Visuality and Pictoriality
Author(s): Whitney Davis
Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 46, Polemical Objects (Autumn, 2004), pp. 9-
31
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Visuality and pictoriality
WHITNEY DAVIS
Beside and above the world of perception all the spheres
[of spiritual activity] produce freely their own image-world
[Bildwelt] which is the true vehicle of their immanent
development?a world whose inner quality is still wholly
sensory, but already discloses a formal sensibility, that is to
say, a sensibility governed by the spirit.
Ernst Cassirer^
The explicit idea of the world in general is required by the
ordering of world-views [Weltbildern]. And if "world" is
itself a constitutive element of Dasein, then the conceptual
working out of the phenomenon of "world" requires an
insight into the fundamental structures of Dasein.
Martin Heidegger2
Visuality is the symbolic form of visual experience?
and simply another word for the "imaging habit of
thought" described in Erwin Ranofsky's iconology,
pursuing Immanuel Kant's contention that human
thought needs images.3 "Visuality," then, refers to the
"constitutive character of symbolic renderings in the
making of 'experience'"?in this case, our experiences
of seeing, imaging, and picturing.4 Ranofsky proposed
that mundane visual experience must be grounded in
successively deeper strata of meaning rooted in
"symbolical values" incarnated in the traditions of a
historical culture. When we speak of "visuality" rather
than vision, we address the difference introduced into
seeing by cultural meaning consolidated in and as
images. In visuality, seeing becomes "viewing." In
visuality, one does not see the world; rather, one sees an
image of the world. Paradoxically, this image can only
be experienced visually as an extra-pictorial world
recognition. It cannot be recognized simply as the
picture it is. If it were, visuality would not be world
recognition. It would simply be a recognition of a
particular depicted world. And there's the rub. Visuality
constitutes a picture of the world as world-seeing. But if
the depictiveness of this picture is to be recognized in
the first place, it requires the pictorially mediated seeing
it supposedly produces. And this picture-seeing, this
recognition of a world being depicted, cannot be
entirely subsumed by the cultural visuality?the world
seeing tout court?it supposedly relays.
Is this a vicious circle? No?for we have identified a
fundamental feature of the historical character of
visuality: visuality both projects and presumes a picture
of the world as a "way of seeing," or world-recognition,
including its way of seeing pictures. This projection
presumption has a peculiar history, which we need to
track. And here we must notice a methodological circle.
Visuality is not a pure seeing. It must be mediated in
activities of image making that cannot be entirely
reduced to the visuality they constitute. In this sense
visuality (or "viewing") is not a historical object. Rather,
it is one analytic pole of historical method when it
addresses its actual historical object?human vision
both projecting and presuming pictures.
These days, visual-culture studies often reify a pure
visuality.5 Indeed, visuality often seems to be taken to be
a historical object?namely, "visual culture" as such. But
this approach violates the underlying theory of an
original phenomenal succession to cultural meaning?a
succession putatively identical in the end to an original
noumenal succession to visual apperception. When
visual-culture studies take visuality to be the very
ground rather than one moment of the history of image
making, it has no coherent way to relate the effects of
the image itself?its supposedly constitutive ordering of1. E. Cassirer, 177e Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1,
Language [1923], trans. R. Manheim (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1955), p. 87 (translation modified).
2. M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit [1927], ?11, p. 52 = Being and
Time, trans. J. Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1996), p. 48.
3. The quoted phrase is from A. H. Gilbert, Review of Panofsky,
Studies in Iconology [1939], The Art Bulletin 22 (1940):172. Gilbert
refers "specifically to [the] 'emblematic and personifying' art of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," but his description could be fully
general?as it was for Ranofsky.
4. The quoted phrase is from S. K. Langer, "On Cassirer's Theory
of Language and Myth," in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. P. A.
Schilpp, The Library of Living Philosophers 6 (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1949), p. 393.
5. It would be tedious to unravel the definitions of visuality
assumed by historians working on visual cultures; see, for example, C.
Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modem China (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997); Visuality Before and Beyond the
Renaissance, ed. R. S. Nelson (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2000); and Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial
and Postcolonial Africa, eds. P. S. Landau and D. D. Kaspin (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002). Here I pursue
essential elements of the concept of visuality as it appears in its
various inflections. For a lively recent discussion, see J. Elkins, Visual
Studies: A Skeptical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge,
2003).
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10 RES 46 AUTUMN 2004
vision?to the causes of its pictorial vehicle in vision. It
has no coherent way to relate them, that is, beyond
identifying them wholly with one another. A reified pure
visuality is just another question-begging dogma of
visual Weltanschauung or "period eye."
Visuality and what I will call pictoriality though
always inter-converting are at no point identical. Indeed,
at every moment in their noetic succession they must be
disjunct. A picture cannot entirely express the essential
"symbolical values" of a visuality, just as a visuality
cannot entirely conceive the essential "formal values" of
a picture. This basic disjunction creates disruptions that
provoke visual imagination and pictorial configuration?
constituting the very mechanism of the cycle of form to
symbol, of image to "discourse," of the sensible to the
intelligible, and round again. It will be helpful to
consider all this in a concrete instance?a paradigm
case in the development of iconology.
The splitting of the art-historical eye
The art-historical method developed by Panofsky in
the 1920s and 1930s distinguished the "pre
iconographical," the "iconographical," and the
"iconological" levels of analysis. For the moment they
can be regarded as requiring the historian to identify
forms, motifs, and cultural meaning, respectively.
Panofsky's most succinct statements of his method can
be found in two well-known essays. The first, written in
German, was published in 1932 in the journal Logos.6
The second, written in English, was published in 1939
as the first part of the "Introductory" section in Studies
in Iconology; Panofsky republished it with a two
paragraph addition in 1955 in Meaning in the Visual
Arts under the rubric "Iconography and Iconology," the
title I use here.7 I will return to differences between the
daims of 1932, 1939, and 1955. At this point I want to
recall a third text, which has been overlooked in
subsequent discussions of Ranofsky's program. In 1951,
Panofsky published "Meaning in the Visual Arts," a brief
essay presaging the title he gave to the collection
published in 1955.8To some extent "Meaning in the
Visual Arts" repeats and summarizes "Iconography and
Iconology." In the final paragraphs, however, Panofsky
turned to an issue directly addressed neither in the
German essay of 1932 nor in the English essay of 1939/
1955?even though the matter had occupied him ever
since his doctoral research dating from 1911 to 1914.
In "Meaning in the Visual Arts," Panofsky tried "to
illustrate what may be called the gradual revelation of
content" in a work of pictorial art (48). He addressed a
familiar print by Albrecht D?rer?the large engraving or
Meisterstich usually known as Knight, Death, and the
Devil, bearing D?rer's monogram and the date 1513
(fig. 1).9 Above all Panofsky hoped to discover "the
indissoluble unity of forms, motives and narrative
subject matter" in the print (MVA, 48; my emphasis).
That they should constitute an "indissoluble unity"
cannot be taken for granted in iconographie terms. As
Panofsky noted, the magnificent trotting horse and the
stern, sanguine rider in D?rer's picture "come from two
6. E. Panofsky, "Zum Problem der Beschreibung und
Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst," Logos 21
(1932): 103-119 = E. Panofsky, Aufs?tze zu Grundfragen der
Kunstwissenschaft, eds. H. Oberer and E. Verheyen (Berlin: B.
Hessling, 1964), pp. 85-97. This essay will be cited in the main body
of the text as PB.
7. E. Panofsky, "Introductory, ?1," Studies in Iconology:
Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1939), pp. 3-17; Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers In
and On Art History (New York: Anchor Books, 1955), pp. 26^11. The
1939 version of the essay will be cited in the main body of the text as
I & I. In the large literature on these writings, I wish to single out
David Summers, "Meaning in the Visual Arts as a Humanistic
Discipline," in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside?A
Centennial Commemoration of Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), ed. I.
Lavin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 9-24.
8. "Meaning in the Visual Arts," Magazine of Art 44, no. 1
(February, 1951):45-50. This essay will be cited in the main body of
the text as MVA. It introduced Panofsky's iconology to the
nonacademic American artworld.
9. The engraving measures 246 x 190 cm. For an early, a later,
and a very late impression, see Albrecht D?rer: Master Printmaker, ed.
E. A. Sayre (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1971 ), nos. 179-181. Subtle
spatializing effects are more visible in earlier impressions than in later
ones, which can be quite lifeless (e.g., ibid., no. 181), and
connoisseurs rightly assert that the print should be viewed "in fresh,
early impressions" (ibid., p. xvii). I will return to the importance of this
point. For the bibliography available to Panofsky, see E. Panofsky, The
Life and An ofAlbrecht D?rer, 1st ed. This book will be cited in the
main body of the text as LAAD. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1943), vol. 2, Handlist No. 205. For recent exhibition history and
bibliography, see R. Schoch, M. Mende, and A. Scherbaum, Albrecht
D?rer: Druckgraphische Werk, vol. 1, Kupferstiche, Eisenradierungen
und Kaltnadelbl?tter (Munich: Prestel, 2001), no. 69, G. Bertram,
Albrecht D?rer and His Legacy (London: British Museum, 2002), no.
126, and Albrecht D?rer, eds. K. A. Schr?der and M. L. Sternath
(Vienna: Albertina, 2003), nos. 137-139. For valuable
historiograph ?cal surveys, see H. Schwerte, "D?rers 'Ritter, Tod und
Teufel': Eine Ideologische Parallele zum 'Faustischen'," in Faust und
das Faustischen: Ein Kapitel deutscher Ideologie (Stuttgart: E. Klett,
1962), pp. 243-278, and J. Bialostocki, D?rer and His Critics,
1500-1971: Chapters in the History of Ideas, Saecula Spiritalia 7
(Baden-Baden: V. Koerner, 1986), pp. 211-242. It is not part of my
purpose to consider post-Ranofskyan scholarship on the print; it has
substantially revised Panofsky's interpretation (see below, note 21).
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Davis: Visuality and pictoriality 11
Figure 1. Albrecht D?rer, Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), engraving. Photograph ? 2004 Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston, Harvey D. Parker Fund 68.261.
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12 RES 46 AUTUMN 2004
different sources" in the artist's production (ibid.). D?rer
based the principal rider, an armed knight, on a life
study of an armed and mounted groom painted in
watercolor in 1498 (fig. 2); as the artist's inscription tells
us, this study was intended to illustrate "the armor in
Germany at the time."10 By contrast, the rider's horse
precipitated from D?rer's "theoretical studies" of equine
proportions, especially a sheet of studies now in
Nuremberg (fig. 3), in turn derived from drawings by
Leonardo da Vinci in which the "exquisite rhythm" of
equine movement had been grasped by the Italian artist
(MVA, 48).11 But despite the disparate pictorial
materials, which flowed into the image created in the
print of 1513, D?rer achieved an "indissoluble unity" of
forms and motifs because he was able to "display this
perfect posture of a horseman for ?ts own sake" (ibid.)?
a complete pictorial image and a self-sufficient work of
art. In this, as Panofsky and his collaborators later wrote,
the artist created one of his "great symbolical forms."12
Whence, however, the "gradual revelation of
content"?the symbolic charge of the picture, the
iconologist's "intrinsic meaning or content" (/ & I, 7-8)?
Panofsky aimed to describe a wholesale continuity from
formal and strictly iconographie to ?conological
identifications of the significance of the print. Thus he
was compelled to suppose that D?rer was "not satisfied"
with the picture of a horseman's posture displayed "for
?ts own sake" (MVA, 48)?even though that self
sufficient image constituted the unity of the disparate
forms and motifs already observed. In the engraving of
1513, D?rer "added" other elements?the figures of
Death and the Devil on their horses, the running hound,
the landscape setting. In this way he "invested [the
?mage of the horseman] with an intelligible idea, and
even transformed it into an allegory" (?bid.). Specifically,
in ?ts intrinsic meaning?the ultimate object of iconology
?n the identification of a visual culture?the print depicts
"the Christian Knight [who] finds himself in the dense,
pathless wilderness of the World, haunted by reptiles
and the remains of those who died on the road, . . .
waylaid by Death, who threateningly holds up his
hourglass, and by the Devil who sneaks up from
behind" (ibid.). These elements were added to the print
insofar as they were generated in its production rather
than inherited from ?ts formal and iconographie sources.
