Erwin Panofsky and the Renascence of the Renaissance

Author(s): Carl Landauer

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), pp. 255-281
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of America
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 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY
Editedby
MICHAEL J. B. ALLEN ALBERT RABIL, JR.

AssociateEditors
RONA GOFFEN BRIDGET GELLERT LYONS COLIN EISLER GENE A. BRUCKER

Erwin Panofskyand the Renascence

of the Renaissance*
by CARL LANDAUER

T HASLONGBEENunderstood that historians, literary critics, and

art historians who write about past cultures use those cultures for
present purposes, whether by turning Periclean Athens into an ideal
for present-day America or the fall of the Roman empire into
an ominous signal for modern empires. German humanists who
sought refuge from Nazi Germany had, however, special reasons
to use their cultural studies as a strategy of escape. Erich Auerbach
in exile in Istanbul and Ernst Robert Curtius in "inner exile" in
Bonn provided narratives of European literary history that mini-
mized the contribution of their native culture, and in so reworking
the narrative of Western literature, they were able to reshape their
own identities. Their reconstructions of past cultures can thus be
read as attempts at self-reconstruction. Ultimately, however, the
attempt by such scholars to distance themselves from German cul-
ture often faltered on the very Germanness of their cultural recon-
structions. These constructions meant to symbolize un-German
essences--whether Curtius's Latinity or Auerbach's tradition of
Western realism-were assembled from rather German elements.
For those German scholars who emigrated to the United States,
such as Erwin Panofsky, another paradox emerged: they found

*Fortheirhelp on this essay, the authorwould like to thankR. Howard Bloch, Joan
Hart, MartinJay, and Fred H. Matthews.
'I have attemptedto provide a model for this self-mythologizing through cultural
constructionin the case of Erich Auerbach. See Landauer.

[255]
256 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

themselves in an academy that was beginning to revere culture in

much the same way as the Germans had traditionally done. The
mid-century American university witnessed a growing effort to
produce an American version of Bildung, and arriving German
scholars were welcomed in some quarters specifically for the Ger-
man style of their cultivation and erudition. It is in this context that
the art historian Erwin Panofsky is particularly interesting. For
Panofsky playing the part of the model humanist for American ac-
ademic audiences often meant cultivating rather than escaping his
Germanness. Although his vision of the Renaissance initially in-
volved some of the same cultural distancing from Hitler's Germany
that Curtius's Latin Middle Ages did, that vision played a more sig-
nificant role within American cultural politics, essentially cooper-
ating with the American academia's own efforts at cultural self-
distancing. Panofsky's American work on the Renaissance is thus
not only an example of self-construction but is also woven into the
story of an academic ideology that has been faltering under attack
for the last two or three decades. The faltering of that academic
ideology, its move from the "hackneyed" to the "irrelevant" to its
present place as an easy object in the canon wars is part of the
post-history of Panofsky's participation. The fact that the ideology
to which Panofsky contributed so much has been under such in-
creasing attack makes Panofsky's role in its creation all the more
interesting.
For many American historians of art the name Erwin Panofsky
represents an important phase not so much in the ideological his-
tory of the humanities but in the history of their own discipline.
There have been attempts to modernize Panofsky, to link his name
to contemporary developments in the humanities, such as Christine
Hasenmueller's comparison of Panofsky's iconology to the semi-
otics of the structural anthropologist Edmund Leach2 or Michael
Ann Holly's comparison at the end of her excellent study of Panof-
sky's early theoretical essays of Panofsky's work with that of
Michel Foucault.3 Nevertheless, Panofsky's many iconological
studies are associated with a specific stage in the history of art his-
tory in the United States, and his books have acquired the patina

2Hasenmueller.
3Holly, esp. 185-87.
 THE RENASCENCE OF THE RENAISSANCE 257

of the "classic." They are venerated and often used in introductory

art history classes. But they are venerated and used as the work of
a past master, and Panofsky has come to be used as a foil for modern
art historians, a symbol of a past to be left behind.4
Whatever justification for the present images of Panofsky, we
should recognize that his writings from his first two decades in the
United States were written in a very specific historical context and
with a high degree of self-consciousness about their implications
both for the development of art history in the United States and for
the development of the humanities as a whole. Indeed, many of his
writings, especially Studies in Iconologyand Meaning in the Visual
Arts, had the air of the manifesto about them.5 The famous "Intro-
ductory" to Studiesin Iconology,with its theoretical discussion of the
layers of meaning in art and consequently in the study of art, argues
that art history should be done with an eye to the "intrinsic mean-
ings" of art.6The art historian had to go beyond mere iconography,
the identification of the "images, stories and allegories" in the art
of the past, and engage in a hermeneutical effort to understand
"'symbolical' values," essentially the cultural message of art.7
Studiesin Iconologywas indeed a manifesto introducing iconology
to the English-speaking art historical world. And in a relatively
short period Panofsky succeeded in bringing his version of iconol-
ogy to the forefront of art historical research in America.8
The very nature of Panofsky's highly interdisciplinary method-
ology suggested that he was less concerned with the interior dia-
logue of his own discipline as with its place in the larger context
of the humanities as a whole. The title of the introductory essay to
Meaningin the VisualArts, "The History of Art as a Humanistic Dis-
cipline," was meant to suggest the broader context in which art

4See, for example, Alpers, esp. xxiv.

5Panofsky, 1939 and I955.
6Panofsky, 1939, esp. 14.
7Ibid., I4-I5.
8Although he had a good deal of help in this-whether from his former students
EdgarWind, WilliamHeckscherandH. W.Janson,or from others, suchasRudolfWitt-
kower and E. H. Gombrich-iconology would be associatedamong Americanhisto-
rianswith the name of Erwin Panofsky. Only recently has Aby Warburggained full
recognitionas the founderoficonology, but often his work is readthrougha familiarity
with work of Panofsky, so that the understandingof Warburg'swork is colored by
Panofsky's. This is ironically also the case in Germany. See, for example, Wuttke.
258 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

historians should work.9 And read within the context of the de-
velopment of the humanities in the United States, Panofsky's
methodological program was closely tied to a particular ideal of
learning in the humanities. As is evident from the essay's original
publication in 1940 in a book edited by T. M. Greene, The Meaning
of theHumanities,Panofsky's methodological efforts fed into an on-
going discussion of the nature of the humanities in America. The
essay was part of a highly polemical interchange on the importance
of the humanities, the nature of learning, and the function of the
university in the United States. That interchange, fought within
the context of the great books courses at Columbia and Chicago,
various proclamations by cultural Cassandras, and worries about
the rise of a technological culture, was highly charged. And Panof-
sky's writings evidenced a self-awareness of the author's deep
engagement in the political culture of the American educator.
Much of Panofsky's energies were funneled into another debate,
a debate over the meaning of the Renaissance, which in many ways
became a figure for the broader discussion over the meaning of the
humanities. In the United States debate over the nature of the Re-
naissance was mostly a mid-century affair, but it drew from the de-
bate on the Renaissance that had opened in Europe with the pub-
lication in 860 of Jacob Burckhardt's Civilization of theRenaissance.
As chronicled by Wallace Ferguson, the concept of the Renaissance,
popularized at the turn of the century, came under attack by schol-
ars who felt that the Renaissance did not produce all that much that
was novel. 10A number of historians tried to give priority to the
several medieval Renaissances, which they claimed did much of
the work of the Italian Renaissance. C. H. Haskins, for example,
almost single-handedly introduced the "twelfth-century Renais-
sance" with The Twelfth-CenturyRenaissancein 1927, while other
scholars brought attention to the Carolingian and Ottonian Renais-
sances.II Concurrently, neo-Thomists, led by Etienne Gilson, in-
sisted that the century of their patron saint represented the height
of Western culture, a height from which the rest of Western history
meant only decline, and consequently, the dawn of the Renaissance
was not a dawn at all.

