. 143-60. Klein's essay is very interesting and very critical of the hierarchical
structure of Panofsky's iconology. Klein constantly refers to the hermeneutic nature of
iconology. He concludes his essay with three central paradoxes in iconology: "understand-
ing" [Verstehen]results in objectification, objectification annuls understanding, and the
understanding of history is itself historical. (One might ask what kind of objectification?)
Panofsky and Klein were friends, and Panofsky read the article (in 1963 when it was first
published) and commented favorably in a letter to Klein. However, even in this response he
never used the word hermeneutics,and I have not found the word in any of his letters or writ-
ings to date. Panofsky wrote to Klein, "I feel both honored and slightly embarrassed by the
fact that I seem to have reached the stage of being commented upon instead of comment-
ing, and have learned to understand myself better in the light of your brilliant and, on the
whole, affirmative exegesis" (17 Feb. 1964).
oped for the exegesis of biblical texts in the seventeenth century. It was
used to validate a universal, organic, and synoptic interpretation of God.
The fact that two assimilated Jewish scholars used this particular method
for those ends is evidence of the need for something akin to God in their
secular cultural environment.66
Both Panofsky and Mannheim were optimistic that the forms and val-
ues of the liberal culture they inherited from the past could invigorate
their age. They rejected the younger avant-garde and clung stubbornly to
the values of the past. As late as 1936, in exile, Mannheim could still write
to his friend Oskir Jaszi: "we are both at our roots 'liberals,' but you
attempt to fly in the face of our age with noble defiance, whereas I, as a
sociologist, would like to divine the secret springs of the age (even if these
springs are diabolical); for I believe this is the only way that we can prevent
the social structure of the new age from gaining ascendancy over us and to
try to make sure that we gain ascendancy over it" (quoted in GLG, pp.
218-19). This liberal faith remained with Mannheim in emigration, and
also with Panofsky.67
66. It is significant that they were assimilated Central European Jews and, therefore,
were not religious but may still have been seeking some other form of transcendence. In
GermanJews beyondJudaism, George Mosse has identified German Jewry as predominantly
Enlightenment in ideology. From the early nineteenth century, the German academy
embraced hermeneutics in the field of philology but never wed it exclusively to the inter-
pretation of the classics, for it maintained its association to religious understanding.
Mannheim and Panofsky seem to have synthesized again a quasi-religious, quasi-classical
formulation of hermeneutics.
The question of how inclusive these ideas of totality are and their precise nature is not
fully explained by Panofsky and Mannheim. Mannheim seems to want to include more than
Panofsky in his holistic theory. Panofsky appears to navigate between a holistic theory and a
cultural holism associated with historicism. Martin Jay has exhaustively explored varieties
of totality in Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Conceptfrom Lukacs to Habermas
(Berkeley, 1984). However, it is difficult to decide, as Jay occasionally admits, the degree of
holism intended, even in extensive Western Marxist tracts. How short a theory of totality
falls of Hegel's Absolute Spirit can be difficult to pin down.
67. It is difficult to assess this liberal optimism in the wake of World War I. One can see
it in the work ofJohn Dewey, also. In Germany, academics might have been encouraged by
the ending of Kaiser Wilhelm II's reign and his tight control over the universities. Perhaps
the rise of the Social Democrats was in itself encouraging, despite the chaos and political
assassinations. Mannheim was a Social Democrat. Panofsky's allegiance is not as clear. His
son Wolfgang stated in an interview (Mar. 1988) that his father had supported the Weimar
democracy and had informed his sons in Germany of the greatness of the legitimately
elected governments. In a questionnaire on file in the Archiv zur Wissenschaftsemigration
in der Kunstgeschichte, Hamburg, Wolfgang Panofsky answered that his father was an
unofficial socialist.
This liberal faith was the basis for Theodor Adorno's tendentious critiques of
Mannheim's sociology of knowledge. See Theodor W. Adorno, "The Sociology of Knowl-
edge and Its Consciousness" (1953), Prisms (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 35-50. Adorno's
criticism was directed at Mannheim's later book, Man and Societyin an Age ofReconstruction:
Studies in Modern Social Structure (London, 1940), which was an enlarged revision of the
1935 book in German. Adorno is correct in perceiving the mix of positivism and circular
The Fate of Their Theories in Exile
The theory Panofsky elaborated became the mainstay of the growing

