Background
Erwin Panofsky was born on March 30, 1892 in Hannover, Lower Saxony, Germany. He was the son of independently wealthy parents, Arnold Panofsky and Caecilie Solling.
("An inquiry into the analogy of the arts, philosophy and ...)
"An inquiry into the analogy of the arts, philosophy and religion in the Middle Ages, with 60 illustrations." Well documented and well written monograph on the interdisicplinary bridges in these areas in a post modern commentary.
https://www.amazon.com/Gothic-Architecture-Scholasticism-Erwin-Panofsky/dp/B000EOPCBO?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B000EOPCBO
( Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art spans the pe...)
Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art spans the period from the 10th to the 15th century, including discussion of the Carolingian renaissance and the 12th century proto-renaissance. Erwin Panofsky posits that there were "reanscences" prior to the widely known Renaissance that began in Italy in the 14th century. Whereas earlier renascences can be classified as revivals, the Renaissance was a unique instance that led to a wider cultural transformation.
https://www.amazon.com/Renaissance-Renascences-Western-Icon-Editions/dp/0064300269?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0064300269
(Exploring the human social themes from Renaissance art)
Exploring the human social themes from Renaissance art
https://www.amazon.com/Studies-Iconology-Humanistic-Themes-Renaissance/dp/B000GPA98W?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B000GPA98W
(Hardback Volume 1 1966 Harvard University Press 573 pages...)
Hardback Volume 1 1966 Harvard University Press 573 pages with additional 28 pages of illustrations
https://www.amazon.com/EARLY-NETHERLANDISH-PAINTING-Origins-Character/dp/B000VMBL2S?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B000VMBL2S
( This classic text presents the life, times, and works o...)
This classic text presents the life, times, and works of Albrecht Dürer. Through the skill and immense knowledge of Erwin Panofsky, the reader is dazzled not only by Dürer the artist but also Dürer in a wide array of other roles, including mathematician and scientific thinker. Originally published in 1943 in two volumes, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer met with such wide popular and scholarly acclaim that it led to three editions and then, in 1955, to the first one-volume edition. Without sacrifice of text or illustrations, the book was reduced to this single volume by the omission of the Handlist and Concordance. The new introduction by Jeffrey Chipps Smith reflects upon Panofsky the man, the tumultuous circumstances surrounding the creation of his masterful monograph, its innovative contents, and its early critical reception. Erwin Panofsky was one of the most important art historians of the twentieth century. Panofsky taught for many years at Hamburg University but was forced by the Nazis to leave Germany. He joined the faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1935, where he spent the remainder of his career and wrote The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer. He developed an iconographic approach to art and interpreted works through an analysis of symbolism, history, and social factors. This book, one of his most important, is a comprehensive study of painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), the greatest exponent of northern European Renaissance art. Although an important painter, Dürer was most renowned for his graphic works. Artists across Europe admired and copied his innovative and powerful prints, ranging from religious and mythological scenes to maps and exotic animals. The book covers Dürer's entire career in exacting detail. With multiple indexes and more than three hundred illustrations, it has served as an indispensable reference, remaining crucial to an understanding of the work of the great artist and printmaker. Subsequent Dürer studies have necessarily made reference to Panofsky's masterpiece. Panofsky's work continues to be admired for the author's immense erudition, subtlety of appreciation, technical knowledge, and profound analyses.
https://www.amazon.com/Albrecht-D%C3%BCrer-PRINCETON-CLASSIC-EDITIONS/dp/0691122768?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0691122768
Erwin Panofsky was born on March 30, 1892 in Hannover, Lower Saxony, Germany. He was the son of independently wealthy parents, Arnold Panofsky and Caecilie Solling.
Erwin Panofsky began his education at the Joachimsthalsches Gymnasium in Berlin and attended the universities of Freiburg, Berlin, and Munich before receiving his Ph. D. from the University of Freiburg in 1914 under the tutelage of Wilhelm Vöge and Adolf Goldschmidt. During his thirty-five years in America, Erwin Panofsky received many honors and academic prizes, including honorary degrees from Utrecht, Princeton, Oberlin, Rutgers, Bard, Upsala, Harvard, New York University, Columbia, and Bonn.
Panofsky was forced to seek employment after the fall of the German mark at the end of World War I. Appointed privatdocent at the newly founded University of Hamburg in 1921, he became a professor in 1926 and held the position of Ordinarius during the Weimar Republic. He soon established a productive intellectual relationship with several scholars from the Warburg library of cultural studies in Hamburg, including Aby Warburg, Edgar Wind, Gertrud Bing, Fritz Saxl, Rudolf Wittkower, and Ernst Cassirer. When he was dismissed from Hamburg by the Nazi regime in 1933.