9"The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline" was originally published in

Greene, 89-118.
'°See the chapter on the "Revolt of the Medievalists" in Ferguson.
IHaskins.
 THE RENASCENCE OF THE RENAISSANCE 259

The struggle over the meaning of the Renaissance occupied

scholars over a number of decades, but one can identify a particu-
larly self-conscious attempt by American scholars to raise these is-
sues in the I940s and 950os. Whole issues of academic periodicals
were given over to the debate, such as the "symposium" on the Re-
naissance published in TheJournalof theHistoryof Ideasin I943. And
other cultural institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, sponsored similar symposia or provided a forum for debate. 12
Although some of the American debate focused on the Renaissance
contribution to the development of the natural sciences, the old
questions about the new spirit ushered in by the Renaissance sus-
tained a great deal of interest. And for American devotees of the Re-
naissance, as for participants in the fin-de-siecle cult of the Renais-
sance, the Italian Quattrocento assumed the aspect of an idealized
society. Although for some there were political lessons to learn
from the Italian city-states, for others the Renaissance took on
symbolic meaning in the discourse on learning and culture; the
Renaissance, revered as a model, reflected their ideals.
It was largely within the context of this American reformulation
of the debate on the Renaissance that Panofsky published his
famous Kenyon Review essay of I944, "Renaissance and Rena-
scences,"l3 originally intended as a contribution to the Renaissance
symposium in theJournalof theHistoryof Ideas. 4 Against this back-
ground Panofsky's Kenyon Review essay offered an idealized
Renaissance which could stand for certain cultural ideas.
It is important to recognize the close affinity of Panofsky's meth-
odological polemics and his apology for the Renaissance, for ulti-
mately the art historical methodology of the iconologist and the
cultural ideals represented by the Renaissance were closely con-
nected in his mind. It was no accident that in the introduction to

I2Baron.This symposium began by reprintinga paperby Durand, "Traditionand

Innovation in Fifteenth-CenturyItaly: 'IIPrimato dell'Italia'in the Field of Science,"
anda retortby Hans Baronat the 194I meeting of the AmericanHistoricalAssociation.
The editor of the Journalof the Historyof Ideas,John Hermann Randall, then asked
several other scholars-including Paul Oskar Kristeller, Lynn Thorndike, and Ernst
Cassirer-to discuss the interchangebetween Durand and Baron. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art held a symposium on the Renaissanceduring I951-52 academicyear
in which paperswere delivered by WallaceFerguson, Robert Lopez, George Sarton,
RolandBainton, LeicesterBradner,and Erwin Panofsky. The talks have subsequently
been published as The Renaissance: A Symposium.
I3Panofsky, I944, 201-36.
I4See "Author's note" in ibid., 235.
260 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

Studiesin IconologyPanofsky placed his methodological discussion

and his interpretation of the Renaissance in close succession: the
first part of the introduction is devoted to methodology while
the second represents an early version of "Renaissance and Rena-
scences." More explicitly, however, Panofsky began his essay
"The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline" with a discussion
of the concept of humanitas,with Ficino, and with Pico. The im-
plication of that opening was not only that Panofsky's cultural
ideals but also his art historical enterprise had its genesis in the
Renaissance.
Before delving deeper into Panofsky's bolstering of a growing
Italian Renaissance ideology in the United States, it is important to
remember his other attachments to the art of the North and the
High Gothic. Significantly, he wrote much more on Albrecht Di-
rer than on any other artist, and his largest book remains the mas-
sive study of Netherlandish art with its full second volume devoted
to plates.'5 If his study of the art of the north was at times oriented
toward the south, discussing its interaction with Italian art, Panof-
sky retained a special interest in the art of the north, an important
alliance within the highly charged German polarities of north and
south. 6 Possibly, the northern culture Panofsky most admired was
seventeenth-century Holland with its unusual tolerance. 7 And ar-
guably, his admiration for Dutch culture fueled his work on Neth-
erlandish art, allowing him to idealize a northern culture without
explicitly idealizing the culture from which he was exiled. But
Panofsky, unlike many German emigre scholars, did not turn away
from German culture as a subject of his study. In his war-time book
on Durer, The Life andArt ofAlbrechtDiirer, published a year before
the Kenyon Review essay, Panofsky attempted quite explicitly to
locate the missing German "voice" in the "fugue" of Western art.
The German contribution to the evolution of art, he felt, was to be
found not in a fully developed style, such as the Gothic or the

I Panofsky, I953.
'6Svetlana Alpers argues that Panofsky "ranked the southern aspirations of Durer
over his northern heritage: in Panofsky's account the Direr who depicted the nude and
was intrigued with perspective is favored over the descriptive artist of the Great Piece
of Turf." Alpers, xxiii-xxiv.
'7In a letter to Booth Tarkington on I I November 1944, Panofsky expressed his
"sympathy" with seventeenth-century Holland. Panofsky and Tarkington, 57.
 THE RENASCENCE OF THE RENAISSANCE 26I

baroque, but in the "personal 'inventions' " of individual artists. 8

And Dtirer's achievement was to be understood as just such a con-
tribution from the genius of a German artist. It may seem odd to
find Panofsky, an exile from the Third Reich, expressing this desire
to locate the German contribution to Western art, but his book
should be read as one of those attempts, common among German
refugees, to resurrect "the other Germany"--an unsullied Ger-
many with which the exile could still identify. In part, the northern
counterpoint to Panofsky's Italian Renaissance studies signify a
personally redemptive effort.
During the very period when he wrote the books and essays
which most identify him with the Italian Renaissance, that is, his
first two decades in America, Panofsky also devoted his attention
and his emotions to medieval art. In Hamburg he had written and
taught often on medieval art, perhaps following the example of his
teacher Adolph Goldschmidt. But if his work of 1924, Die deutsche
Plastikdes elftenbis dreizehntenJahrhunderts, reflected Goldschmidt's
influence, Panofsky's writings of the I940s and early I95os on
Gothic art show an entirely different spirit. 9 His introduction to
Abbot Suger on the Abbey Churchof St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures,
for example, depicts a man with whom Panofsky evidently felt a
great deal of sympathy.20 Panofsky may have insisted that Suger,
despite his strength as an individual, should not be interpreted as
a proto-Renaissance figure. But the distinction Panofsky tried to es-
tablish was perhaps too subtle: "The great man of the Renaissance
asserted his personality centripetally, so to speak: he swallowed up
the world that surrounded him until his whole environment had
been absorbed by his own self. Suger asserted his personality cen-
trifugally: he projected his ego into the world that surrounded him
until his whole self had been absorbed by his environment."21
Panofsky's clever schema here, intended to differentiate the medi-
eval Suger from the great personalities of the Italian Renaissance,
suggests all the more Suger's proximity to the figures of the Italian
Renaissance.

