Panofsky’s Debut William Diebold and Sonja Drimmer Wölfflin whom I had the cheek to attack when I was twenty-two years old but always, I hope, with real respect and three genuflections. —Erwin Panofsky, letter to Willibald Sauerländer (1967)1 Erwin Panofsky’s “‘Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst’” was published in 1915 in the Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft.2 In it, he lays out a critique of the position of the ideas of Heinrich Wölfflin, the dominant art historian of the early twentieth century in Germany (and one of Panofsky’s teachers). For Panofsky, and many critics in his wake, Wölfflin’s close attention to artistic form failed to consider the world in which a work of art was created. This introduction discusses the history and reception of Panofsky’s first published essay and some of the issues raised by its translation (fig. 1). 1 Panofsky’s essay responds to Wölfflin’s 1911 lecture, “Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst,” presented to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in We would like to thank Kris Cohen, Shirin Fozi, Jacqueline Jung, Bruno Reudenbach, and Karl Whittington for their advice and encouragement. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are our own. 1. Erwin Panofsky, letter to Willibald Sauerländer, 6 Apr. 1967, Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1968: Eine kommentierte Auswahl in fünf Bänden, ed. Dieter Wuttke, 5 vols. (Wiesbaden, 2001–2014), 5:995. In the course of the Catholic mass the celebrant priest genuflects three times. 2. See Panofsky, “ ‘Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst,’ ” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 10 (1915): 460–67 and “‘The Problem of Style in the Visual Arts,’” trans. William Diebold and Sonja Drimmer, Critical Inquiry (Summer 2023): 676–84; hereafter abbreviated “P.” Critical Inquiry, volume 49, number 4, Summer 2023. © 2023 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.1086/724945 664 William Diebold and Sonja Drimmer / Panofsky’s Debut Berlin and published the following year.3 Wölfflin’s lecture contained the kernel of his Principles of Art History (1915), one of the most influential works of twentieth-century art history.4 Although Wölfflin’s Berlin lecture is rarely discussed, he regarded it highly. In the preface to the Principles, Wölfflin ascribes a formative role to the lecture, and its title was, for several years after 1910, the one he planned to give his book in progress.5 At the time, Wölfflin had been a member of the academy for barely over a year, and he was nervous about such a public appearance. The lecture came at the end of a fraught period in which he struggled with himself and colleagues about whether he should give up his professorship in Berlin. The lecture fell just a few days after Wölfflin’s final decision to leave Berlin for Munich, so it functioned very much as a valedictory. After it, he writes to his family: “My lecture at the academy continues to garner fruits. With it, I made a really good exit.”6 Panofsky’s decision to challenge Wölfflin was a bold one. Not only was the young art historian—he was twenty-three at the time this essay was published—taking on one of the leaders of European art history, but he was also criticizing his teacher.7 Panofsky’s art history famously developed in ways very different from Wölfflin’s, so it is easy to forget that much of Panofsky’s early art-historical study had been with him. Between 1910 and 1912 (just 3. Heinrich Wölfflin, “Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst,” Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1912): 572–78. Panofsky could not have attended Wölfflin’s lecture, which was open only to academy members. Thanks to Wiebke Witzel for information about who attended. 4. For a new translation of Wölfflin’s text and a thorough recent assessment of his ideas and their reception, see Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Early Modern Art, trans. Jonathan Blower, ed. Evonne Levy and Tristan Weddigen (Los Angeles, 2015). 5. See ibid., p. 72. See also Meinhold Lurz, Heinrich Wölfflin: Biographie einer Kunsttheorie (Worms, 1981), p. 168. 6. Wölfflin, letter to family, 11 Dec. 1911, in Heinrich Wölfflin, 1864–1945: Autobiographie, Tagebücher und Briefe, ed. Joseph Gantner (Basel, 1982), p. 262. For further analysis of 1911 as an especially turbulent year in Wölfflin’s life, see Joan Goldhammer Hart, “Heinrich Wölfflin: An Intellectual Biography” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1981), pp. 436, 441–43. 