THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF ERWIN PANOFSKY'S THEORIES OF ART

This dissertation offers a detailed analytic study of the historical background and philosophical principles which influenced the writings of Erwin Panofsky, arguably the most influential historian of art in the twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on several of Panofsky's untranslated essays written during the decade of 1915-1925 in response to the intellectual challenges offered him in turn by Wolfflin, Riegl, and Cassirer. By examining the development of Panofsky's theories of art within their general historical and epistemological context, this critique discusses the manifold analytic principles around which "iconology", or, to use Panofsky's words, "art history turned interpretative," has come to be shaped.; The first chapter investigates the general development of art historical scholarship by marking its connections with Hegelian cultural history and by discussing the methodological quandaries within the discipline generated by the tension between metaphysical idealism and positivism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In connection with this historiographic background, Chapter two concentrates in detail on the often misunderstood works of Heinrich Wolfflin, and then moves to Panofsky's early contextualist critique of the formalist approach to art. Chapter three examines Riegl's problematic notion of the Kunstwollen, in terms of both Panofsky's early disenchantment with this particular art historical explanation and the contextualist direction in which his ideas were already turning by 1920. The fourth chapter sets forth the work of other contemporary art theorists, from the methodological debates waged in the leading journals of the day of the work of Aby Warburg whose unusual library became a meeting place for scholars from a variety of fields.; The fifth chapter discusses Panofsky's often acknowledged indebtedness to the work of his senior Hamburg colleague, Ernest Cassirer. This essay relates both Panofsky's continuing concern for providing art historical commentary with a sound philosophical basis and his interest in the conventionality of Renaissance perspective to a larger neo-Kantian project which informs the work of Cassirer. In this three volumes of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms composed during the 1920s, Cassirer elaborated a morphology of symbolical values, from mythical thinking to mathematics, through which human beings constitute the world of their experience. Panofsky's "Perspektive als symbolische Form" is discussed in detail because it reveals the genesis of his iconological approach as it is related to Cassirer's thought. Chapter six addresses itself to Panofsky's later and better known English works, including Studies in Iconology, Early Netherlandish Painting, and Meaning in the Visual Arts. This essay analyzes "iconology" in terms of its central interpretive principles and questions why Panofsky's practical art history only rarely fulfills the vision of his theoretical work, a vision similar to the one which has inspired recent work in semiotics, the philosophy of history, and the philosophy of science.; Commenting on Vasari, Panofsky once said he was "a pioneer of an historical way of thinking--a way of thinking which in itself must be judged historically." Panofsky's formative and influential ideas, like Vasari's, deserve to be evaluated in the same way. This dissertation attempts to situate Panofsky's work in the context which made his discoveries possible.