I8Panofsky, 1971, 3.
I9Panofsky, 1924.
2OPanofsky, 1946.
2IPanofsky, 1955, I37.
262 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

But if Panofsky's Abbot Suger is arguably too close to Renais-

sance ideals to be truly emblematic of the Gothic, GothicArchitecture
and Scholasticismremains an unambiguous celebration of an era.22
Indeed, GothicArchitectureand Scholasticismreads as if it were writ-
ten by a convinced neo-Thomist, and some of Panofsky's assess-
ments seem to have come directly from the Etienne Gilson's Reason
and Revelationin the Middle Ages,23such as Panofsky's description
of the century of Thomas as a cultural climax from which one could
trace a decline into subjectivism. In a sentence that could easily have
been written by Gilson, Panofsky wrote: "Both mysticism and
nominalism cut the tie between reason and faith."24 In his narrative
of the Renaissance, however, Panofsky discerned a cultural trough
between the period of High Gothic and the beginning of the Re-
naissance, a concept which ultimately allowed him to praise the
High Gothic for its structured thought while idealizing the Italian
Renaissance in the pages of the Kenyon Review. Consequently, his
Renaissance studies could characterizethe fourteenth century much
the way Etienne Gilson or David Knowles did in their celebrations
of high Scholasticism without having to abandon his devotion to
the Italian Quattrocento. And there is an intellectual quality he dis-
cerned in the high Gothic that might only complement the cultural
values he found in the Renaissance.
Despite Panofsky's praise of high Gothic art, the burden of his
KenyonReview essay of 1944 was to establish a clear break between
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Essentially, his strategy was
to delegitimize the claims for the earlierRenaissances, primarily the
Carolingian and the twelfth-century Renaissances, to have antici-
pated the Italian Renaissance. For Panofsky the earlier "rena-
scences" differed from the Italian Renaissance not in quantity but
in quality. His argument centered on the difference between the
earlier revivals of antiquity and that produced by the quattrocento.
Panofsky was willing to grant that Carolingian artists and scribes
had brought classical materials into their own cultural work and the
twelfth-century renaissance had also been responsible for reintro-
ducing classical materials into European culture. He felt, neverthe-
less, that the medieval renascences were marked by a disjuncture

22Panofsky, 1976.
23Gilson.
24Panofsky, 1976, 14.
 THE RENASCENCE OF THE RENAISSANCE 263

of classical content and classical form. "Wherever," Panofsky

wrote, "a sculptor or painter borrows a figure or a group from a
classical work of art he almost invariably invests it with a non-
classical, viz., Christian, meaning; conversely, wherever he bor-
rows a theme from classical poetry, mythology or history he al-
most invariably presents it in a non-classical, viz., contemporary
form."25 This, Panofsky maintained, was the mark of the medieval
revival of classical material. But the Italian Renaissance represented
an entirely different approach to the classical past: "It was for the
Italian Renaissance to reintegrate classical form with classical con-
tent, and it was by this reintegration that the classical images -first
salvaged, then split asunder and finally recomposed--were really
'reborn'. "26 The Italian Renaissance was able to recombine classical
form and classical content because for the first time Europeans were
able to look upon the classical past "from a fixed, unalterable dis-
tance, quite comparable to the distance between the eye and the ob-
ject in that most characteristic invention of the same Renaissance,
focused perspective."27 For Panofsky the Italian Renaissance
"looked upon classical Antiquity from a historical distance; there-
fore, for the first time, as upon a totality removed from the present;
and therefore, for the first time, as upon an ideal to be longed for
instead of a reality to be both utilized and feared. "28 The Italian Re-
naissance thus represented the true "rinascimento dell' antichita."
This argument, focusing mainly on the visual arts with a few ges-
tures toward developments in literature, is the basic argument of
"Renaissance and Renascences." Panofsky would use a heavily
footnoted and more nuanced version of the article for the title essay
of Renaissanceand Renascencesin WesternArt in I960.29 And the
Kenyon Review essay followed upon several other publications in
which Panofsky had made essentially the same argument, including
the introduction to Studiesin Iconologyin 1939 and "Classical My-
thology in Medieval Art," an essay he wrote jointly with Fritz Saxl
for the MetropolitanMuseum Studiesin I933.30

25Panofsky, 1944, 220.

26Ibid., 222.
27Ibid., 225.
28Ibid., 228.
29Panofsky, 1972.
30°Panofskyand Saxl.
264 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

The essay Panofsky wrote with Saxl is a particularly interesting

variation of what would become a familiar theme, since that essay,
largely because of Saxl's closer involvement with Aby Warburg,
represents an attempt to blend Warburg's discussion of the revival
of classical figures in the Schifanoia frescoes with an early version
of Panofsky's argument about the reintegration of classical form
and classical content in the Renaissance. Part of the interest derives
from the fact that the article in the MetropolitanMuseumStudiessug-
gests Panofsky's debt to Warburg's famous lecture of 1912 on the
Schifanoia palace in Ferrara.31In his lecture Warburg identified the
figures in the top panels of the Schifanoia frescoes as the classical
gods presiding over the twelve months of the year who had not
quite regained their full classical form but had progressed part of
the way to that form. For him the frescoes represented a stage in
the revival of their original Olympian grandeur. According to War-
burg the Greek gods had disguised themselves during the Middle
Ages as eastern astrological figures only to return to their full clas-
sical presence in the Italian Renaissance.
In Warburg's lecture we can locate much of the argument of
Panofsky's "Renaissance and Renascences" in a nascent form. Al-
ready in Warburg's discussion of the Schifanoia frescoes one finds
the notion that classical figures were retained in medieval culture
in non-classical guises and their return was marked by the resump-
tion of classical form. If Warburg's narrative represented only half
of Panofsky's narrative of the medieval separation of classical form
and content, the notion that the reintegration of form and content
represented the rebirth of the classical past was clearly pronounced.
Warburg's lecture on the Schifanoia frescoes was an important
part of the prehistory of Panofsky's "Renaissance and Rena-
scences," but Warburg had not ascribed to the Italian Renaissance
the "historical perspective" on the classical past so important to
Panofsky.32 For Warburg the classical figures on the walls of the
Schifanoia palace had begun to re-emerge in their classical form due