He published a number of acclaimed essays, such as "Dürers Stellung zur Antike" (1922), "Dürers 'Melencolia I'" (with Fritz Saxl, 1923), "Die deutsche Plastik des 11. bis 13. Jahrhunderts" (1924), "Idea" (1924), and "Hercules am Scheidewege" (1931). Compelled to leave Germany, Panofsky immigrated to New York City in 1934 and took a position as visiting professor of fine arts at New York University. Since 1931 he had periodically lectured in the basement of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art under the auspices of what would soon become the Institute of Fine Arts.
In 1934 he went to Princeton University as a visiting lecturer and became a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1935. With colleagues such as Albert Einstein, Jacques Maritain, Thomas Mann, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, he claimed that he suffered an "expulsion into Paradise, " at a place "where members do their research openly and their teaching surreptitiously. " In 1947 - 1948 he held the Charles Eliot Norton lectureship, previously occupied by Igor Stravinsky and Robert Frost, at Harvard University. Panofsky returned to Princeton and taught and wrote there until his death. His wife, with whom he wrote Pandora's Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mystical Symbol (1956), died in 1965.
In addition to his publications, Panofsky's great legacy was his students. He trained many art historians whose fame would come close to rivaling his own. His disciples in Germany included Hugo Buchtal, Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Lise Lotte Moller, H. W. Janson, Hans Swarzenski, Walter Horn, Lotte Brand Philip, P. H. van Blanckenhagen, and William Heckscher. His American students initiated the study of art history as a serious humanistic pursuit. Panofsky has been called the most influential art historian of the twentieth century, but his impact on scholarship far exceeds the boundaries of one discipline.
Literary critics, intellectual historians, and philosophers of science, among others, have turned both to his practical studies of medieval and Renaissance imagery and to his theoretical inquiries into the relationship between works of art and the culture that generates them. In the former category, most of his essays and books attest to his devotion to a subject and method of research associated with many Warburg Institute scholars: the investigation of the Nachleben ("afterlife") of classical images and themes, the ways in which certain antique forms and myths become invested with new meanings across time.
Among Panofsky's most frequently cited practical studies are Albrecht Dürer (1943; entitled The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer after the fourth edition, 1955), Early Netherlandish Painting (1947 - 1948), Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (1960), and Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (1969).
When he first began writing, he openly challenged the formal analyses and connoisseurship of his predecessors and even confronted the formidable stylistic criticism of Heinrich W"lfflin and Alois Riegl. His 1924-1925 essay "Eine Perspektive als 'symbolische Form'" set the stage for later investigations into the ways in which visual imagery can both reflect and be generated by larger cultural and philosophical predispositions. The preface to Studies in Iconology (1939) systematizes Panofsky's iconological method. He distinguished between three levels of investigation and employed Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper as an example. The preiconographic level depends upon practical experience and interprets primary subject matter apart from its historical embodiment (for example, the universal recognition of thirteen men seated at a table laden with food). The iconographic stage "reads" this information according to its textual precedents; that is, it identifies its subject matter by recourse to the Gospel story.
An iconological analysis, the third stage, represents "iconography turned interpretive. " Here the art historian deciphers the work of art as a cultural document, expressive of the "essential tendencies of the human mind" as they are crystallized into a particular historical, personal, and cultural moment. In this regard, the Last Supper is not only a testimony to the artist's idiosyncratic genius but also a supreme confirmation of Renaissance ideas and ideals. Two other noted examples of Panofsky's method are Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951) and "The History of the Theory of Human Proportions as a Reflection of the History of Styles" (1921). Panofsky also wrote several essays in film criticism. His collection of essays Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955) provides the most succinct statement of his wide-ranging intellectual interests.
The essay "Three Decades of Art History in the United States" traces the course of his scholarly career as it reflects changing perspectives in the evolution of the discipline of art history. "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline" is an eloquent testimony to his cherished intellectual values. Late in his life, Panofsky began a lecture on the subject of one of his last books, Tomb Sculpture (1964), with words to the effect that he had "reached an age when one could take pleasure in being able to look at the grave from the outside. " He died in Princeton on March 14, 1968.
( Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art spans the pe...)
("An inquiry into the analogy of the arts, philosophy and ...)
(Hardback Volume 1 1966 Harvard University Press 573 pages...)
( This classic text presents the life, times, and works o...)
(Exploring the human social themes from Renaissance art)
Erwin Panofsky was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
On April 9, 1916, Erwin Panofsky married art historian Dorothea (Dora) Mosse. They had two children. His wife died in 1965. In 1966 he married Gerda Soergel, also an art historian.