Perspective as Symbolic Form

Erwin Panofsky, Christopher S. Wood

• Publisher: Zone Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780942299472
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

Erwin Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Form is one of the great works of modern intellectual history, the legendary text that has dominated all art-historical and philosophical discussions on the topic of perspective in this century. Finally available in English, this unrivaled example of Panofsky's early method places him within broader developments in theories of knowledge and cultural change.Here, drawing on a massive body of learning that ranges over ancient philosophy, theology, science, and optics as well as the history of art, Panofsky produces a type of "archaeology" of Western representation that far surpasses the usual scope of art historical studies.Perspective in Panofsky's hands becomes a central component of a Western "will to form, " the expression of a schema linking the social, cognitive, psychological, and especially technical practices of a given culture into harmonious and integrated wholes. He demonstrates how the perceptual schema of each historical culture or epoch is unique and how each gives rise to a different but equally full vision of the world.Panofsky articulates these distinct spatial systems, explicating their particular coherence and compatibility with the modes of knowledge, belief, and exchange that characterized the cultures in which they arose. Our own modernity, Panofsky shows, is inseparable from its peculiarly mathematical expression of the concept of the infinite, within a space that is both continuous and homogenous.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. 1. “Der Begriff des Kunstwollens,” reprinted in Panofsky, Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed. Hariolf Oberer and Egon Verheyen (Berlin: Hessling, 1964), p. 29; originally published in Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 14 (1920), pp. 321–39. Translated by Kenneth J. Northcote and Joel Snyder as “The Concept of Artistic Volition,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981), pp. 17–34.
2. 2. “Der Begriff des Kunstwollens,” p. 30.
3. 3. Riegl, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (Vienna: Österreichische Staatsdruckerei, 1927; originally published in 1901), pp. 400–401. Translated by Rolf Winkes as Late Roman Art Industry (Rome: Bretschneider, 1985).
4. 4. This point was made by Sheldon Nodelman in his essay “Structural Analysis in Art and Anthropology,” Yale French Studies 36/37 (1966), pp. 89–103. On Riegl’s art history generally, see the excellent essay by Henri Zerner, “Alois Riegl: Art, Value, and Historicism,” Daedalus 105 (1976), pp. 177–88; and the discussion in Michael Podro’s Critical Historians of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 71–97.
5. 5. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History (New York: Dover, 1950), p. 250; originally published as Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Munich: Bruckmann, 1915).
6. 6. Wölfflin’s most important early methodological propositions are found in his dissertation, Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur (1886), reprinted in Kleine Schriften (Basel: Schwabe, 1946), pp. 13–47; and of course in the introduction and conclusion to the Grundbegriffe.
7. 7. Wölfflin’s “structuralism” was less ascetic than Riegl’s. Nevertheless he too stopped short of actually practicing the philosophical art history latent within his formalism. Wölfflin detached art from general history, but only to reattach it later. It is not entirely clear why Wölfflin held back; doubtless the wilder experiments of the succeeding generation, which he lived to see, helped him rediscover the virtues of positivistic discretion. See for instance the “Revision” of the Grundbegriffe (1933), reprinted in Gedanken zur Kunstgeschichte (Basel: Schwabe, 1941), pp. 18–24.
8. 8. The best treatment in English is Nodelman’s essay cited in note 4, above. The manifesto of the group was a pair of remarkable volumes edited by Pacht, Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen 1/2 (1931/1933).
9. 9. See the influential review by Meyer Schapiro, “The New Viennese School,” Art Bulletin 18 (1936).
10. 10. “Die Quintessenz der Lehren Riegls,” Introduction to Riegl, Gesammelte Aufsätze (Augsburg & Vienna: Filser, 1929); reprinted in Sedlmayr, Kunst und Wahrheit (Mittenwald: Maander, 1978), pp. 32–48.
11. 11. Panofsky, Die Deutsche Plastik des elften bis dreizehnten Jahrhunderts (Munich: Wolff, 1924).
12. 12. Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, trans. Joseph J. S. Peake (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 126 and n. 38; originally published as “Idea”: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, 5 (Leipzig & Berlin: Teubner, 1924).
13. 13. Riegl, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, p. 401.
14. 14. Panofsky, “Der Begriff des Kunstwollens,” p. 32, also n. 11 on the “immanent meaning” of a period.
15. 15. One is not necessarily more confident when the synchrony is exact: see for instance Panofsky’s comments on Cubism and Einstein’s relativity in Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 5, n. 1.
16. 16. Damisch, L’Origine de la perspective (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), p. 29.
17. 17. See the excellent essays by Robert Klein, “Pomponius Gauricus on Perspective” and “Studies on Perspective in the Renaissance,” both reprinted in Form and Meaning (New York: Viking, 1979); originally published as La Forme et I’intelligible (Paris: Gallimard, 1970); and by Marisa Dalai, “La Questione della prospettiva,” in the Italian edition of Panofsky, La Prospettiva come ‘forma simbolica’ (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961), pp. 118–41, and translated as the introduction to the French edition, La Perspective comme forme symbolique (Paris: Minuit, 1975).
18. 18. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1958), II.xi, p. 193ff.
19. 19. Snyder, “Picturing Vision,” Critical Inquiry 6 (1980), pp. 499–526.
20. 20. This is one of the implications of Klein’s thinking on perspective; see “Pomponius Gauricus on Perspective.”
21. 21. See the radical nominalist position of Nelson Goodman in Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), pp. 10–19, especially p. 16 and n. 17, with references to various like-minded thinkers.
22. 22. Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 1978), p. 223ff., and Wissenschaft als Kunst (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), pp. 17–84.
23. 23. Feyerabend, “Consolations for the Specialist,” in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 213.
24. 24. Damisch, L’Origine de la perspective, p. 32ff.