3IWarburg.Warburg'slecturewas originallygiven at the InternationalArt Histori-

cal Society in Rome in I912 and published in 1922.
32Warburgin his lectures had also spoken often, as Panofsky did in "Renaissance
and Renascences,"of the medieval moralizationof classicalmythological figures. The
key example for Warburg-and Panofsky learned this from Warburg-was the so-
calledOvidemoralise.And Panofskyalso took his discussionof the move from the style
allafranceseto the style all' anticafrom Warburg.
 THE RENASCENCE OF THE RENAISSANCE 265

to their own dynamism. In their reassumed classicism they expe-

rienced an "afterlife"rather than being the objects of historical dis-
tance. Although Warburg spoke often of objectivity, the figures in
the upper panels of the Schifanoia frescoes seemed to have effected
their own return.
Despite his heavy debt to Warburg, Panofsky was rather un-
Warburgianin his attempt to set the Renaissanceoff so dramatically
from the medieval world. The Warburgian effort to trace the
"Nachleben der Antike" signified a close following of elements
from the antique world as they made their way through the cen-
turies in reworked forms. Warburg's own notes, now in the ar-
chives of the WarburgInstitute in London, are filled with chartsfol-
lowing bits and pieces of the culture of antiquity through medieval
Europe.33 And the labyrinthine structure of Warburg's famous li-
brary in Hamburg proclaimed the organic nature of human culture
and the continuity of culturalhistory. Thus, although Panofsky be-
came a master of Warburg's method, he was not as convinced of
the organic development of culture. Even in Germany, in what
might be considered the best example of the Warburgianhistorical
tracing of cultural types, Herculesam Scheidewege,Panofsky already
tried to establish a more dramatic divide between the Renaissance
and the medieval worlds than one could find in Warburg's work. 34
Warburg had idealized the Renaissance and praised it as a liberating
moment in the history of the West, but his work was marked by
the careful tracing of the inroads of antiquity into the modern
world.
I have argued that by focusing on the relation of the Renaissance
to the classical past, Panofsky borrowed heavily from Warburg.
However, Panofsky also defined the Renaissance by its own inno-
vation, the development of visual perspective in the arts. That this
development was decisive for Panofsky's understanding of the Re-
naissance is barely mentioned in "Renaissance and Renascences,"
but it consumes a large portion of the later Renaissanceand Rena-
scencesin WesternArt; and he had established his interest in Renais-
sance perspective in his well-known essay of 1927, "Die Perspek-
tive als 'symbolische Form'."35 But despite the quick analogy he

33The papers of Aby M. Warburg, Archive of the Warburg Institute (London).

34Panofsky, 1930.
35Panofsky, 1927.
266 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

offers in the KenyonReview essay between Renaissance's visual per-

spective and the historical perspective on the classical past, Panof-
sky does not really integrate his discussion of perspective with his
analysis of classical form and content. That is most clear in Renais-
sanceand Renascencesin WesternArt, where a long discussion of Re-
naissance perspective follows in close succession a version of the
Kenyon Review essay. The development of Renaissance visual per-
spective simply cannot emerge from the reintegration of classical
form and content. If Panofsky tried at times to depict Renaissance
historical perspective itself as a subset of a more general interest
in perspective, it was not perspective but the "rinascimento dell'
antichita" that defined the Renaissance for him.
Panofsky's writing was, of course, framed by the American dis-
course on the importance of the classical heritage. His discussion
of Renaissance perspective was useful when he entered the debate
about the significance of the Renaissance for the development of the
naturalsciences. In a talk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Art-
ist, Scientist, Genius: Notes on the 'Renaissance-Dammerung'," he
cleverly focused on the importance of Renaissance art to the evo-
lution of the sciences: Leonardo had established the fact that a
good anatomist must have a command of draftsmanship and-of
course - perspective. 36 Although Panofsky was able to use his work
on Renaissance perspective so profitably in the debate on the Re-
naissance contribution to science, the questions that were more
pressing revolved around the nature of the humanities and the place
of the classical past.
There were, of course, a range of "classical pasts" to invoke.
Warburgians from Aby Warburg and Fritz Saxl to Frances Yates
and D. P. Walker have been known for their preoccupation with
magic and the occult: astrology, Arab magic, and divination were
constants in the publications of the Warburg Institute. Panofsky
participated in this interest in the occult, if perhaps his most im-
portant engagement was in a book jointly written with Saxl on
Direr's MelencoliaI. As with so many of the Warburgians, the oc-
cult was certainly part of the attraction that Panofsky found in neo-
Platonism. Still, the classical past in Panofsky's American writings
seemed rather tame by comparison to Warburg and Saxl's antiq-
uity. He was, in fact, more often bound up with what other Amer-
ican scholars meant by the "classical." His American writings thus

36Panofsky, 1962.
 THE RENASCENCE OF THE RENAISSANCE 267

fed directly into the discourse on the Western tradition and its roots
in the Greek and Roman past. It is, in fact, possible to read Panof-
sky's Studies in Iconologyalongside Gilbert Highet's The Classical
Traditionwith a sense that these two rather different scholars were
engaged in a similar project.
Panofsky's American writings, I would argue, form part of the
American discourse on the Renaissance, a discourse which idealized
the Renaissance for its classical erudition and its celebration of the
human. For many American scholars, the two were closely con-
nected, for the classical past-as opposed to medieval Chris-
tianity-itself symbolized confidence in human capability. At the
same time, the Renaissance was heralded as the fount of the liberal
arts. All of these aspects of an idealized Renaissance fit together into
a constellation of ideas that were of immense importance to Amer-
ican intellectual life in the 1930s, 1940s, and 195os. If the spectrum
from the pedestrian commencement address in praise of the liberal
arts to one of Panofsky's virtuoso performances in Renaissance er-
udition seems wide, both participated in a rising cultural ideology
that linked the humanities and the classical tradition to a definition
of humanity.
When Panofsky began his essay on art history as a humanistic
discipline by invoking the Renaissance notion of humanitas, and
when he opened the iconological exercises of Studiesin Iconologyby
reidentifying two paintings of Piero di Cosimo's as sequences in a
narrationof the story of Vulcan-the bringer of fire and technology
to humanity-he contributed to the "man-the-measure" vision of
the Renaissance, the same vision which made so much of Pico della
Mirandola's "Oration on the Dignity of Man. " It was, I would ar-
gue, no accident that Panofsky's colleague from Hamburg, the phi-
losopher Ernst Cassirer, whose philosophy had always been writ-
ten in praise of human capability and human creativity, produced
a two-part article on Pico for the Journal of the History of Ideas in
I942.37 And there may be no better example of this agenda than the
set of readings edited by Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and
John Hermann Randall under the title The RenaissancePhilosophy
of Man.38

