Panofsky’s Antinomies

Abstract

This article reconstructs the Neo-Kantian framework of Erwin Panofsky’s theoretical essays of the 1910s and 1920s, demonstrating that the schematic subject/object relation developed in these publications is also implicitly at work in Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form as well as early iconographic studies such as Hercules am Scheidewege. The article then draws on György Lukács and Gillian Rose to argue that there is a circularity in Panofsky’s method whereby the empirically given assumes the role of a ‘quasitranscendental’ a priori object, and furthermore that Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of culture (with which Panofsky was in close dialog) shares this circularity. The aim of this article is not primarily to expose inconsistencies in Panofsky’s method, but rather to suggest that the impasses that art history encountered in its attempts to formalize itself as a discipline may serve as the point of departure for a future materialist art history.