94
colorfully characterizes all philosophy before Husserl as
“digestive”: “The spidery mind trap[s] things in its web,
cover[s] them with a white spit and slowly swallow[s]
them reducing them to its own substance”: an ontology
(certainly not an epistemology) in which Sartre would re-
gard things animate or inanimate around us - say, rocks,
chestnut trees, iridescent dragonflies, or statues in the
park - as all remaining inalienable presences. “If you
could enter ‘into’ [an unknown] consciousness”, claims
the existentialist phenomenologist, “you would be seized
by a whirlwind and thrown back outside”.8
The basic distinction between iconology and phenom-
enology, as I see it, comes down to a confrontation between
representation and presentation. How does Martin Hei-
degger characterize it? In his “The Origin of a Work of Art”
of 1950 (Panofsky, during the 1950s, was publishing Mean-
ing in the Visual Arts, Gothic Architecture and Scholasti-
cism, and Early Netherlandish Painting),9 Heidegger justi-
fiably declares: in “all this busy activity” of recovering art
historical origins and contexts, he combatively asks, “do
we encounter the work itself?”10 Stop and direct your at-
tention to the work of art, he pleads, and let it be what it is:
a “presencing”, a being-in-the-world for a moment, before
you try to do something with it. Art can reveal things to us
that we otherwise cannot see. As one phenomenologist to-
day argues, “meaning resides in the things themselves [and
not outside them], and my dealings with them are guided
by the way the things solicit and give themselves to me”.11
Works of art - poems, paintings, monuments - are forever
guiding their attentive spectators to go beyond, between,
and behind what they first appear to represent, and in that
quiet suggestiveness lies their power over the ordinary and
the everyday. “World-withdrawal and world-decay can
never be undone”, according to Heidegger. “The works are
no longer the same as they once were. It is they themselves
that we encounter there, but they themselves have gone
by”.12 Could any mid-century empiricist art historian ever
really acknowledge this melancholic sentiment?
In 1977 Hans-Georg Gadamer issued a phenomenologi-
cal caveat based upon conclusions in his i960 Truth and
Method (when Panofsky was publishing Renaissance and
Renascences).13 To quote him: “Art achieves more than the
8 J.-P. Sartre, ‘Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea’, p. 5 (as in note 6).
9 E. Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origin and Char-
acter, vol. 1-2, New York, 1971 (= Charles Eliot Norton Lectures,
1947-1948); idem, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism: An In-
quiry into the Analogy of the Arts, Philosophy, and Religion, New
York, 1957.
10 M. Heidegger, ‘The Origin of a Work of Art’, in idem, Poetry,
Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter, New York, 1971, p. 39.
11 J.D. Parry, M. Wrathall [introduction to] Art and Phenomenol-
ogy, ed. J.D. Parry, New York, 2011, p. 3.
12 M. Heidegger, ‘Origin of a Work’, p. 40 (as in note 10).
13 H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed. rev., trans, ƒ. Wein-
shimer, D.G. Marshall, New York, 1990; E. Panofsky, Renaissance
and Renascences in Western Art, New York, 1969.
mere manifestation of meaning. [...] [The] fact that [a work
of art] exists, its facticity, represents an insurmountable
resistance against any superior presumption that we can
make sense of it at all”.14 If what a work represents or means
is dismissed by Gadamer as a goal of art historical inter-
pretation, what remains, especially when it comes to the
contemplation of historical works of art? Gadamer: “Only
in the process of understanding them is the dead trace of
meaning transformed back into living meaning”.15
On first glance, such a claim might well seem to res-
onate with Panofsky s in “Art History as a Humanistic
Discipline” of 1955 where he states that the humanities,
in contradistinction to the sciences, “are not faced by the
task of arresting what otherwise would slip away, but of
enlivening what otherwise would remain dead. Instead of
dealing with temporal phenomena, and causing time to
stop, they penetrate into a region where time has stopped
of its own accord and try to reactivate it”.16 Yet for Ga-
damer a “hermeneutics that regards understanding as
reconstructing the original [that is, another goal of the
iconography/iconological paradigm] would be no more
than handing on of a dead meaning”.17 Its a matter of di-
rection. Panofsky, in a consciously retroactive move, be-
gins with the work of art and then transports it back into
a world before it existed and masterfully (he would say
objectively) reconstructs an iconographie and cultural
surround that eventuates in its creation. While Gadamer
would never deny the significance of this historical world
for the genesis of a work of art, what he wants to draw out
is its complex temporality. “While it is doubtless a prod-
uct of a particular historical era and a particular artist’s
life history, we nevertheless encounter even an artwork
from long ago as immediately present”.18 Past works of art,
though originating in a long-lost world, continue actively
to exist in the present, even to make meanings, perhaps,
where none have existed before.
The experience of a work of art - and not its analysis -
is what is of primary importance for phenomenologists,
not to mention for its putative spectators. Gadamer insists
on the power of a work of art to alter the consciousness
of the observer who looks at it. Crucial to this process
is his idea of art as play: “The structure of play”, he says,
“absorbs the player into itself, and thus frees him from
the burden of taking the initiative. [...] The player knows
very well what play is, and that what he is doing is only
a game’; but he does not know what exactly he ‘knows’
in knowing that”.19 Could the differences in professional
rhetoric between Gadamer and Panofsky be more clearly
14 H.-G. Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays,
ed. R. Bernasconi, trans. N. Walker, Cambridge, 1986, p. 34.
15 H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 164 (as in note 13).
16 E. Panofsky, ‘The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline’, in
idem, Meaning in the Visual Arts, 24 (as in note 1).