37Cassirer, 1942.
38The book included texts from Petrarch, Valla, Ficino, and of course, Pico's "Ora-
tion on the Dignity of Man."
268 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

In part, there was a political message in this apotheosis of the cre-

ative individual envisioned by the American scholars of the Italian
Renaissance, for faith in the capability of the individual was the cor-
nerstone of liberalism. The Renaissance individual could be mus-
tered in defense of a liberalism threatened by Hitler, Stalin, and the
regimentation of the war. But there was, I would argue, a good deal
more involved in the idealization of the Renaissance in mid-century
America than this simple political message, for finally the Renais-
sance was appropriated for cultural-political rather than for strict-
ly political purposes. Ultimately, the apotheosis of Renaissance cul-
ture should be understood as part of an effort to apotheosize culture
itself.
It was, in an important sense, appropriate that Panofsky's "Re-
naissance and Renascences" was published in the Kenyon Review,
the organ of the New Criticism edited by the dean of the New Crit-
ics, John Crowe Ransom. New Criticism, with its textual empha-
sis, programmatically avoided the influence of society and politics
on the creation of the great monuments of Western literature.39
Certainly, the isolation of literary works was distant from the cul-
tural embedding involved in Panofsky's iconology; in its formal-
ism, the New Criticism had more in common with more formalist
art historical methodologies. And yet, one of the central implica-
tions of the New Criticism was the emphasis on the cultural arti-
fact. One should see the New Critics not merely as a response to
other sorts of readings in literary criticism but as part of a devel-
opment in American culture to isolate and praise culture itself. 40 In
an important sense, the New Critics were heir to the American neo-
Humanists of the 1920s.41 My purpose here, however, is not to link
Panofsky's name with that ofJohn Crowe Ransom or Allen Tate,
39AlthoughWellek in his sixth volume of A Historyof ModernCriticismrejectedthe
characterizations - accusationshe felt-that the New Criticismwas formalistand ahis-
torical, it is difficult not to see the New Criticalmethodology as essentiallyformalist
and ahistorical.Wellek, 144 ff.
4°One of the best expressions of this New Critical commitment can be found in
Tate's HudsonReviewessay of I95I, "The Man of Lettersin the Modern World," in
which he articulatedthe centralityof high culture:"By these arts, one means the arts
without which men can live, but without which they cannotlive well, or live as men."
Tate, I.
4'The New Humanists, like Irving BabbittandPaulElmer More, were antagonistic
to any purely aestheticizing criticism, whether it be that of Walter Pater or that later
developed by the New Critics. Despite this, the New Humanistsand the New Critics
had much in common. For a comparison of the New Critics, see Hoeveler.
 THE RENASCENCE OF THE RENAISSANCE 269

or to compare their fascination with the seventeenth-century meta-

physical poets with the subjects of his art history. Rather, I would
like to link Panofsky's name to a broader phenomenon in American
culture of which the New Criticism formed an important part.42
At a time when American scholars were being taught the im-
portance of culture by Franz Boas's students from Columbia-
anthropologists like Ruth Benedict, Alfred Kroeber, and Margaret
Mead-culture itself assumed a special value. And although the Co-
lumbia anthropologists tended to teach a form of cultural relativ-
ism, the curriculum began to focus more self-consciously on the
texts of Western culture.43Not all of the proponents of this new fo-
cus on Western culture found in the Renaissance a symbol of their
own aspirations. Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler,
who developed the Great Books course at the University of Chi-
cago, had Thomistic inclinations. And there were those who were
influenced by the medievalism ofT. S. Eliot's cultural program.44
Still, many American scholars found in the Italian Renaissance an
important symbol not only for the role that the Renaissance played
in the developing ideal of individual creativity but for its role in the
development of the humanities. The promotion of the Renaissance
was ultimately a self-legitimizing act for humanists in an increas-
ingly technological land, for they could remain culture-bearers in
a realm set aside for culture.45
In this context, the interest in Ernst Cassirer's An Essay on Man:
An Introductionto a Philosophyof Human Culture,which appeared in

42AlthoughGraffplaces the New Criticism in the context of the struggle between

criticsand scholars, and between criticismand history, which might seem to set New
Criticismat odds with the sort of close historicalwork representedby Panofsky'sWar-
burgianscholarship,it is New Criticism's extreme reverencefor culturalforms, with
poetry as the archetype, that is important in our context. But more than that, Graff
points out that R. P. Blackmur, with his sponsorshipof the Gauss Lecturesat Prince-
ton, was deeply convinced of the special place of the humanities.
43On the general education movement in the American university, see Graff,
I62-79.
44T. S. Eliot's other side-his modernism-was championedby still others. Thus,
for example, Greenberg'sfamous essay of I939, "Avant-Gardeand Kitsch," was one
expression of a celebrationof modernism as high culture.
4sIn this context, Panofsky's talk, "Artist, Scientist, Genius: Notes on the
'Renaissance-Dammerung',"can be readas an argumentfor the importanceof the arts
for scientific advancement,feeling no threatfrom the scientific. For others, the tech-
nological dovetailedwith the threatof mass culture, so that Tate wrote about the chal-
lenge to the man of letters "at our own criticalmoment, when all languagesare being
debased by the techniques of mass-control." Tate, I I.
270 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

1944, is quite suggestive.46 Cassirer's book was an economical sum-

mation of his philosophical project in praise of human creativity in
its symbol-making capacity. Creativity for Cassirer entered into all
human activity, even the exercise of human memory: "Symbolic
memory is the process by which man not only repeats his past ex-
perience but also reconstructs this experience. Imagination be-
comes a necessary element of true recollection. "47Since the human-
ities can be identified as the study and interpretation of human
symbols, Cassirer's essay on humans as symbol producers could be
read by humanists as a case for the humanities. Even his discussion
of myth and religion prefacing his discussion of subjects like art and
history had an appeal, for within an increasingly anthropologically-
oriented academy the anthropological study of culture was used to
legitimize the creations of higher culture. But finally, the creations
of culture were self-legitimizing even for Cassirer, despite his work
on myth. There was in An Essay on Man-and in Cassirer's work
as a whole-a profound reverence for high culture, the traditional
preserve of the humanist.
I have mentioned Cassirer's book in part because it became so
important, but also because Cassirer, like his former colleague in
Hamburg, Erwin Panofsky, was among the German scholars who
seemed almost upon their arrival in America to embody the mean-
ing of the humanities and the cultural tradition of the West. The im-
pact of refugee scholars such as Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer,
Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt, Leo Olschki and Walter Fried-
laender, Werner Jaeger and Ernst Kantorowicz, Edgar Wind and
RudolfWittkower was so immense that ajustifiable mythology has
emerged about the German emigres who so often became the deans
of their disciplines.48 That German scholars made such an impact
was in part due to the advanced development of disciplines such as
history, sociology, and art history in Germany. But it was also sig-
nificant that these immensely erudite scholars arrived on the scene

