Hollands Maandblad. Jaargang 1969-1970 (258-277)
(1969-1970)– [tijdschrift] Hollands Maandblad–
Auteursrechtelijk beschermd
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In memoriam Erwin Panofsky
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dealing with the Baroque on either side of the Alps, and with problems in sculpture, painting and architecture of all periods; tangible plans to deal with Michelangelo and Bernini problems; a study of many years, done jointly with Dora Panofsky, dealing with Poussin's ‘Flight into Egypt’; promising suggestions on the mysterious Voynich manuscript and, possibly the greatest question mark of them all: a radically new interpretation of the ‘Music Making Angels’ in the Ghent Altarpiece - the ‘Glee-Club’ as he called it - a sharp veering away from some of his cherished concepts, necessitated by Coreman's technical observations ‘in depth’ - conclusions which, as it seems, Panofsky confided to only a small and ever shrinking circle of proximi who took part in the Brussels Colloquium doctum of 1954. Then there are Panofsky's letters. Their range and number, their character and their stylistic perfection remind of the splendor of the epistolarium left by Erasmus of Rotterdam. Not unlike Erasmus's, Panofsky's letters were circulated (in carbon-copies) among close friends, for their edification and instruction. Lucky people were, as it were, on a mailing-list. In addition, Panofsky wrote occasional verse, serious and satirical epigrams, sonnets, limericks, composed with prosodic finesse in German, English, Latin, French and Greek. Last but not least he will be remembered for his obiter dicta, treated by himself and, alas, most of his friends as mere ephemera.Ga naar eindnoot1) Their range was enormous. What made them so arresting is that often they would cover areas of art historical ground which to my knowledge he did not touch upon in his publications. He spoke, for example, of Modigliani (who of all modern artists was nearest to him) as one ‘who had produced the kind of human beings which are a race by themselves - very much like Michelangelo.’ He was fascinated by Mondrian whom he called ‘slave of the square on which he worked, and that is to say slave of his self-imposed restrictions.’ On doughnuts, Emmenthaler, and Henry Moore: ‘The activation of holes in matter.’ He disliked ‘unreliable’ people. Of William Blake he said: ‘I can 't stand him. I don't mind if a man is really mad like Hölderlin. True madness may yield poetical flowers. But I don't like mad geniuses walking all the time at the brink of an abyss. Blake is all negative and unreliable.’ Van Gogh was to him ‘a genius without talent.’ A whole evening of Marcel Marceau was ‘just as bad as a Chinese poem of thirty-four syllables on the Prune Blossom or a Sonata on the G-String which lasts two hours’. Panofsky heard words and whole sentences in his dreams and he had what he called visions and that is to say verbal continuations of his dreams in a half waking state. He dreamt, to illustrate this, of an ugly old lady and woke up with the untranslatable phrase ‘Zum Schauen bestellt.’ Of Rainer Maria Rilke: ‘Mailorder Don Juan.’ Or: ‘In my dream I went to the Princeton Inn and saw the late-lamented Albert Friend looking very rosy and self-satisfied, sitting in the corner of one the big davenports there. He beckoned to me, asking me to sit down beside him, which I did, opening the conversation with the question: ‘Well, Bert, how is it in Hell?’ Whereupon he answered: ‘I like it there’. He saw in another dream a hermit, outside his cave, beating his breast with a stone, when out of the mouth of the cave came a scroll and on it inscribed the words: ‘Long distance for you, Sir.’ Erwin Panofsky was to his last breath a magician with words and he was, increasingly, conscious of their seminal power. At the same time he was, like few of his colleagues, ‘begotten to see.’ This he did, as we all know, as the guardian and proud inhabitant of the much maligned ‘Ivory Tower.’Ga naar eindnoot2) Seeing, and recording what he saw were to him the most gratifying intellectual activities. In the last hours of his life - his features more than ever resembling those of the aging, owl-eyed Voltaire - he held, with his arms stretched above his head, the ponderous plate volume of Millard Meiss's French Painting in the Time of the Duc de Berry. As he did this, he called the attention of his visitor, Harold Cherniss, to the illumination showing ‘Marcia Portraying Herself with the Aid of a Mirror.’ And as he pointed out to his friend that this was one of the earliest manifestations of a self-portrait in the making, he cited with flawless precision the number and the folio of the manuscript in the Bibliothèque National. It was this unique combination of near perfect visual and verbal retention which sustained Panofsky's mind; it enabled him to ‘write’ whole chapters of books-yet-tocome without the need of committing a single word to paper. He could effortlessly recite such unwritten chapters to a breathless companion who tried to keep up with him and his dog Jerry on a brisk walk through the near impenetrable woods behind the Institute for Advanced Study and, since I was the companion, I might just as well record a rare mnemonic lapse. After the | |
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walk I left Princeton for about two weeks. Upon my return, we resumed our walks and Panofsky, who had actually forgotten that he had quoted paragraph after paragraph from his not-yet-written Galileo (Bibl. 117, 1954), repeated to me the identical passages - words, commata, and all.
