Emmanuel Alloa
To cite this article: Emmanuel Alloa (2015) Could Perspective Ever be a Symbolic Form?, Journal
of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 2:1, 51-71, DOI: 10.1080/20539320.2015.11428459
Emmanuel Alloa
University of St Gallen/NCCR eikones
Introduction
In recent years, the special intellectual momentum around the Warburg
Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek in the 1920s and the trajectories of its protago-
nists (Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, etc.) have enjoyed renewed attention. New
studies in cultural history give an ever clearer picture of the questions examined
there; passages between the individual trajectories of thought become increas-
ingly apparent. For Ernst Cassirer, for example, it is evident that his involvement
Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, Volume 2, Issue 1, pp. 51–72. © Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 2015
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Emmanuel Alloa
with artistic dimensions as pursued by his art historian colleagues Warburg and
Panofsky played a more central role than had previously been assumed. Although
these topics are not given their own volume in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,
a letter from Cassirer proves that such a volume was planned, at least for a time,1
and in the scholarship a consensus has gradually formed to point out that art
should be conceived as a fourth symbolic form alongside myth, language, and
science.2
Meanwhile, strikingly little space in these historical-systematic reconstruc-
tions is granted to a text whose title at first glance seems wholly aligned with this
undertaking: Erwin Panofsky’s lecture “Perspective as Symbolic Form,”3 deliv-
ered in the circle of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek in 1924, where the art
historian discusses the historical premises for the emergence of linear perspective
in the Renaissance and asks up to what point perspectival representation is a
more adequate account of natural perception at all.
There is hardly an aspect of this text that, in the ninety years of its reception
history, has not been discussed and debated from all sides and every disciplinary
angle, including the history of mathematics, art studies, perceptual psychology,
and the history of optics. Under all these aspects, one thesis has received little
attention (since, generally speaking, it has not even been posed as a thesis): the
title proposition, “Perspective as Symbolic Form.”
A curious acquiescence can be observed in the scholarship, as though it
had been settled that Panofsky’s essay is clearly not to be read as a contribution
to Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolization. The majority of interpretations as-
sume that in his essay, Panofsky was seeking to denounce central perspective as
a conventionalistic construction and rehabilitate another, “spheroidal/curved”
perspective that he considered closer to “natural” seeing, according to Herrmann
von Helmholtz’s discoveries in the field of optics (Figure 1).
Indeed, Panofsky’s supposed defense of the “curved” character of natural
perception drew harsh criticism from approaches oriented towards the natural
sciences (for example Pirenne, Gibson, and Ten Doesschate) or the psychology
of art (Gombrich and others). By contrast, the essay’s having prompted only little
discussion in the field of philosophy may be attributed to two factors: either it is
understood as a work of historiography, which therefore can only play a support-
ing role in the development of a general theory of symbols; or else the (alleged)
thesis of an originary, natural visual space suggests the nostalgic assumption of a
pre-Kantian, unmediated sensory datum, which people—with exceptions such
as Nelson Goodman—prefer not to speak about out of good taste. The fact is,
however, that the thesis implied in the title, namely, that perspective should be
construed as a symbolic form, until now has not been brought up for debate.
In the following, the objective will be to test this very thesis against the
backdrop of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbols. To give an early summary of the
outcome here: Perspective in fact cannot be seamlessly integrated into a philosophy
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Could Perspective Ever Be A Symbolic Form? Revisiting Panofsky with Cassirer
of symbolic forms; not because it does not meet Cassirer’s philosophical requirements,
but rather, because it implicitly contains its own philosophical requirements that
cannot be absorbed into the concept of symbolic form.
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epistemological background, while there are good reasons to assert, Hub says,
that Panofsky himself “justifiably” transferred the notion of “symbolic form” to
perspective.