46Cassirer, I944.
47Ibid., 52.
480ne of the greatest tributes to the impact of the refugee scholars in America is
the Fleming and Bailyn volume. Especially important in the context of Panofsky is
Colin Eisler'scontributionto "Kunstgeschichte AmericanStyle: A Study in Migration."
Eisler's essay provides a rich and colorful analysis of the impact that the refugee art
historians-like Erwin Panofsky, Richard Krautheimer, H. W. Janson and Walter
Friedlaender-had on the American discipline of art history.
 THE RENASCENCE OF THE RENAISSANCE 27I

just as the veneration of culture was occurring in the American uni-

versity. Scholars like Auerbach, Panofsky, Cassirer, and Spitzer,
who seemed to command the entire of Western culture and could
write on almost any corner of it, not only awed their American stu-
dents, but they also provided models of culture-bearers in an intel-
lectual environment in which the humanist-as-culture-bearer was
becoming increasingly important. The notion of the scholar as
culture-bearerwas, of course, no novelty to these German academ-
ics, for they had learned their trade in the Mandarin culture of the
German university, in which culture had its special realm protected
from the forces of politics.49 In essence, the German refugee schol-
ars offered Mandarinism for export. And their Mandarinism
seemed to fit well into the new "ivory tower" of the American uni-
versity. It was fitting, therefore, that Erwin Panofsky soon found
himself delivering a commencement address "In Defense of the
Ivory Tower," which despite its anti-McCarthy warnings did
justice to its title.s5
Panofsky adapted very well to the United States. He took so well
to his new American surroundings that elements of American pop-
ular culture soon became part of his imaginative vocabulary. In
"Renaissance and Renascences" he used a 1928 Lincoln for an anal-
ogy, although the same car lost its specificity in Renaissanceand Re-
nascencesin WesternArt.5 The man of such obvious high culture
peppered his writing on esoteric subjects with witty allusions to
popular culture, demonstrating simultaneously his playfulness, his
love for the artifactsof popular culture, and his comfort in America,
much the way the literary critic Leo Spitzer did when he wrote on
an advertisement for Sunkist oranges. And Panofsky also learned
quickly to write elegantly in English. He was one of those Euro-
pean scholars whose prose style improved when he made the tran-
sition from German to English. Panofsky remarked that being
forced to write in English made European scholars write more
clearly. In mild self-mockery he wrote that "the German language
unfortunately permits a fairly trivial thought to declaim from be-
hind a woolen curtain of apparent profundity and, conversely, a

49See Ringer.
soPanofsky, I957.
SIPanofsky, 1944, 225.
272 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

multitude of meanings to lurk behind one term."s2 In English

"even an art historian must more or less know what he means and
mean what he says, and this compulsion was exceedingly whole-
some for all of us."53 These lines come from Panofsky's essay
"Three Decades of Art History in the United States: Impressions
of a Transplanted European. "54Faithful to the essay's title, Panof-
sky's assumed persona was very much that of the "transplanted"
German scholar. The purpose of "Three Decades" was to suggest
what American education might learn from the German university.
The American university, Panofsky felt, was too much concerned
with examinations and "teaching loads" -"a disgusting expression
which in itself is a telling symptom of the malady I am trying to
describe."55 For Panofsky the American method of producing
scholars was ill-suited to create true humanists: "Humanists cannot
be 'trained'; they must be allowed to mature or, if I may use so
homely a simile, to marinate."56The implication, of course, was
that he and other German scholars had been allowed to "marinate"
in the humanities. They had essentially cultivated themselves,
which was to suggest that what the American system needed most
was a bit of the German tradition of Bildung. In "Three Decades
of Art History in the United States" Panofsky, the "transplanted
European," offered the youthful American academy the accrued
wisdom of the German university. There was a ready market for
just such advice. As one can see from the essay, Panofsky felt little
need to lose his identity as a German scholar. Ultimately, even his
playfulness with American popular culture only highlighted his
Germanness, coming as it did in the context of exercises in German
erudition.
Panofsky's own displays of erudition could only have been daz-
zling to American audiences. In Studies in Iconologyhe devoted
chapters to some of the most mundane cultural items, such as "fa-
ther time" and "blind cupid," and even these everyday figures of
our calendars and advertisements could be traced back through a

s2panofsky, 1955, 329.

s3Ibid., 330.
s4The epilogue was originally published as an entry in Crawford under the title,
"The History of Art."
SSPanofsky, 1955, 34I.
s6Ibid.
 THE RENASCENCE OF THE RENAISSANCE 273

labyrinth of classical texts and medieval depictions. Panofsky

would deftly reidentify Renaissance paintings by comparing what
would seem minor attributes of classical figures with their repre-
sentational tradition in art and literature. To establish that a vine-
enveloped tree trunk might accompany a representation of Bac-
chus, Panofsky turned to an early seventeenth-century emblem
book for its reference to Catallus's Carmina.57 And Panofsky would
quote Mario Equicola's Di naturad'Amoreto establish that the six-
teenth century cited Greek and Roman sources to the effect that an-
tiquity "knew nothing of Cupid's blindness."58 Panofsky's War-
burgian preoccupation with detail and intermingling of literary and
artistic materials made his work particularly erudite. Perhaps it was
another Warburgian predilection, the fascination with the hermetic
tradition and the occult, which intensified Panofsky's image as a
master of the obscure. If, as I have mentioned, his involvement
with hermetic materials, especially during his American years, was
less than that of many other Warburgians, there were enough as-
trological and magical references to add an esoteric side to Panof-
sky's magisterial prose.
With his Warburgian virtuoso performances and his witty ur-
banity, Panofsky was particularly well suited to assume the role of
the model humanist. If he traced his humanism to the Renaissance
itself, his work implied more than the conventional grounding of
the liberal arts in Renaissance Italy. Ultimately, Panofsky's defini-
tion of the Renaissance--that it was able to view classical antiquity
with historical distance-meant that the very essence of the Renais-
sance he described in "Renaissance and Renascences" was its own
historicism. If the growing mythologizing of the Renaissance in the
American academy identified the Renaissance with culture and the
liberal arts, Panofsky took that mythology one step further by iden-
tifying historical vision as the fundamental aspect of Renaissance
culture. Panofsky's definition of the Renaissance implied that any-
one who was working in the historical fields -which in Panofsky's
own neo-Kantian definition meant anyone working in the human-
ities in general-was not only indebted to the Renaissance but was
carrying out the central work of the Renaissance.

