Erwin Panofsky Research Articles

Ikonologi Gambar Karya Anak TPA An-Nawawi Cikeusal

Expressions in the imagination process of making fine art works naturally have a positive impact on children's intellectual, emotional, creative and social development. In this case, art activities are associated with mental health because art activities are a medium for expressing feelings, either sad or happy ones. In drawing activities there is a process of imagination with the innocence of children. Through a unique image, even with minimal knowledge of drawing and coloring techniques, children still produce interesting works. The approach used is the Psychology of Imagination from Jean Paul Satre and Iconology from Erwin Panofsky. The research method used is a qualitative with participatory methods letting children play and express themselves without being directed and commanded. The drawings that TPA An-Nawawi children produced shows that the work uses four images according to Jean Paul Satre: images of consciousness, images of spontaneity, images of imitation, and mental images. Keywords: Imagination, Creativity, Child Image

Indigenous Cosmogony and Andean Architecture in El Alto, Bolivia

AbstractThis essay applies Bourdieu's analysis of the formation of the ‘scholastic habitus’ in medieval times—elaborated in his 1967 afterword to his French translation of Erwin Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism—to the correspondence between indigenous mental categories and architectural innovation in the Bolivian ‘rebel city’ of El Alto. The principle of homology between mental categories and building layout (rooted in a shared habitus) can be used to interpret one of the most spectacular features of Bolivia's ‘emerging architectures’, known as chalets. The term chalet designates a hybrid structure consisting of a colorful and ornate penthouse and multi‐story dwelling erected on building rooftops. The chalets are architectural forms embedded within an economy of symbolic goods characterized by a ‘dual truth’: they are at once material and symbolic; they perform economic functions while seeking public visibility. The conspicuous lifestyle advertised by the construction of chalets can be understood by reference to the rising social power of the indigenous elites (cholos) dominating the thriving ‘ethnic economy’ of the city. The fraternities of El Alto emerge as the structural equivalent of the scholastic institution that Bourdieu associated with Gothic architecture: they are the site of production of a specific habitus, shared by native urban categories defined by similar residential locations, economic activities and forms of collective organization.

Perspective in acting practice

ABSTRACT”Perspective“ is a notion present in Stanislavski’s “system” but not as commonly used in acting practice as “given circumstances” or “objectives”. It deals with the future and with the verbal action. Its use for actors was renewed by the Russian director Anatoly Vasiliev in his work on conceptual texts using the term “reverse perspective”, which has a rich background in art theory, especially as articulated by Pavel Florensky. “Perspective” itself is a notion that has been considered by many art historians, including Erwin Panofsky. After a workshop led at the Stanislavski symposium in Malta in April 2019, this paper shows concretely how to work with “perspective” on Chekhovian texts, particularly on the monologues of Three sisters. It unveils the meaning of this artistic concept for acting, the sense it has specifically for Stanislavski and Vasiliev and how it transforms the preparation of the actor in approaching a monologue from its end through active visualization.

Becoming Leo. Steinberg e l'Institute of Fine Arts di New York: dall’eredità dei professori tedeschi allo sviluppo di un nuovo criticism

Leo Steinberg, born in Moscow in 1920 but raised in Berlin and London, arrived in New York in January 1945. Trained as an artist in London in the early 1950s, when he was already in his thirties, he decided to study art history at the Institute of Fine Arts (IFA), where he was educated by Jewish-German refugee art historians such as Richard Krautheimer, Wolfgang Lotz, and Erwin Panofsky. This essay reconsiders Steinberg’s work, which is well-known for its unconventional and revisionist inter- pretations, through the lens of his academic formation and the legacy of German Kunstwissenschaft in postwar America. Taking into account unpublished material (including university course notes and papers and an abandoned dissertation on the afterlife of Romanesque art), I point out how Steinberg’s first scholarly works, while respecting the methodologies of his professors, at the same time tried to “resist” their heritage. His engagement with contemporary art, for example, led him to challenge the biases of his professors, sometimes to their annoyance, as was the case with his Ph.D. dissertation on Borromini’s church of San Carlino, which was contested by his adviser Richard Krautheimer. The essay argues that during the IFA years Steinberg had already developed some of the concepts that would characterize his later intellectual trajectory: the dialogue between Old Master art and contemporary experience, the emphasis on the beholder’s physical and psychological response to artworks, the epistemological reevaluation of subjectivity, the priority of visual data over texts, and the hermeneutical validity of ambiguity and multiple levels of meaning. Through these means, Steinberg achieved a personal synthesis between historical investigation and criticism, anticipat- ing the rethinking of the methodological tradition in the 1960s and 1970s.