7. The quotation marks that Panofsky placed around the title of his essay were a deviation from the normal style of the Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. As Gerda Panofsky has noted, they make clear that the 1915 essay was to be seen as a very direct response to Wölfflin’s identically titled publication of 1912; see Gerda Panofsky, Erwin Panofsky von Zehn bis Dreißig und seine jüdischen Wurzeln (Passau, 2017), p. 109. W i l l i a m D i e b o l d is Jane Neuberger Goodsell professor emeritus of art history and humanities at Reed College. S o n j a D r i m m e r is associate professor of medieval art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. FIGURE 1. Erwin Panofsky’s handwritten folder for his corrected typescript of “‘Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst.’” Erwin Panofsky papers, box 17, folder 24, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 666 William Diebold and Sonja Drimmer / Panofsky’s Debut around the time Wölfflin gave the lecture to which he responded), Panofsky attended five of Wölfflin’s courses.8 The subject of Panofsky’s debut essay signaled the young scholar’s ambitions—so, too, did its place of publication. The Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft had been founded in 1906 by the psychologist and aesthetician Max Dessoir; he was still the editor when Panofsky’s text appeared. The journal’s title, with its reference to Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (the universal science of art), makes clear Dessoir’s desire to discuss art-historical issues on the same high methodological plane as the traditional philosophical study of aesthetics. The young Panofsky believed that with his critique of Wölfflin he had something to contribute to that project. Dessoir’s journal became a congenial home for Panofsky; he would publish two further essays there, both similarly concerned with methodological issues: his critique of Alois Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen (1920) and his examination of the relationship of art history to art theory (1925).9 “‘Das Problem’” is not well known, but Panofsky generally thought well of it, although he also recognized that it was perhaps best characterized among his juvenilia.10 This divided attitude makes the history of Panofsky’s reception of the essay complex and telling. Panofsky included “‘Das Problem’” with his application for the Habilitation, the license to become a German university professor.11 He was sufficiently confident about the text to note that his 1920 essay on Riegl continued “‘Das Problem’” and returned explicitly to its arguments.12 And Panofsky repeated many of his 1915 criticisms of Wölfflin in the appreciation of his teacher he published a decade later on the occasion 8. For a full list, and a good discussion of the student Panofsky’s relationship to Wölfflin, see ibid., pp. 108–10. 9. On the intellectual aims of the journal in its early years, see Josef Früchtl and Maria Moog-Grünewald, “Vorwort der Herausgeber” and Willibald Sauerländer, “Kunstgeschichte und Bildwissenschaft,” in Ästhetik in metaphysikkritischen Zeiten: 100 Jahre “Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft,” ed. Früchtl and Moog-Grünewald (Hamburg, 2007), pp. v–vi, 93–96. For Panofsky’s three essays in the Zeitschrift, see Karlheinz Lüdeking, “Panofskys Umweg zur Ikonographie,” in Ästhetik in metaphysikkritischen Zeiten, pp. 201–24. 10. The essay has never been fully translated into English, although several excerpts are in Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984). There are full Italian and French translations; see Panofsky, “Il problema dello stile nelle arte figurative,” in La prospettiva come “forma simbolica” e altri scritti, trans. Enrico Filippini, ed. Guido Davide Neri (Milan, 1961), pp. 145–56 and “Le problème du style dans les arts plastiques,” in La perspective comme forme symbolique et autres essais, trans. Guy Ballangé (Paris, 1975), pp. 183–96. 11. See Horst Bredekamp, “Ex nihilo: Panofskys Habilitation,” in Erwin Panofsky. Beiträge des Symposions, Hamburg 1992, ed. Bruno Reudenbach (Berlin, 1994), p. 48. 12. “In a certain way this article represents the continuation of my ‘Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst’ . . . the final paragraph of which is more closely argued here” (Panofsky, “The Concept of Artistic Volition,” trans. Kenneth J. Northcott and Joel Snyder, Critical Inquiry 8 [Autumn 1981]: 17 n.). Panofsky later expands explicitly on “‘Das Problem’”; see p. 24 n. 7. Critical Inquiry / Summer 2023 of Wölfflin’s sixtieth birthday, suggesting that he stood by them.13 This last text is full of the praise the genre requires, but Panofsky did not hesitate to note that Wölfflin had always pushed to the side important questions such as whether his pairs were truly “fundamental concepts” or “only descriptive terms that point to the solutions to the problems” and whether the number of pairs could be increased or decreased.14 As he had in 1915, Panofsky in 1924 (perhaps with more grace) emphasized the utility of Wölfflin’s pairs for characterizing and describing the truly artistic in a work of art; this made them a parallel to art-historical inquiries that look at religious or philosophical factors, the kind of inquiries for which Panofsky himself would become famous.15 Over the course of his professional life, Panofsky often reflected on his first publication; his attitude was an odd mixture of the self-deprecating and the