Walter Friedlaender, one of Panofsky's academic teachers and a lifelong friend, related how to Erwin Panofsky's cradle at Hannover there hurried two fairies, Wealth and Intelligence. The third, Good Looks, didn't make it. In her stead came a fairy who said: ‘Whichever book you open, you will find precisely the passage you need.’ Adolph Goldschmidt is supposed to have remarked of his young student: ‘Wenn Erwin ein Bild sieht, dann fällt ihm immer sogleich was ein.’ This well-attested Serendipity, however legendary its beginnings, served Panofsky throughout. His astonishingly rare and brief visits to libraries reminded the discreet observer of the behavior of an ecstatic insect which, in quest of honey, nervously flits from flower to flower, sampling here and there, until, having finally arrived at the preordained blossom, it comes to rest, imbibing the nectar with deep absorption. Witty and incisive, sceptical and warmhearted, possessed of limitless curiosity (‘Do you know the address of the Swiss Museum of baby shoes?’), yet on the whole as discreet as most eloquent people with a natural urge of communication, Panofsky knew how to guard his creative moments with supra-personal stubbornness when faced by what he considered trivial outside interference. He said of himself (November 1946) ‘Every six weeks I have a thought. The rest of the time I work.’ There was nothing of the scholar's mock-humility in such reflexions.
Panofsky has given us a nostalgic description of his school years in Berlin at the Joachimthalsche Gymnasium (Bibl. 116). His highschool teachers were scholars first and foremost. At the age of sixteen he knew Dante's Divine Comedy by heart. He attributed this fact, as well as his fluent command of Italian, to the unconventional method of Gino Ravaili. This gifted teacher, scorning the use of grammar, syntax and vocabulary, began with the text right away. Young Panofsky also committed to memory all of Shakespeare's Sonnets and the themes of the Preludes and Fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. A disciple of two giants in his field, Adolf Goldschmidt and Wilhelm Vöge, Panofsky received his Doctor of Philosophy degree at Freiburg in 1914 with a dissertation on Dürer's Art Theory (Bibl. Nos. 1f., 1914-1915). Prior to this he had been awarded the coveted Hermann-Grimm Prize of Berlin University for a brilliant study of the Italianinspired mathematics in Dürer's work. This means that at the age of eighteen Panofsky anticipated not only his magnum opus, the two-volume Albrecht Dürer (Bibl. 84, 1943ff.), but also his revolutionary mathematics-based studies on the Theory of Proportion (Bibl. 14), on Perspective as Symbolic Form (36), and, ultimately, on Dürer's Geometry (1966). In 1916 he married Dora Mosse whom he had met when both attended a Goldschmidt seminar at Berlin. Dora, older by eight years, preceded her husband in death. She was one of his severest, most perceptive and also one of his most stimulating critics. For decades she herself keenly felt to be living in the shadow of Erwin Panofsky's mental superriority. At the age of sixty, following severe illness, Dora unexpectedly found herself as a scholar, able to create independently of her husband's immediate interests. It is from this standpoint of miraculously gained spiritual independence that we must see her remarkable work and expecially the Panofsky's joint endeavors: Pandora's Box (122) and the ‘Galérie François 1er at Fontainebleau’ (129), two works which he himself considered among his most successful creations. In a letter of April 1st, 1958, he reported in his typical fashion: ‘The Swedish Book (Renaissance and Renascences) is ready but extremely bad; the Fontainebleau article is also ready and much better (1958). The hardest thing I have to do is an Introduction to Vöge's collected essays (1958) which I have to write in German and in such a way that it brings out some of his personality and makes my great affection for him apparent while avoiding the Thomas Mann type of obituary which begins with a brief description of the situation in which he met the deceased and then talks only about Thomas Mann.’