discipline in America in the postwar period, when Americans were eager
to learn from their prestigious European counterparts, who had emi-
grated to escape persecution.
Art history in the United States before the emigration in the 1930s
was a small field, and the prestigious figures in it were often the indepen-
dently wealthy WASP cliche, with the notable exception of the young
Meyer Schapiro at Columbia.68 This is not to say that these were not schol-
arly men, only to note how much the demographics of the discipline has
changed. Women, though often-then as now-interested students of art
history, were systematically excluded from professorships, although a
number held prestigious museum appointments. Foreigners and Jews, on
the other hand, were largely unrepresented. Panofsky recorded his aston-
ishment when the Boston Museum of Fine Arts appointed as head of deco-
rative arts Georg Swarzenski, who had been director of the Frankfurt
Stfdel Museum for thirty years, and his son Hanns Swarzenski to the
Department of Painting, because foreigners in general, Jewish or not, sim-
ply were not considered for museum positions.69
In 1930, Panofsky was recruited for the fledgling department at New
York University and, in 1931, he began spending half a year in New York
and half a year at Hamburg University where he was a full professor.70
thinking in the argument of the book, which was evidence of the compromise Mannheim
was attempting to make between his German roots and the sociology of England, his
adopted country. Adorno states that "the liberal, who sees no way out, makes himself the
spokesman of a dictatorial arrangement of society even while he imagines he is opposing it"
(p. 48). Martin Jay provides an interesting critique of Adorno's analysis in "The Frankfurt
School's Critique of Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Knowledge," Permanent Exiles:
Essays on the Intellectual Migrationfrom Germanyto America(New York, 1985), pp. 62-78. Jay
turns Adorno's criticism around and notes that Adorno failed to understand Mannheim's
challenge: "what is the Archimedean point in which a true consciousness can be said to be
grounded?" (p. 72). This takes us back to Dilthey's and Husserl's dilemma in the first dec-
ade of the twentieth century.
68. Panofsky described American art history in rosier hues in "Three Decades
of Art History in the United States," but in his personal correspondence he was far
more critical.
69. Panofsky, letter to Hanns Swarzenski, 4 Apr. 1949: "it is a tremendous distinction
for an emigrant scholar to be offered a permanent position at an American museum of the
rank of the M.F.A. at Boston." There are several other statements to this effect in
Panofsky's correspondence.
70. Richard Offner, letter to Panofsky, 13 Dec. 1930, wherein Offner invited Panofsky
to teach in the graduate division of the College of Fine Arts at NYU. Panofsky told the
Hamburg Hochschulbeh6rde that he needed a leave since he had just turned down an offer
at Heidelberg University, and he wanted to take the U.S. position. Senator Chapeaurouge
of the Hamburg Assembly asked the Hochschulbeh6rde to deny Panofsky's leave for fear
When he was dismissed from the university at Hamburg in 1933 by the