The “Eternal Mystery of the Picture Plane”: Leo Steinberg’s Unfinished Study on Titian

In the mid to late 1960s, art critic Leo Steinberg (1920–2011) carried out research on Titian that was never published and has remained so far unknown to scholars. By examining research material now held in the special collections of the Getty Research Institute, this study reconstructs Steinberg’s inquiry on the topic and discusses more broadly its methodological significance in relation to both his critical thinking and key issues concerning the study of Renaissance art. In particular, it deals with Steinberg’s interest in the relationships between the picture plane and the real space, site-specificity, and the spectator’s engagement. Steinberg’s critical attitude is analyzed by comparison with that of art historians Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) and David Rosand (1938–2014), with whom he was principally concerned throughout the investigation of Titian’s Presentation of the Virgin (1519–26). The article evaluates how Steinberg’s approach can today effectively serve the analysis of premodern artworks from an alternative perspective to mainstream art history.

Sibilas: a sobrevivência das profetisas pagãs no mundo cristão

Os mitos antigos não estão mortos. A partir desta afirmação fundamentada nas obras de autores como Warburg, Jean Seznec, Erwin Panofsky e Fritz Saxl, este trabalho pretende apontar os caminhos históricos que legitimaram a sobrevivência do mito das sibilas no mundo cristão, em sua estreita relação com a astrologia. O paganismo não renasceu após o medievo, mas esteve sempre presente no cristianismo, não só como símbolos, mas como efetiva influência essencial sobre os homens e as suas vidas. Alguns momentos históricos em particular são privilegiados neste caminho, desde os padres apologistas do cristianismo primitivo até o nascimento da ciência moderna. Sibilas e astrologia, como testemunhos “de fora” são presença constante seja na teologia cristã, seja na literatura e na música, ou nas representações plásticas do mundo cristão, que aqui privilegiamos. A sua sobrevivência ou pós-vida (Naschleben) é ora afirmada também pela legitimação de grandes nomes da patrística e da escolástica, e ainda por meio da influência de Albumasar, teólogo muçulmano nascido no século VIII e que faz o elo entre sibilas, astrologia e a Virgem Maria. O que fazem as sibilas nos tetos das igrejas católicas? É esta a pergunta que o presente trabalho pretende, em grande medida, responder.

Queer avant la lettre: moda e performance de gênero nos autorretratos de Claude Cahun

O objetivo do artigo é analisar o uso de vestimentas e demais itens de moda nos autorretratos da fotógrafa francesa Claude Cahun (1894-1954), focando a sua função nas performances de gênero apresentadas nas imagens. Para tanto, procedemos a análise de três fotografias, com base no método iconográfico de Erwin Panofsky. A análise nos permite concluir que a vestimenta (juntamente com outros itens de moda) é um elemento crucial de inteligibilidade das imagens, servindo como um instrumento para o reconhecimento de identidades de gênero. A relevância do trabalho decorre do reconhecimento que Cahun tem recebido ultimamente como precursora das discussões contemporâneas de gênero, bem como da falta de trabalhos que tenham analisado sua obra especificamente na área de Moda.