So what are we to understand by the notion of “symbolic form”? According
to Cassirer, the “symbolic form” is what allows one to explain how the world
becomes intelligible to us. What there is to understand is how “a perception as
a ‘sensory’ experience contains at the same time a certain non-intuitive ‘mean-
ing,’ which it immediately and concretely represents.”6 Rather than simply refer-
ring to what it stands for, the symbol gives an intuitive-sensible presence to the
meaning—Cassirer also speaks of “symbolic pregnance”—which highlights that
the symbolic form is more to be understood as a process (forming) than as a
given form. As Cassirer has it in his canonical (and Goethe-inspired) definition,
the “symbolic form” is a kind of “mental energy,” which allows “a mental content
of meaning” (geistiger Bedeutungsgehalt) to be connected to a “concrete, sensory
sign” (konkretes sinnliches Zeichen) and “made to adhere internally to it.”7
Many posthumous publications by Cassirer allow us to get a good sense
of what he exactly meant by this energy of “symbolic form” and of “symbolic
pregnance.” It goes without saying that Panofsky was not in this position, and
that his knowledge of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic form, which was still in
the making, had to remain unavoidably superficial. Yet, he seemed nonetheless
to have made the choice to make use of the notion of “symbolic form,” although
in a very unconventional way. In recent years, there has been some discussion
about whether Panofsky’s notion of “symbolic form” is compatible at all with
Cassirer’s philosophy.8 In order for this question to be answered seriously, how-
ever, we would need to know what Panofsky himself meant by “symbolic form”
and what his general understanding of Cassirer had been.
The difficulties in answering this question are, at least in part, also Panofsky’s
own fault. The extent to which the lecture, which appeared with many addi-
tional footnotes in 1927 alongside Cassirer’s lecture “Language and Myth” in
the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek’s annual publication, is to be thought of
simply as an academic homage to his colleague, or whether Panofsky in fact
envisioned a continuation of Cassirer’s program, is not easy to determine. In
the text, statements about this—despite repeated references—are in any case
extremely sparse. Panofsky announces that with his contribution, he wants to
“extend Ernst Cassirer’s felicitous term to the history of art.” But in the further
course of the text, little information is provided as to how he himself understands
this term. Strictly speaking, he lets the matter rest by transcribing Cassirer’s
early definition, that through symbolic forms, “spiritual meaning is attached to
a concrete, material sign and intrinsically given to this sign.”9
The fact that, beyond providing this quotation, Panofsky did not feel
the need to comment further on this hardly self-evident new term has often
prompted the allegation that he was not particularly interested in its systematic
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Could Perspective Ever Be A Symbolic Form? Revisiting Panofsky with Cassirer
implications. In his defense it must be added that Cassirer only elaborated the
concept of the symbolic form in the real sense in Volume 3 of Philosophy of
Symbolic Forms, which was not published until 1929,10 so Panofsky could very
well not have known it for his lecture given in 1924. On the other hand, how-
ever, one must certainly assume that Panofsky was highly informed about the
progress of Cassirer’s project, and that the two often talked about it in the time
before the lecture. What Panofsky took from it for himself is difficult to ascer-
tain. In Hans Blumberg’s memorable phrasing, Cassirer may well have provided
the theory which explains the Library.11 The question remains: what did the
Library—and in this case one of its key figures, Panofsky—do with this theory?
A stubborn preconception maintains that Panofsky specifically (even more than
Warburg) failed to understand Cassirer’s attempts to found a new approach to
culture through symbolic forms.
In her monograph on Cassirer, Birgit Recki recalls an anecdote that was
told by Ernst Gombrich: sometime in the 1920s (whether before or after the
perspective lecture is not known), Panofsky made a gift to the philosopher of a
bar of soap, and for the occasion composed the following light verse:
Deines Geistes Reife
Tat mir arg Beschmutztem Wohl
Nimm, drum, diese Goetheseife
teils als Form, teils als Symbol.12
According to the story, the joke gave Cassirer only moderate enjoyment. For
Recki, this should be taken as an indication that Cassirer felt misunderstood.
“Part as form and part as symbol”—this line could only be written by someone
who has not understood that in this case, it is not about the usual concept of
form-or-symbol, not about crosses, stars, or anchor medals.13
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Could Perspective Ever Be A Symbolic Form? Revisiting Panofsky with Cassirer
Figure 2 Pieter Saenredam, Nave and West Window of the Mariakerk, Utrecht, 1638, Oil
on panel, 62.5 × 93.5 cm. Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
the history of culture, and to liberate it from what he considered the formalistic
straitjacket of the Munich history of style (Wölfflin, Riegl, etc.). If one calls
into evidence his analytical method for the interpretation of art works, which
later was to become canonical in art historical analysis, the question of style is
predominantly addressed on the level of what Panofsky calls the “iconographic
level.” The further level—the so-called “iconological level”—which, following
Panofsky, is only where the real understanding of the picture begins, cannot be
attained by an immanent reading of the picture; the analysis needs to reach be-
yond the art work, in order to secure its hidden and profound meaning. While,
iconographically speaking, a formal analysis might be helpful, the true iconolog-
ical insight comes from beyond: the meaning of the picture must lie outside of
the picture.16
Art works are thus transpositions of a certain source text—a biblical epi-
sode, a legend, an allegory—but in case there is no strictly identifiable “pre-text”
preceding the realization of the art work, it remains nonetheless a reflection
of something that lies beyond it: in Panofsky’s conceptions, art works are the
symptoms of a certain period, of an artist’s mentality or of the spirit of a time.
