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crushed granite, we deduced from the evidence of extant maps and guidebooks that this had been the site of a ferry landing, over whose muddy approach gener- ations of proprietors had spread, little by little, a common paving material. It is hard for a historian who works with (literally) concrete evidence, and who has talked to the grandchildren of engineers who signed the construction documents, to doubt the causal efficacy of the past, even if he concedes the strength of the constructionists' argument. He might only ask, where is the dividing line between the present and the past, the line that marks a change in the ontological status of things? How does the line (or lines) move in relation to the passing of time? And does a history constructed entirely from the present side of the line have a different heuristic value, or a different influence upon our thought and action, than one derived from an actual past?

DALE H. PORTER Western Michigan University

PANOFSKY AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF ART HISTORY. By Michael Ann Holly. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984. Pp. 267.

Art history is undoubtedly a going concern. Its more well established neighbors within the field of the humanities, such as philosophy, history, and the various language-based and literary studies, may be undergoing a certain crisis of iden- tity in the present decade. But art history, which started small and never made a claim to occupy the central ground so hotly disputed by the big battalions, is still a gently burgeoning area of study. One might suppose that an important aspect of any humane discipline's claim to public esteem and attention was the credibility with which it contrived to present itself as a custodian of the treasures of the past. Yet a host of combining factors, many of them connected with the development of new media and forms of mass communication, have cast doubt upon the custodianship of the traditional disciplines. Are the treasures really there, asks the contemporary voice; and if so, are the disciplines doing their best to make them available to a contemporary public. History, addressed in this way, becomes coy and evasive. It is no part of the historian's professional ethos to purvey pomp and pageantry to a public thirsty for spectacle. But there the art historian leaps into the gap. He takes the credit for those Towers of cultural Babel which are the mighty and ever-growing modern museums; he also supervises the steady growth of conservationist policies which spread irreversibly from the castles and mansions to the terraces and traditional working-class quarters. To anyone who challenges him about his custodianship, he has only to point to this achievement - as he can confidently point to the fact that billionaires seem willing to pour an endless stream of cash into new museological and conservatorial en- terprises.

It is reasonable to ask if this public success has been matched by a comparable

200 REVIEW ESSAYS

development of the intellectual coherence of the discipline. Has art history sold its soul for a mess of oil money? Or has it managed to combine a high degree of public visibility with a steady development and refinement of the disciplinary tools which were handed down by the founding fathers? Michael Ann Holly does not see the issue in precisely these terms. But her admirable study of Panofsky comes providentially at a stage when such questions have begun to be asked with a degree of insistence. In her very first few lines, she quotes a statement made less than ten years ago by Mark Roskill in a study optimistically entitled What is Art History? "Art history is a science," writes Roskill, "with definite principles and techniques, rather than a matter of intuition or guesswork."' Yes, indeed. That was how the fledgling discipline used to define itself, borrowing the aspira- tions of its elder colleagues towards the respectable status of Wissenschaft. But Holly is well aware that this will not do today. The rhetoric of scientificity has become pretty threadbare, and, in place of an assertion which seems effectively to place art history outside history, we need to have the concrete evidence of how the "principles and techniques" were originally developed: How, then, can we confidently speak of the history of art as a "science" -and for that matter, how can we even call it a "history" if we refuse to acknowledge the historical character of its own principles and techniques? Historical understanding in the fullest sense of the word demands that historians think not only about the historical nature of the objects they investigate but also about the historical character of their own intellectual discipline.(9)

Hence Holly has decided to look closely at the career of the figure who, by common consent, bulks largest in the saga of art history's accession to maturity - whose very impatience with the "intellectual poverty"(147) of art history in the early years of the century betokened a burning desire to set the discipline on a strait and narrow, but respectable path. Yet this study of the exploits of a founding father is not simply about the creation of a method -the well-known method of iconology with its three-fold hierarchy of interpretation, to which I must inevitably return at a later stage. Surveying Panofsky's career is not like scrutinizing, for example, the professional career of Leopold von Ranke, where it is legitimate to take certain principles of archival technique, or pedagogic prac- tice, as initiating a new, indeed revolutionary, conception of a discipline. For Panofsky had to be not so much the father, perhaps, as the midwife of the new approach. He had to extricate his notion of art history from the immense, pal- pitating body of the German cultural and philosophical tradition. Holly tends to formalize this lengthy and extremely complicated business by presenting it as a series of bouts of Jacob wrestling with the Angel: Panofsky and Wolfflin, Panofsky and Riegl, and (last, but very far from least, since it is the longest chapter in the book) Panofsky and Cassirer. But this is a short-hand terminology for what is a necessarily much broader investigation. Behind the epigones are the looming presences of Kant and Hegel.