17 H.-G.Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 167 (as in note 13).
18 Ibidem, p. xiii.
19 Ibidem, p. 102,105.
colorfully characterizes all philosophy before Husserl as
“digestive”: “The spidery mind trap[s] things in its web,
cover[s] them with a white spit and slowly swallow[s]
them reducing them to its own substance”: an ontology
(certainly not an epistemology) in which Sartre would re-
gard things animate or inanimate around us - say, rocks,
chestnut trees, iridescent dragonflies, or statues in the
park - as all remaining inalienable presences. “If you
could enter ‘into’ [an unknown] consciousness”, claims
the existentialist phenomenologist, “you would be seized
by a whirlwind and thrown back outside”.8
The basic distinction between iconology and phenom-
enology, as I see it, comes down to a confrontation between
representation and presentation. How does Martin Hei-
degger characterize it? In his “The Origin of a Work of Art”
of 1950 (Panofsky, during the 1950s, was publishing Mean-
ing in the Visual Arts, Gothic Architecture and Scholasti-
cism, and Early Netherlandish Painting),9 Heidegger justi-
fiably declares: in “all this busy activity” of recovering art
historical origins and contexts, he combatively asks, “do
we encounter the work itself?”10 Stop and direct your at-
tention to the work of art, he pleads, and let it be what it is:
a “presencing”, a being-in-the-world for a moment, before
you try to do something with it. Art can reveal things to us
that we otherwise cannot see. As one phenomenologist to-
day argues, “meaning resides in the things themselves [and
not outside them], and my dealings with them are guided
by the way the things solicit and give themselves to me”.11
Works of art - poems, paintings, monuments - are forever
guiding their attentive spectators to go beyond, between,
and behind what they first appear to represent, and in that
quiet suggestiveness lies their power over the ordinary and
the everyday. “World-withdrawal and world-decay can
never be undone”, according to Heidegger. “The works are
no longer the same as they once were. It is they themselves
that we encounter there, but they themselves have gone
by”.12 Could any mid-century empiricist art historian ever
really acknowledge this melancholic sentiment?
In 1977 Hans-Georg Gadamer issued a phenomenologi-
cal caveat based upon conclusions in his i960 Truth and
Method (when Panofsky was publishing Renaissance and
Renascences).13 To quote him: “Art achieves more than the
8 J.-P. Sartre, ‘Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea’, p. 5 (as in note 6).
9 E. Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origin and Char-
acter, vol. 1-2, New York, 1971 (= Charles Eliot Norton Lectures,
1947-1948); idem, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism: An In-
quiry into the Analogy of the Arts, Philosophy, and Religion, New
York, 1957.
10 M. Heidegger, ‘The Origin of a Work of Art’, in idem, Poetry,
Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter, New York, 1971, p. 39.
11 J.D. Parry, M. Wrathall [introduction to] Art and Phenomenol-
ogy, ed. J.D. Parry, New York, 2011, p. 3.
12 M. Heidegger, ‘Origin of a Work’, p. 40 (as in note 10).
13 H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed. rev., trans, ƒ. Wein-
shimer, D.G. Marshall, New York, 1990; E. Panofsky, Renaissance
and Renascences in Western Art, New York, 1969.
mere manifestation of meaning. [...] [The] fact that [a work
of art] exists, its facticity, represents an insurmountable
resistance against any superior presumption that we can
make sense of it at all”.14 If what a work represents or means
is dismissed by Gadamer as a goal of art historical inter-
pretation, what remains, especially when it comes to the
contemplation of historical works of art? Gadamer: “Only
in the process of understanding them is the dead trace of
meaning transformed back into living meaning”.15
On first glance, such a claim might well seem to res-
onate with Panofsky s in “Art History as a Humanistic
Discipline” of 1955 where he states that the humanities,
in contradistinction to the sciences, “are not faced by the
task of arresting what otherwise would slip away, but of
enlivening what otherwise would remain dead. Instead of
dealing with temporal phenomena, and causing time to
stop, they penetrate into a region where time has stopped
of its own accord and try to reactivate it”.16 Yet for Ga-
damer a “hermeneutics that regards understanding as
reconstructing the original [that is, another goal of the
iconography/iconological paradigm] would be no more
than handing on of a dead meaning”.17 Its a matter of di-
rection. Panofsky, in a consciously retroactive move, be-
gins with the work of art and then transports it back into
a world before it existed and masterfully (he would say
objectively) reconstructs an iconographie and cultural
surround that eventuates in its creation. While Gadamer
would never deny the significance of this historical world
for the genesis of a work of art, what he wants to draw out
is its complex temporality. “While it is doubtless a prod-
uct of a particular historical era and a particular artist’s
life history, we nevertheless encounter even an artwork
from long ago as immediately present”.18 Past works of art,
though originating in a long-lost world, continue actively
to exist in the present, even to make meanings, perhaps,
where none have existed before.
The experience of a work of art - and not its analysis -
is what is of primary importance for phenomenologists,
not to mention for its putative spectators. Gadamer insists
on the power of a work of art to alter the consciousness
of the observer who looks at it. Crucial to this process
is his idea of art as play: “The structure of play”, he says,
“absorbs the player into itself, and thus frees him from
the burden of taking the initiative. [...] The player knows
very well what play is, and that what he is doing is only
a game’; but he does not know what exactly he ‘knows’
in knowing that”.19 Could the differences in professional
rhetoric between Gadamer and Panofsky be more clearly
14 H.-G. Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays,
ed. R. Bernasconi, trans. N. Walker, Cambridge, 1986, p. 34.
15 H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 164 (as in note 13).
16 E. Panofsky, ‘The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline’, in
idem, Meaning in the Visual Arts, 24 (as in note 1).
17 H.-G.Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 167 (as in note 13).
18 Ibidem, p. xiii.
19 Ibidem, p. 102,105.