But they also translated the self-sufficient pictorial
display of the horse and rider into the "intelligible idea"
of a Christian Knight on his dread journey. In turn this
idea subsisted in "indissoluble unity" with the form and
jr
Figure 2. Albrecht D?rer, Man on Horseback
watercolor. Courtesy of The Albertina, Vienna
10. For the watercolor, see Panofsky (see note 9), vol. 2, Handlist
No. 1227 (Albertina). The rider is said to be Philipp Link, groom to the
family of one of the artist's patrons. In scouring the D?rer canon, the
Tietzes rejected the drawing, taking it to be a workshop copy after his
original (H. Tietze and E. Tletze-Conrat, Kritisches Verzeichnis der
Werke Albrecht D?rers [Augsburg: B. Filser, 1928], vol. 1, p. 90).
Panofsky did not accept this reattribution and it does not appear to
have been taken up; see Albrecht D?rer, eds. Schr?der and Sternath
(see note 10), no. 137.
11. For the Nuremberg sheet (?ts "horses are constructed according
to the system employed for the engraving"), see Panofsky (see note 9),
vol. 2, Handlist No. 1674. For a two-sided "preparatory drawing" for
the engraving, see ibid., vol. 2, Handlist Nos. 1675-1676 (Ambrosiana).
(Both sides are illustrated in Albrecht D?rer, eds. Schr?der and
Sternath [see note 9], no. 138.) The verso of the sheet is the "fair
copy," and insofar as ?t reversed the drawing on the recto, it could
have served as a working drawing for the engraving (which would, of
course, reverse it in turn). For a further copy of it (not always accepted
to be D?rer's), see ibid., vol. 2, Handlist No. 1677 (Uffizi). None of
these three studies includes the figures of Death and the Devil.
12. R. Klibansky, E. Panofsky, and F. Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy:
Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy Religion, and Art
(London: Nelson, 1964), p. 373. This text was prepared in the 1930s
but finished and published long afterward.
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Davis: Visuality and pictoriality 13
Figure 3. Albrecht D?rer, Study of a Horse, pen drawing. Detail of MS. Nuremberg, fol. 162r. (Georg
Reimer Verlag, 1915).
motif of the horse and rider: there was no reason for
D?rer to depict the horse and rider except in order to
depict the Christian Knight. In sum, in D?rer's print
pictoriality, including the formal and iconographie
constitution of the picture over time, smoothly gives
onto visuality, the cultural meaning of the ?mage?even
as that visuality determines pictoriality.
Now Panofsky knew very well the purported unity of
the sensible form and the intelligible idea of D?rer's
print had been questioned by Heinrich W?lfflin, "the
greatest advocate of purely formal analysis" (MVA,
48-49). Panofsky's doctoral thesis on D?rer's art theory,
submitted in 1914 at Freiburg, had begun life in an
essay awarded a prize in 1911, on W?lfflin's
recommendation, by the University of Berlin. Six years
earlier, in 1905, W?lfflin had published the first edition
of Die Kunst Albrecht D?rers.n In his treatment of the
print (in a lecture of 1921 he called it the "best known
picture in all German art"), W?lfflin insisted that D?rer
was "originally"?and as it were throughout the entire
process of making the image?"merely concerned with
the simple subject of a horse and rider" (KAD, 242).14
D?rer presented the beast."in pure side view, and there
has been no playing down of the intention to reveal the
13. H. W?lfflin, Die Kunst Albrecht D?rers [1905], 6th ed., ed. K.
Gerstenberg (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1943). This edition will be cited
in the main body of the text as KAD. For Panofsky's dissertation, see E.
Panofsky, Die theoretische Kunst-Lehre Albrecht D?rers (D?rers
?sthetik) (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1914). The 60-page dissertation did
not present the technical details of Panofsky's researches on D?rer's
theoretical studies. These appeared a year later in Panofsky's first (and
a 200-page) book: D?rers Kunsttheorie; vornehmlich in ihrem
Verh?ltnis zur Kunsttheorie der Italiener (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1915).
For W?lfflin's review of Panofsky's book, which reminded readers of
W?lfflin's role in its genesis, see Monatshefte f?r Kunstwissenschaft 8
(1915):254-255; though complimenting Panofsky's scholarship,
W?lfflin did not wholly endorse the younger scholar's account of the
"synonymity" of Art and Beauty in D?rer's thinking.
14. In this he followed the pioneering commentary of Moritz
Thausing, who had written that "D?rer wanted, above all, to do as
perfect a picture as possible of a knight on horseback" (Alben D?rer:
His Life and Works [1876], trans. F. A. Eaton [London: J. Murray,
1882], vol. 2, p. 227). According to Thausing (followed by other
nineteenth-century commentators), the Knight represents the Sanguine
Temperament. Both W?lfflin and Panofsky rejected this interpretation.
For W?lfflin's 1921 lecture, see his Albrecht D?rer (Darmstadt: O.
Reichl, 1922); the text became the chapter "Zur Einleitung" in the later
editions of KAD (quotation from p. 11).
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14 RES 46 AUTUMN 2004
actual shape in its utmost distinctness" (KAD, 241); the
artist did his best to preserve the strictly formal unity of
this initial, his primary, pictorial image.
According to W?lfflin, this replication subsisted in
tension?even in clear contrast?with the "intelligible
idea" imported in its wake. Most striking, the artist's
additions were an obvious failure?evidence, for
W?lfflin, that the persisting primary pictorial
determination continued to overwhelm a secondary
symbolic reformatting. To be sure, D?rer gave a "new
sense" to the horse and rider "by going back to the type
of the eques christianus, bringing in Death and the Devil
and changing the figure into a symbolic one" (KAD,
242). But W?lfflin insisted that this change was "not to
the advantage of the picture." As he put it?and in
"Meaning and the Visual Arts" Panofsky quoted this
remark?"it cannot be denied for a moment that the
accompanying figures [of Death and the Devil] are
merely tacked on and that the whole scene represents a
compromise" (ibid.). The subsidiary figures interfered
with the horse at the noetic center of the image. To
recall Panofsky's phrasing, we can gradually identify
what Death and the Devil might be doing; we can
construct a narrative. But in seeing the horse and rider,
as W?lfflin asserted, "the eye immediately feels the
order on which the principal outlines and their rhythm
are based, even though the mind is incapable of
penetrating the secret" (KAD, 244-245). At the
W?lfflinian origin of the picture, then, there was no
intelligible idea even if and indeed precisely because
the formal unity of an original image?and its occlusion
in a secondary symbolism?remains palpable.
This is not to say that W?lfflin saw no significance in
D?rer's horse and its rider. The very presence of a
secret?the image of the horse and rider?implies a
deep and perhaps surprising or even disruptive
significance. It is only to say that for W?lfflin this
significance cannot be (or cannot be limited to) the
cultural-traditional significance of the Christian Knight
later identified by Panofsky (following scholarship
already cited by W?lfflin) as the "gradual revelation" of
the secret?that is, the "intrinsic content" which,
Panofsky would say, expresses a "cultural philosophy
condensed by a single personality and determining even
the form of a work of art" (/ & I, 8). In W?lfflin's
treatment of the print, the secret of the image, as it were,
simply is its primal formal unity persisting in?and
overwhelming?a symbolic reconstruction. This inner
image harbors a significance that must be radically
outside?and noetically prior to?wholly cultural
intelligibility in part because it is D?rer's own
expression, his image rendered in or as a picture. And,
in part, it must be outside merely cultural intelligibility
because its unity can be grasped immediately by us,
observers belonging to a later and a different cultural
universe who nonetheless visually understand the noetic
history of D?rer's print. We immediately grasp its
"principal outlines and their rhythm" and the primordial
and persisting extra-symbolic meaningfulness they
betoken?an artistic imagination in direct engagement
with its pictorial means. To dramatize his conclusion, in
the fifth edition of Die Kunst Albrecht D?rers, issued in
1926, W?lfflin included an illustration of D?rer's
engraving with everything but D?rer's primary pictorial
image?the horse and rider?which was completely
blacked out (KAD, 244) (fig. 4).15
According to W?lfflin, his illustration enables us to
see how D?rer "secured the entire rhythmic action" of
the horse (KAD, 245, n. 1). And the illustration suggests
why that unity could not be fully extended to the rest of
the image. Because the rider "fills the whole breadth" of
the picture plane, which appears in the illustration when
the landscape depth is excluded, Death and the Devil
must be squeezed behind him. In particular, the "mere
size" of Death looks "insignificant." D?rer managed to
mitigate this by making Death's white shirt stand out
strongly against the horse's mane in front of him; Death
looks bigger than he is. "The disastrous muddle of the
legs," however, "was irreparable; nothing could undo
the impression of incoherence" (KAD, 247). The four
acutely foreshortened legs of Death's horse and the one
barely visible leg of the Devil's horse?not to speak of
the running dog's legs?create a formal as well as a
narrative tangle. Still, W?lfflin conceded a certain logic
to the mess. "Just because the subsidiary figures seem so
dismembered, the main figure gains its flat, structurally
clear and concise appearance, which goes well with the
print's meaning" (ibid.)?namely, the Knight's faith and
resolve in the face of mortality and temptation. But for
W?lfflin this suggestion of a conventional meaning was
built around an original pictorial unity to which it
remained a symbolic complement, a formal accessory.
In 1943, Panofsky published his Life and Art of
Albrecht D?rer; it criticized W?lfflin's interpretation
15. The blacked-out engraving was illustrated in the fifth (1926)
and sixth (1943) editions of KAD. The latter edition was prepared by
W?lfflin's student Kurt Gerstenberg. Gerstenberg also prepared the 7th
edition, published in 1963; this edition was translated into English
(The Art of Albrecht D?rer, trans. A. and H. Grieve [London: Phaidon,
1971]). Here Gerstenberg eliminated the illustration; thus the
controversy has not been apparent to English-speaking readers.
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Davis: Visuality and pictoriality 15
Figure 4. Illustration of Knight, Death, and the Devil with
background removed, from Heinrich W?lfflin, Die Kunst
Albrecht D?rers, 5th and 6th eds. only (F. Bruckmann Verlag,
Munich, 1926 and 1943).
without mentioning him by name. According to
Panofsky, W?lfflin's illustration of D?rer's print
eliminating everything but the horse and rider "defeats
?ts own purpose," for it really shows, against W?lfflin,
that "the 'many odds and ends' are indispensable"
(LAAD, 153):
In my opinion [Panofsky wrote in 1951], this attempt to
teach a great master his business defeats its own ends. The
blacked-out composition appears less meaningful, not only
from the point of view of subject matter but also from that
of form. With the background eliminated, the group simply
looks wrong. It looks like an equestrian monument
deprived of ?ts pedestal and taken out of ?ts architectural
context: overmodeled, yet unstable, expressionlessly
moving no one knows whence, no one knows whither
(MVA, 49).
Nevertheless, Panofsky recognized that his
objection?it is itself avowedly formalistic?cannot
dispose of W?lfflin's illustration. For W?lfflin, it was the
very contrast between the primal image of a mysterious
horse and rider and the secondary symbolic significance
that constituted the noetic history of the engraving.