In this respect, a painting is the expression of a peculiar way of seeing. This is
where Panofsky comes quite close to Cassirer: with Cassirer, Panofsky shares
the conviction that there is a symmetrical mirroring between historical forms
of Anschauung and their modes of representation. Kant’s problem of how to
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Emmanuel Alloa
Between the lines of this program can also be read the gradual break with neo-
Kantianism. In the effort to defend Kant against all manner of misreadings that
were rampant in the nineteenth century, for instance, those which sought to
locate the pure forms of Anschauung physiologically, the Marburg school and
especially Cassirer’s teacher Hermann Cohen pointed out that Kant’s condition
of possibility of experience was to be thought of as purely logical. However,
this defense of Kantian philosophy was accompanied by a critique of Kant:
the philosopher did not carry out his own program consistently, since a second
source of knowledge (pure Anschauung) is treated as equal or even superior to
the concept:
Kant urges distinguishing pure Anschauung from pure thought. Not that they
should remain separated, but rather in order that they connect and are suited
to connection. But through this plan of his methodical terminology, to say
nothing of Anschauung, internal damage is done to thought. An Anschauung
thus precedes thought. It, too, is pure, thus it is related to thought. But thought
does have its beginning in something outside itself. Here lies the weakness in
Kant’s foundation. Here lies the basis for the deterioration that soon befell the
school.18
Transcendental philosophy can only be a priori if it has its bases in itself, and
the pure condition of possibility can therefore only be logical, since only in
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Could Perspective Ever Be A Symbolic Form? Revisiting Panofsky with Cassirer
thought is nothing external mixed in. If Hermann Cohen in fact overcomes the
two great dualisms of Kantian philosophy (first, the two-worlds ontology, by
finally eliminating the “thing in itself,” and second, the dualism of Anschauung
and concept, by identifying Anschauung as a posteriori), through this subjectivist
about-face, transcendental philosophy thus slips into the dangerous waters of
idealism, as has often been remarked. With The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,
Ernst Cassirer takes a distinctly different route, without setting aside Kant’s
question as to the conditions of human experience of the world. To Cassirer,
there are indeed unified forms of Anschauung that are independent of any object
of experience. While Kant rightly stressed that these forms of Anschauung always
remain identical with themselves, according to Cassirer he disregarded that the
forms of Anschauung are modulated in a particular way according to the realm
of meaning, that they take on particular “tones” and “colors.” One is reminded
of Leibniz, for whom the human power of conception does not amount to a
mechanical and merely passive mirror—thus the popular metaphor in the medi-
eval theory of the species in medio—but rather a living, itself active mirror. Now,
the conditions of the conception of an object are by no means exhausted by its
spatio-temporal situatedness or by the categorical determination of quality and
quantity. Rather, the category of modality must be revisited in order to be able
to reconstruct the process of the genesis of meaning.19
In this context, Cassirer refers to the example of lines (Figure 3): when we
view a line, we can conceive of it under various aspects without changing any-
thing in its being. Accordingly, we can conceive of the line first simply in its
expressive function; second, we can recognize it as the concretization of a math-
ematical sine curve; third, we may interpret it as a mythic symbol; and fourth,
from a purely aesthetic standpoint, we could see it as an artistic ornament.20
Consequently, the line cannot be viewed other than in its respective mode of
viewing, alternately in the symbol system of language, science, religion, or art,
whereby the classic cloverleaf of symbolic forms is also run through. The ques-
tion of the thing in itself then in fact becomes invalid, but not because it—as
for Cohen—is a mere construction of thought, but rather because it always can
only become a carrier of meaning in one of the particular modes of sensible
manifestation. As early as 1925, thus several years before the disputation with
Heidegger in Davos, Cassirer summarized the philosophical line of attack of
his approach in a small study: “The question as to what reality is apart from
these forms [of visibility and the making visible], and what are its independent
attributes, becomes irrelevant here.”21
“Visibility and the making visible” (Sichtbarkeit und Sichtbarmachung)—an
echo of Kant’s doublet of receptivity and spontaneity, which still could be related
to Anschauung and thought—are abandoned in favor of a constant rearticulation
in the sensible. In every seemingly purely receptive empirical experience a men-
