1. Erwin Panofsky was a German-Jewish art historian whose work represents a high point in the modern academic study of iconography, including his hugely influential Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art and his seminal Early Netherlandish Painting.
Erwin Panofsky was immersed in an environment that valued education and cultural refinement from a young age and exposed to classical music and literature such as Divine Comedy, Shakespeare's sonnets and the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.
Erwin Panofsky did not observe Jewish religious customs as an adult, but he remained proud of his heritage such as sharing story about his grandfather as a renowned Talmud scholar.
Erwin Panofsky received his Abitur in 1910 at the Joachimsthalsches Gymnasium.
In December 1918, while working in Berlin, Erwin Panofsky applied for habilitation at the University of Heidelberg, proposing to submit either his 1915 expanded Durers Kunsttheorie vornehmlich in ihrem Verhaltnis zur Kunsttheorie der Italiener or Der Westbau des Doms zu Minden.
Erwin Panofsky withdrew the application in March 1919 due to unexplained circumstances.
Gerda Erwin Panofsky was unable to locate it cause there is possibility that Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich, who had studied under Erwin Panofsky, was in the possession of this manuscript from 1946 to 1970 and bring it to Zentralinstitut fur Kunstgeschichte, in whose basement the manuscript was found.
Erwin Panofsky has already expressed interest in visiting America as early as 1929 on his correspondence with Fritz Saxl, and in 1930, he was invited by New York University to serve as a Visiting Professor by recommendation from Goldschmidt.
Erwin Panofsky reconnected with Paul Sachs at Harvard delivering a lecture at the Fogg Museum.
Erwin Panofsky had previously met Sachs in 1927 when Sachs visited Hamburg to inspect Aby Warburg's Institute.
Erwin Panofsky visited Charles Rufus Morey, Alfred Barr, William J Ivins and was introduced by Edward Warburg to a wealthy New York elite.
Erwin Panofsky usually gave lectures at weekly salons hosted by Josephine Porter Boardman Crane which acquainted him with prominent figures such as the Rockefellers and the Straus family of Macy's Department Store.
Erwin Panofsky managed to secure two additional twelve-week lecture courses for the spring of 1933 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Erwin Panofsky faced limited employment opportunities outside of Germany, and the College of Fine Arts, due to a lack of funds, had not planned to invite him back after his spring lectureship.
Erwin Panofsky returned to New York in January 1934 to fulfill a temporary commitment to Cook and NYU, while Dora and their two young sons stayed in Hamburg.
Overwhelmed by his teaching and administrative duties at NYU, Erwin Panofsky lamented the lack of time for his own research and the prioritization of monetary concerns over scholarly pursuits.
Erwin Panofsky expressed frustration to Margaret Barr about his extensive workload, including organizing syllabi, correcting test papers, and conducting numerous lectures and consultations.
Erwin Panofsky's dissatisfaction was further highlighted in a letter to Gertrud Bing, where he criticized the use of his seminar for NYU's publicity without his consent.
Erwin Panofsky initially had no plans to settle permanently in America.
Erwin Panofsky was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy and a number of other national academies.
Erwin Panofsky became particularly well known for his studies of symbols and iconography in art.
Erwin Panofsky identifies a plethora of hidden symbols that all point to the sacrament of marriage.
Similarly, in his monograph on Durer, Erwin Panofsky gives lengthy "symbolic" analyses of the prints Knight, Death, and the Devil and Melencolia I, the former based on Erasmus's Handbook of a Christian Knight.
Erwin Panofsky was known to be a friend with physicists Wolfgang Pauli and Albert Einstein.
Erwin Panofsky's elder son, Hans A Panofsky, was "an atmospheric scientist who taught at Pennsylvania State University for 30 years and who was credited with several advances in the study of meteorology".
Erwin Panofsky has been recognized as both a "highly distinguished" professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, and in Jeffrey Chipps' biography of the subject as "the most influential art historian of the twentieth century".
Erwin Panofsky was the most eminent representative of iconology, a method of studying the history of art created by Aby Warburg and his disciples, especially Fritz Saxl, at the Warburg Institute in Hamburg.
Erwin Panofsky gave a short and precise description of his method in his article "Iconography and Iconology", published in 1939.
For Erwin Panofsky, it was important to consider all three strata as one examines Renaissance art.
The method of iconology, which had developed following Erwin Panofsky, has been critically discussed since the mid-1950s, in part strongly.
Erwin Panofsky's work has greatly influenced the theory of taste developed by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, in books such as The Rules of Art and Distinction.