PERSPECTIVE AS SYMBOLIC FORM

1. 1. K. von Lange and F. Fuhse, Dürers schriftlicher Nachlass (Halle, 1893), p. 319, 1. 11.
2. 2. Boethius, Analyt. poster. Aristot. Interpretatio 1.7 and 1.10, in Opera (Basel, 1570), pp. 527 and 538; perspectiva is characterized in both passages as a subdiscipline of geometry.
3. 3. The word ought to be derived not from perspicere meaning “to see through,” but from perspicere meaning “to see clearly”; thus it amounts to a literal translation of the Greek term optikē. Dürer’s interpretation is based already on the modern definition and construction of the image as a cross section through the visual pyramid. Felix Witting, on the other hand, detected in the transformation of the Italian perspettiva into prospettiva a kind of protest against this understanding of the image (“the former is reminiscent of Brunelleschi’s ‘punto dove percoteva l’occhio,’ whereas the latter suggests only a seeing forward,” Von Kunst und Christentum [Strassburg, 1903], p. 106). This is more than doubtful, for it is precisely the most rigorous theoreticians of the cross-section method, such as Piero della Francesca, who use the term prospettiva. At most we can grant that prospettiva implies more strongly the idea of the artistic achievement (namely the conquest of spatial depth), while perspettiva evokes rather the mathematical procedure. A purely phonetic consideration must have then favored the triumph of the term prospettiva, to wit, an aversion to the sequence of consonants “rsp.”
4. 4. Leon Battista Alberti, Della pittura,in Kleinere kunsttheoretische Schriften, Quellenschriften für Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttechnik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance, no. 11, ed. Hubert Janitschek (Vienna, 1877), p. 79: “scrivo uno quadroangulo … el quale reputo essere una fenestra aperta per donde io miri quello que quivi sara dipinto” (On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966], p. 56: “I inscribe a quadrangle … which is considered to be an open window through which I see what I want to paint”). See also Leonardo (Jean Paul Richter, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci [London, 1883], no. 83), where the same analogy to a “pariete di vetro,” or pane of glass, is drawn.
5. 5. Already Lessing, in the ninth of his Antiquarische Briefe, distinguished between a broader and a narrower meaning of perspective. In the broader sense perspective is “the science of representing objects on a surface just as they would appear to our eye at a certain distance.… Not to credit the ancients with perspective in this sense would be rather foolish. For it would mean depriving them not only of perspective but of the entire art of drawing, an art which they had quite mastered. No one could maintain this. Rather, when one contests the antique claim to perspective, it is in this narrower sense, the sense in which artists take the word. For artists, perspective is the science of representing a number of objects together with the space around them, just as these objects, dispersed among various planes of the space, together with their space, would appear to the eye from a single standpoint” (Schriften [Berlin, 1753–1755], vol. 8, pp. 25–26).
   Essentially, then, we are adopting Lessing’s second definition, only that we formulate it a little more liberally by dropping the condition of the rigorously maintained single point of view. For unlike Lessing we accept late Hellenistic and Greco-Roman paintings as already authentically “perspectival.” For us perspective is, quite precisely, the capacity to represent a number of objects together with a part of the space around them in such a way that the conception of the material picture support is completely supplanted by the conception of a transparent plane through which we believe we are looking into an imaginary space. This space comprises the entirety of the objects in apparent recession into depth, and is not bounded by the edges of the picture, but rather only cut off.