grandiose. In 1958 (more than forty years after “‘Das Problem’” appeared), Panofsky thanked Wölfflin’s pupil and intellectual heir, Joseph Gantner, for sending him a book. Panofsky writes that he was especially interested in the book’s last chapter, on Wölfflin and Croce, which reminded me of a deservedly forgotten article (forgotten even by myself) which was the first thing I ever wrote, and with a temerity that frightens me in retrospect, attacked Wölfflin’s Grundbegriffe, even before his famous book had appeared, merely on the basis of his equally famous Berlin Academy lecture. . . . When the book appeared Wölfflin (whom I never met) did me the honor of counter-attacking without mentioning the name of a then unknown student (“Wer so spricht, der verkennt . . .”), and I flatter myself that it was my and other art historians’ objection to his originally rigid separation of form from content rather than Croce’s pronouncements that caused him to mellow his attitude in his “Revision” of 1933.16 13. See Panofsky, “Heinrich Wölfflin: Zu seinem 60. Geburtstage am 21. Juni 1924,” Deutschsprachige Aufsätze, ed. Karen Michels and Martin Warnke, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1998), 2:1105– 08. 14. Ibid., 2:1107. 15. Although Wölfflin was Panofsky’s primary target in “ ‘Das Problem,’ ” he was not the only senior art historian he criticized. In his last paragraph, Panofsky writes that even the possession of an “ ‘empathy’ identical, as it were, with the spirit of the various eras” would not allow the interpreter to explain style (“P,” p. 684). The scare quotes around “empathy” (Einfühlung) and the reference to an era’s Geist make clear that Panofsky here is criticizing Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965), whose Abstraktion und Einfühlung (1908) and Formprobleme der Gotik (1911) attempted just what Panofsky claimed was impossible. 16. Panofsky, letter to Joseph Gantner, 19 Dec. 1958, in Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1968, 4:396. 667 668 William Diebold and Sonja Drimmer / Panofsky’s Debut Panofsky’s pride in “‘Das Problem’” is clear, but this brief passage also manifests a divided mind and begs for an analysis in psychological terms. Given that Gantner’s book did not refer to Panofsky’s 1915 essay, how did it call to Panofsky’s mind a text that not only the discipline of art history but he himself had “deservedly forgotten”? And what are we to make of Panofsky’s claim that, while his early essay was nothing either to him or to art history, it was nonetheless referred to in Wölfflin’s Grundbegriffe? Panofsky not only cited with perfect accuracy the phrase “Wer so spricht, der verkennt”17 (“anyone who says so has failed to recognize”)18 from the introduction to Wölfflin’s book but also decided that, despite its impersonal and generic wording, it referred to him. Panofsky had actually been reminded of “‘Das Problem’” almost a decade earlier by Alfred Kroeber, who had been trying to track down the early essay. Panofsky supplied the reference along with a summary of the argument and a frank assessment of how, more than thirty years on, he perceived it: The article referred to would seem to be a very early attempt at criticizing the exaggerated formalism of Wölfflin, and if your kind note had not reminded me of it I should have entirely forgotten that I ever wrote it. . . . It is very short and merely tries to prove that form, so called, cannot be separated from content, so called, if one wishes to do justice to a work of art, the work of art being after all a unified whole upon which the categories “form” and “content” are only superimposed ex postfacto. This I am afraid is a rather trivial notion but it seemed necessary to stress it at the time.19 Again, we see Panofsky’s split judgment about “‘Das Problem;’” the essay is both “trivial” and “necessary.” The mature Panofsky tended to emphasize the latter position because he viewed Wölfflin’s art history as essentially antithetical to his own. In a report to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton about his work there as an art historian, Panofsky writes that the “formal analysis . . . championed by such eminent scholars as A. Riegl and H. Wölfflin . . . gradually suppressed the interest in subject matter and content and ultimately threatened to sever the connection between the history of art and other humanistic disciplines.”20 Panofsky viewed that connection as absolutely essential (notably in his programmatic 1940 essay “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline”), and, for him, “‘Das Problem’” was crucial 17. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Munich, 1917), p. 18. 18. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 98. 19. Panofsky, letter to A. L. Kroeber, 16 May 1949, in Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1968, 2:1081. 