Erwin Panofsky (30 March 1892 – 14 March 1968) was a German art historian, whose academic career was pursued mostly in the U.S. after the rise of the Nazi regime. Panofsky's work remains highly influential in the modern academic study of iconography. Many of his works remain in print, including Studies in Iconology: Humanist Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939), and his eponymous 1943 study of Albrecht Dürer.

His work has greatly influenced the theory of taste developed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in books such as The Rules of Art or Distinction. In particular, Bourdieu first adapted his notion of habitus from Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism.^[1]

Biography[link]

Erwin Panofsky was born in Hannover, Germany. He studied at the universities of Berlin, Munich, and Freiburg, receiving his Ph.D. in 1914 from the University of Freiburg. His academic career in art history took him to the universities of Berlin, Munich, and finally to Hamburg, where he taught from 1920 to 1933. It was during this period when his first major writings on art history began to appear. A significant early work was Idea: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunstheorie (1924; translated into English as Idea: A Concept in Art Theory).

Panofsky first came to the United States in 1931 to teach at New York University. Although initially allowed to spend alternate terms in Hamburg and New York, after the Nazis came to power in Germany his appointment in Hamburg was terminated, and he remained permanently in the United States with his wife, Dorothea (Dora) Mosse. By 1934 he was teaching concurrently at New York University and Princeton University. In 1935, he was invited to join the faculty of the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Panofsky was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy and a number of other national academies. In 1962 he received the Haskins Medal of The Medieval Academy of America. In 1947-1948 Panofsky was the Charles Eliot Norton professor at Harvard University.

Panofsky became particularly well known for his studies of symbols and iconography within works of art. First in a 1934 article, then in his Early Netherlandish Painting, Panofsky is the first to interpret Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait (London, National Gallery) as not only a depiction of a wedding ceremony, but also a visual contract testifying to the act of marriage. Panofsky identifies a plethora of hidden symbols that all point to the sacrament of marriage. In recent years, this conclusion has been challenged. And yet, Panofsky's work with what he called "hidden" or "disguised" symbolism are still very much influential in the study and understanding of Northern Renaissance Art.

Panofsky was known to be friends with Wolfgang Pauli, one of the main contributors to quantum physics and atomic theory, as well as Albert Einstein. His son, Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, became a renowned physicist who specialized in particle accelerators. His other son was a meteorologist. As Wolfgang Panofsky related, their father used to call his sons "meine beiden Klempner" (German: "my two plumbers"), which revealed the usual attitude of the German elite educated in the humanities, who looked down upon those trained in the sciences.

Three Strata of Subject Matter or Meaning[link]

In Studies in Iconology Panofsky details his idea of three levels of art-historical understanding ^[2]:

• Primary or Natural Subject Matter: The most basic level of understanding, this stratum consists of perception of the work’s pure form. Take, for example, a painting of The Last Supper. If we stopped at this first stratum, such a picture could only be perceived as a painting of 13 men seated at a table. This first level is the most basic understanding of a work, devoid of any added cultural knowledge.

• Secondary or Conventional subject matter (Iconography): This stratum goes a step further and brings to the equation cultural and iconographic knowledge. For example, a Western viewer would understand that the painting of 13 men around a table would represent The Last Supper. Similarly, a representation of a haloed man with a lion could be interpreted as a depiction of St. Mark.

• Tertiary or Intrinsic Meaning or Content (Iconology): This level takes into account personal, technical, and cultural history into the understanding of a work. It looks at art not as an isolated incident, but as the product of a historical environment. Working in this stratum, the art historian can ask questions like “why did the artist choose to represent The Last Supper in this way?” or “Why was St. Mark such an important saint to the patron of this work?” Essentially, this last stratum is a synthesis; it is the art historian asking "what does it all mean?"