Review: Building Anglo-Saxon England, by John Blair

John Blair Building Anglo-Saxon England Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2018, 471 pp., 109 color and 43 b/w illus. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780691162980 “One of the most intractable problems in the whole range of early medieval studies concerns the dwellings of the Anglo-Saxons. It is generally agreed that they were of wood and that no example survives above ground. Beyond this the student must rely on incidental references in the literature and on the scanty data provided by excavation.” C. A. R. Radford's opening remarks on the Anglo-Saxon house in the inaugural issue of Medieval Archaeology (1957) belong to another age.1 In the sixty years since Radford wrote, archaeology has revolutionized our understanding of Anglo-Saxon architecture. This much is clear from John Blair's majestic new book, Building Anglo-Saxon England . The amount of archaeological evidence and scholarship amassed since 1957 is remarkable, and Blair uses it and his subject to advance a new history of Anglo-Saxon England. The result promises myriad new directions for Anglo-Saxon studies. A tacit objective of Blair's book is to revisit W. G. Hoskins's The Making of the English Landscape (1955)—a canonical interpretation of England's topographical history.2 In Blair's view, Anglo-Saxons “behaved within constructed space : the rural space of farms, the ritual space of holy landscapes, the administrative and defensive space of forts and installations, the hierarchical space of great halls and proto-manorial sites, the commercial space of towns” (3). As with Anglo-Saxon England's other art forms, Blair argues, the approach to architecture was distinctive and elegant. This assertion diverges boldly both from Hoskins and from prevailing postmodern and postprocessual approaches that echo art historians such as Erwin Panofsky and Walter Horn, who before and just after World War II outlined programmatic and guiding ideas for understanding and studying the Continental Carolingian Renaissance. The most innovative …

Iconology and Methods of Studying Artistic Processes of the Modernism Era. Commentary on Mikhail Sokolov’s Article «Iconology and the Study of Soviet Art. On the Problem of Hidden Symbolism»

The proposed article develops the summarized report presented by the author at the conference of the Research Institute of Theory and History of Fine Arts of the Russian Academy of Arts “Image and Plot in Visual Arts. Poetics from Antiquity to Modern Times” (X.2018) dedicated to the memory of Mikhail Nikolaevich Sokolov who was a consistent and talented successor of the interpretation strategies of Erwin Panofsky’s iconological method. The author refers to a little-known article by a remarkable scientist published in one of the reprint collections of the Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Arts (1991). Sokolov’s reflections on the problems of methodology, the use of iconological analysis connected to the study of the art of modern and contemporary times, in particular, the art of social modernism, bring into focus the content of his article. Special tools are needed to answer the question on what the spiritual world of a man of the twentieth century was, how the tragic events of the century were reflected in it. The tools the researcher used relatively recently to study the artist’s relations with society, the social order, the political system, the dictate of power and its order cannot contribute to solving new issues arising today. Therefore, the need to find (to develop) a method of extracting the desired knowledge in the spiritual life of the artist of the modernist era is the prerogative. The published article is a reflection and a kind of commentary on the methodological strategies proposed by Sokolov. The correlation of his own experience of many years of work on the study of the artistic creativity of the modernist era serves as an additional argument in favour of the applicability and effectiveness of the iconological method. There is a three-part article structure. The first part deals with the aspects of Sokolov’s article. The second and third parts of the article are devoted to the iconological analysis of the works of two painters (St. Petersburg-Leningrad): the landscapes by Nikolai Protopopov (1876-1960) and the still lifes of his wife Elizabeth Uvodskaya (1875-1943). The iconological analysis of N. Protopopov’s works shows the presence of semantic subtexts, symbolic content, indicating a clear difference between the artist’s values and the stilted rhetoric of the semiofficial narrative in relation to the events. The creative work of his wife, artist Elizabeth Vladimirovna Uvodskaya, appears to be completely unresearched due to particular life circumstances: the works were lost in the flow of events of the First World War and the revolution, absorbed by the spontaneous market of the the New Economic Policy (NEP) period and lost in the post-war years. The documents, letters, diaries were used for the kindling the stove in besieged Leningrad. Elizaveta Vladimirovna died during the blockade in 1943. The artist’s analyzed still lifes are being published for the first time. The iconological method of understanding the cultural meanings and deciphering symbols helps to reveal the affirmation of another reality in the structure of the works of both artists, in their style, semantics and symbolism.