20. Panofsky, “Report on the Activities of the Institute for Advanced Study in the History of Art,” 15 Apr. 1941, in Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1968, 2:289–90. Critical Inquiry / Summer 2023 in having staked out his core position: “Even as a child, so to speak, I felt strongly that the purely formal analysis initiated by Wölfflin, indispensable and fruitful though it is, was not sufficient to understand works of art in their entirety and had the impudence, as a boy of twenty-two, to attack the great man on this very score.”21 Perhaps the most telling of all of Panofsky’s references to his 1915 essay comes from two 1960 letters to the art historian James Ackerman, who wanted to republish Panofsky’s 1920 article on Riegl’s Kunstwollen in a collection (one that never appeared). Panofsky responded by sending Ackerman the requested article and his earlier essay and suggested that Ackerman publish the critique of Wölfflin rather than that of Riegl. Panofsky justified that idea by writing: I should like to make a suggestion which would save space (therefore, money) and, if accepted, save from oblivion what is a rather curious item in my bibliography, to wit, a criticism of Wölfflin’s system which I had the cheek of writing even two years before his famous book, Principles of Art History, had appeared and which I still believe to be rather valid. It is about the first thing I ever wrote and mysteriously anticipates not only the tendencies which dominated everything that came later (viz., the conviction that ‘“form” cannot be divorced from “subject” and “content”) and, as I see only now, gropes towards that Gestalt psychology which did not yet exist at the time. . . . I am enclosing the original manuscript which is the only one of all my manuscripts which, for reasons unknown to myself, has survived.22 There is much that is puzzling here. First, Panofsky remarks that he composed his essay two years before Principles of Art History; whenever it was written, the essay and that book were both published in 1915. Second, while many of the ideas expressed in “‘Das Problem’” indeed continue in Panofsky’s later writing (this is one of the reasons Panofsky was proud of the essay and why we were eager to translate it), Panofsky characterizes what seems an expected intellectual continuity as a “mysterious” phenomenon. Finally, 21. Panofsky, letter to J.(ozef ) de Coo, 25 Jan. 1955, in Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1968, 3:664. For other approving self-assessments of his 1915 essay, significantly often in letters to other very distinguished art historians, see Panofsky, letter to Meyer Schapiro, 20 Apr. 1956, letter to Heidi Heimann, 10 Mar. 1965, letter to Ernst H. Gombrich, 15 Nov. 1965, and letter to Willibald Sauerländer, 6 Apr. 1967, in Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1968, 3:956, 5:632, 5:735, 5:995. 22. Panofsky, letter to James Ackerman, 5 Nov. 1960, in Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1968, 4:770. The manuscript survives in the form of a fourteen-page typescript with handwritten revisions by Panofsky, primarily typographic corrections and some minor changes in wording; see Archives of American Art, Erwin Panofsky papers, box 17, folder 24. 669 670 William Diebold and Sonja Drimmer / Panofsky’s Debut Panofsky’s claim that “‘Das Problem’” anticipated the ideas of Gestalt psychology is both hard to understand and seems overblown.23 If Panofsky’s assessment of his inaugural scholarly essay was generally exceptionally positive, many later critics have explicitly downplayed the text’s significance, often simply by ignoring it. Martin Warnke characterized the 1915 essay as a “somewhat hasty review” of Wölfflin’s book, while Michael Ann Holly believed that the young Panofsky had failed to understand Wölfflin correctly.24 There are exceptions. E. H. Gombrich, in his obituary of Panofsky, devoted as much space to “‘Das Problem’” as he did to any other of Panofsky’s much more substantial later texts; and Wölfflin’s intellectual biographer credited Panofsky’s essay with fundamentally and influentially changing the scholarly view of Wölfflin from that of an empathy psychologist to that of a theorist of style.25 It is not our aim in this introduction to arbitrate these different evaluations. Rather, in publishing this translation, we hope to allow readers to judge it alongside Wölfflin’s work. 2 Panofsky once distinguished writing in the humanities from that in the sciences, and his sentiments are directly relevant to the argument of the essay at hand as well as the principles governing our translation. For the humanist, according to Panofsky, “the stylistic formulation is an integral part of the meaning he tries to convey. Consequently, when he writes himself in a language other than his own, he will hurt the reader’s ear by unfamiliar words, rhythms and constructions; when he has his text translated, he will address his audience wearing a wig and a false nose.”26 Following this observation, we have thus attended to his style, so that, while costumed in English, its character remains recognizable. This is the duty of any translator; but it is 23. For a discussion of the relationship of Gestalt psychology to art history, see Ian Verstegen, “Art History, Gestalt and Nazism,” Gestalt Theory 26, no. 2 (2004): 134–50. Panofsky’s insistence in “ ‘Das Problem’ ” on the impossibility of separating form and content may to his mind have been reminiscent of a central claim of Gestalt psychology: that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. 