Panofsky realized he needed to preserve the tension
identified by W?lfflin even as he had to convert its chief
index?the formal disunity and aesthetic disorder of the
print?into an "indissoluble unity" between all the forms
and motifs and their cultural meanings. As he went on
to say in 1943:
It is quite true that D?rer was anxious to find a subject
matter which would permit him to demonstrate the final
results of his studies in the anatomy, movements, and
proportions of the horse. But he would not have been a
great artist had he conceived of this problem in terms of
detachable accessories. Once he had discovered his theme
in the idea of the Christian Knight the visual image of the
perfect horseman merged with the mental ?mage of the
perfect miles Christianus into an artistic concept, that is to
say, an integral unity. The iconography of the Christian
Knight took shape according to the formal pattern of a
carefully balanced equestrian group while, conversely, this
formal pattern assumed, as such, an expressive or even
symbolic significance (LAAD, 153-154).
To my mind, we could hardly find a more succinct
application of iconological method?and its
methodological circularity?in the entire literature of art
history and visual-culture studies. It needs careful
unpacking. As Panofsky insisted, in order to unify
?mages?"visual" and "mental"?as an intelligible artistic
concept D?rer had to have "discovered his theme in the
idea of the Christian Knight." In itself, of course, the
"idea of the Christian Knight" could only foreshadow
the "intelligible idea" of the final image relayed in the
engraving. But putting first things first, whence did D?rer
derive the idea of the Christian Knight?
In 1521, in his diary of his journey to the Netherlands
the artist responded to rumors of the assassination of
Martin Luther by appealing to Erasmus?"ride forth, you
Knight of Christ!" (du Ritter Christi). Panofsky wants to
associate D?rer's exclamation of 1521 with his print of
1513?though in the same diary D?rer himself, as
Panofsky noted, referred to the engraving not as der
16. "H?r, du Ritter Christi, reit hervor neben den Herrn Christum,
besch?tz die Wahrheit, erlang der M?rtyrer Kr?n!": D?rers schriftlicher
Nachlass auf Grund der Originalhandschriften, eds. K. Lange and F.
Fuhse (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1893), p. 164 (27). Scholars had
embraced this connection as soon as it had been proposed by
W?lfflin's predecessor Herman Grimm, a "documentary" art historian
("D?rers Ritter, Tod und Teufel," Preussische Jahrb?cher 36
[18751:543-549).
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16 RES 46 AUTUMN 2004
Ritter (the Knight) but as der Reuter (the Rider).17
According to Panofsky, the phrase "du Ritter Christi"
alludes to Erasmus's Enchiridion militis Christiani or
Handbook of the Christian Soldier. Erasmus's
Enchiridion was first published, Panofsky reminds us, in
1504?implying that the book influenced D?rer's
outlook in 1513.18 In particular, Erasmus's imagery must
have colored the artist's identification of his own
achieved knight on horseback?the watercolor study he
had already painted in 1498?with an Erasmian
Christian Soldier, at least when the study of 1498 came
to be "adapted to the new purpose" of the engraving in
1513 (LAAD, 152). But Panofsky neglects to mention
that Erasmus's Enchiridion was not translated into
German until 1520 and 1521, well after the engraving
had been made. Instead, he suggests that the supposed
fact that D?rer "promoted the Erasmian 'soldier' (miles,
not eques) to a 'knight' riding forth on horseback shows
that his mind involuntarily associated him with the hero
of his own engraving" (LAAD, 151-152). As the
chronology of the iconography suggests, however,
D?rer's awareness of the Erasmian applications of the
Christian Soldier?and hence any link he made to his
own Reuter as a Christian Ritter?could well have
postdated his pictorial visualization of his knightly rider,
whether Reuter or Ritter. If these involuntary
associations were made at all they were quite as likely
to have been made after?and perhaps responding to?
the engraving rather than before it and as its founding
idea. Panofsky produced the crucial linking of an Armed
Rider and a Christian Knight out of nowhere: a link
made only in the print itself, it cannot be discovered in
a preceding iconography even if D?rer might have partly
ratified it in his own later discourse. In the engraving,
then, D?rer's pictorial association had to be
"involuntary"?just like slipping in speech from Reuter
to Ritter. To be sure, this association of Ritterand Reuter
should take us to the heart of D?rer's "artistic concept"?
an indissoluble unity achieved in an involuntary
association when Erasmus's Christian Soldier of 1504
somehow coupled in 1513 with the image of the knight
based on the costume study of 1498. But the only
evidence for this can be the engraving itself, in
particular its supposed wholesale formal unification of
the central image and the subsidiary figures. And it was
precisely this unification that had been directly
questioned by W?lfflin.
Panofsky's inquiry, then, was displaced yet again.
Rather than showing how the Rider became a Knight,
the process at the center of the image of horse and rider
identified by W?lfflin, Panofsky tried to show how the
Knight became a Christian, a process vested in the
elaboration of the figures of Death and the Devil.
Panofsky recalled that D?rer's tradition provided him
with a type of the Christian soldier girding himself for
battle or even mounted for war (fig. 5)?though he is
always depicted as a single figure?as well as a type of
the Pilgrim beset by Death, the Devil, or other fiendish
adversaries.19 According to Panofsky, "the two ideas
intermingled . . . and a complete fusion of Soldier's
March and Pilgrim's Progress ... is seen in woodcuts
and etchings of the sixteenth century where the miles
Christianus climbs the ladder which leads to God,
hampered but not discouraged by the strings of Death,
Luxury, Disease, and Poverty" (LAAD, 152) (fig. 6).20 But
the fusion in these pictures does not equate with the
fusion achieved in D?rer's engraving. Neither the fully
armed knight nor the rider appears in them; the
protagonist is always an ordinary foot soldier or a
humble pilgrim. And where the knight does appear in a
symbolism of death and the devil?for instance, in the
title page of the German translation of Erasmus's
Enchiridion printed in Basel in 1520 (fig. 7)?he is
not a rider. Of course, adding these available types to
the image of a mounted knight could convert him into
the Christian Reuter/Ritter of D?rer's image. For
Panofsky, this fusion occurred as a unitary artistic
17. Lange and Fuhse (see note 16), pp. 140 (5) (der Reuther), 150
(20) (der Reuter). The artist referred to sales of his print. For a more
recent edition of the Diary, see D?rers schriftlicher Nachlass, ed. H.
Rupprich, vol. 1, Autobiographische Schriften . . . (Berlin: Deutscher
Verein f?r Kunstwissenschaft, 1956), pp. 146-202 (der Reuter named
on pp. 162 and 166; du Ritter Christi on p. 171).
18. In the scholarship available to Panofsky, the date of first
publication varied from 1502 to 1504; it is now agreed to have been
1502. A second publication occurred in 1509. Panofsky did not
mention that all following editions?the most widely circulated?
appeared after 1515; it was in this later year that "the great
dissemination and real popularity of the book first took hold" (P.
Weber, Beitr?ge zu D?rers Weltanschauung; eine Studie ?ber die drei
Stiche Ritter Tod und Teufel, Melancholie und Hieronymous im
Geh?us, Studien zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte 23 [Strassburg: J. H. E.
Heitz, 1900], p. 16).
19. Weber (see note 18), p. 31, reproduced an illustration in a
pamphlet published in 1494.
20. Weber (see note 18), p. 32, pis. 4-5, reproduced a painted
woodcut issued in 1488. For the iconography, Panofsky himself (see
note 9, vol. 2, Handlist No. 205) cited R. Muther, Die deutsche
Bucherillustration der Gothik und Renaissance (Munich and Leipzig:
George Hirth, 1884), vol. 2, pi. 169 (right) (Hans Wieditz's illustrations
to Petrarch), reproduced here (fig. 6), and G. Pauli, Inkunabeln der
deutschen und niederl?ndischen Radierung (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer,
1908), pl. 18 (top left) (a poor replication of the same?).
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Davis: Visuality and pictoriality 17
Figure 5. A Spiritual Knight (ein geystlich Ritter) from Der
Fusspfadt tzuo der ewigen seyligkeyt (booklet of 1494),
woodcut (from Weber, D?rers Weltanschauung [1900], 31).
conceptualization: "the visual image of the perfect
horseman merged with the mental image of the perfect
miles Christianus into an artistic concept, an integral
unity" (LAAD, 153). Panofsky takes care to say, touching
bottom, and the essence of our problem, that the "visual
image" of the horseman merged with the requisite
"mental image" because D?rer had produced no such
?mage qua picture, even if his imaginative world or
cultural visuality may have allowed for it. But the
evidence for all of the required association and merging
of these images is simply the "integral unity" of the
print, even though the fusion must constitute its formal
pictorial unity in the first place. To dispute that unity
must be to question the communication between
expressive and symbolic significance or?to recall
Panofsky's effort to bind the visual image and the mental
image in an integral unity?to question the very
possibility of a wholesale interconversion of pictoriality
and visuality.21
Figure 6. A Pilgrim with Death and other adversaries (ca.
1490), woodcut (from Muther, Die deutsche B?cherillustration
der Gothik und Renaissance [1884], II, pl. 169 [right]).
21. Panofsky's interpretation has suffered considerably in recent
years. According to Edgar Wind, D?rer depicted the Knight, a "cold,
brutal, efficient warrior," in the "final vanity of [his] martial prowess":
the Knight has no iconographically Christian identity whatsoever
(Giorgione's Tempesta with Comments on Giorgione's Poetic Allegories
[Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969], p. 27, n. 31). On the basis of
alternate iconographies (considering, for example, the skull on the
ground, the salamander, and the fox-brush on the knight's lance), E. H.
Gombrich has taken the Knight to be a soldier "in need of contrition"
("The Evidence of Images," in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed.
C. Singleton [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969], pp.
35-104, quotation from p. 103)?in historical context, possibly D?rer's
"protest against the brutal and unscrupulous ravagings of the robber
knights" who still plagued his country (S. Karling, "Ritter, Tod und
Teufel: Ein Beitrag zur Deutung von D?rers Stich," in Evolution
g?n?rale et d?veloppements r?gionaux en histoire de Fart: Actes du
22e Congr?s international d'Histoire de l'Art, vol. 1 [Budapest:
Akad?miai Kiad?, 1972], pp. 731-738; cf. U. Meyer, "Politische
Bez?ge in D?rers 'Ritter, Tod und Teufel'," Kritische Berichte 6, no. 6
[1978]:27-41). This interpretation had already appeared in the
nineteenth century before Grimm's insistence on the miles Christianus
had fully taken hold. In an elegant analysis of pictoriality (Bildsinn)
and visuality (Sinnbild) in the print, Heinrich Theissing (D?rer's Ritter,
Tod und Teufel: Sinnbild und Bildsinn [Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1978]) has
offered a compelling interpretation of the engraving; according to him,
its symbolism of the overcoming of death can be seen to mesh?to be
synonymous?with the presentation of the formal devices of art itself.
Theissing's account does not depend on identifying the Rider as a
Christian Knight in iconographie terms. Instead, according to Theissing
the Knight relays D?rer's concept of Beauty (the artistic locus of
Culture) overcoming Nature and in particular the natural necessity of
Death?a visualization which can be taken to reflect the artist's
Christian spirituality.
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18 RES 46 AUTUMN 2004
Figure 7. Urs Graf, A Christian Knight (1520), title page of Erasmus,
Handb?chlein des christlichen Ritters (Basel, 1520), woodcut (from
Weber, D?rers Weltanschauung, 28).
Recognitions in the iconographie succession
In methodological remarks published in 1939,
Panofsky asserted that our study of the primary
expressive value of a motif, including form "in W?lfflin's
sense," must be a pre-iconographical investigation of
"what we see" (/ & I, 9). What we see is simply a
"change of details within a configuration ... in [our]
world of vision" (/ & I, 3). We automatically recognize
objects and events; visual intuition gives us the "primary
expressional meaning" of perceived states of affairs.
