Erwin Panofsky's Work

Working on "Ovide moralisé" in verse in Stockholm Photo courtesy of Gerda Panofsky

Although his interests were wide-ranging, Panofsky devoted much of his career to the study of the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). His doctoral dissertation dealt with Dürers Kunsttheorie (Berlin, 1915), and his monumental two-volume monograph Albrecht Dürer (Princeton University Press, 1943) is, according to Victor Cassidy of artnet magazine, the result of a lifetime of looking, thinking, reading, and making connections. The work has been republished many times, minus the Handlist, under the title The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer.

Panofsky's two-volume Early Netherlandish Painting (Harvard University Press, 1953) was, according to Keith P.F. Moxey in The Practice of Persuasion: Politics and Paradox in Art History, "a work that effectively transformed scholarly thinking about this period and place of artistic production." The book was taken from Panofsky's 1947-48 Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, and was a detailed iconographical study demonstrating how the realism in fifteenth century Northern paintings could be called Christian symbolism in disguise.

Panofsky also focused on the secular iconography of the Renaissance, early Dutch and Flemish book illumination, German sculpture and painting of the eleventh through fifteenth centuries, and many other subjects, both in the visual arts and beyond.

In Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 1939ff. and Perseus Books/Westview Press, 1972ff.), Panofsky explained his concept of three levels of understanding in art. First, was the pure form of a work, the primary (or natural) subject matter; then came the secondary or conventional subject matter, the iconography; finally, there was the intrinsic meaning of the work, or its iconology.

One of his most enduring books was Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Doubleday, 1955ff.), a collection of his most significant articles and essays on a variety of subjects.

According to Irving Lavin, "...it was this insistence on, and search for, meaning – especially in places where no one suspected there was any – that led Panofsky to understand art, as no previous historian had, as an intellectual endeavor on a par with the traditional liberal arts."

A man known for his remarkable memory, Panofsky was diligent about answering all of his correspondence. In his later years, he drove from his home on Battle Road to his office at the Institute each morning to answer his business mail and dictate to his secretary whatever manuscript he was currently working on. In the afternoons at home, he would reply by hand to any personal correspondence. "You have to write when written to," he would always say.

Erwin Panofsky Photo courtesy of Gerda Panofsky

Following his death in 1968, one of a number of commemorative gatherings was held at the NYU Institute of Fine Arts, with prominent scholars in the field of art history in attendance. Former Institute Professor (1958-75) Millard Meiss was among them. "Through a mad, comical coincidence, a new era in our discipline in the United States was initiated by a scholar, outlawed in Germany because of his Jewish family tradition," said Meiss that day. "It is good to recall, especially in our present troubled time, that in an earlier crisis two American institutions were sufficiently perceptive, and, I must add, sufficiently bold (because America is not entirely cosmopolitan) to bring this man to us and to offer him a life appropriate to his gifts."

The author of dozens of books in both German and English, Panofsky was a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a number of other national and international academies and societies. In 1962, he received the Haskins Medal of The Medieval Academy of America, and in 1967, the German government presented him with the Orden Pour le Mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste, created in 1842 by Friedrich Wilhelm IV to honor prominent artists and scientists. His wife Gerda accompanied him to the presentation ceremonies in Munich, and Panofsky spoke in German on German soil for the first time since he had emigrated.

The art historical tradition begun at the Institute with Panofsky was continued with the faculty appointment in 1958 of Meiss, a specialist on Late Medieval manuscript painting in Burgundy; in 1973 with the appointment of Lavin, a specialist in Renaissance and Baroque art; in 2002 with the appointment of Kirk Varnedoe, a specialist in Modern art; and, most recently, with Yve-Alain Bois, a specialist in twentieth-century European and American art, who joined the Faculty in 2005.