Entheogens in Christian art: Wasson, Allegro, and the Psychedelic Gospels

In light of new historical evidence regarding ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson’s correspondence with art historian Erwin Panofsky, this article provides an in-depth analysis of the presence of entheogenic mushroom images in Christian art within the context of the controversy between Wasson and philologist John Marco Allegro over the identification of a Garden of Eden fresco in the 12th century Chapel of Plaincourault in France. It reveals a compelling financial motive for Wasson’s refusal to acknowledge that this fresco represents Amanita muscaria, as well as for Wasson’s reluctance to pursue his hypothesis regarding the entheogenic origins of religion into Christian art and artifacts. While Wasson’s view – that the presence of psychoactive mushrooms in the Near and Middle East ended around 1000 BCE – prevailed and stymied research on entheogens in Christianity for decades, a new generation of 21st century researchers has documented growing evidence of A. muscaria and psilocybin-containing mushrooms in Christian art, consistent with ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini’s typology of mushroom trees. This article presents original photographs, taken during fieldwork at churches and cathedrals throughout Europe and the Middle East, that confirm the presence of entheogenic mushrooms in Christian art: in frescoes, illuminated manuscripts, mosaics, sculptures, and stained glass windows. Based on this iconic evidence, the article proposes a psychedelic gospels theory and addresses critiques of this theory by art historians, ardent advocates, medieval historians, and conservative Catholics. It calls for the establishment of an Interdisciplinary Committee on the Psychedelic Gospels to independently evaluate the growing body of evidence of entheogenic mushrooms in Christian art in order to resolve a controversial question regarding the possible role of entheogens in the history and origins of Christianity.

La bandera de Francia en Facebook: un debate en torno a la identidad, la ideología y la globalización

In recent years, social media have incorporated into their communications the use of filters for published images, specifically, the profile photos. Within Facebook, these image filters have been presented frequently to express support or rejection to some social or political causes. This paper analyzes the case of the French flag filter in Facebook, used the days after the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015. Beyond the filter itself, the work analyzes the different reactions that arose inside the network motivated by the use of these images. To carry out this exercise, an image hermeneutic analysis is applied to these images. This method is based on the proposals of Erwin Panofsky in iconography and iconology and aims to review the ideological and identity questions underlying down the use of these filters in the images of networks.

Review: Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity, and the Representation of Space, by Martino Stierli

Martino Stierli Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity, and the Representation of Space New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018, 320 pp., 72 color and 85 b/w illus. $60 (cloth), ISBN 9780300221312 Both instrumental technique and potentially radical political critique, montage occupies a crucial place within architectural culture. From August Schmarsow to Manfredo Tafuri, Le Corbusier to Colin Rowe, a wide array of architects, theorists, and historians have used montage while seeking to comprehend and reshape modern urban space. El Lissitzky's 1924–25 Wolkenbugel (Cloud Hanger) is a paradigmatic example (Figure 1). The term montage refers generally to a technique involving the synthetic spatial and temporal arrangement of image fragments, whether from still photography or moving pictures. It is difficult to pin down, however: while constructed primarily from photographic fragments, montage imbricates multiple media, as evidenced by its centrality to cinematic discourse. Its importance to the formation of modernism is indisputable, and alongside collage and assemblage, montage remains a paradigmatic type of modern image making charged with the symbolic representation of twentieth-century experience. Figure 1 El Lissitzky, Wolkenbugel, 1924–25, photomontage. In Montage and the Metropolis , Martino Stierli demonstrates that montage served as twentieth-century modernity's “symbolic form.” Echoing Erwin Panofsky, Stierli argues for montage as the visual schema par excellence through which the mobile and fragmented heterogeneity of modernist production supersedes the monocular spatial continuity of Renaissance art. As such, it is a cultural technique capable of representing the traumas inflicted on the metropolitan subject by modernity and of reconciling that subject to the modern world. In his introductory chapter, Stierli defines montage according to five characteristics. The first three concern montage's formal properties and their relationship to a viewing subject. First, montage produces representations through the spatial or temporal juxtaposition of fragmentary images; meaning is produced through the active participation of the viewer who apprehends them. Second, montage operates spatially, ordering the disordered world upon the image surface. Third, it presupposes a mobile observer whose embodied perception generates a polyfocal and antiperspectival view of …