Such realizations need not be conscious and intentional,
but they are always sensible: they are constituted in
visual perception. As W?lfflin had put it in considering
D?rer's print, they must be immediate. In one sense,
Panofsky excluded such reflexive visual experience from
his iconology, leaving it to natural history, psychology,
or ethnology?to speculative anthropology. Still, in a
deeper sense "what we see" ultimately must be a visual
world which has been constituted symbolically?a
visuality. To be sure, much of this iconological
anthropology?especially the closing of the circle in the
discovery of visuality or the symbolic form of visual
experience?remained implicit in Panofskyan iconology
and visual-culture studies. It has typically been relayed
in innumerable wishful art and cultural histories in
which "visual" and "mental" images have been
magically interconverted. Thus we need to remind
ourselves why visual image and mental image, picture
and symbol or the "intrinsic content" of a picture, though
interrelated, cannot be conflated. Better, we need to
recall why visual culture, if it is a historical object at
all, is not simply visuality but also pictoriality?and at
the limit, the pure form of depiction as resistance to
symbolic or discursive cultural intelligibility.
Our recognition of the expressional meaning of
objects and events in pictures must be included in
"what we see" because pictures are furnishings of the
world fully open to our vision. Indeed, they are
produced specifically for our vision?our "viewing."
Panofsky acknowledged, however, that "what we see" in
pictures?and precisely because they are pictures?must
be grasped in a "fraction of a second and almost
automatically" (I & I, 11; my emphasis). In other words,
he noticed, against himself, that our seeing of pictures
includes a not-quite-immediate recursion, which
occupies psychological duration and requires
psychological work?duration and work not to be found
in extra-pictorial seeing. In the case of seeing pictures,
visual perception must "identify pure forms ... as
representations of objects, events, [and] expressions" (/
& I, 5; my emphasis)?as motifs. In part, Panofsky used
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Davis: Visuality and pictoriality 19
the word "representation" (Darstellung [PB, 95, see
note 6]) in a Kantian sense to refer to the schematic
constitution of visual intuition: objects and events in
perception are representations or what Ernst Cassirer
called "representative meanings" created by the intrinsic
Darstellungsfunktion of human cognition.22 But Panofsky
introduced Darstellung specifically in his effort, as he
put it, to "transfer the results" of a psychological analysis
of extra-pictorial situations in everyday life "to a work of
art" (/ & I, 5)?that is, when he moved, as the art
historian must, from seeing the world to seeing pictures
or from visuality to pictoriality.
As Panofsky's iconography proclaimed, the study of
the secondary conventional meaning of motifs explicitly
needs a cultural history; it considers both traditional
types and their historically specific thematization. In
their perceptual near-immediacy motifs are inherently
representational; "what we see" in pictures is not the
world but representation. This constitutive recursion of
representation?the "fraction of a second" it takes us to
see a picture?marks the passage through which the
method of iconology (in its theory of an ultimate
visuality) needs to move. But it is also the moment of
possible disjunction, resistance, or blockage. It might be
much more difficult to recognize a pictorial motif than it
is for us to see the very same objects and events in our
non-pictorial world. Moreover, the recognition that gives
us the picture (this particular object or event) and the
recognition that gives us its motifs (the objects or events
depicted by this particular object-event) are not the
same. The recognizability of pictorial form occurs in a
recursion quite distinct from the constitution of the
significance of anything that might be represented by
pictorial form. In theory, an anthropology of visuality
wants to say that these realizations are one and the
same: one and the same visuality grounds both
recognitions as an integrated and unified (if not-quite
immediate) perceptual and cognitive succession. But this
ultimate and yet determining visuality must somehow
have been bootstrapped into being through the very
synthesis of proximate recognitions?somehow
determined by visuality?which would make it possible
in the first place. The anthropology practiced here seems
more like astrology.23
Supposedly our ordinary recognitional abilities in the
mundane context explain our recognitional abilities in
the depicted context. But the transfer between these
environments requires the primary recognition of the
formal integrity of a picture as such?the point Panofsky
partially obfuscated when he assumed a complete and
unperturbed transfer from the recognitions that support
the picture to the recognitions that the picture supports.
In this magical succession, initially it is as if the seeing
of pictures must have become almost (though not quite)
identical with extra-pictorial seeing: our abilities in
world-recognition enable us to recognize pictures as
such. Vision enables pictoriality. In the end, however, it
becomes clear that extra-pictorial seeing must have
become entirely identical with a seeing of pictures: our
abilities in world-representation enable us to recognize
pictorial motifs. Visuality enables pictoriality. But the
pictoriality enabled by world-recognition itself enables
this recognition of world-representation. We have
moved in a great loop from vision to pictures to the
pictoriality of vision to the visuality of pictures . . . and
presumably round and round again. Throughout,
moments of nonidentity?any cleavage between seeing
the world and seeing pictures of the world?must be
converted into identity. And this translation continually
requires us to forego a critical history that might
examine how the integrity (or nonintegrity) of a picture
does (or does not) entirely cohere with the integrity (or
nonintegrity) of the world it putatively depicts. This is a
question neither of visuality nor of pictoriality alone,
and thus a task neither for an anthropology of visual
culture nor for pictorial formalism on their own. It is a
task for their mutual critical negation?a method of
confronting a visuality with its pictoriality and vice versa.
We grasp forms and motifs in a picture partly because
we understand its depictive style. Therefore Panofsky
took the history of styles to be the foundation of
iconography and iconology.24 Pre-iconographical
22. See E. Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und
Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit, vol. 2 [1907], 3rd ed. (Berlin: Bruno
Cassirer, 1922), p. 699, and Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff:
Untersuchungen ?ber die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik (Berlin:
Bruno Cassirer, 1910) = Substance and Function, trans. W. C. and M.
T. Swabey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923). Throughout I
have depended on the superb discussion by Michael Friedman, A
Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago and
LaSalle: Open Court, 2000), pp. 87-110.
23. Panofsky cautioned as much in a comment he added to / & I of
1939 on ?ts republication in Meaning in the Visual Ans in 1955 (see
note 7, p. 32): "There is, however, admittedly some danger that
iconology will behave, not like ethnology as opposed to ethnography,
but like astrology as opposed to astrography."
24. See E. Panofsky, "Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden
Kunst," Zeitschrift f?r ?sthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 10
(1915): 460-^67 = Aufs?tze (see note 6), pp. 23-31. This article
responded to W?lfflin's essay, "Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden
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20 RES 46 AUTUMN 2004
picture-viewing is separated from pre-iconographical
world-seeing by the fact of style?our awareness that the
world looks natural, "objective," while pictures look
constructed, "subjective." Nevertheless, when the full
loop of visuality has been traversed, when symbolic
understanding or cultural discursivity constitutes vision
as such, then, of course, we must say that seeing itself
has a style. In its most radical statement, this thesis?
seeing itself is stylized according to prevailing canons of
depiction?would seem to be the logical consequence
of art-historical theories of visuality. But it has rarely
been defended by art historians.25 Indeed, Panofsky
could not bring himself to suppose that the art historian
can actually see the world as an artist in the past saw it,
even if art history can specify the original cultural
meaning of that artist's depiction. Thus he waved away
the phenomenon of style precisely when it should have
taken center stage.
To be fair, and as I have already implied, Panofsky's
method incorporated the resistance of depiction. Panofsky
urged that in examining historical pictures?pictures
made by people in the past, subjects of a visuality
different from our own?we must correct our seeing:
we must reconstruct the original expressive, traditional,
and symptomatic meanings of pictorial configurations
produced in the past. This so-called contextual knowledge
derives from the history of style (Gestaltungsgeschichte),
the history of types (Typengeschichte), and the history of
cultural or spiritual significance (Geistesgeschichte). In
the end we should be able to identify the past world
representations that constitute the ground of the primary
picture-recognitions with which we ourselves began.
Panofsky's three correctives acknowledge the layered
mediations of this connection. But he intended them to
overcome the resistance of the picture?and the
historical alterity of the world-representations it has
formalized?admitted at each and every step of the way.
For him, what can only begin as a hermeneutic of our
own visual recognition of pictures should be wholly
converted into the contextualist anthropology of a
historical visuality.
Panofsky's program for Kunstwissenschaft closely
resembles the conception of the progress of science
promoted by neo-Kantian philosophers in the preceding
generation, notably by Panofsky's mentor Ernst Cassirer.
Their doctrine has been well described by Michael
Friedman:
[M]ore and more layers of "form" are successively injected
by the application of our scientific methods so as gradually
to constitute the object of empirical natural science. In this
methodological progression we find . . . only an infinite
series of levels in which any two succeeding stages relate to
one another relatively as matter and form. The object of
knowledge itself, as "reality" standing over and against
pure thought, is simply the ideal limit point?the never
completed "X"?towards which the methodological
progress of science is converging. There is thus no "pre
conceptual" manifold of sensations existing independently
of pure thought at all.26
Panofsky himself did not quite assert that his historical
object, the symptomatic cultural meaning of a picture,
subsists in our historical method in the same fashion as
the object of science (i.e., "reality"), namely, as a "never
completed 'X'." Nonetheless the methodological
correctives of Kunstwissenschaft, like the method of
science, should progress toward the reality of culture?
the identity of form and symbol or better, of apperception
and discursivity described by Cassirer in his philosophy
of symbolic forms, developed in the early 1920s in close
interaction with Panofsky.27 In the same years, and
overlapping Cassirer's phenomenology of knowledge
and Panofsky's history of culture, Rudolf Carnap tried to
construct empirical world-knowledge as a series of steps
leading from the "autopsychological" realm (the
subjective world of sense data) through the "physical"
Kunst," Sitzungsberichte der k?niglich Preussischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften 31 (1912):572-578.
25. In philosophy, the thesis has been associated with the
arguments of Marx Wartofsky: see his "Perception, Representation, and
the Forms of Action: Towards a Historical Epistemology," in Models:
Representation and the Scientific Understanding (Dordrecht and
Boston: D. Reidel, 1979), pp. 188-210; "Sight, Symbol, and Society:
Towards a History of Visual Perception," Philosophical Exchange 3
(1981):23-38; and "The Paradox of Painting: Pictorial
Representationality and the Dimensionality of Visual Space," Social
Research 51 (1984):863-884. For comments, see A. C. Danto, "Seeing
and Showing," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (2001): 1-9,
and W. Davis, "When Pictures Are Present," Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 59 (2001):29-38.
26. Friedman (see note 22), p. 31. Friedman refers in particular to
Cassirer's Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff o? 1910 (see note 22).
For background, see K. C. K?hnke, The Rise of Neo-Kantianism:
German Academic Philosophy Between Idealism and Positivism, trans.
R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
27. Cassirer's involvement with the Warburg Library and with
Panofsky's project was taken at the time to have created a new center
of art-historical and art-theoretical research in Hamburg, where
Cassirer had been appointed the first professor of philosophy at the
new university: see E. Utitz, "?sthetik und Philosophie der Kunst,"
Jahrb?cher der Philosophie 3 (1927):306-332. In another essay, Utitz
marked his critical understanding of the aims of this Hamburg School
when he complained that nothing can be gained by combining the
problems of form with the problem of the symbol; see "?ber
Grundbegriffen der Kunstwissenschaft," Kant-Studien 34 (1929):6-69.
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Davis: Visuality and pictoriality 21
realm (the public world of external objects) to the
"heteropsychological" realm (a transpersonal cultural
world).28 To be sure, Camap's logical positivism?it
should be distinguished from the cognitive idealism of
Cassirer and Panofsky?treated each of the steps of
world-construction (die Aufbau der Welt) not as
phenomenal experiences, as Cassirer and Panofsky
supposed, but as logical types, derivative or dependent
classes of and relations between objects derived from
the objects constructed at the preceding level. For this
reason, as Carnap tried to show, the "never completed
'X'" of a real object nonetheless can be effectively
attained by the subject "in finitely many determinations
. . . [which provide] its univocal description among the
objects in general."29 In other words, the putative
noncompletion of "X" is metaphysical; human beings
effectively know this from that precisely because they
have constructed both of them. This brilliant insight
spelled the end of Cassirer's and Panofsky's brand of
idealism; if for them the Idea had been hunted back to a
"never completed X," for Carnap it had reappeared as a
perfectly definite and discriminable logical construct.
