Erwin Panofsky
Erwin "Pan" Panofsky (March 30, 1892 in Hannover – March 14, 1968 in Princeton, New Jersey) 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 represents a high point in the modern academic study of iconography, which he used in hugely influential works like his "little book" Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art and his masterpiece,Early Netherlandish Painting. Many of his works are still in print, including Studies in Iconology: Humanist Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939), and his eponymous 1943 study of Albrecht Dürer. Panofsky's ideas were also highly influential in intellectual history in general, particularly in his use of historical ideas to interpret artworks and vice-versa.
Biography
Panofsky was born in Hannover to a wealthy Jewish Silesian mining family. He grew up in Berlin, receiving his Abitur in 1910 at the Joachimsthalsche Gymnasium. In 1910-1914 he studied law, philosophy, philology, and art history in Freiburg, Munich, and Berlin, where he heard lectures by the art historian Margarete Bieber, who was filling in for Georg Loeschcke. While he was taking courses at Freiburg University, a slightly older student, Kurt Badt, took him to hear a lecture by the founder of the art history department, Wilhelm Vöge, under whom he wrote his dissertation in 1914. His topic, Dürer's artistic theory Dürers Kunsttheorie: vornehmlich in ihrem Verhaltnis zur Kunsttheorie der Italiener was published the following year in Berlin as Die Theoretische Kunstlehre Albrecht Dürers. Because of a horse-riding accident, Panofsky was exempted from military service during World War I, using the time to attend the seminars of the medievalist Adolph Goldschmidt in Berlin.