If in retrospect we try to assess the influences - academic and personal - that shaped Erwin Panofsky's mind, I think that we must beware of seeing in him a man nurtured by the ‘great books’ or by the monuments produced by the ‘great artists’ only. On the contrary, it was the obscure and curriculum-shunned texts - often those composed in difficult or abstruse languages - which he taught us to appreciate as true supports of our humanistic studies. | |
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 ‘Who has read Hisperica famina?’ he might ask members of his privatissimum; ‘are you familiar with Lykophron's Alexandra?, do you understand the significance of Virgilius Maro grammaticus?, of Hiob Ludolph's Assyrian studies?, of Kepler's Somnium?’ And when we shook our heads, he might add: ‘Gentlemen, you have yet to discover the value of useless knowledge.’ Some of us took heed and worked on obscure authors and sources, and did our best to acquire linguistic skills beyond what might be considered our call of duty. Hugo Buchthal, Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Lise Lotte Möller, H.W. Janson, Hanns Swarzenski, Walter Horn, Lotte Brand Philip, Hans-Konrad Röthel, Peter Heinz von Blankenhagen - to mention only a few of Panofsky's students and disciples of Hamburg days, all indeed art historians in their own right, have successfully carried on and developed (often in ways quite removed from those of their great teacher) this Panofskyan blend of the humanist tradition. Readers of his facetiously titled ‘Iconological Antecedents of the Rolls-Royce Radiator’ will remember the significant role of the obscure Hisperica famina as a mythical antecedent ‘by a thousand years’ of both Ossian and William Turner and, we might add, James Joyce.Ga naar eindnoot3) We would, naturally, be equally rash if we were to conclude from Panofsky's undeniable delight in rariora, arcana, aenigmatica, in literature and in art, that he attached little significance to questions of aesthetic significance or relative degree of historical value. His mind saw itself incessantly challenged by the great in art. He contributed fundamental studies on Michelangelo and Leonardo, Albrecht Dürer and Piero di Cosimo, on Titian, Correggio, Bernini and Poussin, on mediaeval sculpture and architecture, and on the great masters of the Northern Renaissance. Hand in hand with a keen interest in aesthetics - not to be confused with the abhorred ‘appreciationism’, which in his words ‘deprives naivité of its charm without correcting its errors’ - there went Panofsky's doubt in regard to Aesthetics as a fruitful or even legitimate field of modern academic research. When asked to recommend a fundamental work on Aesthetics, he would suggest to his students Jean Paul's Vorschule der Aesthetik, a work of about 1804 which, as he said not so long ago, is ‘infinitely better than Suzanne Langer!’ How had he come to discover Jean Paul? As a young man he was vacationing at Titisee, waiting for snow to come. As he waited, he opened at random Jean Paul's Flegeljahre, the great fragment of a novel that had grown out of the Vorschule, and read: ‘Jetzt brannte und zitterte im zarten Umriss eine Obstallée durchsichtig und riesenhaft in der Abendglut’ - and became a lifelong addict and follower of Germany's greatest and least appreciated prose writer. A strong and lasting personal influence was exerted on the young student by the to us somewhat nebulous flgure of Viktor Lowinsky who was, among others, the author of ‘Raum und Geschehnis in Poussins Kunst,’ a study which appeared in the Zeitschrift fur Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft of the year 1914. It might be called a philosophical extension of Walter Friedlaender's monographic work on Poussin. Lowinsky was ‘the cleverest man I think I have ever met... a terribly witty man... a polyhistor... infinitely more attractive than the whole Stefan George | |
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circle.’ As late as January 9, 1961, Panofsky sent me a xerox-copy of Lowinsky's ‘Poussin’ which he inscribed: ‘For 1914 or so, this is still a very good article! Pan’. In reading it one senses the source of inspiration for young Panofsky's highly formalized and encapsulated style of presentation which permeated his Hamburg lectures on the Italian Baroque and on Dürer. The Lowinsky phase culminated in Panofsky's Idea of 1924, a study on the theory of art from Plato to the seventeenth century, a work in character more philosophical than art historical. When not so long ago I told Panofsky what the Idea had meant to his students in terms of its being an inimitable pattern that caused its readers agony and frustration, he smiled and asked: ‘Eine Kater-Idee?’Ga naar eindnoot4)
Being a man of independent means, the young doctor of Philosophy planned on a life as a free lance scholar doing research in the pursuit of art historical problems. However, no sooner had the inflation of the German Mark deprived him and his family of their fortune, than the newly established University of Hamburg offered him in 1921 the chair of Art History with the initial rank of Privatdozent. Five years later, in 1926, Panofsky was made professor. In a short time Hamburg's ‘Art Historical Seminar’ as the Department was called, attracted young and highly promising scholars as teachers. Edgar Wind, Hans Liebeschütz, Charles de Tolnai became, each in a different way, associates of Panofsky. Gustav Pauli - ‘the incarnation of Hanseatic noblesse’ - the farsighted director of the Kunsthalle who had proposed Panofsky for his post, regarded and treated him from the outset as collega proximus while, at the same time by Warburg, Fritz Saxl, Rudolf Wittkower and Gertrud Bing of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg linked up with Panofsky's ‘Seminar’ to