PANOFSKY: LINEAR PERSPECTIVE AND PERSPECTIVES OF MODERNITY

Rhys W. Roark

Erwin Panofsky’s discussions of linear perspective are well known and much celebrated both within and outside the field of art history. His analysis of linear perspective has been available for the past half- century to the English-speaking world primarily through two texts: Early Netherlandish Painting (1953) and Renaissance and Renascences (1960).1 But these works are themselves based on Panofsky’s original perspective paper, presented in 1925, first published in German in 1927, and finally receiving an English translation in 1991: Perspective as ‘Symbolic Form’.2 It is the original essay that principally motivates this paper, even though the other two texts, along with others by Panofsky, will also enter into discussion. To begin, Panofsky presents linear perspective as a notable—if not the unique—feature of Italian Renaissance art. For him, this uniqueness lies in linear perspective’s extremely versatile conception of space and in the fruitful and productive implications it has for both the visual arts and the sciences. The importance of this is of such magnitude that, for Panofsky, linear perspective constitutes a significant break from the philosophical and aesthetic worldviews of both Antiquity and the Middle Ages. As Carl Landauer observes, this break allows Panofsky to claim that the Renaissance is in fact a genuine rebirth of Antiquity, and thus something more permanent and less transitory than the mere ‘revivals’ (or ‘renascences’) seen during the Carolingian period and the High Middle Ages.3 ‘Panofsky,’ Landauer suggests, ‘is taking the old tripartite division of history into antique, medieval and modern

1 The editions to which page references will relate are: Erwin Panofsky, Early Neth- erlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1958); Panof- sky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York, 1972). 2 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as ‘Symbolic Form’, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York, 1991). 3 Carl Landauer, ‘Erwin Panofsky and the Renascence of the Renaissance’, Renais- sance Quarterly 47/2 (1994): 255–81. 182 rhys w. roark epochs quite seriously, implying that the Renaissance and the present are both parts of what the Germans called “die Neuzeit” [literally ‘the new time’, or the modern era]’.4

Panofsky’s Linear Perspective as Ernst Cassirer’s ‘Symbolic Form’

As the title itself suggests, Panofsky’s Perspective as ‘Symbolic Form’ takes inspiration from Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.5 In highlighting the uniqueness of Renaissance linear perspec- tive, Panofsky signalled his indebtedness by analysing the artistic and intellectual foundations of the relationship between space and objects from the perspective of Cassirer’s own analysis of the distinctions between Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Rather than being productive processes, Cassirer’s symbolic forms are the manifest products of various expressions of culture, such as art, literature or religion. In that it speaks to epistemology and phenom- enology, Cassirer’s formulation of the symbolic form is both Kantian and Hegelian in inspiration.6 It is notably Kantian in that it repre- sents the mind as actively structuring experience rather than as the passive recipient of objective knowledge from a fixed outside world. For Cassirer, cultural activities such as art or literature are mediating frames of reference around which the mind constructs its knowledge of the world. We cannot claim any knowledge of either without them, nor can we see ‘behind’ them to know what reality is in itself apart from them. For Cassirer, the two factors of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, of ‘I’ and ‘reality’ are deter- mined and delimited from one another only in these symbolic forms and through their mediation. If each of these forms embraces a spiritual coming-to-grips of the I with reality, it does not imply that the two, the I and reality, are to be taken as given quantities, as finished self-enclosed halves of being, which are only subsequently composed into a whole. On the contrary, the crucial achievement of every symbolic form lies pre- cisely in the fact that it does not have the limit between the I and reality

4 C. Landauer, ‘Erwin Panofsky and the Renascence of the Renaissance’, 274; see also 264–5. 5 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Mannheim, introd. Charles Mandel, 3 vols. (New Haven and London, 1955–1957). Originally published as Philosophie der symbolische Formen (Berlin, 1923–1929). 6 See Donald Phillip Verene, ‘Kant, Hegel and Cassirer: The Origins of the Philoso- phy of Symbolic Forms’, Journal of the History of Ideas 30/1 (1969): 33–46.