Regardless, for Carnap, as for Cassirer and Panofsky, the
catch was not so much the incompleteability of the
progress of knowledge as its seeming tautology. The
world-reports of other people become available to a
percipient only at an advanced stage in the construction
of its world. Nonetheless they would seem also to
constitute a basis, if not the only basis, for that very
construction. Somehow this substantive circularity?
the tautology of history itself, and certainly of anything
that could be called "social" or "cultural" history?
must be grasped in the methodological tautology of
its analysis.30
In this regard Panofsky explicitly conceived his
method of art-historical recognition-correction as a
circulus methodicus, a methodological circle. In
formulating it, he relied on the work of his friend Edgar
Wind, Cassirer's first doctoral student in Hamburg;
though fully acquainted with neo-Kantianism and its
discontents, Panofsky cited only Wind (PB, 93; / & I, 11).
Wind attempted to compare?even to identify?the
methods of natural science and cultural history. But
he did not urge a scientization of cultural history.
Instead he argued that in science and history alike "the
investigator intrudes into the process he is investigating"
and "every [scientific] instrument and every [historical]
document participates in the structure which it is meant
to reveal."31 Specifically, we must "preconceive the
universal, physical, or historical constellation" of which
the instruments and documents form a part and then
correct our assumptions about it through experiment.
For Wind, then, "what first appeared as a logical circle,
and, therefore, as self-contradictory, thus turns out to be
a methodical cycle, and, therefore, self-regulating."32
Panofsky repeated this point for his own purposes
in relation to the correction secured through
Gestaltungsgeschichte: "to control the interpretation of
an individual work of art by a 'history of style' which in
turn can only be built up by interpreting individual
works may look like a vicious circle. It is, indeed, a
28. R. Carnap, Die logische Aufbau der Welt: Scheinprobleme in
der Philosophie [1929], 2nd ed. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1961) = The
Logical Structure of the World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1967).
29. Carnap (see note 28), ?179. Carnap goes on, "Once such a
description is set up the object is no longer an X, but rather something
univocally determined?whose complete description then certainly
still remains an incompleteable task."
30. In describing the heteropsychological level of world
construction, Carnap acknowledged a further problem obscured in
Cassirer's and Panofsky's culturalist cognitive idealism (and in its
attendant theory of visuality): although we can build an individual
subject's world-knowledge from his or her elementary visual
experiences, in order to construct an intersubjective world we must
seemingly effect an "abstraction (via an equivalence relation) from the
resulting diversity in 'points of view'" (Friedman [see note 22], pp.
84-85)?a point fully appreciated at this time, I believe, by Ludwig
Wittgenstein. To be sure, Panofsky's work on the history of perspective
prepared him to grasp the logical necessity and perhaps even the
cultural-symbolic mechanism of this "abstraction" as it might function
in the visual field (E. Panofsky, "Die Perspektive als 'symbolische
Form'," Vortr?ge der Bibliothek Warburg 1924-1925 [Leipzig and
Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1927], pp. 258-330 = Aufs?tze [see note 6], pp.
99-167 = Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. C. S. Wood [New York:
Zone Books, 1997]). But in his theoretical work he simply assumed?
rather than explicated?the necessary convergence of "viewpoints"
which must constitute transpersonal meaning in or as human culture.
In the early 1930s, Jacques Lacan's theories about the "mirror stage" of
human subjectivity?they built on work conducted in the 1920s by
Raul Schilder and others?conceived the convergence in terms of
perspective optics; Lacan's "schema of the subject" places "I" and
"Other" on a line of coincidence connecting two perfectly opposed
optical pyramids?constituting the "equivalence relation" of
intersubjectivity by ?ptica I-geometric fiat. On these and related
problems, see H. Damisch, The Origin of Perspective [1987], trans. J.
Goodman (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), and W. Davis,
"Virtually Straight," Art History 19 (1996):434-444.
31. E. Wind, "Some Points of Contact Between History and
Natural Science," in Philosophy and History, eds. R. Klibansky and H.
J. Raton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), pp. 255-264 (quotations
from pp. 257-258).
32. E. Wind, "Experiment and Metaphysics," Proceedings of the
Sixth International Congress of Philosophy, Harvard University,
September 1926 [1927], ed. E. S. Brightman (Liechtenstein: Klaus
Reprint, 1968), pp. 217-224 (quotations from p. 222).
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22 RES 46 AUTUMN 2004
circle, though not a vicious, but a methodical one" (/ &
/,11).33
Panofsky hoped that the circulus methodicus of
iconology can be distinguished from its analytic
Doppelg?nger, the vicious circle, because?and only
insofar as?the expressive forms identified in our
ultimate anthropology of visuality are not the same as
the expressive forms recognized in our initial
hermeneutic of vision even though they might look
identical at the level of form. In the initial moment of
the loop, expressive form must be located in the picture
recognized in our spatio-temporal and causal world
order (/ & I, 16). In the ultimate moment of the loop,
however, expressive form must be located in the picture
understood to derive from a historical spatio-temporal
and causal world-order. Nonetheless, as I have already
noted, the methods of Ranofskyan Kunstwissenschaft can
never actually reach this visual-cultural reality?the
"never completed 'X'" of a historical visuality?in the
sense that the art historian can never actually come to
see the world through the same eyes as the "viewers" of
the past.34 We can correct our world-seeing as we apply
it to historical pictures. But this only gives us the ability
to enter the great loop of visuality at the opposite end
from historical viewers. At best we can "think" the
picture "seen" by them. This "thinking"?the project of
Kunstwissenschaft?claims to identify the syntheses
effected by the human visual imagination in a concrete
depictive practice historically removed from us. To put
the matter another way, the primordial analytic difficulty
of iconology lies in the fact that our method must
assume a passage?a conversion between our world of
seeing and a historical world?precisely where our
theory must assert an essential nonidentity, a historical
difference. We must preserve the difference between
seeing the world and seeing pictures; it enables us to
pass from apperceptive recognitions to symbolic and
symptomatic interpretations. But in the historical
context, this difference had been entirely sublated; in
any historical visual culture, apperception is
interpretation, and both functions would be wholly
disabled by their distinction. In this sense our analytic
method shelters an essential cleavage of form and
content?their lack of unity?which in theory could
never be discovered in the original historical situation
of "viewing."
This doesn't mean that nothing at all can be said
about partly unintelligible pictorial objects in our vision.
It means that our analysis consists in observing the
irreducible tension between a formal expressivity, which
might be open to us, and depictive significances "whose
secret remains impenetrable to the mind." Although
visuality is historically relative, it remains historical
relative to us. If it were historically "other" in a more
radical sense?the sense W?lfflin had indicated in
pointing to the "impenetrable secret" of D?rer's
engraving?the iconological program of visual-culture
studies could not identify it.
From Sein und Zeit to "Zeit und Ort"
Here at last we reach the deepest dispute between
iconology and its opposite or negation?namely, the
existential ontology of radical alterity in, or the
"otherness" of, historically located formal expression. In
the German publication of his iconological method in
1932, Panofsky said that the art historian approaches the
intrinsic cultural meaning of a picture (the so-called
Dokumentsinn) at the level of (his or her) visual
apperception of (its) formal expressivity?an expressive
significance apprehended in what Panofsky called our
vitale Daseinserfahrung, our "living experience of
existence," or Dasein (PB, 95). In part Panofsky's
terminology in this essay implicitly invoked the
philological and documentary procedures of pre
33. Unlike Panofsky, Wind urged his readers to jettison the neo
Kantian grounding of the circulus methodicus. In particular, Wind
wished to avoid the Kantian antinomies by deploying what he called
"the method of 'implicit determination' which defines the relation of
'part' to 'whole' in such a way that any proposition concerning the
structure of the 'whole' can be tested in terms of the behaviour of the
'parts' " ("Can the Antinomies Be Restated?," Psyche 14 [1934]:177
178 [quotation from p. 177]; see Das Experiment und die Metaphysik;
Zur Aufl?sung der kosmologischen Antinomien, Beitr?ge zur
Philosophie und ihrer Geschichte 3 [T?bingen: J. C. Mohr, 1934] =
Experiment and Metaphysics: Towards a Resolution of the
Cosmological Antinomies, trans. C. Edwards, introd. by M. Rampley
[Oxford: European Humanities Research Center, 2001]). This method
enables the work of experimental hypothesis to proceed because we
do need not to address the entire constellation?in which our
instrumentation and our documentation are embedded?in order to
investigate the conditions of ?ts coherence. Wind associated his
proposals with the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce, citing such
essays as "What Pragmatism Is" (The Monist 15, no. 2 [April,
1905]:161-181). In turn these were cited by Ranofsky in PB (p. 94)
and again in "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline" (Meaning
in the Visual Arts: Papers In and On Art History [New York: Anchor
Books, 1955], p. 14). But Ranofskyan iconology cannot be regarded as
pragmatist.
34. Panofsky did write in 1940 that when an art historian has
made the objective corrections of the history of style, types, and
cultural meanings, "his aesthetic perception as such will change
accordingly, and will more and more adapt itself to the original
'intention' of the works" (ibid., p. 17). But this statement does not go
all the way; it does not state that the "adaptation" of our perception is
the assumption of another's perception.
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Davis: Visuality and pictoriality 23
W?lfflinian German art historians, such as Herman
Grimm, who had been eclipsed by the rise of formalism.
Still, the "documentary" meanings pursued by these
positivist philologists and the "intrinsic" meanings
pursued by neo-Kantian critics in the Hamburg School
were antithetical: the positivists' specification of the
historical meanings of pictorial motifs typically had
not shown them to be visualities intrinsic to?and
constitutive of?primary formal expression. Moreover,
and as Panofsky's terminology suggests, in deriving the
Dokumentsinn of the picture from our Daseinserfahrung
iconology has not only been a dispute between W?lfflin
and Panofsky or between "form" on the one hand and
"content" on the other hand. It has also?and more
profoundly?been a confrontation between the
documents of Idee and the identifications of Dasein in
enabling us to reconstruct and to experience the
primordial historicity and expressivity of human artistic
culture. This was a confrontation between Cassirer and
Panofsky on the one hand and Martin Heidegger on the
other hand.
Heidegger was well aware of the art- and culture
historical research which had framed Cassirer's emerging
philosophy of symbolic forms. In 1923, he lectured on
"Aufgaben und Wege der ph?nomenologischen
Forschung" at Hamburg. On this occasion, as he later
wrote, he came to "an agreement [with Cassirer] as to
the necessity of an existential analytic which was
sketched out in the lecture."35 Later he reviewed the
second (1925) volume of Cassirer's Philosophie der
symbolischen Formen, which treated "mythical
thought"; for his part, in the third (1929) volume
Cassirer included several brief responses to Heidegger's
Sein und Zeit of 1928.36 At Davos in 1929, Cassirer and
Heidegger publicly discussed?and disputed?the
grounds, aims, and results of the Kantian critical
system.37 For my purposes here, Cassirer and Panofsky
wished to uphold (or in light of Heidegger's challenges
to restore) the sense in which representations of the
world?even those images achieved in a nontheoretical
symbolism?could construct and relay transpersonal
cultural meaning.
In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (KPM),
published in 1929, Heidegger asked whether Kant's
conclusions in the Critique of Pure Reason imply that
things-in-themselves "dissolve in a playing of
representngs."38 Kant believed (Heidegger contended)
that "being occurs for a finite creature in a representing
whose pure representations of objectivity as such have
played up to one another"?a Heideggerean phrasing for
Kant's "play of representations." And the play of
representations?their "playing up to one another"?
occurs, Heidegger continued, in a Spiel-Raum formed
through pure determinations of the inner sense.