Playing at Kant and Hegel has never, I think, been a particularly congenial pursuit for the Anglo-Saxon mind. Like the gremlins in video games, they have a habit of popping up at every exit and delivering an incapacitating blow. As

1. Mark Roskill. What is Art History? (New York, 1976), 9.

REVIEW ESSAYS 201

Holly notes, poor Burckhardt spent a lifetime in trying to exorcise the Hegelian world-spirit, only to be posthumously convicted by Gombrich of being a closet Hegelian all along. Certainly she deserves credit for steering us through this lab- yrinth, where Wdlfflin is found to be Hegelian in his acceptance of the model of thesis/antithesis, and neo-Kantian in his attachment to fleshing out the con- cept of "modes of vision"(57), and where Riegl is found to have translated the concept of Hegelian process into psychological terms with his influential con- cept of Kunstwollen. Panofsky's engagement with these two decisive figures takes, on the whole, the neo-Kantian line, debating Wolfflin's implication that histor- ical shifts in style are explicable as transformations of the world-spirit, and deflecting attention to the question of alterations in the optical perception of the world. In the face of Riegl's Kunstwollen -most usually translated for our benefit as the "will-to-form" - Panofsky applied a further dose of neo-Kantian hygiene. Riegl's concept has been somewhat vulgarized in a debate which reduced the issue to one of mere artistic intentions; as one art historian wrote of the Greek painter Polygnotus, he "did not paint naturalistic landscapes because he did not want to, not at all because he could not" (85). Panofsky recognized that, in this context, it was a crucial mistake to divorce the concept of "will-to-form" from the concrete and particular evidence of the existing works of art. Over against the delusive spectacle of a "Greek" or "Gothic" man who was theoretically om- nicompetent, but chose to do one particular sort of thing, he set the notion of the "immanent" sense of the work of art on its own terms: "Polygnotus could neither have wished to represent nor have been capable of representing a naturalistic landscape because this kind of representation would have contradicted the immanenten Sinn [ immanent sense I of fifth-century Greek art in general."(90)

It becomes increasingly clear from these debates why Panofsky has been credited with a decisive role in the establishment of art history as a distinctive and firmly based discipline. Panofsky's predecessors had, in the last resort, an ambiguous and unresolved attitude to the problem of art history as it related to the general project of cultural history. Burckhardt, for example, conceived the bold meta- phor of "the state as a work of art." But the work of art as such played a com- paratively minor part in his cultural synthesis. Panofsky conceived of a way of approaching the individual painting or sculpture which would yield nothing in its intensity of exploration to the attentions of the Berensonian connoisseurs, yet would stake a much more substantial claim to historical and philosophical importance. In order to carry this program through, he finally needed the in- tellectual support of the most impressive of all the neo-Kantians, Ernst Cassirer, who was his colleague both at the University of Hamburg and at the Warburg Institute from the early 1920's onwards. From Cassirer's doctrine of "symbolic forms", as Holly ably shows, Panofsky derived the matrix for his own, highly original investigations. Cassirer had asserted in a general way that art, like other symbolic forms, was "not an imitation but a discovery of reality."2 Panofsky dis-

2. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven, 1962), 143.

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cerned the possibility of using this principle to uncover the pictorial mechanisms which the "imitative" tradition had somewhat taken for granted. In the 1924- 1925 Vortrage der Bibliothek Warburg- whose date recalls that Marcel Duchamp had also just made his definitive comment on the Albertian tradition with the "incompleting" of the Large Glass- Panofsky published his essay on "Perspec- tive as a symbolic form."

In any conventional tribute to a founding father, this would be the moment at which the great discovery was made, and the disciples flocked to his standard. Panofsky had rightly diagnosed that the invention of linear perspective at the time of the Renaissance was a constructive achievement, which proposed and consolidated a particular paradigm for the understanding of visual reality. Yet it is precisely here, it would seem, that the notion of foundations starts to go oddly astray. As is notorious among art historians, the essay on "Perspective as a symbolic form" has never been translated into English. This would be under- standable if its lessons had been accepted and assimilated through other, subse- quent, writings, and if it really mattered very little for the original text to be avail- able to the English-speaking world. But such is not the case. Paradoxically, we are obliged to say that Panofsky's great unread essay is anything but the received wisdom of a founding father whose lessons have been transmitted integrally to the discipline of art history. In fact, it remains at the same time an advanced piece of work and a superseded one. Panofsky had seen the necessity of scrutinizing the codes of perspective in the context of the scientific and cultural forms of the Renaissance, and to this extent his intuitions are still running ahead of the residual tendency to take perspectival space as given. He had also, how- ever, made assumptions about the significance of Renaissance perspective which rested upon untenable psychological presuppositions. For him, the essence of the "legitimate construction" of perspective was that "the subjective visual ex- perience was rationalized" and became "the foundation for the construction of a world of experience firmly grounded and yet in an entirely modern sense infinite... .". But Joel Snyder has argued clearly that this is not in fact what is at stake: By characterizing what we see in terms of visual experience and by disregarding the formal principles of perspective, Panofsky misrepresents Alberti's program. Alberti is not con- cerned with subjective experience, he is concerned with finding a means by which he can depict objects established by perception.... What Alberti accomplished was not the objectification of the subjective, but rather the externalisation of the internal.4