form in a completely informal fashion a humanist research group whose international fame rested on a series of published lectures, the Warburg Vorträge, and a series of monographic Studies, as well as the now little known analytical Bibliography devoted to themes and motives of classical antiquity in post-classical times. Above all, however, towered the personality of Ernst Cassirer, ‘the only German philosopher of our generation who to the cultured was a substitute for the Church - when you were in love, or otherwise unhappy’ (Nov. 1946). Panofsky's grand lectures, the socalled publica, attracted several hundred persons at a time. They were profound, eloquent, and of a cogency in their disposition which remarkably anticipated his American style of writing and speaking. In retrospect one wonders what part in the shaping of Panofsky at this time - beside Cassirer - the rhetorician and philosopher Edgar Wind may have played. Wind had been in America from where he had brought to his work and to his ravishing style of lecturing some of the lucidity coupled to a deceptive simplicity to which academically trained Germans at that time responded with noticeable Unbehagen. Wind, in turn, described to me his first encounters with Panofsky: ‘I had not yet met Panofsky at that time. When I wrote him my first letter, to enquire whether I could study with him, he was not yet “habilitated”, but he took me on - at the advice of the university - in a private capacity, to await consummation after his inaugural lecture. So I had the rare privilege of listening to the Probevorlesung of my instructor. It was a highly dialectical exercise, a comparison of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo as artistic types, in which the antitheses exploded like firecrackers... Panofsky had in those days a distinctly romantic physiognomy. A thick moustache (almost Nietzschian) covered his upper lip, and long whiskers descended in front of his ears, throwing into prominence the luminous eyes and the high forehead, over which the black hair was pretty long, though already receding. His face - believe it or not - was rather thin, and his expression always pensive. - On the day when he was to examine me for the doctor's degree (29 July 1922), we met accidentally in the street, since we were both walking toward the same destination. We had a long and funny conversation, but as we approached the university building, he suddenly felt that our intimacy might be regarded as unbecoming in official quarters. So he suggested that I should go in first, while he would walk around the building. On his arrival he greeted me as if he had never seen me in his life, and then continued - for an hour - the conversation we had begun in the street.’Ga naar eindnoot5) Above all it was in those years our good fortune to observe our teacher at close quarters. He grew by leaps and bounds - with every lecture course and with every new publication. We waylaid him after his lectures and frequently went with him to his hospitable flat in the Alte Rabenstrasse, debating, discussing, reciting; often until | |
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the dawn of the following day. Panofsky's self-created setting, the ‘Hamburg Seminar,’ was remarkable among the art historical centers of the European continent for what might be called its cultural ecology. It was cradled between Kunsthalle and Warburg Library. Its wider framework was a curiously sober mercurial Biedermeier city, a freie und Hansestadt, which, even though its prominent citizens tended to mistrust the Muses, stood, nevertheless, uniquely open to the intellectual influences radiating from the British Isles and from across the Atlantic Ocean.
In the unquestionably glorious years of the Weimar Republic, Erwin Panofsky laid the foundation of his fame as a scholar who helped to turn art history from an aesthetically oriented and antiquarian-minded discipline into a humanistic science which with bold steps ventured into adjacent auxiliary fields without, however, relinquishing the traditional methods and approaches to art as they were practised by ‘laconic art historians’ and ‘loquacious connoisseurs.’ Iconology (in the modern sense of the word) was first propounded at the very threshold of World War One by Aby Warburg in a twenty-minute lecture at the International Congress of Art History in Rome. The iconological method, we may say, came to its true flowering in Panofsky's wonderfully surrealistic tour-de-force, Hercules am Scheidewege, which in 1930 appeared as one of the Warburg Studien (Bibl. 45)Ga naar eindnoot6). It was at about this point that the Goddess Fortuna, in the guise of Professor Cook of New York University, went into action with unexpectedly favorable results: Years before the enforced exodus of the intellectual élite that resulted from Adolf Hitler's advent, Panofsky - on the invitation of Walter W.S. Cook - had been a regular guest-professor in the United States. He lectured in the basement of the Metropolitan Museum of Art under the auspices of what was to become the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University's Graduate School of art historical studies and immediately made a deep impression on his American colleagues and students. On his first arrival, September 1931, Erwin Panofsky was met and greeted at the pier by Millard Meiss whom ook had dispatched as his emissary and who was assigned to him as an assistant for the term. Meiss, who also lectured at the Institute, was then working toward his Ph.D. degree. In the Customs' Shed the discussion almost immediately turned to the art at the court of the Duc de Berry. To this project Meiss brought a thorough knowledge of the Trecento. We may say that what started as a casual discussion between two young scholars, ripened into the monumental work