Erwin Panofsky 1892 1968 Erwin Panofsky Studies in

Erwin Panofsky (1892 -1968)

Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York, 1939) • Primary or natural subject matter. The most basic level of understanding. This level consists of perception of the work’s pure form. • Secondary or conventional subject matter (iconography). This level uses cultural and iconographic knowledge. • Tertiary or intrinsic meaning or content (iconology). This level analyses a work in its personal, technical, and cultural context. It looks at art not as an isolated incident, but as the product of a historical environment.

Jan van Eyck Arnolfini Portrait 1434 Oil on oak panel of 3 vertical boards 82. 2 cm × 60 cm National Gallery, London

Michael Baxandall (1933 -2008)

Michael Baxendall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford, 1972) But each of us had different experience, and so each of us has slightly different knowledge and skills of interpretation. Everyone, in fact, processes data for the eye with different equipment. . . yet in some circumstances the otherwise marginal differences between one man and another can take on a curious prominence. . some of the mental equipment a man orders his visual experience with is variable, and much of this variable equipment is culturally relative, in the sense of being determined by the society which has influenced his experience.

Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (Latrobe, PA, 1951) What I have in mind is a genuine cause-and-effect relation. . . It comes about by the spreading of what may be called, for want of a better term, a mental habit. . . Such mental habits are at work in all and every civilization.