The status of Panofsky's essay on perspective is, one might say, a pointer to the contemporary position of his theoretical work in general. It is unjustly neglected, and it is a crucial link in the chain which leads to the very much more intensive recent studies of the issue. But it is certainly not the state of the art.

3. Erwin Panofsky, "Die Perspective als 'Symbolische Form,"' (Leipzig/Berlin, 1927), translated and quoted in Joel Snyder, "Picturing Vision," in The Language of Images, ed. W. J. Mitchell (Chicago, 1980), 243.

4. Ibid., 246.

REVIEW ESSAYS 203

And here I diverge from Holly, whose strategy is, to a great extent, to demon- strate that Panofsky is not only immersed in the debates of post-Hegelian and neo-Kantian thought, but is also up with the leaders in the theoretical stakes of today. Holly quotes the Italian art historian Giulio Argan as having termed Panofsky "the Saussure of art history." It is a remark which seems disconcert- ingly vague and pointless until we realize that what Argan actually said was a little different. "Panofsky, not W6lfflin," he asserted, "was the Saussure of art history."5 In other words, Argan is conducting a rather complicated argument which consists in anticipating the view that W6lfflin's formalism, and his exten- sive use of binary oppositional categories, is a true parallel to Saussure's struc- tural linguistics: Saussure was concerned with the signified as well as with the signifier, and to this extent Panofsky's iconology follows the main tendency of his analysis. But I do not feel that the analogy can be pushed much further than this. Nor do I find Holly's attempt to secure a connection between Panofsky's approach and that of Michel Foucault particularly illuminating. It is just about possible to advance the claim that Foucault, like Panofsky, was interested in "the essential tendencies of the human mind," but that precarious verbal formulation is about all that secures the connection between two methods, which could hardly be more different in their basic assumptions, their working procedures, and their final results. Anyone inclined to doubt this has only to look at what Foucault does to Las Meninas at the beginning of Les Mots et les chases.

In effect, this reference to Foucault's virtuoso (if fallacious) passage on the theory of representation brings us to a discernible weakness in the iconological method which has had its observable consequences in the contemporary practice of art history. What is conspicuously elided in the famous example which Panofsky uses to demonstrate the successive methodological steps of iconography/iconology is the very notion of representation itself. Svetlana Alpers indicates the difficulty very precisely: He introduces his subject with the simple example of meeting a friend on the street who lifts his hat in greeting. The blur of shapes and colors identified as a man and the sense that he is in a certain humor are called by Panofsky the primary or natural meaning, but the understanding that to raise the hat is a greeting is a secondary, conventional, or iconographic meaning. So far we are dealing only with life. Panofsky's strategy is then simply to recommend transferring the results of this analysis from everyday life to a work of art. So now we have a picture of a man lifting his hat. What Panofsky chooses to ignore is that the man is not present but is represented in the picture. In what manner, under what conditions is the man represented in paint on the surface of the canvas? What is needed, and what art historians lack, is a notion of representation.'

That this is not just an exquisite theoretical quibble can easily be demonstrated by an example which Alpers herself has developed. In a recent exhibition of seventeenth-century Dutch art at Philadelphia and London, one of the paintings included was a celebrated genre piece by Ter Borch, which had the distinction of being mentioned in Goethe's Elective Affinities. Goethe had known the work

5. Giulio Carlo Argan, "Ideology and Iconology," transl. Rebecca West, ibid., 17. 6. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing (London, 1983), 236.

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under the title "Parental Admonition," but subsequent art historians have cor- rected his innocent impression by noting that the young man who confronts a splendidly dressed woman is holding a coin in his hand. Obviously, they argue, the scene is not a family circle but a brothel. And yet, as Alpers maintains, such an iconographic reading takes for granted the unproblematic connection between life and the depicted scene. It seems highly likely that Ter Borch's paintings were conceived in terms of tableaux vivants acted by family and friends, in which the element of performance, or representation, was foregrounded. We may well sup- pose that the point of interest for Ter Borch was not some banal moral drawn from contemporary life, but the very element which a later painter like Watteau seems to have taken from him: precisely the representational enigma of the young woman whose face is hidden from us, and whose lack of overt gesture becomes a subtle, negative means of exploiting the lacunae of the perspectival scheme.'