whose growth but also whose final fruition Panofsky was happy to witness. In 1933 Erwin Panofsky presented, what may be termed his American calling-card. I have in mind the fifty-two page article ‘Classical Mythology in Mediaeval Art’ which was published as a Metropolitan Museum Study. He had written it in collaboration with Fritz Saxl, following their joint effort, the Melencolia I (1923). Although written for an English speaking public, it was conceived in the highly polished, antithetically grouped periods which were so characteristic of Panofsky's mature Hamburgian style. His statements were clear, logical and highly didactic. Needless to say, the essential thing was that with Panofsky-Saxl's ‘Classical Mythology,’ the Warburgian preoccupation with the Nachleben of Paganism - and that is to say the study of the transformation of classical mythology in the mediaeval art - made its entry into the world of American humanistic scholarship. Providentially, Panofsky escaped from Nazi Germany unscathed. He joined the professorial staff of Abraham Flexner's newly founded Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton as the first permanent member of its School of Historical Studies. At the same time, he established and further cemented his affiliations with New York and Princeton universities respectively. His influence on generation after generation of American graduate students in art history was immense. One of his earliest students at Princeton, John Rupert Martin, referred to the ‘transfiguring and illuminating quality of Panofsky's teaching, which was farthest removed from Archaeology.’ It was Panofsky's unconventional approach ‘which made his tough seminars so exciting from the very beginning as when, discussing the International Style, he would start by reading the poetry of Charles d'Orléans, comparing him to Verlaine, doing all this, needless to say, in French.’ Panofsky was indeed, as Martin suggested, antagonistic to what he himself called ‘the naive aspects of the strictly archaeological method.’ After a lecture on the wells of Periclean Athens, he was heard to murmur: ‘Well, well, well.’ One of his dearest friends at Princeton, Erik Sjöqvist, told me ‘when Pan discovered that I considered the humanistic and historical interpretation of our material as the | |
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only really important thing, he at once asked me: “If so, why did you become an archaeologist?”’ (letter of September 16, 1968). A ‘transplanted European’ (Bibl. 115b). the American Panofsky elicited as a scholar and as a man - for these two qualities cannot be as neatly separated here as they often are in continental Europe - a deeper and more enduring response than in Germany. It is characteristic of him that he never forgot his scholarly debt to the great men among the American art historians of his and the preceding generation: Charles Rufus Morey (Bibl. 120, 1955), Arthur Kingsley Porter, Baldwin Smith, Albert M. Friend, Meyer Schapiro, Fiske Kimball. Kimball the great museum director he placed beside Pauli of Hamburg and Carl Nordenfalk of Stockholm who to him combined two indispensable qualities: they were true gentlemen and they were superb administrators because they were scholars first and foremost while, at the opposite end of the pole he found a man like Francis Henry Taylor who to him was ‘a Sunday iconographer.’ The great American art historians Panofsky regarded as living proof of the fact that it was by no means the European emigrant scholars who had triggered the vogue of humanistic scholarship which, as he would point out, originated in the United States soon after the first World War and experienced its Golden Age in the decade from 1923-1933. At the same time, he did not hide his genuine concern as he noticed in America the undercurrents of barbarism and antiintellectualism, favored and cultivated by the intellectual and political libertines who forever menace the very roots of cultural traditions and human values (Bibl. 79 and 116).
Princeton, with its circle of loyal friends and a constant stream of visiting scholars who during the academic year came from all corners of the globe, had to him a dreamlike quality. A ‘priority target for visitors from abroad,’ it was to him above all ‘Erewhon.’ Its university was ‘the last Indian Reserve for gentlemen (because a gentleman is only a gentleman in a womanless atmosphere)’ (1947). Panofsky, who described women as predatory animals, preying on time (Zeitraubtiere), was far from ever being an outright gynophobe. He deeply respected great scholars such as Hetty Goldman, Dorothy Miner, Marjory Nicholson, Mirella Levi d'Ancona, Lola Szladits. He admired and loved Rosalie Green, the learned director of the Index of Christian Art. She was to him a constant source of iconographic information pertaining to things mediaeval. He praised what he called her Euclidian ability to create ‘ex ungue leonem’. All this did not prevent him from remarking in reference to the tireless work of the exclusively feminine staff of the Princeton Index with: ‘Parturiunt mures, nascitur ridiculus mons.’ Similarly he admired Rosa Schapiro at Hamburg. But when, in a lecture on her first visit to Greece, she confessed to having kissed the ground of Greece upon arrival - German Boden happens to be masculine - Panofsky could not refrain from whispering: ‘Er konnte sich ja nicht wehren!’ but, immediately, added Ovid's ‘Cadmus agit grates, preregrinaque oscula terrae/Figit, et ignotos montesque agrosque salutat.’ His gratitude to Roxanne Forster was deep and justified. To the last she was at his side as his secretary and friend with whom he battled, over every cadence and over every comma from both a semantic and a phonetic point of view - often agonizingly, but always to his and his readers' profit.
