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 has 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.