Perspective as Symbolic Form

Panofsky, Erwin, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans Christopher S Wood ( New York: Zone Books, 1994, originally published as 'Die Perspektive als symbolisch Form,'  in the Vortrage der Bibliothek Warburg 1924 - 1927 (Leipzig & Berlin: 1927).

For a book to be both influential and obscure would appear on the face of it to be a contradiction in terms. However, Panofsky's early writings on the problem of perspective achieve this. It is influential in-so-far as it formulated a innovative approach towards analysing 'artistic products' - which Panofsky asserted in 1920 were 'not statements by subjects, but formulations of material, not events, but results. Wood, in his densely argued introduction makes the point that the strategy of of 'isolating the work temporarily in order to grasp more clearly its deep cultural principles' can be regarded in terms of Art History as a parallel to New Criticism's approach to literary criticism. This approach sharpens 'our sensitivity to the social character of the linguistic sign', thus enabling the work to be reinsert(ed) into its primordial environment on more legitimate grounds'. Panofsky sought, by attempting to reconcile 'materialist' and 'idealist' approaches to art history to develop a new 'serious Kunstphilosophie'. This method, first utilised in Perspective as Symboic Form and later more fully realised in canonical texts such as Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955) and Renascences and Renaissances in Western Art (1960) contributed significantly to the development of History of Art and were highly influential during the rise of the subject as a separate discipline in British and American Universities during 1960's.

Panofsky's  Perspective as Symboic Form was first translated into English sixty five years after its original publication; this partly accounts fot its apparent obscurity as a text within undergraduate study. However it did influence the better kown work by  E. H. Gomebrich who cites it as a key source for chaper VIII of  Art and Illusion - The Ambiguities  of the Third Dimension (1960). However, the latter text does not quite capture the ingenuity of Panofsky's original argument. Based on a series of lectures, Perspective as Symboic Form is divided into five sections. It opens with a consideration of the differences between the kind of perspective found in Greek and Roman art which adheres to the 'retinal' curvature of Euclidean mathematics, compared with linear perspective, developed during the early Renaissance by Durer and Alberti.. The following sections amplify this idea and set our in detail the philosophical and scientific assumptions behind Byzantine and Medieval art's treatment of space and compare these to early modern notions regarding the perspectiival view as a 'window' which assumes a single observer and vanishing point.

The imaginative leap that Panofsky makes is to redefine the relationship between Euclidean curved perspectiive, the Romansque assertion of surface pattern and Renaissance linear perspective. The conventional view asserts that the return to a representational art in the Renaissance was largely a rebirth of classical principles. Panofsky not only sets out the key differences between classical art's conception of space and that of the Renaissance but makes a case for regarding medieval art's interest in surface pattern as an important influence on  renaissance painting's conception of space. He maintains that the single vanishing point of linear perspective contains within it, elements of medieval concerns with surface through its picture plane, albeit rendered invisible as the a 'glass wall' of  a fifteenth century master's 'window' on the world.

The final section broadens the discussion to consider the impact of linear perspective more broadly within the emergence of a new world view during the early modern period. Panofsky argues that Plato's objection to classical perspective - that it replaced the richness of reality with arbitrary subjective appearance, and the apparently contrary objection of twentieth century thinkers - that it was the tool of a limited and limiting rationalism, are in fact 'the double face of one and the same issue'. Underlying both these concerns is the issue that 'perspective mathematizes visual space [...] it is an ordering of  visual phenomena', and as uch tends to emphasise visual experience and knowledge over other sensations and experiences. Some of the broader cultural effects of this are then explored. Perspective 'seals off'' religious art from the symbolic and magical and instead opens up the representation of the 'visionary' where supernatural events 'erupt' into the beholder's apparently natural visual space and so 'permit him to imternalise their supernatualness'. This latter phenomena, Panofsky argues, opens up visual art to the psychological, paving the way not only for  Baroque visionary exuberance but also the insight and profundity foundin late Rembrandt. He concludes:

'Perspective, in transforming the ousia (reality) into the phainomenon (appearance), seems to reduce the divine to a mere subject matter for human conciousness; but for that very reason, conversly, it expands human conciousness into a vessel for the divine'.

I came to Panofsky's work on perspective while researching Roland Barthes' book on photography Camera Lucida. In many ways their conclusions and arguments are diametrically opposed. Panofsky talks of perspective as a device which enables the 'objectivisation of the subjective'. Barthes' conclusions regarding photography infers the opposite, that as a medium it subjectivises the objective. In one crucial respect, however, the books are similar; both 'overspill' the limits of a discipline and draw conclusions of broader cultural significance from a  focussed starting point. Barthes sets out to reflect on photography, however Camera Lucida strays into a broader contemplation into the nature of memory, ancestral remembrance, and death. Panofsky too uses the narrow starting point of the nature of perspective to speculate on how this mathematical 'trick' underlies many aspects of the Western world view. Given that in the ninety years since its first publication we have swapped the picture plane for the screen as our primary method of representation and human communication, then if anything issues relating to a world represented through the limitations of Albertian perspective becomes more pressing than ever. It is little surprise, therefore, that this early work by Erwin Panofsky, which remained somewhat overlooked for many years, has recently been re-evaluated. The statement on the book's jacket  hailing  Perspective as Symbolic Form as 'one of the great works of modern intellectual history' no longert appears to be entirely hyperbolic.