Of course Panofsky is not uniquely responsible for the neglect of such represen- tational values (a neglect which art historians like Svetlana Alpers and Michael Fried are well on the way to counteracting). As Holly rightly stresses, we cannot condemn him for the excesses of a method which, at its most crude, is merely the replacement of a visible property by a moral or social stereotype (the dog in the Arnolfini portrait is really not a dog; it stands for marital fidelity). But this does not imply that we cannot criticize Panofsky at all. Even the most deservedly successful examples of his iconological method now need close crit- ical scrutiny, and it would be a curious form of respect for his pioneering work if this were to be denied to him. In effect, though Holly is oddly reticent about acknowledging the fact, there is already a fairly clear consensus about the limita- tions of Panofsky's method; and though it may overstep the mark in some cases, it is broadly justified in its assessment of the dominant tendencies of his thought. A contemporary semiologist like Jiri Veltrusky may seem to be exaggerating when he states that "iconology is concerned with thematic meanings alone." For Panofsky, "meaning" and "subject-matter" are interchangeable."" Does not Panofsky state explicitly at the conclusion of his fine essay on Titian's Allegory of Prudence: And it is doubtful whether this human document would have fully revealed to us the beauty and appropriateness of its diction had we not had the patience to decode its ob- scure vocabulary. In a work of art, "form" cannot be divorced from "content": the distri- bution of color and lines, light and shade, volumes and planes, however delightful as a visual spectacle, must also be understood as carrying a more-than-visual meaning.9 Yes indeed, Panofsky does say this, and so suggests how the circulus methodicus completes itself by returning from the iconological meaning to the pre- iconographic level of "color and lines." But as J.-C. Lebensztejn justly remarks, Panofsky's statement that form cannot be divorced from content is itself nothing more or less than a separation of form from content; and there is nothing in

7. Svetlana Alpers, in London Review of Books, 15 November - 6 December 1984, 21-22. 8. Jih Veltrusky, "Some aspects of the Pictorial Sign," in Semiotics of Art, ed. Ladislav Matejka

and Irwin R. Titunik (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 252. 9. Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Harmondsworth, 1970), 204-205.

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his analysis of the Allegory of Prudence which effectively challenges this separa- tion. To introduce the picture with a comment about "the magnificence of Titian's ultima maniera" is merely to stick on an imprecise stylistic label which plays no part whatsoever in the further analysis. 10 As we might expect, Lebensztejn's own essay on the same painting by Titian is a very different type of operation, which does not proceed confidently from level to level, but patiently and minutely traces the vagaries and redundancies of the process of signification.

Holly does not really engage with these contemporary problems that beset Panofsky's writings and his academic legacy. Yet her account of the intellectual context of his early work is outstandingly good, and she is right to settle, in the last analysis, for the claim that she has tried to judge his "way of thinking ... historically" (193). In his own historical and indeed geographical context, Panofsky is both an attractive and a significant representative of the classical humanist position which he helped to clarify and continue. Holly remarks on Panofsky's sense of humor when, speaking in a northern country, he attributed iconology's success there to the fact that "the country is remote, barren, and short on sun- light, and everybody knows that iconology can be done when there are no originals to look at and nothing but artificial light to work in." Humorous the evocation undoubtedly is, but the classical name for such an avowal of the gap between the original and the commentary might well be "elegiac." Panofsky's marvelous essay on the tradition of "Et in Arcadia Ego" is surely one of the elegiac master- pieces of our century, testifying as it does to the steady and careful accretion of knowledge which was for him the only passport to humanistic study. "Hu- manists cannot be trained," wrote Panofsky; "they must be allowed to mature or, if I may use so homely a simile, to marinate" (160). Perhaps those benevolent billionaires could be persuaded to see their role in these terms. To them falls the responsibility of enriching the marinade -and to the art historians the duty of bathing in it.

STEPHEN BANN University of Kent

10. Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, "Un tableau de Titien / un essai de Panofsky," Critique (August- September 1973), 826.

PHILOSOPHY IN HISTORY. Edited by Richard Rorty, J.B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Pp. xii, 403.

This prestigious anthology of sixteen new essays by some of the more "histor- ical" of contemporary English-uttering philosophers has an air of legitimating what was, till now, a risky heresy - definitively modern, even radical or left-wing. One of the contributors, Ian Hacking, coyly wonders how his ideas can be sufficiently "outlandish" to get him included in a book with such a "subversive