S7Panofsky, 1939, 60.

ssIbid., 125.
274 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

Panofsky made the Renaissance historical, but in an important

sense he was not fully historical about the Renaissance. In differ-
entiating the Italian Renaissance from the Carolingian and the
twelfth-century renascences, Panofsky argued that "the two medi-
aeval renascences were limited and transitory, the Italian 'rinasci-
mento del 'antichita' was total and permanent. "59In a particularly
lively passage Panofsky asserted that due to the work of the Quat-
trocento, antiquity was recovered for good: "From the Renaissance
classical Antiquity is constantly with us, whether we like it or not.
It lives in our mathematics and natural sciences. It has built our the-
atres and movie houses as opposed to the mediaeval mystery stage.
It haunts the speech of our cab driver as opposed to that of the me-
diaeval peasant; and it is firmly entrenched behind the thin but thus
far unbroken glass walls of history, philology and archaeology."60
From these sentences and others it is clear that we are still living in
the Renaissance. In part, Panofsky is taking the old tripartite divi-
sion of history into antique, medieval, and modern epochs quite se-
riously, implying that the Renaissance and the present are both
parts of what the Germans called "die Neuzeit." Panofsky under-
cuts the basic argument of "Renaissance and Renascences" by sug-
gesting that antiquity, which was viewed with historical perspec-
tive in the Renaissance, was somehow still alive in the present if an
almost unconscious way-in the "speech of our cab driver." All of
this makes us ask whether Panofsky's cab driver looked upon the
classical past "from a fixed, unalterable distance"? Much more im-
portant than this lapse in Panofsky's argument is the challenge it
creates: if the Renaissance is part of the present, then the historian
of the Renaissance would be in no position to have historical per-
spective on it. Taken to its logical conclusion, this suggestion
would make Panofsky, as magnificent a historian of Renaissance
culture as he was, unable to perform his duties as historian. His
Kenyon Review essay, which is largely impelled toward a legitima-
tion of the historical disciplines, seems here to undermine their vo-
cation with regard to the Renaissance.
It is, of course, unlikely that Panofsky meant to undermine his
own calling. We are, I think, compelled to interpret this challenge
to Panofsky's overriding historicism in another fashion: the lapse

59Panofsky, I944, 223; the same argument appears in Panofsky, 1972, io6.
6°Panofsky, 1944, 225.
 THE RENASCENCE OF THE RENAISSANCE 275

in Panofsky's own historical perspective was not intended to di-

minish the powers of the historian but rather to make the past
present. Essentially, Panofsky identified his idealized Renaissance
not so much as a world he would like to occupy as a part of the
world he does occupy. With a permanent Renaissance he could as-
sume the identity of a Renaissance humanist, the compatriot of Pico
or Ficino, whether or not 1928 Lincolns were part of his mental fur-
niture. To appropriate a phrase analyzed by Panofsky in Meaning
in the VisualArts, "Et in Arcadia Ego." It is clear that Panofsky felt
"I too am in Arcady."
In Panofsky's modernity the age of his beloved Renaissance was
still breathing life. And yet, it was also the age of National Social-
ism. Panofsky, who had been denied his chair in Hamburg in the
spring of 1933 in accordance with the civil service laws of the Third
Reich, did more than paint an idealized world in which he could
assume the role of insider; at the height of the war, he insisted that
the world he idealized was part of the present. One may find it
ironic that Panofsky expressed a distance with respect to the Renais-
sance only in his post-war version of the Kenyon Review essay. In
Renaissanceand Renascencesin WesternArt he acknowledged that "a
good case might be made for restricting the term 'modern' to that
'fourth period of history,' essentially distinguished from the Re-
naissance, which began about 600o and seems to be drawing to a
close right now."61 That line, delivered in a dispassionate voice,
suggested a heightened realism about the Renaissance. But the es-
say of 1944 would rather that the past, with all of its artistic and
intellectual brilliance, be present.
In a paper delivered in 1985 Renaissance historian Nancy Streu-
ver spoke about the theme of historical distance in Panofsky's "Re-
naissance and Renascences."62 She focused on the sense of loss
which Panofsky located in the historical perspective of the Renais-
sance, the disjuncture between the Renaissance and the antique
world. Whether or not Panofsky, as Struever suggested, prefigured
the post-structuralist preoccupation with disjuncture, at the very
least he made absence a category. But Panofsky's work, I would
argue, not only identified the historical absence of the past for the
Renaissance; it also located the historical past as a presence in the

6'Panofsky, 1972, 35.

62Struever.
276 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

twentieth century. In part, the paradox of Panofsky's position is

symbolized by his insistence that the very age which developed a
historical perspective on the past represented a true "rinascimento
dell' antichita."
Ultimately, with Panofsky's permanent Renaissance not only is
the Renaissance still present, but the recovered antiquity is also a
living part of our culture. At the very least, it is a vital part of Panof-
sky's own world. It is in part this aspect of Panofsky, the inveterate
historian, that fed into the ahistoricism that marked the growing
humanistic mythology of the American university, the ahistori-
cism best symbolized in the great books courses and New Critical
methodology.
I have suggested that the disjuncture between the historian and
the past in Panofsky's work is not as complete as his definition of
the historical perspective would suggest. But certainly the histori-
cal imagination, which Panofsky credited the Renaissance, refused
to find disjuncture within past cultures. In their reintegration of
classical form and content, Renaissance humanists viewed the clas-
sical past as forming a cohesive whole. That holistic view of par-
ticular cultures--if not cultural development--was not merely an
aspect of Renaissance historicism. It was, for Panofsky, central to
the philosophy of Renaissance. In Panofsky's mind, Vasari's pro-
vision of his own Gothic frame for a sketch attributed to Cimabue
in his Librowas a perfect illustration of Renaissance historicism, for
despite his contempt for the Gothic, Vasari felt that the drawing
should be given a frame appropriate to its style.63 The Renaissance
did not merely acknowledge the organic cohesion of past cultures;
the culture of the Renaissance was itself deliberately organic. By lo-
cating the Renaissance artist's contribution to the history of science,
Panofsky's "Artist, Scientist, Genius: Notes on the 'Renaissance-
Dammerung' " was more than a shrewd response by an art histo-
rian to historians of science skeptical of the significance of the
Renaissance. It was also a response to the "two cultures" problem
that C. P. Snow described in his famous post-war essay. Panofsky's
lecture to the Metropolitan Museum glorified the interaction of arts