His book, Studies in Iconology (Bibl. 74, 1939), marks the turning point in which Iconology no longer features as a Hilfswissenschaft, ancillary to the history of art, but functions as an indispensable cog on the wheels of the art historical method. The parade-pieces were: ‘Piero di Cosimo,’ ‘Father Time,’ ‘Blind Cupid,’ ‘The Neo-Platonic Movement.’ The ‘Introductory’ chapter, with less than thirty pages and with its ingenious tables dissecting the three strata of subject matter or meaning, was to become the classical statement on the iconological and iconographic procedures.Ga naar eindnoot7) Panofsky's Albrecht Dürer, which the Princeton University Press produced in its first edition in 1943 (Bibl. 84), is his great and definitive tribute to the Nuremberg artist-humanist with whom his scholarly work had begun in 1911-12. It might also justly be called Panofsky's answer to the Teutonic concept of the 1930's and 40's which, to the lasting detriment of German scholarship, claimed to be able to distinguish between Germanic and Jewish scholarship. On the morning of the 25th of January 1947 Panofsky received the invitation to give the Norton Lectures at Harvard University. He showed me the letter and, as I returned it to him he said with a wry smile: ‘Ach verflucht!’ It was only on the morning of the 5th of March that he began writing. He commented in genuine despair: ‘I find nothing as difficult as starting.’ Six years | |
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 later, ten years after the book on Albrecht Dürer, the Norton Lectures appeared as a monumental publication under the title Early Netherlandish Painting (Bibl. 112, 1953). Here now the mastery of the English language had grown beyond mere virtuosity and had reached the range of a brilliantly sustained literary style, in perfect balance with the minutiae of the scientific apparatus criticus. This latter work was preceded by two smaller books. Both deeply revealing to the reader in quest of the author. I know that he passionately identified himself with the theses proffered in Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. This work highlights, as I think, the specifically scholastic strain in Panofsky's whole manner of thinking. In publishing this confessio amantis, he felt vulnerable, more than ever before or after. The other, a critical edition of the Latin text along with an immaculate translation of the writings of Suger of St. - Denis, is of particular interest because of its Preface, a New Yorker-style profile of the great abbot. It represents, mutatis mutandis, a spiritual autobiography of Panofsky himself. The triad of books just mentioned may justly be called a contribution to problems in history of art and, to an equal measure, to the history of ideas. Like almost all of his subsequent publications, these works began with the spoken word, as a lecture or as a series of lectures. He knew how to preserve the character of the argumentation delivered viva voce - even in his most formal publications. Panofsky acknowledged the momentous impact which the English language had had on the very foundations of his thinking and on his manner of presenting ideas in a lucid and organic, in a euphonic as well as logical way - so very different from the ‘woolen curtain’ from behind which so many continental writers, above all the Germans and the Dutch, are wont to proclaim their findings.
Erwin Panofsky was proud of the fact that he had one nearsighted and one farsighted eye - the best of two worlds. With Bernard Berenson in mind - he referred to him as ‘the art bishop of Florence’ - Panofsky remarked that connoisseurs as they get older become, increasingly, narrowminded and farsighted, while humanists become, increasingly, fairminded and nearsighted. The maturing process of Panofsky's mind did not lead to the all too common retreat of the aging scholar behind a parapet of profundities and generalities. Even by their intriguing and often intentionally bizarre titles, innumerable small but extremely significant articles testified to his undiminished will and ability to venture into ever new fields. We encounter, in the 1960's, essays such as ‘Canopus Deus. The Iconography of a Non-Existent God’ (1961), ‘Homage to Fracastoro’ - discussing the role of Syphilis in Renaissance Art (1961), the revised dialogue ‘Sokrates in Hamburg’ (1962), ‘The Rolls-Royce Radiator’ (1963). ‘The Mouse that Michelangelo Failed to Carve’ (1964), ‘Gregorian Calendar Re- | |
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form’ - dedicated to his friend Alexandre Koyre (1964), and, besides, his great book, all text and no footnotes: Tomb Sculpture. Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini - ‘the result of a somewhat morbid but rather intense interest in funerary art.’Ga naar eindnoot8)