tal activity already intervenes, which Cassirer also terms “symbolic pregnance”:
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Emmanuel Alloa
Only through such a symbolic forming of the sensible can an experience take
place, as Cassirer writes with Kant: “Through the reciprocal involvement of
these representative functions consciousness acquires the power to spell out phe-
nomena, to read them as experiences.”23
A quick reading could give the impression that this is simply a confirmation
of Kant’s thesis that intuition without concept is blind. But in the insistence
upon the activity of representation, the framework of the concept of reason
has been left far behind and the field of spontaneity has been expanded to all
cultural activities of symbolization. Kant’s question, “What is the human?” can
only be answered by regarding the human in the mirror of his creative involve-
ment with the world, and thus in the mirror of his culture, as Cassirer repeatedly
stresses in the Essay on Man: as the animal symbolicum, the nature of the human
lies nowhere else than in the symbolic relationships that he creates. In this sense,
Jürgen Habermas is perfectly right when he characterizes Cassirer’s speculative
endeavor as a “semiotic reforming of transcendental philosophy.”24
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Could Perspective Ever Be A Symbolic Form? Revisiting Panofsky with Cassirer
The scientific world picture of the Modern period, its mathematics, geometry,
and cosmology, is already prefigured in the theory of perspective, as (according
to Cassirer) Erwin Panofsky showed in his study of 1924.26 This passage suggests
that Cassirer interpreted Panofsky’s work as a type of prehistory of the scientific
world picture of the Modern period. The art historian also fundamentally car-
ried out Cassirer’s program in a totally different way by seeking to decipher
the epochal forms of Anschauung in their visible and material manifestations.
(This has been Samuel Edgerton’s influential interpretation: “The real thrust of
[Panofsky’s] was not to prove that the ancients believed the visual world was
curved or that Renaissance perspective was a mere artistic convention, but that
each historical period had its own special ‘perspective,’ a particular symbolic form
reflecting a particular Weltanschauung”27). As such, it could be argued that in
linear-perspectival painting, an epoch itself holds up a mirror to its own world-
view; the individual perspectival painting must be considered one of these expo-
nents, in which according to Cassirer the “objectivity of this world-view” and its
“fully self-contained character” is expressed.28 Perspective is therefore much more
than a “factor of style,” as Panofsky formulates rather uncertainly at one point.29
This uncertainty may explain why Panofsky critics such as Pirenne considered it
legitimate to place perspective on a level with alexandrines and thereby dismiss
them both as irrelevant to epistemology.30 All this indicates that Panofsky cannot
have his sights set on a history of style in the classical sense. Central perspective
instead presented an objectivization of the Modern era’s approach to the world.
In it, the coinciding of Anschauung and Darstellung, of presence and representa-
tion can be observed that Cassirer claimed for his philosophy of symbolic forms.
However, such a surreptitiously Hegelian image of history, which John M.
Krois pointed out early on,31 is not borne out by the historical reality. Thus,
the discovery of linear perspective and the associated idea of projection size did
not yet entirely supplant Euclid’s optics and its concept of angular size. (Well
into the late seventeenth century, the French Académie Royale de peinture et de
sculpture had lively debates about which conception of optics to favor). Even
more striking are the discrepancies on an artistic level. While as author of his
scientific treatise De prospectiva pingendi, Piero della Francesca came forward as
the spokesperson of a new rigorously mathematic mode of representation, in his
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Could Perspective Ever Be A Symbolic Form? Revisiting Panofsky with Cassirer
through which we believe we are looking into an imaginary space. This space
comprises the entirety of the objects in apparent recession into depth, and is not
bounded by the edges of the picture, but merely cut off.37
Such a conception of the image as a cut through the visual pyramid thus implies
that by “perspective,” Panofsky simply means the unified, geometric, linear or
central perspective. But in other places, Panofsky virtually insists that the ques-
tion is not only whether particular cultural epochs have perspective, “but also
which perspective they have,”38 whereby the implication is that there is more
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Emmanuel Alloa
than just one. This crucial point in the essay perhaps contains the most impor-
tant evidence for our question. It is here that we may start addressing the issue
of whether and, if yes, how it is that perspective could ever be a symbolic form.
