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Wilhelm Vöge: A Biographical Memoir Author(s): Erwin Panofsky and Ernest C. Hassold Reviewed work(s): Source: Art Journal, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Autumn, 1968), pp. 27-37 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/775163 . Accessed: 13/06/2012 22:42 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal. http://www.jstor.org Wilhelm was born in a decade that an Erwin Panofsky V6ge produced astonishing number of art historians, on whose shoulders of stand like the dwarves of Bernard of Char- Wilhelm A Memoir those today Voge: Biographical tres on the shoulders of the giants: Dies haben wir vor den Tieren, Vor den G6ttern voraus: Emile Mlle was born in 1862, in Unsterbliche wachsen nicht. Karl Giehlow and Adolph Goldschmidt were born 1863, (Vdge) Heinrich W61fflin in 1864, Bernard Berenson in 1865, Aby Warburg and Julius von Schlosser in 1866, Max J. Friedlaender and Campbell Dodgson in 1867. Who is Wilhelm V6ge? The question was raised in the minds of American readers when Erwin Panofsky's Early men and of their works are Netherlandish Painting appeared in 1953. It was dedicated The names of these many known in But the name of Wilhelm to Wilhelm V6ge. In 1958 Panofsky answered this ques- today every country. even in lives in a small and in tion. He published V6ge'sscattered essays in Bildhauer des V6ge Germany only circle, where his love was re- Mittelalters (Berlin: Mann 1958) and prefaced it with the foreign countries (except France, memoir which is here translated. ciprocated) he is all but forgotten. Cite a study by V6ge and will have to Wilhelm V6ge was professor of Art History in the to English or American students, you name him as teacher and will University of Freiburg i. Breisgau only from 1908-1916. spell his name; your you to who and what he then Panofsky took his doctorate with V6ge in 1914, and kept have describe was, though you in touch with him till his death on Dec. 30, 1952. His may not easily change the subject. in the fact "Life" of Vdge is based on personal encounters, corre- This neglect is explained part by simple that retired as as at the of from spondence and poems V6ge sent him, and on his profound V6ge early 1916, age 48, as it from the sense of V6ge's value. all public activity, and, were, disappeared The reader senses at once how unusual this piece is world of the living. But there are also internal reasons. his As certain wines are too sensitive among Panofsky's writings in what it tells about himself. One is literary style. Heine is His customary sagacity and range of vision is here suf- to export, so some authors are untranslatable. fused with a tenderness and warmth which only serves to translatable (within limits of basic possibilities), but not but not Balzac and but sharpen his judgment. Time after time come sentences Morike; Musset, Verlaine; Zola, Fontane nor Stifter. to the untrans- applicable to Panofsky himself: thus what we would say neither V6ge belongs which will of Panofsky's Early Netherlandish Painting, he says of latable. And precisely those of his formulations comes remain with those who have heard or read him trans- V6ge's J6rg Syrlin, "it is perhaps the book which defy closest to the often postulated ideal of a total history of lation as Daphne refused the embrace of Apollo. art." "Die Byzantiner waren Greise, aber sie waren The source of V6ge's lack of fame, Panofsky explains, Griechen," he once began a lecture, extemporizing when a in of the lies largely in his untranslateability. His memoir shares to the screen showed mid-Byzantine ivory place some extent this quality; all the more credit to him to expected vault of Morienval (Voge had picked up the countenance a translation. "A friend of V6ge is a friend wrong slide box-still they are excellent, let's look at of mine," he said at once when the subject was broached; them"). How translate the play on Greise-Griechen? and read the manuscript with great care and interest and Where is the language that can describe a man of great alliterates with made suggestions to improve its readability no less than age with a single word which also its fidelity to the original. "Greeks"? (English has only "old man," although it is This essay is, so far as I can see, the tenderest and more dignified than the Italian vecchio and the French noblest tribute by one great art historian to another. vieillard.) Or-to cite another example: "Das schreitende E. C. H. Stehen-nun wards Wandeln." In what language can one differentiate two forms of relaxed walking-the one bound in