18 Facts About Panofsky

Erwin Panofsky was a German-Jewish art historian, whose academic career was pursued mostly in the U S after the rise of the Nazi regime.

Panofsky's work represents a high point in the modern academic study of iconography, which he used in hugely influential works like his "little book" Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art and his masterpiece, Early Netherlandish Painting.

Panofsky's ideas were highly influential in intellectual history in general, particularly in his use of historical ideas to interpret artworks and vice versa.

Panofsky was born in Hannover to a wealthy Jewish Silesian mining family.

Panofsky grew up in Berlin, receiving his Abitur in 1910 at the Joachimsthalsches Gymnasium.

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Panofsky first came to the United States in 1931 to teach at New York University.

In 1999, "Panofsky Lane", named in his honor, was created in the institute's faculty housing complex.

Panofsky was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy and a number of other national academies.

Panofsky became particularly well known for his studies of symbols and iconography in art.

Panofsky identifies a plethora of hidden symbols that all point to the sacrament of marriage.

Similarly, in his monograph on Durer, Panofsky gives lengthy "symbolic" analyses of the prints Knight, Death, and the Devil and Melancolia I, the former based on Erasmus's Handbook of a Christian Knight.

Panofsky was known to be a friend with physicists Wolfgang Pauli and Albert Einstein.

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".

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.

Panofsky gave a short and precise description of his method in his article "Iconography and Iconology", published in 1939.

Panofsky, it was important to consider all three strata as one examines Renaissance art.

The first Panofsky Professors have been Victor Stoichita, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Caroline van Eck, and Olivier Bonfait .

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.