24. Warnke, “On Heinrich Wölfflin,” Representations 27 (Summer 1989): 172. See also Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, pp. 47, 61–62. 25. See E. H. Gombrich, “Erwin Panofsky (30th March 1892–14th March 1968),” Burlington Magazine 110 (June 1968): 359, and Lurz, Heinrich Wölfflin, p. 4. For other positive assessments of “‘Das Problem,’ ” see Carlo Ginzburg, “From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi. (Baltimore, 1986), pp. 38–39. See also Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich, “Kunstwerke verstehen: Erwin Panofsky wird siebzig,” in Panofsky, Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1968, 5:1201. 26. Panofsky, letter to Abraham Flexner, 16 July 1938, in Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1968, 2:119. See also Andreas Beyer, “Stranger in Paradise: Erwin Panofsky’s Expulsion to the Academic Parnassus,” in “Escape to Life”: German Intellectuals in New York: A Compendium on Exile after 1933, ed. Eckart Goebel et al. (Boston, 2012), p. 434. Critical Inquiry / Summer 2023 a duty that Panofsky’s very argument in “‘Das Problem’” shows to be impossible to fulfill completely. Panofsky’s chief criticism is that Wölfflin’s attention to form at the expense of content and context does violence to the work of art by destroying its integrity. Academic translation, mutatis mutandis, must do the same; it sacrifices the form of a text in the vain hope of preserving its content. In the passage just quoted, Panofsky likened the procedure to vaudeville or the circus; elsewhere, he drew on his field of expertise to make the same criticism of translation in equally scathing terms. In the 1930s and 1940s, Panofsky became close friends with the writer Booth Tarkington, and Tarkington complimented Panofsky on his English prose style. Panofsky replied that he knew that his English was far from perfect but that he could not possibly adopt the other possible “procedure”: to write in his native German and to have someone translate his prose into English. Panofsky calls that “comparable to the ruinous habit of most modern sculptors of merely modelling their statues in clay while leaving the execution in marble to a ‘technician.’” Like Tarkington, Panofsky instead “preferred the somewhat uneven texture of a sculpture directly carved from the stone to the smooth perfection which a professional ‘translator’ might have attained.”27 It is commonplace to bemoan the difficulty of translating Panofsky. Jas’ Elsner and Katharina Lorenz describe his German as “more complicated than it needs to be,”28 while Kenneth Northcott and Joel Snyder characterize his writing as “couched in that opaque language which German scholars frequently feel necessary if the gravity of their views is to be correctly communicated to their public.”29 Panofsky himself admits as much in a well-known passage that, if nothing else, is a balm to those who have struggled over his prose: Every German-educated art historian endeavoring to make himself understood in English had to make up his own dictionary. In doing so he realized that his native terminology was often either unnecessarily recondite or downright imprecise; the German language unfortunately permits a fairly trivial thought to declaim from behind a 27. Panofsky, letter to Booth Tarkington, 20 Oct. 1939; Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1968, 2:229. A discussion of translation between Panofsky and Tarkington was particularly appropriate because Panofsky dedicated his English translation of the Latin writings of the twelfth-century Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis to Tarkington. 28. Katharina Lorenz and Jas’ Elsner, “Translators’ Introduction,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008): 40. 29. Northcott and Snyder, translators’ note to Panofsky, “The Concept of Artistic Volition,” p. 17. 671 672 William Diebold and Sonja Drimmer / Panofsky’s Debut woolen curtain of apparent profundity and, conversely, a multitude of meanings to lurk behind one term.30 Several years earlier, Panofsky identifies the same distinction between German and English academic writing, citing specifically an example from the lexicon Wölfflin designated as his Grundbegriffe: “In English one simply cannot cheat (just as one cannot produce impressionistic effects with the precisely determined line of an engraver’s burin), but rather must say exactly what one means. Wölfflin’s ‘malerisch,’ for example, has to be expressed in five or six entirely different words or phrases, on a case-by-case basis.”31 Our experience translating this essay has confirmed this characterization. Panofsky’s own language presents a number of challenges at both