Phenomenological analysis of our play-space of
representings?it is both Heidegger's starting point and
his object?discovers it to be "pure self-affection, i.e.,
original time" (KPM, 138-139). The play of our
representations transpires in the play-space of our
temporalized finitude. Thus Heidegger took the pure
Kantian schemata, the transcendental determinations of
time, to be identical with the temporalities of Dasein or
the concrete being-in-the-world of the human
individual. In this way, Heidegger thought, Kant's system
supposedly presaged his own existential ontology in
Sein und Zeit, published in 1928; Heidegger took
himself to enunciate what Kant really meant to say.
35. Sein und Zeit, 51, n. 1 = Being and Time, trans. Stambaugh
(see note 2), p. 401, n. 11.
36. For Heidegger's review of Cassirer, see Deutsche
Literaturzeitung 21 (1928):10O0-1012 = M. Heidegger,
Gesamtausgabe, Abt. I, vol. 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1991),
pp. 255-270 = "Review of Ernst Cassirer's Mythical Thought," in The
Piety of Thinking: Essays by Martin Heidegger, trans, with notes and
commentary by J. G. Hart and J. C. Maraldo (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1976), pp. 32-45. Indirectly Heidegger also
addressed Cassirer's influential article, a virtual summa of Hamburg
School Kunstwissenschaft, on cultural symbolism: E. Cassirer, "Das
Symbolproblem und seine Stellung im System der Philosophie,"
Zeitschrift f?r ?sthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 21
(1927):191-208 = "The Problem of the Symbol and Its Place in
the System of Philosophy," trans. J. M. Krois, Man and World 11
(1978):411-422.
37. "Davoser Disputation zwischen Ernst Cassirer und Martin
Heidegger," in M. Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik,
4th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1973), pp. 246-268 =
Gesamtausgabe (see note 36), Abt. I, vol. 3, pp. 274-296 = Kant and
the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th ed., trans. R. Taft (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1997), Appendix IV, pp. 193-207. I will not
rehearse the substance of all these exchanges here. For commentaries,
see Heidegger, German Idealism, and Neo-Kantianism, ed. T.
Rockmore (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2000); Cassirer?Heidegger:
70 Jahre Davoser Disputation, eds. D. Kaegi and E. Rudolph, Cassirer
Forschungen 9 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2002); and especially
Friedman (see note 22).
38. Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 1 st ed.
(Bonn: F. Cohen, 1929); this edition will be cited in the main body of
the text as KPM (quotation from p. 138). The text was written a few
weeks after the famous "disputation" at Davos. Cassirer's hard-hitting
review of Heidegger's book?one of the older philosopher's most
powerful summations?was published in 1931: "Kant und die
Problem der Metaphysik: Bemerkungen zu Martin Heideggers
Kantinterpretation," Kant-Studien 36 (1931 ): 1-26 = "Kant and the
Problem of Metaphysics: Remarks on Martin Heidegger's Interpretation
of Kant," trans. M. S. Gram, in Kant: Disputed Questions, ed. M. S.
Gram (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), pp. 131-157.
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24 RES 46 AUTUMN 2004
Contemporary neo-Kantians like Cassirer and
Panofsky regarded Heidegger's assertion as thoroughly
tendentious. Kant had asserted, for example, "the
transcendental function of space'?that "space also
enters into the pure schematism" (KPM, 139; my
emphases). World-recognition must devolve in part from
our original spatialization of the world as much as our
temporalization in it. "That Kant himself has hereby
opened up a new insight is unmistakable," Heidegger
allowed. Nonetheless, to save his own analysis of Being
and Time, Heidegger deflected any suggestion that "time
alone is not what originally forms transcendence" (KPM,
139). For our purposes, the equal status of space and
time in the schematism suggests that the deduction of
"pure space" must be rooted in an original space in just
the same way that the deduction of "pure time" must be
rooted in an original time. If so, Heidegger's existential
ontology of a primordial temporalizing finitude of
Dasein would turn out to be partial. It might, for
instance, overlook the possibility of the transcendental
deduction of world-objectivity from the finitude of
spatiality. The direction of this deduction, I admit,
remains to be fully specified, an outstanding task of the
anthropology of visual culture. But we might recall that
objects are not only "here" with us (Heidegger's
zuhanden or ready-to-hand) but also "there" at a distance
and at a particular horizon of their (dis)appearance. A
spatializing or world-distancing "then" and "there," we
might say, shows that the "then and there" of Dasein's
coming-to-an-end in the world cannot be the same as
the coming-to-the-end of the world. Partly in space or as
spatializing creatures, we discover that we will never
experience all the world which we can see to be
beyond us. In this original spatiality and its finitude, we
discover that we are in or that we have a time. In this
sense, my temporalized finitude can be said to be my
awareness of my nonpersistence in what I know remains
pervasive?the world at its distance or in its beyondness.
In 1930, Cassirer published a critique of Heidegger in
considerations on "mythic, aesthetic, and theoretical
space."39 With Kant, he urged that space and time
together provide the "two basic pillars" of human
knowledge (MATS, 3). Thus we have every need for an
account of "original space" which would complement
Heidegger's "original time" in a phenomenology of
knowledge; it would explore ways in which our
spatiality can reveal "the horizon of objectivity." From
this vantage point, space, beginning as schematism,
issues in symbolic form: it can represent the "distance"
between determinate beings in the manifold or, equally
important, between beings and our standpoints in
apprehending them. Panofsky's essay "Perspective as
Symbolic Form," published in 1925, provided a
powerful historical demonstration, and probably a
provocation, for Cassirer's statements. These could
summarize Panofsky's history of perspective too: in the
symbolic form relayed in perspectival depiction, to
quote Cassirer, "the object shifts to a new distance, to a
remoteness from the T; only in this does it gain its own
independent existence and create a new form of
objectivity" (MATS, 13).40 In sum, if Heidegger's
existential ontology addressed a temporalized being-/n
the world, Panofsky's phenomenology of knowledge
addressed a spatialized being-o/-the-world. Imagining
the world-space constructs the world's objectivity for us
as "perspective."
Cassirer respected Heidegger's "perceptive and
profound" inquiry into the historicality?the essential or
original temporality?of Dasein.41 He insisted, however,
that if we wish to understand the full historicity of
human thought we must effect a "change in [the]
subject of temporality" from Dasein to human culture
as such (HPD, 205, see note 41): culture possesses
a primordial temporality, a transpersonal and
intersubjective history made possible by the symbolic
function itself. For Cassirer, "not only Dasein but also
meaning?the idea?is primordially historical" (HPD,
204). From the futural-finitude of Dasein given by the
prospect of its death, Heidegger derives the world
orientation of Dasein as care (die Sorge)?i.e., the
thrownness of its being-in-the-world as a field of anxiety
39. "Mythischer, ?sthetischer und theoretischer Raum," Vierter
Congress f?r ?sthetik und Kunstwissenschaft, Hamburg, 1930, ed. H.
Noack (Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1931), pp. 21-36 = E. Cassirer, Symbol,
Technik, Sprache: Aufs?tze aus den Jahren 1927-1933, eds. E. W. Orth
and J. M. Krois, Philosophische Bibliothek 372 (Hamburg: Felix
Meiner, 1985), pp. 93-117. Cassirer's essay has been translated as
"Mythic, Aesthetic and Theoretical Space," trans. D. P. Verene and L.
H. Foster, Man and World 2, no. 1 (1969):3-17 (this essay will be
cited in the main body of the text as MATS); regrettably, the translation
does not include the commentaries, including Panofsky's.
40. On this problem, see further Damisch (see note 30) and Davis
(see note 30).
41. "Symbolic Forms: For Volume Four" [MS. ca. 1928], sect. II,
"'Geist' and 'Life'," no. 1, "'Geist' and 'Life' in Heidegger," no. 2,
"Heidegger and the Problem of Death," and no. 3, "Time in Bergson
and Heidegger," in E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol.
4, The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, eds. J. M. Krois and D. P.
Verene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); this posthumously
published manuscript will be cited in the main body of the text as
HPD (quotation from p. 209). Apparently the text was drafted in 1928
before the disputation at Davos in 1929.
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Davis: Visuality and pictoriality 25
(die Angst). And he derives the meaninglessness of
transpersonal truths: as Cassirer puts it, "for an entity
that is in time and which passes away in time, there can
be no eternal truths; the stigma of death is impressed
upon everything human" (HPD, 206). By contrast,
Cassirer would uphold "the broader, more universal,
idealistic meaning of religion" not limited to the strand
of dolefulness in Reformation Protestantism. In history?
in culture and even in its representations of death?we
"behold liberation and deliverance from the 'anxiety'
which is the signature, the basic 'state-of-mind,' of finite
Dasein" according to Heidegger (HPD, 203). From this
perspective, the possibility of logos?transpersonal
meaning and even eternal truth?might be said to be a
project of "learning how to die." A Stoic outlook and a
Spinozist ethics should be able to confront and to refute
Heidegger's existential anxiety point for point and at
every turn: "whoever has learned to see things sub
specie aeterni is elevated above the fear of death."42
In particular, every human being "develops a concept
of nature and of thinking of natural necessity and
within this he gives the phenomenon of death its place"
(HPD, 208).
All this is well and good; it's as if Panofsky and his
school of neo-Kantian philosophy, led by Cassirer, had
refuted Heidegger's Sein und Zeit before its publication.
But Heidegger's existential ontology generated an
overwhelming problem specifically in the case of artistic
representations of space?Panofsky's pictorial evidence
for that visuality within which perspective constitutes
world-knowledge. Modern science might well constitute
a "theoretical space" in the medium of "pure thought."
But artistic representation?such as the paintings in
perspective considered by Panofsky?must constitute
space in imaging and in the "medium of pure form"
(MATS, 7). Any putatively objective knowledge secured
in the imaging habit of consciousness and the medium
of pure form must remain tethered to the temporal
finiteness of human consciousness whenever and
wherever it has not been mediated by pure thought. For
this reason, artistic representations would seem
peculiarly, perhaps even uniquely, to require a
Heideggerean existential-ontological analysis even if our
world-representations mediated in other ways might
partly or wholly escape absolute reduction to the
temporality of Dasein.43
Naturally this uncomfortable consideration did not
attract direct comment from Cassirer or Panofsky. As we
have seen, Panofsky insisted that artistic representation
42. Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. G. H. R.
Rarkinson, Oxford Philosophical Texts (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000), Pt. 5, prop. 30 (pp. 306-307).
43. Although it cannot be my topic here, the directions of this
analysis were indicated by Heidegger's comment in his lectures at
Freiburg in 1935 on the "rough peasant shoes" supposedly depicted in
a painting by Vincent Van Gogh (one of his Shoes, painted in the late
1880s): "But as to what is in that picture, you are immediately alone
with it as though you yourself were making your way wearily
homeward with your hoe on an evening in late fall after the last potato
fires have died down" (Einf?hrung in die Metaphysik [T?bingen: Max
Niemeyer, 1953] = Gesamtausgabe, Abt. II, vol. 40 [Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1983], p. 38 = An Introduction to Metaphysics,
trans. Ralph Manheim [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959], p.
35). Here we should remark the observer's own identification with the
painted shoes and the historical existence(s) they seem to disclose?
namely, one's own existence "as though you yourself. . ." were there,
then (as well as here, now). For Heidegger, there can be no
meaningful question of the "visuality" of the painting, the sense in
which it derives from and gives onto another?or another's?world: as
he claims, "Actually the painting represents nothing. . . . What is here?
The canvas? The brushstrokes? The spots of color?" The "distance" of
another world?of an other's world?from which Cassirer and Ranofsky
would begin has here been categorically foreclosed; we begin?and
remain in?the original and the absolute time of our existential
identifications. In more developed comments on the same painting in
"Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes"?they also originated in Freiburg
lectures at this time?Heidegger transferred the identification to a
"peasant woman"; supposedly it is she who is alone with and owns
the shoes (Holzwege [Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1950], pp.