For Panofsky, it was important to consider all three strata as one examines Renaissance art. Irving Lavin says, "it was this insistence on, and search for, meaning—especially in places where no one suspected there was any—that led Panofsky to understand art, as no previous historian had, as an intellectual endeavor on a par with the traditional liberal arts.^[3]

Works[link]

• Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (1924)
• Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927)
• Studies in Iconology (1939)
• The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (1943)
• Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951)
• Early Netherlandish Painting (1953)
• Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955)
• Pandora's Box: the Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol (1956) (with Dora Panofsky)
• Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (1960)
• Tomb Sculpture (1964)
• Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (1964) (with Raymond Klibansky and Fritz Saxl)
• Problems in Titian, mostly iconographic (1969)
• Three Essays on Style (1995) (Ed. Irving Lavin)

References and sources[link]

References

Sources

• Holly, Michael Ann, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, (1985)
• Ferretti, Sylvia, Cassirer, Panofsky, Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History, New Haven, Yale University Press, (1989)
• Lavin, Irving, editor, Meaning in the Visual Arts: View from the Outside. A Centennial Commemoration of Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), Princeton, Institute for Advanced Study, (1995)
• Panofsky, Erwin, & Lavin, Irving (Ed.), Three essays on style, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, (1995)
• Panofsky, Erwin. in the Dictionary of Art Historians Lee Sorensen, ed.
• Wuttke, Dieter (Ed.), Erwin Panofsky. Korrespondenz, Wiesbanden, Harrassowitz, (2001–2011)

External links[link]

• Biography
• Erwin Panofsky Papers at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art

Allegory on dignity.

Sentences of the Iconologia illustrating the Bureau du Roi (King's Desk or Louis XV's roll-top secretary) marquetry in the Palace of Versailles

Cesare Ripa (c. 1560 – c. 1622) was an Italian aesthetician who worked for Cardinal Anton Maria Salviati as a cook and butler.

Little is known about his life. He was born in Perugia and died in Rome. After the death of the cardinal, Ripa worked for his relatives. He was knighted after his highly successful book called Iconologia, which he wrote in his free time, was published.

The Iconologia overo Descrittione Dell’imagini Universali cavate dall’Antichità et da altri luoghi was a highly influential emblem book based on Egyptian, Greek and Roman emblematical representations. The book was used by orators, artists and poets to give substance to qualities such as virtues, vices, passions, arts and sciences. The concepts were arranged in alphabetical order, after the fashion of the Renaissance. For each there was a verbal description of the allegorical figure proposed by Ripa to embody the concept, giving the type and color of its clothing and its varied symbolic paraphernalias, along with the reasons why these were chosen, reasons often supported by references to literature (largely classical).^[1]

The first edition of his Iconologia was published in 1593 and dedicated to Anton Maria Salviati. A second edition was published in Rome in 1603 this time with 684 concepts and 151 woodcuts, dedicated to Lorenzo Salviati. The book was extremely influential in the 17th and 18th centuries and was quoted extensively in various art forms. In particular, it influenced the painter Pietro da Cortona and his followers. Also Dutch painters like Gerard de Lairesse, Willem van Mieris based work on Ripa's emblems. Vermeer used the emblem for the muse Clio for his The Art of Painting, and several others in his The Allegory of Faith. A large part of Vondel's work cannot be understood without this allegorical source, and ornamentation of the Amsterdam townhall by Artus Quellinus, a sculptor, is totally dependent on Ripa.^[2] An English translation appeared in 1709 by Pierce Tempest.^[3]

The baroque painter Antonio Cavallucci drew inspiration for his painting Origin of Music from the book. In 1779, the Scottish architect George Richardson's Iconology; or a Collection of Emblematical Figures; containing four hundred and twenty-four remarkable subjects, moral and instructive; in which are displayed the beauty of Virtue and deformity of Vice was published in London. The drawings were by William Hamilton. In 1819, Filippo Pitrucci, a London-based artist, published his version of Iconologia.

See also[link]

• Andrea Alciato

References[link]

Suger of Saint-Denis on a medieval window

Suger (c. 1081 – 13 January 1151) was one of the last Frankish abbot-statesmen, a historian, and the influential first patron of Gothic architecture.