the syntactic and lexical levels. It is worth reiterating his relative youth at the time, which might be useful to bear in mind when considering his overwrought syntax and the almost surgical approach to Wölfflin’s words throughout the essay. This is, among other things, the work of a young scholar attempting to establish his intellectual bona fides. His frequent recourse to Sperrdruck (adding spaces between letters for emphasis, an alternative typographic convention to italics favored in German-speaking countries) was not unusual in academic publications of the period. But, by using it, Panofsky does not simply lend an authoritative air to his essay; he also demands attention to the precision of his formulations, in which emphasis does indeed play an important part—appropriately, not as a matter of style only, but also as a substantive feature of his meaning. We have thus preserved all Panofsky’s emphases in our translation. Likewise, certain rhetorical devices are essential to Panofsky’s argumentation, and our aim has been to retain those that could translate intelligibly into English. Gerda Panofsky remarks that his “favourite figure of speech is the chiasmus.”32 That figure crops up in the present essay, notably just before the closing section, when Panofsky writes: “It must never forget that art . . . not only commits to a certain view of the world but also a certain worldview” (“P.” p. 684). However, more common in this piece is not chiasmus strictly speaking but rather antithesis and parallelism, structures that seem to inhabit the very mentality of Wölfflin’s dyadic thinking (whether in the double rootedness of style or the stylistic polarities of his Grundbegriffe) all the better 30. Panofsky, “Three Decades of Art History in the United States: Impressions of a Transplanted European,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, N.Y., 1955), p. 329. 31. Panofsky, letter to Hermann Giesau, 27 Jan. 1949, in Korrespondenz 1910 bis 1968, 2:1038. We are grateful to Peter Parshall for discussion on the translation of this sentence. 32. Gerda Panofsky, “Editor’s Introduction” to Panofsky, Michelangelo’s Design Principles, Particularly in Relation to Those of Raphael (Princeton, N.J., 2020), p. lxix. Critical Inquiry / Summer 2023 to critique it. Such constructions strike with particular force near the beginning of the essay, in the repeated, “We are not asking . . . instead, we are asking” and variations on “Wölfflin concedes that the way . . . he denies that the fact that” (“P,” p. 678). We have retained as much as possible in English the verbal balance on either side of these parallels and antitheses; however, we also found that at times the need to break up long sentences with nested clauses was unavoidable for intelligibility in English. At the lexical level, this translation proved less fraught, although there were several terms over which we mulled and which, as a result, are worth glossing here. The first of these is Seele, a word that is essential to Panofsky’s argument and one that can, perhaps confusingly for English-speakers, embrace both the mind and the soul and that can accommodate both feeling and intellection. In her commentary on this essay, Karen Lang renders Seele as “psyche,” a term that we ultimately opted against in favor of the more colloquial mind.33 Psyche is nowadays so wed to psychoanalytic theory that it risks overcomplicating what we believe to be Panofsky’s simpler intention; namely, to designate the mental faculty that acts on what is seen. After translating it as “psyche,” Lang takes Panofsky to task for “presum[ing] the a priori nature of his most important critical term, Seele, just as he fails to determine this term critically.”34 But perhaps we can relieve him of this expectation if we do not burden Seele itself with the freight that psyche brings in our world.35 Similar to the complications that arose from Seele, Gesinnung required some deliberation. Panofsky had great admiration for this Wölfflinian word; almost a decade after publishing “‘Das Problem,’” Panofsky called Wölfflin’s use of this term a sign of “the total beauty of his diction and the absolute wealth of his humanistic education” directed toward “ethical understanding.”36 We have rendered Gesinnung sometimes as “attitude,” sometimes as “disposition” in order to capture the sense in which Panofsky uses it to mean a way of thinking or turn of mind. Finally, Optik (optics) merits a remark.37 In 33. See Karen Lang, Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History (Ithaca, N.Y., 2006), pp. 23–26. 34. Ibid., p. 26. 35. Psyche is a term that Panofsky would go on to use explicitly, as in an essay of 1920, perhaps suggesting that he did not have its cognate in mind when using Seele in this earlier piece; see Panofsky, “Der Begriff des Kunstwollens,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 14 (1920): 324, 328. Confirmation for our decision to translate Seele as “mind” is suggested by edits Panofsky made to the typescript of his essay (see note 22), where, on two occasions, he struck out the more ethereal Geist in favor of Seele. 