In December 1959 I received a letter from Panofsky, telling me that Millard Meiss had invited him ostensibly to a perfectly harmless luncheon at his house, ‘and when we entered the room we found ourselves confronted with major fragments of the committee that had clandestinely prepared what seems to be the most opulent Festschrift ever known to man... it is somewhat ironical that I shall receive the Festschrift, if I live that long, without being entitled to it. By this I mean not only that I am not worthy (that goes without saying) but also that the occasion for which the Festschrift was originally planned (Panofsky's retirement from the Institute had unexpectedly been moved up by two years) has disappeared with the result that I find myself in the somewhat anomalous position of receiving a Festschrift without any obvious reason. I have a choice between either resigning before my time so as to justify the Festschrift or receiving the Festschrift with the feeling of a man who wakes up from apparent death in the middle of his own burial service, feeling somewhat sheepish and even a little indiscreet on account of having listened in on what was not really intended to be heard by himself.’ Some time after, early in 1960, Millard Meiss asked me to act for the editorial board and take the specially bound volumes of the Festschrift to its destination. This was not an easy task simply because Panofsky refused to put down Georges Wildenstein's Fragonard which he insisted on reading, even after he had ushered me into his living room. The whole procedure was highly embarrassing to both of us. Finally, I repaired to the kitchen to mix us some drinks when Panofsky followed me, carrying the two heavy volumes which, as yet in their cases, he put with awakened curiosity on the kitchen scales. Once the ice had been broken, his delighted curiosity, especially in regard to the who's who of the forty contributors, changed from astonishment to laughter, from laughter to frowning, and back to laughter again. The curriculum vitae of Erwin Panofsky would be wanting if mention was not made of at least some of his intellectual hobbies and idiosyncracies. Here the movies rank, undoubtedly, in the first place. Although his article ‘On Movies’ (Bibl. 64, 1936ff.) was republished more often than any of his other works, few if any of the professional film-critics seem to have comprehended its message. It is only quite recently that it begins to dawn on departments of art history and on the responsible deans that the history of the film represents, in minute compass, the genesis and maturation of an art form that originated within living memory, and that therefore can be watched, in all its phases, with almost clinical precision.Ga naar eindnoot9)
It was strangely touching to hear Panofsky discuss (on February 2, 1966) the enigmatic film by Alain Robbe-Grillet: ‘L'année dernière à Marienbad’ which in 1961 had actually been produced (under the direction of Alain Resnais) elsewhere: at Nymphenburg and Schleissheim castles. The heroine, Delphine Seyrig, as those who have seen the film will remember, remains throughout ambiguously uncertain, at the monotonously insistent question of her partner as to whether she remembers what can only have been a love-affair, ‘Last Year at Marienbad.’ Panofsky said he was immediately reminded of Goethe who at the age of seventy-four (Panofsky's own age at that point) had fallen in love with Ulrike von Lewetzow, a girl in her late teens, whom he saw in three consecutive summers at Marienbad. The elements of Love, Death, and Oblivion in Goethe's commemorative poem, the ‘Marienbader Eligie’ (Bibl. 122), seemed to him like anticipations of the leit-motifs of Resnais's film. Panofsky quoted the beginning words of the Elegy: ‘Was soll ich nun vom Wiedersehen hoffen...?’ and pointed out how the elements of clouded remembrance and erotic uncertainty were shared in common by both poem and film. He added that Resnais had a way of leaving his actors uncommonly free to chart their own parts. Miss Seyrig might well have been familiar with Goethe's ‘Marienbad’ and its ambiguous message. Was she not, after all, the daughter of a famous and learned father, Henri Seyrig, archaeologist, formerly Directeur Général des Musées de France and on repeated occasions a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.Ga naar eindnoot10)
Next to the film as an art form, Panofsky was fascinated by what he called the Aristotelian quality of the Mystery or Detective Story. He liked to compare the Sherlock Holmes canon and its conscious or unconscious influence on all later writers of this genre to the importance which the canon of the Fathers of the Church had held for the | |
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 later middle ages - ‘the assumption being that Sherlock Holmes's Word was Truth. Discrepancies, as in the scholastic method, had to be ironed out.’ The Holmesian dictum that ‘if all that which is impossible has been excluded, the improbable that remains must be true,’ became in a half serious way part of Panofsky's iconographic working method. He illustrated this by saying: ‘A saint receiving a rose from Heaven is improbable but convincing. If, on the other hand, Disreali on entering Queen Victoria's drawing room finds the Queen smoking a big black sigar - this is possible but unconvincing and cannot therefore be admitted as a literary motif’ (February 1948). One of Panofsky's favorites among crime story writers was Matthew Head (John Canaday) who reciprocated those feelings and inscribed Another Man's Life: ‘For E.P.’ Once, M.H., as Panofsky thought, had overstepped the limits of the mystery story. ‘The moment you inject psychology or rather psycho-pathology into a story of that kind,’ he said, ‘you take the onus of responsibility off the hero's schoulders... A good detective or mystery story is, at present, the only category of literature where man is responsible - neither mother-complex nor glandular disturbance can be used as an excuse... this genre represents the only relic of the pre-Freudian and the pre-Marxist past. Roman psychologique in the sense of Georges Simenon is acceptable, not, however, roman pathologique.’