7-68). This interpretation has attracted considerable attention,
including Meyer Schapiro's claim (based on his painstaking iconology)
that we should instead regard the painting as relaying the artist's
identification with his own shoes?shoes which have little to do with a
peasant Dasein ("The Still Life as a Personal Object?A Note on
Heidegger and van Gogh" [1968] and "Further Notes on Heidegger
and van Gogh" [1994], in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist,
and Society [New York: George Braziller, 1994], pp. 135-152). In a
footnote, Schapiro (ibid., p. 142, n. 2) did quote Heidegger's shorter?
and original??remark without comment. To my knowledge, however,
Heidegger's shorter comment?it states that the pictorial representation
becomes meaningful as a projection of our Dasein?has been
overlooked in the debate about the degree to which the Dasein of a
person (or class of persons) imagined in a depicted world or the
Dasein of the maker of the depicted world can be (re)constructed from
the picture. To be sure, Schapiro showed effectively (though not
definitively) that the "peasant woman" was Heidegger's pure
projection, as Heidegger intended and fully acknowledged. For a
trenchant commentary on Schapiro's dispute with Heidegger, see
Michael Kelly, Iconoclasm in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 20-54; Kelly considers Heidegger's claims to
manifest his philosophic "disinterest" in van Gogh's painting(s) or at
least in their historicity in van Gogh's context?in van Gogh's painterly
culture and social consciousness. According to Jacques Derrida,
another participant in the controversy about van Gogh's Shoes, the
deepest difficulty of Heidegger's "epochal thinking" is the way in
which it "locks up, neutralizes, and finally cancels historicity" 0
Derrida, Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International, trans. P. Kamuf [London and
New York: Routledge, 1984), p. 74 (quoted and discussed by Kelly,
Iconoclasm in Aesthetics, p. 41).
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26 RES 46 AUTUMN 2004
emerges in the determinations exerted by a culturally
specific world-picture?a visuality?upon formal
expression and upon imaging or visualizing itself. For
Panofsky, in fact, there is essentially no such thing as the
"medium of pure form." Form must be a wholly
determined?not an originary or primordial?moment in
the imagistic mediation of pure thought. As Cassirer put
it, "by virtue of the basic content of artistic representation
[Darstellung] the true content [Vorstellung] of the
imagination is realized" (MATS, 13). At the same time,
as we have seen, according to Cassirer and Panofsky the
true content of the imagination must constitute the basic
content of artistic representation?the "form of its spatial
and temporal perception" (MATS, 16). To revert to my
organizing terms, while pictoriality constitutes visuality,
visuality at the same time constitutes pictoriality?but
(we can now say) only if pure form never emerges as
the true or the basic content along the way. As I have
urged, this wished-for wholesale self-transcending of
pictoriality is impossible. Our basic tautology recurs: an
objective recognition of the pure form of depiction?a
recognition of Being being-depicted?always enters
artistic space-representation even if imagistic space
presentation must be subjectively experienced as the
true and the basic content of experience, of Being
being-seen.
In responding to Cassirer's essay, Panofsky noted that
art historians must begin with their assumptions about
the "aesthetic space" (Vorstellung) within which a style
was generated in order to effect a formal description of
pictures produced in that style (Darstellung).44 In other
words, he acknowledged the iconological cycle?the
mutual determination of pictorial expression and
cultural imagination. He pursued the methodological
implications in a lecture presented to the Kiel section of
the Kant Society, the initial statement of the ideas (i.e.,
PB) which became "Iconography and Iconology" in
1939 and "Meaning in the Visual Arts" in 1951.
According to Panofsky, the "seemingly unproblematic
exhibition of a mere phenomenal meaning"?the
primary formal and expressive meaning that he placed
at the beginning of his method?will be grounded in an
"unsaid [set out] before the eyes" (Ungesagtes vor
Augen), here quoting Heidegger's description of Kant's
supposedly unspoken but implicit recognition of original
time. But, Panofsky asked, and mindful that Heidegger
would reduce spatial ?zed world-objectivity to
temporalized Dasein, wer oder was setz dieser Gewalt
eine Grenze (PB, 92)?"who or what sets a limit on this
violence"?which our interpretations seem constrained
to inflict on historical pictures, and which Heidegger
had explicitly acknowledged and justified in his own
reading of Kant?
In interpreting a picture, the art historian applies his
or her "living experience of existence." As we have
seen, Panofsky would apply a series of correctives to this
Daseinserfahrung. In general, the history of cultural
tradition should limit our subjective arbitrariness. As
Panofsky put it, from within the finitude of our own
vitale Daseinserfahrung we sometimes cannot say what
things in a picture might be. But the history of cultural
tradition reveals their "time and place" to us?their Zeit
und Ort. In other words, the "original time" or the Sein
und Zeit of Heidegger's Dasein?it must enter into the
Daseinserfahrung with which we begin looking at
pictures?can be converted into the Zeit und Ort of
objective historical context. Ranofsky shifted Heidegger's
emphasis on a uniquely determining original time,
essentially subjective, to the determinations of a
historical temporal-spatial locatedness which is at least
provisionally objective. The conversion devolves from
putting the object not simply in its past time but in
particular from putting in its place objectively over and
against us or, as we say in the metaphor of history,
"distant" from us. If and when the loop closes, to have
this visuality as my own ordinary Daseinserfahrung?my
own being-in-the-world?must be to move Dasein from
its inaugural relation to its own original time toward the
cultural-symbolic form of another's spatialized world
perspective, a "view." In promoting the self-distancing of
Dasein, then, Panofskyan iconology or the anthropology
of visuality in the end constitutes a recognition of the
Other as essentially like oneself (if contextually or
contingently different and distant) and thus a recognition
of transpersonal meaning?a cultural history meant to
expand our objective horizons and to reduce our
subjective involvements.
Maybe the project is laudable; as in the 1920s and
1930s, today it serves a fitfully progressive humanistic
antiauthoritarian liberalism. Its problem is not that our
historical interpretation of images must be secured in an
analytic circle, bootstrapping out and away from original
temporal self-involutions of Dasein. That is basic
hermeneutics. Rather, the disjunction of recognitions?
and the resistance of the picture?means that the
existential time of the picture as a world-object (what I
have called pictoriality) remains essentially divided from
44. E. Ranofsky, "Aussprach," Vierter Kongress f?r ?sthetik und
Kunstwissenschaft, ed. H. Noack (Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1931), pp. 53-54
= E. Cassirer, Symbol, Technik, und Sprache (see note 39), pp.
115-117.
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Davis: Visuality and pictoriality 27
the significant spatiality of its object-world (or visuality).
Ranofsky hoped that their passage occurs immediately
and imperceptibly?the merging and binding I have
considered in the paradigmatic case of D?rer's
engraving of 1513. But he had to invent the binding and
merging of what he called D?rer's "visual" and "mental"
images: D?rer's supposed Erasmian visual culture
appeared out of nowhere in Panofsky's method. In
itself, of course, this does not mean that there is no
determinate relation between pictoriality and visuality. I
have suggested that we must critically investigate the
mutual resistance of pictoriality and visuality rather than
their mythic synthesis and identity?and I want to
pursue that thought further in the case of our
paradigmatic example. It is not obvious what a "visual
culture" could be if it is the material cohabitation?and
the potential mutual negation?of disjunct recognitions
rather than their mythic synthesis.
D?rer's correction
We can guess Panofsky's motivation for supposing
that his iconology could think?if it could not see?the
Erasmian culture of D?rer's visuality. Scholars before
W?lfflin and Ranofsky had often identified the Knight as
a protagonist of a Northern or specifically German
Rittertum. He could be a legendary hero of Teutonic
saga or he could be a late-medieval warrior; he could
be strong and pure ("spiritual" or geistlich) or he could
be evil and doomed, a horror (equally geistlich), a
phantom like his companions?"a German, national
hero incorporating all the conflicts, desires, tragedies,
and malaises of the German soul."45 By far the most
influential version of this construction of the print was
propagated by Friedrich Nietzsche and his followers,
especially Ernst Bertram, whose immensely popular
1918 book on Nietzsche contained a chapter on the
print. In the 1870s Nietzsche took the Knight to be an
emblem of Schopenhauerian pessimism?a man
"isolated and totally without hope who goes on his
dread journey in a longing for truth."46 Writing during
the Great War, Bertram connected the Knight's
Nietzschean "will-to-pessimism" with a "fateful
'protestant' isolation of the individual," especially
solitude in the face of Death.47 (As already noted,
Cassirer identified the same attitude in Heidegger's
philosophy.) Thus Bertram provided the Lutheran symbol
with a Nietzschean gloss. Ranofsky, however, made no
mention of this general interpretive possibility, if only to
refute it. In his doctoral thesis on D?rer's art theory, he
went only so far as to remark on the German Late
Gothic aspect of the engraving. By this he chiefly meant
its naturalism, "stylized in accordance with a 'classic'
canon of pose and proportions" (LAAD, 152). D?rer's
relation to Italy and the Antique occupied studies of the
artist that Ranofsky published in the 1920s and 1930s.
But in 1943, when he dealt with the engraving in his
artistic biography of D?rer, the Northern Rittertum
proposed as a tradition for the print had been
reconstituted in terms of the mystic German nationalism
of the 1930s; an emblem deployed in National Socialist
propaganda, D?rer's Knight had become a "forefather of
the Prussian officer."48 Ignoring Panofsky's subtle
researches on D?rer's Italian affiliations, several German
writers in the 1930s reduced all aspects of D?rer's
pictorial investigations to "German Form," as Theodor
Hertze put it in Die Rasse, the new periodical of racial
anthropology.49 Against this portrayal of the artist, in
the early 1940s Ranofsky, at this point a refugee, tried
to construct D?rer in the "universal image of a
cosmopolitan humanist."50 If the Knight was not to be
an O-Nazi, he almost had to be an Erasmian Christian.
Panofsky's and Cassirer's earlier tangle with Heidegger
blended with this ideology: Panofsky wanted D?rer's
print to be a transpersonal symbol?it had to lead
into the universal Ideenwelt. For a Heideggerean
phenomenology, D?rer's Reuter would be constituted in
Being partly unintelligible to the art historian even
though its "secret," to use W?lfflin's word, seems to be
visible to us in the medium of pure form in D?rer's
45. Bialostocki (see note 9), p. 217. The medievalist scholarship
supporting this interpretation was summarized in Weber (see note 18),
pp. 18-36?the principal documentary source for W?lfflin and
Ranofsky if Ranofsky, in particular, followed it selectively.
46. Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Trag?die, oder: Griechentum und
Pessimismus [1870-1871], in Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, eds.
G. Colli and M. Montinari, vol. 3, pt. 1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1972), ?20, p. 127.
47. Bertram, Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie(Berlin: G.
Bondi, 1919), p. 69. For Bertram, see Schwerte (see note 9), pp.
269-271, and for parallel reflections in early writings by Thomas
Mann, see Bialostocki (see note 9), pp. 236-239.
48. Wilhelm Waetzoldt, D?rer und seine Zeit (Vienna: Phaidon,
1935), pp. 232-233, and see his D?rers Ritter, Tod und Teufel,
Schriftenreihe der Preussischen Jahrb?cher 33 (Berlin: Georg Stilke,
1936), where he reminded readers (pp. 22-23) that Adolf Hitler loved
the print as Nietzsche did. The principal portrait of Hitler at the Nazi
art exhibition at Munich in 1938, Hubert Lanzinger's Bannertr?ger,
depicted Hitler carrying the Nazi flag and posed and equipped like the
Knight.
49. "D?rers deutsche Form," Die Rasse 2 (1934):134-138; see
further Bialostocki (see note 9), pp. 313-314, cf. pp. 353-344.