While Panofsky, on the one hand, expounds the tremendous cultural
achievement of central perspective, on the other, he emphasizes that this prin-
ciple was not simply available in nature, but rather already itself represents a
cultural invention through which the world can be reconfigured. It is therefore
as incorrect to interpret within Perspective as Symbolic Form the naturalization
of a historically arising process of symbolization, as it would be conversely to
read the essay as a diatribe against perspective as mere societal convention, as
has occasionally transpired in the American reception. Although the discussion
about the so-called “curved perspective” at points could suggest that his goal is
to pit a perspective of natural perception against a merely conventional repre-
sentational ordering, Panofsky makes clear at the end that central perspective is
indeed an ordering, “but an ordering of the visual phenomenon.”39 Whether the
perspective is parallel, elliptical, curved, or linear: it is not an abstract datum,
but rather results from the dynamic forming of the material of Anschauung itself.
In Cassirer’s expression, perspective can be called the “integral of experience.”40
Thus, to be sure, the domain of the mere history of art and optics has been left
far behind, and the concept of perspective has been understood no longer as a
symbolic form, but as an overall principle of formation of Anschauung. So Cassirer
speaks, for example, of perspective as an optical inversion or change in attitude,
when we place the experience of perception into a figure/ground relationship.41
But are we not thereby implementing a figurative conception of perspective?
Have we not interpreted the term, which Panofsky in his terminological history
derives from the optics of antiquity, from the retrospective standpoint of philo-
sophical perspectivism, for which Leibniz or Nietzsche were the driving forces?
In his book The Poetics of Perspective, James Elkins persuasively demonstrates
that such an expanded concept of perspective is by no means subordinate to
Panofsky’s narrower definition of perspective as a technical guide for representa-
tion, but rather, that, in a manner of speaking, the latter became the condition
of possibility for the former.42 Only when one assumes that any approach to the
world is always carried out through its particular perspective can it be appreci-
ated what an inventive accomplishment is contained in the specific development
of a central-perspectival technique of representation. However, along with the
so-called “central” perspective, there are numerous other perspectival formations
that Elkins discusses. Axonometric (so-called “parallel”) perspectives are mani-
fold (they can be isometric, diametric of trimetric) and they are not only relevant
for the immense field of geometric projections (mathematical objects, virtual
objects, 3D visualizations, etc.), but also for understanding certain non-Western
forms of painting (in traditional Chinese and Japanese paintings, cityscapes are
often represented according to a combination of parallel projection and a view
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Could Perspective Ever Be A Symbolic Form? Revisiting Panofsky with Cassirer
Figure 5 Parallel Perspective. Qing Ming Shang He Tu (Along the River during Qing
Ming Festival). Detail from the scroll painting, c. 1045–1145. China Online Museum.
from above; Figure 5). Most importantly, the issue of perspective forces to shift
the problem of representation from a mere representation of a given thing, scene
or event towards representation as performativity: perspectivity is not just a mat-
ter of different viewpoints on a given object, but also about bringing about what
it refers to. It is compelling that even the so-called “impossible objects” (impos-
sible, because self-contradictory) are still under the condition of perspectival
representation (Figure 6). In this sense, perspectivity is not just another name
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Could Perspective Ever Be A Symbolic Form? Revisiting Panofsky with Cassirer
Notes
1. Letter of 13 May 1942 to Paul Schilpp. As quoted in J.M. Krois and D.P. Verene,
“Introduction.” Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 4: The Metaphysics
of Symbolic Forms (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), xxiii.
2. See P.F. Bundgard, “The Grammar of Aesthetic Intuition: On Ernst Cassirer’s
Concept of Symbolic Form in the Visual Arts.” Synthese, 179(1) (2011): 43–57;
M. Van Vliet (ed.), Ernst Cassirer et l’art comme forme symbolique (Rennes: Presses
universitaires de Rennes, 2010); M. Lauschke, Ästhetik im Zeichen des Menschen:
Die ästhetische Vorgeschichte der Symbolphilosophie Ernst Cassirers und die symbolische
Form der Kunst (Hamburg: Meiner, 2007); B. Recki, “Die Fülle des Lebens: Ernst
Cassirer als Ästhetiker.” In J. Früchtl and M. Moog-Grünewald (eds) Ästhetik in
metaphysikkritischen Zeiten (Hamburg: Meiner, 2007); M. Hinsch, Die kunstäs-
thetische Perspektive in Ernst Cassirers Kunstphilosophie (Würzburg: Königshausen
& Neumann, 2001). See also the somewhat older chapter “Kunst als symbolische
Form” in H. Paetzold, Cassirer zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 1993), 95–104.