Suger's family origins are unknown. Several times in his writings he suggests that his was a humble background, though this may just be a topos or convention of autobiographical writing. In 1091, at the age of ten, Suger was given as an oblate to the abbey of St. Denis, where he began his education. He trained at the priory of Saint-Denis de l'Estrée, and there first met the future king Louis VI of France. From 1104 to 1106, Suger attended another school, perhaps that attached to the abbey of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire. In 1106 he became secretary to the abbot of Saint-Denis. In the following year he became provost of Berneval in Normandy, and in 1109 of Toury. In 1118, Louis VI sent Suger to the court of Pope Gelasius II at Maguelonne (at Montpellier, Gulf of Lyon), and he lived from 1121 to 1122 at the court of Gelasius's successor, Calixtus II.

On his return from Maguelonne, Suger became abbot of St-Denis. Until 1127, he occupied himself at court mainly with the temporal affairs of the kingdom, while during the following decade he devoted himself to the reorganization and reform of St-Denis. In 1137, he accompanied the future king, Louis VII, into Aquitaine on the occasion of that prince's marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, and during the Second Crusade served as one of the regents of the kingdom (1147–1149). He bitterly opposed the king's divorce, having himself advised the marriage. Although he disapproved of the Second Crusade, he himself, at the time of his death, had started preaching a new crusade.

Suger served as the friend and counsellor both of Louis VI and Louis VII. He urged the king to destroy the feudal bandits, was responsible for the royal tactics in dealing with the communal movements, and endeavoured to regularize the administration of justice. He left his abbey, which possessed considerable property, enriched and embellished by the construction of a new church built in the nascent Gothic style. Suger wrote extensively on the construction of the abbey in Liber de Rebus in Administratione sua Gestis, Libellus Alter de Consecratione Ecclesiae Sancti Dionysii, and Ordinatio. In the 1940s, the prominent art-historian Erwin Panofsky claimed that the theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite influenced the architectural style of the abbey of St. Denis, though later scholars have argued against such a simplistic link between philosophy and architectural form.^[1] Similarly the assumption by 19th century French authors that Suger was the 'designer' of St Denis (and hence the 'inventor' of Gothic architecture) have been almost entirely discounted by more recent scholars. Instead he is generally seen as having been a bold and imaginative patron who encouraged the work of an innovative (but now unknown) master mason.^[2][3]

Suger became the foremost historian of his time. He wrote a panegyric on Louis VI (Vita Ludovici regis), and collaborated in writing the perhaps more impartial history of Louis VII (Historia gloriosi regis Ludovici). In his Liber de rebus in administratione sua gestis, and its supplement Libellus de consecratione ecclesiae S. Dionysii, he treats of the improvements he had made to St Denis, describes the treasure of the church, and gives an account of the rebuilding. Suger's works served to imbue the monks of St Denis with a taste for history and called forth a long series of quasi-official chronicles.^{[citation needed]}

A chalice once owned by Suger is now in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

References[link]

1. ^ For a summary of the 'arguments against' Panofsky's view, see Panofsky, Suger and St Denis, Peter Kidson, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 50, (1987), pp. 1–17
2. ^ Conrad Rudolph, Artistic Change at St Denis: Abbot Suger's Program and the Early Twelfth Century Controversy Over Art, Princeton, 1990
3. ^ Kibler et al (eds) Medieval France: An Encyclopedia, Routledge, 1995

• "Suger", Encyclopædia Britannica, 1911
• "Suger", The Middle Ages, A Concise Encyclopedia, H.R. Loyn Editor, 1989 (ISBN 0-500-27645-5)
• Abbot Suger of St. Denis: Church and State in Early Twelfth-Century France. Grant, Lindy. Essex, UK: Addison Wesley Longman Limited, 1998. (ISBN 0-582-05150-9)
• The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture & the Medieval Concept of Order (Third Edition), Van Simson, Otto. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1988. Bollingen Series XLVIII. (ISBN 0-691-09959-6)..

Further reading[link]

• Suger, Abbot of Saint Denis,. The Deeds of Louis the Fat. Translated with introduction and notes by Richard Cusimano and John Moorhead. Washington, DC : Catholic University of America Press,1992. (ISBN 0-8132-0758-4)
• Suger, Abbot of Saint Denis,. The Deeds of Louis the Fat. Translated by Jean Dunbabin (Free, but has no annotations)