50. Bialostocki (see note 9), p. 378.
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28 RES 46 AUTUMN 2004
picturing of the mysterious horseman?the image
singled out in W?lfflin's illustration. If we follow
Ranofsky, in apprehending this form the art historian
enters the visual world of D?rer's engraving by
recognizing the binding of the formal expressivity and
the symbolic content to be both the existential and the
cultural meaning?history of the engraving itself?the
merging of the form of the original persisting image with
the traditional allegory. As we have seen, however, these
representations must be recognized in diverging registers
of their supposed interabsorption. In turn, then,
somehow the print must leap through its disjunction. In
the end, the image subsists not so much in the formal
and symbolic recognitions?for they are always
disjunct?as in their mutual correction. For W?lfflin,
D?rer worked within the disjunction: he could not
overcome it. But for Ranofsky, D?rer proceeded through
the disjunction: he corrected it. If you like, for Ranofsky
the print negates and transcends the disjunction of
pictoriality and visuality; it is itself essentially the
objective correction of subjective existential-temporal
meaning-involution.
Oddly enough, W?lfflin nowhere mentioned that in
making his engraving D?rer corrected the hind off leg of
the Knight's horse?lifting it further from the ground and
bending it more acutely. The change remains clearly
visible in the print even though D?rer did his best to
disguise it as a tuft of grass crushed below the horse's
hoof. For Ranofsky, this "last minute" correction
intensified the movement of the horse (LAAD, 253).51
Perhaps this befits D?rer's supposed narrative of the
Knight's progress on his Rath?that is, Panofsky's
reconstruction of the symbol. But the correction would
seem equally to encourage W?lfflin's emphasis on the
image of horse and rider. Indeed, in his dissertation
Ranofsky himself had shown that the right hind foot of
the horse (as corrected) helped to render the animal
visible according to an overall proportional canon
worked out in theoretical studies (fig. 8).52 Specifically,
when D?rer raised the hoof on the horse's right hind
foot he ensured that it touched a crucial construction
line of this canon?a line, labeled E in Panofsky's
diagram, drawn through the upper limit of the hooves
on the right forefoot and the left hind foot of the horse.
The lower limit of the hoof on the left hind foot rests on
the so-called standline itself (Panofsky's line F), which is
almost identical with the bottom edge of the print. The
vertical distance EF, then, is the height of the horse's
hoof; it is also precisely one-quarter the height and
width of the basic constructional quadrant used
throughout the canon. Indeed, one wonders if it was the
actual module of the canon. (So far as I can see
Panofsky did not recognize this, probably because he
did not explore the pictoriality of the correction.) That
possibility aside, D?rer's correction clearly helped the
proportional construction of the entire image to be
made visible as its "true content," confirming his
persistent and pervasive interest in this aspect of his
image throughout its construction in the engraving, just
as W?lfflin had suggested.53 If we permit ourselves
51. The correction in the engraving should be compared to the
"correction" or reworking visible in the right hind leg of the horse in
the Ambrosiana drawing (recto), a study for the engraving (see above,
note 11). According to Josef Kurthen ("Zum Problem der D?rerschen
Pferdekonstruktion," Repertorium f?r Kunstwissenschaft 44
[1929]:82-86), when the drawing was finished D?rer changed the
right hind leg to create a sharper bend, as in the engraving. It is not
clear, however, why he did not trace the entire revision onto the verso
of the sheet, although he did trace a few lines of the correction?
proving that he had already made it on the recto, that is, at the very
beginning of the construction of the figure. Alternatively, as Henry Rox
suggests, on the recto D?rer initially planned the sharply bent leg and
revised it in the drawing which was traced on the verso for the
engraving ("On D?rer's Knight, Death, and Devil," The Art Bulletin 30
[1948]:68). Although I have not been able to inspect the two-sided
sheet, reproductions suggest that Kurthen's interpretation is more likely
than Rox's: the sharply bent leg in the drawing on the recto is lightly
sketched and seems to be laid over the straighter leg. Either way, when
the artist came to make the engraving he began with the pose relayed
in the tracing (verso)?with the right hind leg on or at least closer to
the ground?and then "corrected" it on the plate itself, in a sense
returning him to the alternate (untraced) pose in the drawing. This
history did not affect Panofsky's observations (though it might imply
that D?rer's investigations and changes were not really "last minute")
and need not be pursued further here. But in principle an archaeology
of depiction?distinguished from an anthropology of visuality?must
attend closely to these stratigraphies; they attest to the noetic
emergence of pictoriality in the visual image(s). For this approach, see
further W. Davis, Replications: Archaeology, Art History,
Psychoanalysis (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1996).
52. Panofsky, D?rers Kunsttheorie (see note 13), pp. 200-204 and
figs. 21-22. Ranofsky corrected an earlier reconstruction of the artist's
proportional canon: H. David, "Zum Problem der D?rerschen
Pferdekonstruktion," Repertorium f?r Kunstwissenschaft 33
(1910):310-317; and compare G. Pauli, "D?rers fr?heste
Proportionstudie eines Pferdes," Zeitschrift f?r bildenden Kunst NF 25
(=49)(1914):205-208.
53. In a beautiful pictorial demonstration, in the engraving D?rer
showed that the breadth of the horse's hoof is equal to its height: in
the lefthand lowermost quadrant of the implied proportional grid,
the hoof of the raised left forefoot of the horse?it is placed at the
upper terminus of a diagonal running from the left hind hoof on the
ground through the right hind hoof raised from the ground (in the
correction)?is equal to one-quarter the height/width of the quadrant
itself (and specifically EF). (Of course, while the left hind hoof is
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Davis: Visuality and pictoriality 29
G H J K
Figure 8. Erwin Ranofsky, Proposed reconstruct
proportions for Knight, Death, and the Devil,
22. (Georg Reimer Verlag, 1915).
Heidegger's terminology, the artist's anxiety to effect
demonstration drives the care that he expended on
correction of the horse's h
image in W?lfflin's terms. B
objectification of the artis
Aufhebung Cassirer deman
existential ity? Whence the R
Dasein from itself? For Ran
could not serve exclusively
?mage. It must also mediate
significance of the form. B
For one thing, the uncorr
included in W?lfflin's own il
original image. And for ano
correction of the horse's h
placed just outside its quadrant, the left fore hoof is placed just
its quadrant.) In other words, as just suggested D?rer seems to b
showing that the hoof in both its breadth and its height is the
measure?the module?for the proportions of the whole figure o
horse and rider. By contrast, in the proportional study for the hor
Nuremberg (fig. 3), the right hind hoof "cuts over" line E (Ranofsk
D?rers Kunsttheorie [see note 13], p. 202, n. 2). I would suppose
in this version of the image D?rer was trying to discover whethe
hoof should touch against line J (in Panofsky's reconstruction)?
attempt the artist abandoned in both the uncorrected and the
corrected hooves in the engraving.
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30 RES 46 AUTUMN 2004
putatively original image of perfect horse and rider?
partly belongs to the supposedly secondary background:
it has become the crushed grass beneath the horse's
hoof. As a pure form of depiction, then, the correction
subsists between the W?lfflinian form relaying D?rer's
artistic Dasein and the Panofskyan background
constituting the cultural symbol; the stitching is carried
out by the correction itself. We might even say that the
merging of the form and the symbol occurred because
of the correction of the engraving. Here I go beyond
anything claimed by W?lfflin or Ranofsky. When D?rer
modified the horse's hoof in order better to display the
primary pictorial construction of the horse and rider, he
was forced to transform the residue, which could not be
wholly erased, into a "background"?perhaps the whole
background we can now see.54 By the same token,
however, we might imagine that the correction occurred
because of the merging of the pictorial form into
"symbolical form." When D?rer began to surround the
proportional construction with a "background" and
to build the allegory, in order to retain the primal
construction?to keep it visible?he was forced to
transform the horse's hoof. The correction subsists in
both domains and it pulls in both directions. It seems to
consolidate a visuality?the correction intensifies the
fearless forward progress of the Christian Knight required
by the emergent narrative symbol?at the same time as
it displays the work of pictoriality, the artist's efforts to
realize an existentially significant image, the perfect
horse and rider. Pictoriality and visuality, then, occur at
the same time: they are simultaneously within our sight.
But they do not occur in exactly the same place. Our
visual inspection of the engraving can immediately tell
the difference between the activity of pictoriality, which
is at least partly retained in the uncorrected matter,
however transformed, and the activity of visuality?at
least partly displayed in the transformation, however
corrected.
To be sure, in the history of making the engraving,
D?rer's correction would seem to have moved the
original image and its existential "secret," embodied in
its pictoriality, toward allegorical world-construction and
cultural world-recognition. The correction seems to
effect a translation from a specifically pictorial artistic
problem to a specifically visualizing artistic problem?a
translation from what we can actually "see" to what we
should "view," from Experience to Idea or from "Is" to
"Ought." To use Panofsky's terms for D?rer's activity in
engraving the print, the correction submitted itself
"before the tribunal of reason" (MVA, 48). In this it
could have provided Panofsky's best evidence for the
real conversion of the self-affectionate existential
significance of the image into the rational transpersonal
symbolism of the picture. Notice that when D?rer
placed the right hind hoof on line E in his correction, he
also visualized EF, the height of the hoof on the picture
plane, as equal to the distance between the forward and
rear planes of the horse in depth?that is, as the
measure of the fictive three-dimensional space occupied
by the knight's horse in the very same (and spatially
pervasive) foreshortening in which the figures of Death
and the Devil likewise appear in the picture. In terms of
pictorial construction, the vertical distance on the
picture plane between the horse's hind hooves equals
the vertical distance on the picture plane from the rear
hooves to the dog's left foreleg equals the vertical
distance on the picture plane from the dog's left foreleg
to the bottom of the left hind hoof of Death's horse; this
diagonal of fictive visual depth, and thus of narrative
space and the visuality of the allegory, is identical to the
proportional quadrant on the pictorial plane. If we
endorse the Ranofskyan logic of visuality, D?rer's
correction subjected the image-form constituted in his
artistic expression to the very same spatial ization
recognized in the image-symbol constituted in his
cultural tradition?images measured out and hence
pictorially depicted and visually recognized both by the
spatial construction of the picture and by the spatial
relations imagined in the world it visualized.
But the problem I have traced in the case of D?rer's
supposed "Erasmian" visual culture appears here too. In
the absence of a visual culture of "reason" which
surveyed them, these conjunctions could be seen as
purely pictorial creations subsisting exclusively in the
disjunction of a correction?habits and choices
requiring no culture-historical image-symbolic
interpretation. When Panofsky supposed that the
sixteenth-century artist intended to justify his formal
inventions "before the tribunal of reason," effectively he
asserted that the most recalcitrant and self-reflexive
recursions in representation tend ineluctably toward
consolidating a world-recognition. What is this tribunal,
however, but the art historian's iconology itself? In
order to identify the constitutive cultural symbolism of
54. In order to absorb the correction, the artist might have had to
rework the whole plate so that the blackness created around the
correction would not leap into view. According to Thausing (see note
14), p. 228, this intensive reworking created the "unusual blackness"
of the entire finished engraving as it was first published by the artist.
This point is not strictly necessary for Panofsky's or for my own
observations. But it reinforces the sense in which the correction
consumes and in a crucial sense actually constitutes the engraving.
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Davis: Visuality and pictoriality 31
the image, the visuality of the picture, Ranofsky
systematically had to overlook what we can actually see
at the places of the correction?D?rer's picture making
as such and its visible resistance to the pure
visualization of that very world, that virtual space of
narrative and allegory. The visibility of the correction as
a historical event on the picture plane does not
disappear in our vision because a virtual space of
narrative and allegory has been constituted in the
correction?because a visuality has been constructed in
the pictoriality.
Both visuality and pictoriality are metaphysical ideals,
the never-completed "X"s, of seeing and picturing?of a
disjunctive material co-presence which can never be
eliminated. Being being-depicted and Being being-seen
require and resist one another as the history of an
?mage?the pictorial correction of seeing and the visual
correction of picturing spatially distributed on the
plane of the image in the temporal emergence of its
virtual world.
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