Nazis, he decided to emigrate and his family moved in 1934.71 In 1935,
the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton invited Panofsky to become
one of its original members. Thus Panofsky, by virtue of his incredible
scholarship and extreme good fortune, was placed in a position to ensure
the future of his own work and that of his colleagues and students. He
helped (among others) his professor from Freiburg University, Walter
Friedlaender, come to teach at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU, as well as
Karl Lehmann, the classical archaeologist. His German and American
students read like a who's who in the discipline: Peter Janson, Adolf
Katzenellenbogen, Walter Horn, Hugo Buchthal, Ludwig Heydenreich,
Marilyn and Irving Lavin, George Kubler, Edgar Wind, Frederick
Hartt, William Heckscher, Colin Eisler, and Lotte Brand-Philip, among
many others.
Karl Mannheim, like Panofsky, was fortunate again in his second jour-
ney into exile, which took him to England in 1933 to lecture on sociology
at the London School of Economics.72 Mannheim's strategy of adaptation
to this new cultural matrix was more startling than Panofsky's. His pub-
lished work changed dramatically after 1933. His earlier epistemological
concerns in the sociology of knowledge receded, and pragmatic problems
of social planning and reform in the liberal state took precedence. One
can ascribe this shift in his research to a sense of urgency in the need to
that they would lose their best professor (Hochschulwesen Dozenten und Personalakten IV
1204, Staatsarchiv Hamburg).
71. See Panofsky, "Three Decades of Art History in the United States," pp. 321-22.
Shortly after taking power in 1933, the Nazis instituted a law for the purification of the
civil service, the Wiederherstellungdes Berufsbeamtentums.They sent a questionnaire to all
civil servants, which included all professors at German universities, to discover their
"racial"origins. On the basis of the 7 April 1933 questionnaire, mostJews and political and
cultural dissidents were immediately fired. Even in liberal Hamburg, the law took immedi-
ate effect. Most astonishing is the fact that two museum directors in Hamburg with "pure"
Aryan roots-Gustav Pauli of the Kunsthalle and Max Sauerlandt of the Museum of Arts
and Crafts-were also immediately fired. Their "impurity" resulted from collecting mod-
ern art.
There are some remarkable letters in the Panofsky Papers between Panofsky and
Pauli, Udo von Alvensleben (an aristocratic friend and student of Panofsky), and Peter von
Blanckenhagen (a student and later classical archaeologist), during the period of 1933-34
when Panofsky was in the process of leaving Germany. Von Blanckenhagen was one of the
few students who wrote to Panofsky when he read the newspaper in April 1933 and learned
of Panofsky's dismissal from the university. It is a moving document, for he explained to
Panofsky that not all Germans support Hitler and that resistance is bound to result. Von
Alvensleben saw the immediate danger and offered sanctuary to Dora Panofsky and their
sons (Panofsky was already in the United States). Pauli tried to convince Panofsky to stay,
and in these letters Panofsky explained his reasons for leaving.
72. See Simonds, Karl Mannheim's Sociology of Knowledge, pp. 5-6, and Gunter W.
Remmling, The Sociology of Karl Mannheim (London, 1975), pp. 83-103.
reform society, resulting from his direct experience of the German disas-
ter.73 The Anglo-American tradition of social science was positivist, and
Mannheim courted acceptance in his new environment. He succeeded. In
1946 he accepted a position in the Institute of Education at the University
of London, where he could pursue his interest in the development of pub-
lic education. He took the position of director of European UNESCO
prior to his death in 1947.
Panofsky had to make a different kind of adjustment in America.
The natural sciences, particularly physics, were the status disciplines in
America, not the humanities. (Panofsky's two sons became scientists.)
The humanities were largely nontheoretical, even antitheoretical.
Panofsky's work, even when he did not discuss theory, was initially diffi-
cult for American art historians to understand.74 There was no tradition
in the United States comparable to that which had existed in Europe.
Panofsky set about recreating the European tradition in the U.S. insofar
as he could, but he proceeded cautiously, with charm, and by demon-
strating the usefulness of iconology, not through theorizing about it. He
left his legacy through his students and his publications. His later pub-
lished works were devoid of the philosophical jargon and difficult con-
struction of his earlier work. He believed that it was in learning English
73. Remmling believed that Mannheim's direction changed in England as a result of

the need to adapt to the new academic philosophy and his own desire to transform society.
This is a kinder interpretation than Simonds gave. Paul Kecskemeti, in his introduction to
Mannheim's Essays on Sociology and Social Psychology, ed. Kecskemeti (London, 1953),
assigned great importance to the idea of "structure" in Mannheim's early work: "underly-
ing this concept of structure was, then, a metaphysical, quasi-religious belief in the creative
function of history" (p. 1). According to Kecskemeti, totalitarianism broke the spell of his-
tory for Mannheim. Harmonizing structure could no longer be explained. Kecskemeti
ascribed the change in Mannheim's work in England to the Nazi experience and the atmo-
sphere of academic life in Britain, which he described as "far less Olympian and inbred"
and in which sociology was a new and less important field. Mannheim drew on Freudian
theory to develop ideas on social planning in his last works.
74. Panofsky admitted in a letter to Monsieur le Chevalier Guy de Schoutheete de
Tervarent, a diplomat and iconographer (17 Feb. 1966), that Studies in Iconology could
safely be entitled "Studies in Iconography":
When it was published the very term "iconology," as yet unknown in America, proved
to be puzzling to certain colleagues and one of them (the late-lamented Henry Francis
Taylor, the Director of the Metropolitan Museum) became so angry that he made me
personally responsible for the rise of Hitler, saying that it was small wonder that stu-
dents "confronted with this kind of incomprehensible and useless investigation, turned
to National Socialism in despair." He, of course, had never heard of Ripa and his fol-
lowing; nor had he ever thought of the difference between iconology and iconography
as it was understood before what may be called the iconological revolution. He
repented, however, in the end; and now, I am afraid, things have come to the point
where iconology has entered a kind of Mannerist phase which evidences both the suc-
cesses and the dangers of what we all have been trying to do during the last few
decades.
Taylor's letter of repentance is preserved, undated, in the Panofsky Papers.
that this transformation occurred. More likely it was his adaptation to