Above all, perhaps, Panofsky was a devotee and a genuine connoisseur of music, in particular Mozart's. Köchel's Verzeichnis was one of the reference works he had | |
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always on hand. A distich, a dialogue between Posterity and Death, testifies to this great and reverent love: ‘Quare, Mors, juvenem Wolfgangum praeripuisti?’ ‘Ne secreta mea prodere pergat opus.’ I believe I am right in describing Panofsky as a man swayed by deep emotions in all stages of his life. This was true inspite of his almost puritanical insistence on integrity and truthfulness in his utterances private as well as public. He approached music and the figurative arts and also literature both intellectually and emotionally. Yet, there was in his pronouncements never a trace of the sentimental or an acceptance of the cult of the Sublime. Natural phenomena left him unmoved. He had an ineradicable aversion to children, and he once said to me: ‘Shall I tell you the most repulsive sentence in Creation?: “Have you ever seen a child's hair in the sun?”’ His proud motto was: ‘Es gibt mehr Dinge in unserer Schulweisheit als Erde und Himmel sich träumen lassen.’ At the end of an electrifying evening with Ernst Kantorowicz, in which the topic of discussion had been man's innate sense of the Sublime, E. Ka., as he was stepping out of the house on Battle Road, remarked: ‘Looking at the stars, I feel my own futility.’ Whereupon Panofsky replied: ‘All I feel is the futility of the stars’ (February 18, 1952).
In spite of endless and fruitful exchanges of ideas and information which he imparted to and elicited from friends and colleagues everywhere, Panofsky kept his work as it were under cover. Anything worthy of the name research was to him a one-man-job. Conversely, he remained to the end deeply suspicious of any kind of computerized knowledge, of data-retrieval systems, of iconological institutes, and of index-work carried out by the ‘little people’ as being capable of making meaningful contributions to the humanities. In despair I once asked him (June 27, 1953) why he had so strenuously (and effectively!) resisted the grandiose plan of his friend Fritz Saxl (d. 1948), continued for a while by Saxl's successor at the Warburg Institute, Henri Frankfort: to set up an equivalent for the Renaissance of the Pauly-Wissowa Real-Encyclopädie of the classical scholars. As often when he was in dead earnest, he smiled. And his tantalizingly satirical answer was: ‘You mean: all pull together - in the wrong direction?’ Everything in humanistic scholarship, even the to him somewhat comical New Criticism (which he characterized with Pierot's word: ‘Je sais bien écrire, mais je ne sais pas lire’) he considered acceptable as long as it wasn't ‘institutionalized.’ This is why he loved, and rightly so, Guy de Tervarent's one-man job, the Attributs et symboles dans l'art profane,Ga naar eindnoot11) and why he praised, and rightly so, the superb catalogue of the Early Netherlandish School by Martin Davies of the London National Gallery. He called the latter ‘not so much a work of reference but a series of highly concentrated little monographs.’
Dora Panofsky died after a long and trying illness. Soon thereafter, Panofsky married Gerda Soergel. Whereas until then he had adjusted his mode of living to that of an invalid, the last two years of his life were truly happy and eventful. For although frail, and now often beset by illness himself, Panofsky enjoyed extensive travel abroad with the youthful enthusiasm which had been dormant for so long. New honors and awards came his way. Some gratified his ego, others - much to his chagrin - were thrust upon him. While he might say in regard to the former, ‘he got all sorts of medals - he was a real terror,’ as for the latter, he cited, not without a certain trace of bitterness, the words of Boethius in prison: ‘Quis illos igitur putet beatos, / Quos miseri tribuunt honores?’ ‘Who can deem those honors worthwhile which are awarded by the unworthy?’ Old age and death were to Panofsky much dreaded enemies. Toward the end he circled them restlessly in his own mind. At the age of forty-four, Panofsky - whom his friends called ‘Pan’ - had written an essay on the conception of transience in Poussin and Watteau under the title ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ (Bibl. 63, 1963). Arcadia, according to Virgil, an ideal realm of perfect bucolic bliss, was the abode of the pagan deity Pan. As Panofsky pointed out, the Renaissance turned the visionary kingdom of Arcadia into a utopic paradise ‘wrapped in a subtle veil of melancholy’ because it was not only the place of love, but also of death. As he showed with philological perspicuity, it was Death who in fact must be understood to have pronounced the ominous words of the title which he would wish us to paraphrase: ‘I, Death, also dwell in Arcadia.’Ga naar eindnoot12)
In a quasi magical gesture, the aging Panofsky summoned all his mental equipment and called on his vast store of historical knowledge in order to reveal in his book on Tombs (1964) the mysteries of Man's manipulation of the dead through the ages. He | |
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did this with incredible virtuosity in a survey that by far surpassed anything that had ever been written on the theme. A poem which he composed sub umbra mortis, will help to hint at that ‘sweetness and bitterness intermingled’ which those last years held for Erwin Panofsky: Dulcia sane et amara simul praebere senectus
Cernitur, atque mihi munus utrumque placet.
Pallescunt frondes; stellae tamen usque manebunt.
Lucet, non urit Sole cadente Venus.
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