KAJIAN IKONOGRAFI DESAIN GRAFIS BERGAYA SUREALISTIK PADA T-SHIRT MEREK WELLBORN KOLEKSI TAHUN 2017 DI BANDUNG

Local brand is a fashion creative industry which is favored by young people. There are many local brands in Bandung City. T-shirt is one of local brand products which is related to graphic design. Concept and meaning in graphic design on T-shirt can be researched using The Iconography Theory of Erwin Panofsky. Graphic design on local brands T-shirt in Bandung City leads to simple graphic design trends, display direct branding and variation of color in T-shirts. However, one of brand, Wellborn, features graphic design with its own characteristics on the T-shirt as a creativity, that is surrealistic style graphics design on T-shirt. It is a sub category of T-shirt that can be studied through the meaning of graphic design on T-shirt. It underlies the research on graphic design of Wellborn T-shirt. The research stages are observation, interview, literature study, documentation and analysis which includes pre-iconography, iconography and iconology. The purpose of this study is to know the meaning of Wellborn T-shirt design based on The Iconography Theory of Erwin Panofsky and its association with Wellborn branding. The research method is descriptive qualitative. Objects studied are the surrealistic style graphic designs of Wellborn T-shirts 2017 collection. The samples of data are selected using purposive sampling. The result of the analysis shows that in pre-iconography, there are various objects placed in one graphic design on T-shirt. In iconography, it has a secondary meaning that there are things which are limitless, and in iconology, it has the meaning of freedom of mind/thought because it is related to freedom in imagination, infinity and a difference. They show the characteristics of the Wellborn brand. Keywords: Iconography, Graphic Design, Surrealistic Wellborn T-shirt, Bandung.

THE IMAGE A VISUALLY IMPAIRED PERSON IN PHILATELY AS A MEANS OF FORMING AN ADEQUATE ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE BLINDNESS AND BLIND

The topic of blindness and the image of a blind person in philately, although rarely analysed, has a great information potential. This research topic is part of our research "The Image of a Blind Man in the Cultural Heritage of Humanity." The purpose of the study is to systematize knowledge on the subject of image and blindness in philately, to consider the social aspects of this phenomenon. To collect information, the bulletin used the analysis of literature and the search for postage stamps depicting blind people in private collections of philatelists. The iconological method of interpretation of culture and art history was also used, which permitted to reveal the meaning of visions, symbols and their contexts. The monograph is based on the methodological assumptions of art historians Aby Walburg (1866 – 1929) and Erwin Panofsky (1892 – 1968), who claimed that historical and social aspects could be revealed through the works of art. E. Panofsky states that the works of art as human signs as well as other works can be considered documents, encoding the knowledge of the epoch, its culture and attitudes. The work of art is a symbol, indicating “something else” and allowing us to perceive the allegory; it is a document, telling us about certain cultural, religious, social and historic phenomena, depending on the context. The image of a blind person in stamps and commemorative envelopes are divided according to separate themes and analysed as social phenomena. The image of the blind and the topic of blindness in philately allow acquiring more knowledge about the blind, their potential, embossed writing, specificity of their orientation and mobility and at the same time forming positive attitudes towards visually impaired people. These findings activate further research on the image of a blind person in other areas of cultural heritage.

La quête du sens et la croisée des chemins de l'iconographie aux nouvelles approches des images

The history of art, especially the study of images and the iconography, is it still shaken by anxiety or transfixed – as Erwin Panofsky noted en 1925 – in a theoretical stagnation? If the worry rem...