63"DasersteBlatt aus dem 'Libro'Giorgio Vasaris;eine StudiefiberderBeurteilung

derGotik in der italienischenRenaissancemit einem ExkursOberzwei Fasadenprojekte
Domenico Beccafumis," Stddel-Jahrbuch6 (1930): 25-72; reprinted as "The First Page
of Giorgio Vasari's'Libro':A Study on the Gothic Style in theJudgment of the Italian
Renaissance" in Panofsky, 1955, I69-235.
 THE RENASCENCE OF THE RENAISSANCE 277

and sciences in the Renaissance. In his mind the Renaissance rep-

resented cultural unity, a point made explicitly at the close of the
talk: "Yet the fact remains that what had been a unity in the Re-
naissance is now, again, a complex diversity; and there are those
who were not, are not, and will never be satisfied with this state
of affairs. There is a type of mind, and not necessarily of an inferior
order, which finds it impossible to accept the sum of the parts as
a substitute for the whole. "64 The organic ties between Renaissance
science with other aspects of Renaissance culture carried signifi-
cant implications about the present: "The modern scientist can,
of course, not think of reverting to Kepler; but he may well be
sensitive to the loss entailed by what may be called the 're-
compartmentalization' of the seventeenth century."65 By choosing
the term "re-compartmentalization," Panofsky suggested that
modern culture was reverting to its medieval fragmentation. The
twentieth-century isolation of science was analogous to the medi-
eval disassociation of classical form and classical content.
That Panofsky turned toJohannes Kepler to provide a model for
the cultural unity of the Renaissance is quite significant, for Kepler
represented not a fusion of art and science but an intermingling of
the scientific and the pre-scientific. Panofsky states that Kepler "re-
jected a perfectly plausible astronomical hypothesis because it was
inaccurate by eight minutes; but he refused to abandon astrology.
He found the three planetary laws which in sheer beauty are rivalled
only by Newton's Law of Gravity, but he would have been un-
happy had he not found a consonance between the structure of the
physical world and the Trinity. "66 It was just that blend of the sci-
entific and the magical which made Kepler an attractive figure for
Panofsky, as it did for Aby Warburg who modelled his library's
main reading room after Kepler's ellipse. Kepler served as a repre-
sentative of that special conjunction of science and the occult that
was a conscious specialty of the Bibliothek Warburg. And that con-
junction of science and the occult dovetailed for the Warburgians
with the intricate history ofneo-Platonism, a history painstakingly
followed by Warburgian scholars-including Erwin Panofsky.

64Panofsky, 1962, i82.

6sIbid.
66Ibid., 18I.
278 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

For Panofsky neo-Platonism represented the best of Renaissance

thought. In a culture that emphasized harmony and the whole, a
culture that stood for "decompartmentalization," neo-Platonism
offered a philosophy of harmony and a brief for decompartmental-
ization. Renaissance neo-Platonism combined the classic and the
Christian, as well as the esoteric and the scientific, into a coherent
philosophy. And as Panofsky argued in "The Neo-Platonic Move-
ment and Michelangelo," it tried to fuse the vita activa and the vita
contemplativa.67 Much of Panofsky's essay on Michelangelo nar-
rates the artist's movement away from neo-Platonism towards an
unalloyed Christian piety and traces Michelangelo's spiritual odys-
sey through his work: "Thus in Michelangelo's last works the du-
alism between the Christian and the classical was solved. But it was
a solution by way of surrender."68 The neo-Platonist had surren-
dered to the Counter-Reformation. The narrative suggested a cul-
tural tragedy. Indeed, Panofsky ended the essay-and his book-
on a tragic note. The modern solution to the dualism of Christianity
and the classical was "a solution by way of subjective deliverance.
But this subjective deliverance naturally tended towards a gradual
disintegration both of Christian faith and classicalhumanity, the re-
sults of which are very much in evidence in the world of today. "69
In thus closing a book for publication in 1939, Panofsky ushered
the threatening darkness of world events into his essay on Michel-
angelo, heightening the sense of cultural tragedy which he invoked
at the end of his essay. What more powerful brief for neo-Platonism
could he have provided than this tale of declension?
Without question, Panofsky had an emotional commitment to
Renaissance neo-Platonism, a philosophy which gave priority to
harmony, even combining a magical vision with the scientific.
Panofsky was, of course, not the only German who had found
neo-Platonism so attractive.70Many acquired a fascination of neo-
Platonism through the intermediary of Goethe, who in turn had
learned his neo-Platonism largely through the mediation of
Shaftesbury. Many important German cultural elements that are

67Panofsky, 1939, esp. 208 ff.

68Ibid., 229.
69Ibid., 230.
70In additionto the Warburgiansconcernedwith neo-Platonism, includingKliban-
sky, Cassirer, Warburg, Wittkower, and Panofsky, one can add a long list of other
names, including Karl Reinhardt,Paul Oskar Kristeller, and Leo Spitzer.
 THE RENASCENCE OF THE RENAISSANCE 279

identified with Weimar classicism, including an overriding holism

and the shaping of the self, can be traced back to the writings of the
Renaissance neo-Platonists. It is likely, then, that Panofsky's devo-
tion to Renaissance neo-Platonism was grounded in his schooling
in Weimar classicism. Thus, at the end of "Artist, Scientist, Ge-
nius," when Panofsky praisesJohannes Kepler, Goethe's name also
arises, as it must, although not in the same hagiographical tone:
"And we may smile, respectfully, at Goethe, who refused to accept
the results of Newton's optical experiments and held that the use
of microscopes merely 'confuses the mind'."7I This sentence may
not be entirely flattering, but as one reads the last pages of Panof-
sky's talk, the shadow of Goethe looms large even before his name
is mentioned; for a German scholar extolling a holistic science at the
expense of a more positivistic science can do so only with Goethe
in mind.
Much of what Panofsky found in Renaissance neo-Platonism
can be found in aspects of Goethe which had by the turn of the cen-
tury become codified elements of German culture. Thus, whether
or not one interprets Kepler in the Metropolitan Museum talk as
a figure for Goethe, one can read Panofsky's preoccupation with
neo-Platonism in general as a surrogate for German culture. And
one might go further in decoding Panofsky's rich tribute to the
Italian Renaissance. If the classical past became the "object of a
passionate nostalgia which found its symbolic expression in the
re-emergence--after fifteen centuries--of that enchanting vision,
Arcady, "72the Renaissance past assumed for Panofsky-despite his
insistence on the permanence of the Renaissance-a similar object
of nostalgia, a similar Arcady. Almost all of those things which
Panofsky most prized, with the exception of Thomistic rationality,
were embodied by the Renaissance. His very profession, that of his-
torian, was the calling of an entire age. But Panofsky's Arcady was
fashioned of rather German elements. And even the centrality he
gave to the historical imagination was a fully German occupation.
Panofsky's nostalgic enterprise, his glorification of the Quattro-
cento, was finally a self-mirroring. Or rather, the idealized world
of his Italian Renaissance was largely a projection of his idealized
German self. The past, which Panofsky paints with such vibrant

7IPanofsky, 1962, i8i.

72Panofsky, 1960, I13.
280 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

colors, with wit and elegance, has as much to say about the world
Panofsky lost in 1933 as it has to say about the cultural life of the
Italiancity-states. And yet, that past, as much as it provided a figure
for an idealized German self, was at the same time constructed to
play a part in the cultural politics of the American academy.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

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