meter, the other relaxed in rhythm as in the words: schreiten-wandeln. And how can a sentence of six words be imitated in which four artistic devices-picking up the subject with a pronoun, archaism (wards instead of Ernest C. Hassold, who translated the Panofsky article, is wurde), syncope (wards for ward es), and alliteration-are emeritus professor of English and the Humanities at the used with the result a model of pregnant, as well as of University of Louisville, Kentucky. He is currently at work natural speech? In V6ge's style, at once poetic and precise, on biographies of art historians. a sensitive and witty, creative imagination combines idea 27 Panofsky: Wilhelm V6ge: A Biographical Memoir with vision and vision with sound into forms that allow no he is an excellent scholar: only he lacks the sweetness change. (He was profoundly musical and heard what he of the individual.' wrote, as he saw what he It is no accident just thought.) The combination of and that his clearest often found in a peculiar universality indi- insights expression poem, vidualism und which his tenderest often in a on words. (Allseitigkeit Abseitigkeit), V6ge feelings play as in his as in his is re- But that is less "famous" even in his own coun- expressed clearly thought style, V6ge flected also in the course of his life. The other schol- than his coevals are, stems from another cause. As his great try ars of his stood either inside or outside the not defies translation but even so period orga- style only paraphrase, to their inclinations his scientific method eludes imitation and his nized scientific industry, according professional and But wherever eludes classification. The dimensions of inter- capabilities. they stood, they stayed: personality each of them had, so to his locus. est and methods of art historians are de- speak, geometric W61ff- working usually lin and Goldschmidt were and remained termined tendencies which are seldom ex- university pro- by mutually fessors; Friedlaender, Schlosser, were clusive but still more interfused. Campbell Dodgson rarely completely and remained museum directors; Giehlow, Beren- The achievements of M and Giehlow and Male, le by large son, and were and remained scholars, re- lie in the realm of of content; in Warburg private interpretation W1lfflin's of administrative, or, in Berenson's form cite his own is an gardless pedagogic analysis; Warburg's (to words) case, commercial interests. career, however, as "extension of the limits of art research in substance and V6ge's though fate wanted both to recognize and penalize his space by virtue of which it serves a still unwritten psychol- multiple capability, fulfilled itself in peripeteias. It led ogy of human expression"; Goldschmidt's in the precise him from the university to the museum, from the museum solution of precisely formulated problems and a study of back to the university, and finally into self-chosen "exile" monuments that was at once detailed and comprehensive; (his own term) in a tiny town in the Harz Mountains. Schlosser's in the history of the tradition of art and art Each transplantation meant a crisis, and each crisis led to literature; Berenson's, Friedlaender's and Campbell inner renewal. But the price was high. Dodgson's in critical connoisseurship. achievement resists such a limitation. As a stu- V6ge's Studies Bonn, dent at 18 he wrote: "How one descends to the sources- (Hannover, Leipzig, Strassburg) be they codices or works of art-is the secret of all scien- The first five years of his life V6ge spent in his native tific history." And one feels that the sources "sang in his city, Bremen. Elementary school he attended in Detmold, ear." Even his most basic theses grow out of his delving where his family had settled for about four years. His sec- into particulars and not out of generalization; they are ondary education he received in the excellent Lyceum II "insights," not abstractions-results of what the nominal- at Hannover, where he made his matura in April 1886. to well- ists opposed to notitia abstractiva as notitia intuitiva. But He retained all his life the careful, so speak, of precisely because he apprehended every work of art-every dressed, speech which is characteristic of the province and of Hansa and which most piece of music, every poem, and in human intercourse Hannover the towns, every word and gesture-as a res se ipsa singularis, it was charmingly contrasted with his very unconventional way all the more necessary for him to contemplate the individ- of thinking and expressing himself.

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