the prevailing academic culture, which was permeated with scientism,
that led to this change in his style.75
Art history in America, until the arrival of the refugee scholars, was a
weak discipline, although there was a strong tradition in the archaeology
and analysis of medieval and classical art. Connoisseurship and apprecia-
tionism were probably the strongest currents in the discipline. Panofsky
and other refugee scholars were forced to come to terms with the indige-
nous tradition that they had previously scorned. Even as late as the late
1950s, one of Panofsky's students wrote to him in despair that she was
being forced to teach art history as though it were timeless because her
colleagues believed "historical methods are wrong and old-fashioned."
Her superiors insisted that "by discussing an artist as an integral part of his
time, I deny his 'free-will.' "76 Before she resigned, she asked Panofsky
what she should do. His answer was ajustification of historical methods:
It seems to me that just historical methods are the only ones that rec-
ognize the artist's free will whereas all nonhistorical methods-
whether psychological or, God forbid, aesthetic-always preestablish
absolute standards (mostly unbeknownst to the writers or speakers)
which tend to measure artistic achievements by the prejudices of the
speaker. In your further discussions you may remind your interlocu-
tors that with a very few exceptions no artist, however intense his
"human expression," was ever judged according to his merits. We all
know that the whole seventeenth century violently disapproved of "ce
fanfaron de Michelange," that Shakespeare and Rembrandt were
long considered to be barbarians, and that, conversely, such German
writers as Scheffler looked down upon Raphael as a producer of
picture postcards and accepted only what they thought was Gothic.
Thus, who are we to pass judgment on, or even to understand, the
works of art produced in an environment different from our own if
not by the application of historical methods?77
Although Panofsky's tone was even, he had, in fact, been more

involved in the fight against appreciationism than he admitted here, or in
"Three Decades of Art History," where he painted a rosy picture of Amer-
ican art history. Later he told his student that "it was, in fact, merely
because these diabolical tendencies began to get hold of the College Art
Association that I resigned from its board of directors. You and I (and, I
hope, a few others) will have to resign ourselves to the role of reactionaries
75. He admitted this link with the pervading atmosphere of positivism in "Three
Decades of Art History," p. 329: "it was a blessing for him [the emigrant] to come into
contact-and occasionally into conflict-with an Anglo-Saxon positivism."
76. Mirella Levi D'Ancona, letter to Panofsky, 10 Dec. 1959.
77. Panofsky, letter to D'Ancona, 15 Dec. 1959.
who, in the end, may yet prove to be ahead of the general swim."'"78 It
would be interesting to know more about the history of this "appreciation-
ism" that sounds like I. A. Richards's New Criticism applied to the visual
arts, that is, taking a text or work of art completely out of context to dis-
cuss its intrinsic meaning.79
While art appreciation courses are still taught, the historical method
of the emigrants dominates in art history programs today. The United
States became deprovincialized; students came from abroad to study here,
and European professors often came to teach here. This process has con-
tinued, although new theories from abroad have recently challenged the
older, entrenched theory of iconography.
Panofsky radically changed the discipline of art history in America.
From his central position at the Institute for Advanced Study, which he
made into his fiefdom, he exerted the greatest authority in the discipline
during his lifetime; he was cherished in this role. In Germany, Panofsky
and Mannheim could proceed along similar theoretical paths that privi-
leged the cultural sciences over the natural sciences. For Panofsky in the
United States, their common route culminated in the formulation of
iconology, an almost theological harmonizing of meaning in the visual
arts. With the emigration, Mannheim and Panofsky had to adjust to dif-
ferent ecological matrixes: Mannheim to the Anglo-American positivist
strain in the social sciences and Panofsky to the atheoretical, incipient art
history in America. Despite their later changes, it was their early theoreti-
cal work, in which they had cooperated, that ultimately had the greatest
impact in their new environments.80
78. Panofsky, letter to D'Ancona, 7 Oct. 1960.