Into the Clouds of Rakuchu Rakugai Zu: Eastern< >Western Drawing Tolerance Critiqued through Speculative Drawing Practices

This article examines parallel projection as spatial representation and considers its role in constructing the city image. It investigates the representation of materially intangible concepts, such as infinity, impossibility and irrationality, through a close study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century screen paintings of Kyoto called Rakuchu Rakugai zu. The tools of composition used in the paintings to influence the forms of the urban imagination bring into question the current Eurocentric historiography of parallel projection in architectural drawing by Erwin Panofsky, Yves-Alain Bois, Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Massimo Scolari. The article investigates and critiques Scenes from Another Kyoto through drawing experimentation: how and what are the spaces of urban, political and imaginative tolerances of what is allowed to be represented? The drawing practice reveals, scrutinizes and inhabits aspects of Eastern< >Western authorship and authority in Rakuchu Rakugai zu and speculates on the potential and limits of drawing to influence urban imagination.

Morphologie, Transformation und Übersetzbarkeit

The comparison of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms and Levi-Strauss’ structural anthropology requires a clarification of their definitions of morphology, transformation and translatability. We will expose the morphological field where Cassirer’s aesthetics emerges in relation to Goethe, who represents an important source for Levi-Strauss as well. Defining the concept of transformation is supposed to follow his modifications of the key ideas of the German poet and biologist, by taking account of the new point of view provided by the theory of groups of transformation which the mathematician Felix Klein developed in the ≫circle of Erlangen ≪. Then we will show how Edgar Wind, a brilliant student of Cassirer, invents a kind of morphological aesthetics to provide art history with a methodology, and we will give some examples for the application of the concept of building series of pictures in the field of art history. We will examine the global function of the tables of Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, Erwin Panofsky’s wellknown iconological interpretation of Durer’s Melencolia I and then, by contrast, the creation of a virtual series of masks through an imaginative variation which Levi-Strauss creates to give sense to a particular Ameridian mask found during his investigations. Finally, we will investigate the problems appearing by the definition of transformation as translatability in both Cassirer’s and Levi-Strauss’ semiologies. We will ask for their uses of the model of translation in linguistics to compare different forms of structural homologies

A iconografia em revisão

Este texto discute a atualidade da abordagem iconográfica. A partir da definição de conceitos baseada em Erwin Panofsky, relaciona alguns desenvolvimentos e críticas a respeito desse campo de conhecimentos. Aponta possibilidades de aplicação da iconografia no estudo da arte contemporânea, a partir de duas pesquisas teóricas orientadas pelo autor no Programa de Pós-Graduação em Artes Visuais da UFSM.

Materiality as Periphery

This article examines how the materiality of art operates as a periphery in art-historical interpretation. Taking as a case study the Palette of King Narmer (c. 3100 bc), a famous monument of Egyptian culture, the author explores how it has been interpreted while isolating the role of materiality in writings on it. It begins with a discussion of the palette found in a widely used art-historical survey text, Gardner’s History of Art, before turning to a methodological authority for much American art-historical writing, Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968). The article analyzes a sophisticated interpretation of the palette by Whitney Davis (b. 1958), which is both a complication of earlier approaches and a confirmation of their tenets when concerning materiality. It then treats recent archaeological approaches to the palette, arguing that they have done more to credit materiality as part of the object’s importance, before turning to the work of Alice Stevenson as an exemplification of how much an emphasis on materiality can bring to light. The article concludes by pondering disciplinary divisions and arguing for a layered, de-centralized critical approach to object analysis.

Sociologia, cultura e arte: um debate entre espaços e tempos

Based on the volumes of the Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Velho – Sociologia da arte ; Sociologia da arte II ; and Arte e sociedade – ensaios de sociologia da arte (1966, 1967 and 1977) – in light of the book A sociologia da arte (2008), of the French sociologist Nathalie Heinich, the article highlights Brazilian publications comprising thinkers of sociology of art and culture through space-time dialogues. Included in Velho’s books and analyzed by Heinich, authors such as Erwin Panofsky, Jean Duvignaud, Pierre Francastel, and Roger Bastide will have their ideas analyzed, in order to verify whether or not there would be common aspects in their theoretical and methodological propositions and what their pertinence in the contemporary debate would be. The analysis of established assumptions, which comprehend art and social worlds, seeks a conceptual contribution and a current reflection on the field. Keywords: sociology and culture, artistic and social worlds.