   There are of course a multitude of transitional cases between mere “foreshortening” (which for its part does represent the necessary first step and precondition for the development of a true perspectival conception of space) and something recognizable as perspective in this sense. An example of such a transitional case are those well-known southern Italian vases which show a figure or even several figures assembled in a foreshortened aedicule. This approximates true perspective insofar as a greater spatial construct already contains within it a number of individual bodies; but this greater spatial construct is itself still offered up as an isolated object, upon a picture support which retains its materiality. Instead, the entire surface of the painting would have to be transformed into a projective plane for a perspectival illusion of the entire space.
6. 6. Lange and Fuhse, Dürers schriftlicher Nachlass, p. 195, 1. 15: “Ein ebne durchsichtige Abschneidung aller der Streimlinien, die aus dem Aug fallen auf die Ding, die es sicht.”
7. 7. Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, vol. 2: Das mythische Denken (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1925), p. 107f. (Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2: Mythical Thought, trans. Ralph Manheim [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955], pp. 83–84. [In the last sentence of the passage Cassirer quotes Ernst Mach. —TR]). For the psychophysiological view of space, of course, the distinction between solid bodies and the medium of open space surrounding them is sharper than that between “front” and “back,” etc. For immediate and mathematically unrationalized perception, empty space is qualitatively altogether different from “objects.” On this subject, see E. R. Jaensch, Über die Wahrnehmung des Raumes, Zeitschrift für Psychologie, supplement 6 (Leipzig: Barth, 1911), sec. 1, ch. 6: “Zur Phänomenologie des leeren Raumes.”
8. 8. On the phenomenon of marginal distortions, see above all Guido Hauck, Die subjektive Perspektive und die horizontalen Curvaturen des Dorischen Styls (Stuttgart, 1879), esp. p. 51ff., and “Die malerische Perspektive,” Wochenblatt für Architekten und Ingenieuren 4 (1882). On the historical aspects, see Hans Schuritz, Die Perspektive in der Kunst Dürers (Frankfurt: H. Keller, 1919), p. 11ff., among others. This problem was rather disconcerting for Renaissance theoreticians because marginal distortions expose an undeniable contradiction between the construction and the actual visual impression; indeed, under some circumstances the “foreshortened” dimensions can exceed the “unforeshortened.” The differences in opinion are nevertheless instructive. The rigorous Piero della Francesca, for one, decides the dispute between perspective and reality without hesitation in favor of the former (De prospectiva pingendi, ed. C. Winterberg [Strassburg, 1899], p. xxxi). Piero recognizes the fact of marginal distortions and adduces the example (used by Hauck as well as by Leonardo: see Richter, Leonardo da Vinci, no. 544) of the exact perspectival construction of a frontal portico, or any comparable structure with a row of objectively equal elements, in which the breadth of the elements increases toward the edges (Figure 9). But so far from proposing a remedy, Piero proves rather that it must be so. One may marvel at this, he says; and yet “io intendo di dimostrare cosi essere e doversi fare.” Then follows the strictly geometrical proof (which is, of course, very easy, for precisely the premise upon which the proof rests, namely the planar section of the visual pyramid, necessarily entails marginal distortions) and, introduced here not unintentionally, a long encomium of perspective. The conciliatory Ignazio Danti (in Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, Le Due regole della prospettiva pratica, edited with commentary by Danti [Rome, 1583]) denies marginal distortions altogether when they are less blatant (see, for example, p. 62); he then reco...