79. Panofsky characterized appreciationism in "Three Decades of Art History," but it
would be worthwhile to consider its origins and protagonists. There are some suggestive
letters from Panofsky to Sumner Crosby, the Yale medievalist, during Panofsky's tenure as
a member of the College Art Association's board of directors (see, for example, the letter
of 2 June 1941). Wolfgang Panofsky informed me in a recent letter that his father was very
critical of art appreciation in Germany. Accordingly, Panofsky refused requests by art deal-
ers and collectors for statements of attribution, authenticity, or quality of artworks,
although sometimes he gave detailed information about the item if he found it interesting.
80. Mannheim's Ideologyand Utopia:An Introduction to the Sociologyof Knowledge(1929;
New York, 1936) was the culmination of his early theoretical essays and his most complete
exposition of his hermeneutic method. Sociologists in the United States, notably C. Wright
Mills and Daniel Bell, found it compelling, for different reasons, in the 1960s. See C.
Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (London, 1959), p. 168.

Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim

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Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim

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Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim: A Dialogue on Interpretation

Author(s): Joan Hart

Erwin Panofsky is the most influential art historian of the twentieth

I am grateful to Gerda Panofsky for her generosity in granting me access to the

Critical Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993)

ries of interpretation. In Germany before the Third Reich, it was not

1. See Jeffrey Herf, ReactionaryModernism: Technology,Culture, and Politics in Weimar

Joan Hart has a Ph. D. from the Universityof California,Berkeley,in

simple and becomes increasingly complex as Panofsky traces the history of

3. Karl Mannheim, "On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung,"From Karl Mannheim,

born in 1893 to a middle-class Hungarian family. Approximately the

10. In German it was the KulturwissenschaftlicheBibliothekWarburg(KBW). I note that

the state. In 1918, Mannheim described the transformation among his

One of Mannheim's earliest publications, "On the Interpretation of

Wolfflin in later reflections on his contribution to the history of art, realiz-

between Platonism and the three Warburgians, though somewhat convolutedly.

Panofsky's primary intent was to depsychologize Riegl's theory, just

of art by providing a reconstruction of a lost work or part of a work, or an

ough synthesis of cultural meaning-Dilthey with his three types of

summary of a hermeneutic theory of this sort includes the following ideas:

By 1925, he must have realized, like Mannheim, the limitations of

and, finally, to fusion versus independence. These contrasting pairs con-

medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque themes.40 The newly founded Ham-

40. See Panofsky, "Das perspektivische Verfahren Leone Battista Albertis,"

tract, formal or iconographical oddities in the altarpiece. Thus, "the

51. Leo Spitzer, letter to Panofsky, 12 Oct. 1955.

"Fullness" "Optical values" "depth values" "values of "Time"

Spezifische Gegensaitzeinnerhalb der

Source: "Uber das Verh~iltnisder Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie,"in Aufsiitzezu Grundfragen

57. See Dilthey, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichenWelt in den Geisteswissenschaften(1910),

1. Phenomenon sense Vital experience of History of formal configu-

2. Meaning sense Literary knowledge History of types (including

3. Documentary sense Original condition of General history of ideas

Gegenstand der Subjektive Quelle der Objectives Korrective der

1. Phainomensinn (zu Vitale Daseinserfahrung Gestaltungsgeschichte

2. Bedeutungssinn Literarisches Wissen Typengeschichte (Inbegriff

3. Dokumentsinn Weltanschauliches Allgemeine Geistes-

I-Primary or natural subject Pre-iconographical description (and Practical experience (familiar

III-Intrinsic meaning or content, Iconographical interpretation in a Synthetic intuition (familiar

method, for his collaborative work with Panofsky produced iconological

60. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophyof Human Culture

The seeming unconsciousness of their appropriation of hermeneutics

The Fate of Their Theories in Exile

The theory Panofsky elaborated became the mainstay of the growing

When he was dismissed from the university at Hamburg in 1933 by the

73. Remmling believed that Mannheim's direction changed in England as a result of

Taylor's letter of repentance is preserved, undated, in the Panofsky Papers.

that this transformation occurred. More likely it was his adaptation to

Although Panofsky's tone was even, he had, in fact, been more

78. Panofsky, letter to D'Ancona, 7 Oct. 1960.

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