36. Panofsky, “Heinrich Wölfflin,” p. 1108. 37. When Panofsky places the words in quotation marks, he is referring to the ideas of Wölfflin, even if Optik does not literally appear in the publication of Wölfflin’s lecture, which has the adjective optische. Wölfflin does use Optik in another essay; see Wölfflin, “Über den Begriff des Malerischen,” Der Kunstwart und Kulturwart 26 (1913): 104–09. 673 674 William Diebold and Sonja Drimmer / Panofsky’s Debut this context, the word refers not to the science of light but rather to Panofsky’s belief that Wölfflin held that the style of a painting evidences a neutral or expressionless relationship between the seeing organ (the eye) and what is perceived. While Panofsky acknowledges that Wölfflin does not impute changes in vision to “differently constructed retinas” (“P,” p. 679), Wölfflin could, according to David Summers, “be suspected of suggesting that actual vision, rather than having a universal physiological base, with a great variety of culturally shaped variants, differs from one ‘nation and race’ to another.”38 It would be overly generous to credit Panofsky with foreknowledge of the direction these ideas would take and the agendas they would serve in the 1930s; still, his skepticism of what he sees as their theoretical questionability are on view at this early stage in his career. 3 Some closing words on the importance of making this essay available in English: although it is Panofsky’s first publication, it adumbrates ideas about art-historical meaning that would later become famous through his concepts of iconography and iconology. However, it does so with a capacious idea of meaning that is more typical of his earlier, German-language theoretical essays and that he has been criticized for neglecting in his later, more influential, English-language scholarship. Translators of his scholarship as well as those who have taken an interest in the arc of his career habitually comment on its two main phases—the German and the American—and their distinction, even alienation, from one another.39 Anglophone readers, particularly students, have for the most part only been exposed to his American writings, learning about his early development as an art historian at second hand or through the relatively small number of his early essays that have been translated into English. And since the onset of scholarly exhaustion with iconology in the late 1980s, the partial awareness of his corpus has not only reduced Panofsky to an unfortunately one-dimensional proponent of an unexciting method in the minds of students and even advanced scholars; it has also inhibited their access to the origins of that method as an outgrowth of theory itself as well as the historical context in which it burgeoned. 38. David Summers, “Heinrich Wölfflin’s ‘Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe’, 1915,” Burlington Magazine 151 (July 2009): 477. 39. Irving Lavin refers to this as the “profound transformation of his academic persona,” which he attributes to Panofsky’s “Americanization” (Irving Lavin, “American Panofsky,” in Migrating Histories of Art: Self-Translations of a Discipline, ed. Maria Teresa Costa and Hans Christian Hönes [Berlin, 2018], p. 97). The shift in Panofsky’s art history between his German and American periods is also an important theme of Elsner and Lorenz, “The Genesis of Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 38 (Spring 2012): 483–512. Critical Inquiry / Summer 2023 Ignorance of this background obscures the nature of iconology as a reaction— possibly political—to rigidly formalist approaches to art.40 Furthermore, Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History was long a cornerstone in American introductory courses in art history, yet this early and quite direct challenge to it was never presented to English-language students. While Wölfflin’s text has fallen out of favor, making this response available at last in English restores what has been a lost chapter in the historiography of the field. If Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History is no longer often assigned as an introduction to the concept of style or in methods courses, with Panofsky’s reaction to it (well in advance of Walter Benjamin’s and Gombrich’s) now accessible in English, Wölfflin’s text might be seen more widely not as an instant “classic” from the early history of the discipline but instead as an effort that from the outset was vulnerable to criticism from an ambitious young scholar who would himself go on to produce “classics” several decades later. 40. For more on the possible politics of Panofsky’s early essays, see Beyer, “Stranger in Paradise,” p. 439, and Elsner and Lorenz, “The Genesis of Iconology.” Panofsky himself, in the same letter to Tarkington cited above, referred to his Studies in Iconology as “reactionary rather than revolutionary,” perhaps confirming this interpretation (Panofsky, letter to Tarkington, p. 229). 675