Specifically with regard to the unpublished lecture manuscripts from Yale: T.I. Bayer,
“Art as Symbolic Form: Cassirer on the Educational Value of Art.” The Journal of
Aesthetic Education, 40(4) (2006): 51–64. M. Jesinghausen-Lauster, Die Suche nach
der symbolischen Form: Der Kreis um die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg
(Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1985) is still worth reading for Cassirer’s intellectual milieu
at the Bibliothek.
3. E. Panofsky, “Die Perspektive als symbolische Form.” Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg
1924/25 (Leipzig/Berlin: Teubner, 1927[1924]); English translation: Perspective as
Symbolic Form. Trans. C. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
4. W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Pictorial Turn.” In Picture Theory: Essays of Verbal and Visual
Representation (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1994).
5. B. Hub, “Perspektive, Symbol und symbolische Form. Zum Verhältnis Cassirer—
Panofsky.” Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, 47(2) (2010): 146.
6. E. Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Vol. 3 (Darmstadt: WBG, 1929),
235; English translation: The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Trans. R. Mannheim
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), 202.
7. Quoted in Krois’ translation (J.M. Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 50).
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Emmanuel Alloa
8. For Allister Neher, despite some very different terminologies, the two perspec-
tives are ultimately compatible (A. Neher, “How Perspective Could Be a Symbolic
Form.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63(4) (2005): 359–73). Audrey
Rieber talks of a “critical shift” in Panofsky’s use of Cassirer’s notion of symbolic
form: for Panofsky, the “symbolic form” is not so much the expression of an ac-
tivity of the mind but an issue of meaning. Both however ultimately converge,
Rieber argues, in the possibility of interpreting artistic forms as the expression of
a certain worldview (A. Rieber, Art, histoire et signification Un essai d’épistémologie
d’histoire de l’art autour de l’iconologie d’Erwin Panofsky (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012)).
To Maud Hagelstein, Origine et survivance des symboles: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky
(Hildesheim, Zurich and New York: Olms, 2014), 183) “Perspective as symbolic
form” should be read as Panofsky’s most audacious essay, which, although shaky in
its use of Neokantian conceptuality, aims at unravelling the transcendentality of the
work of art, i.e. perspective as the condition of possibility of painting.
9. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 41.
10. Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Teil 3: Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis;
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge.
11. H. Blumenberg, “Ernst Cassirer gedenkend.” In Wirklichkeiten, in denen wir leben:
Aufsätze und eine Rede (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), 165.
12. As quoted in B. Recki, Kultur als Praxis: Eine Einführung in Ernst Cassirers Philosophie
der symbolischen Formen (Berlin: Akademie, 2004), 37.
13. Recki, Kultur als Praxis, 36.
14. This is, for instance, the critical verdict of Gottfried Boehm (Studien zur
Perspektivität: Philosophie und Kunst in der Frühen Neuzeit (Heidelberg: Winter,
1969), 15).
15. E. Panofsky, Herkules am Scheidewege. Leipzig/Berlin: Teubner, 1930).
16. E. Panofsky, “Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der
bildenden Kunst.” Logos, 21 (1932): 103–19. On this topic of the “pre-text” of the
image, see my article “Iconic Turn: A Plea for Three Turns of the Screw” (E. Alloa,
“Iconic Turn: A Plea for Three Turns of the Screw.” Culture, Theory and Critique
(2015): forthcoming). However, within art history, attention was mainly given
to the new, fundamentally reworked English version of the essay, “Iconography
and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art” from 1955
(E. Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of
Renaissance Art.” In Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers In and On Art History (New
York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955)).
17. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 1: 79–80.
18. H. Cohen, “Logik der reinen Erkenntnis.” In H. Holzhey (ed.) Werke, Vol. 6
(Hildesheim: Olms, 1977), 12 (my translation).
19. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 1: 94sqq. and Vol. 2: 60.
20. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 3: 200–1. The same example ap-
pears in the essay of 1927 (E. Cassirer, “Das Symbolproblem und seine Stellung
in der Philosophie.” In E.W. Orth and J.M. Krois (eds) Symbol, Technik, Sprache
(Hamburg: Meiner, 1985[1927]), 5sqq.).
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Could Perspective Ever Be A Symbolic Form? Revisiting Panofsky with Cassirer
21. “Die Frage, was das Seiende an sich, außerhalb dieser Formen der Sichtbarkeit
und der Sichtbarmachung sein und wie es beschaffen sein möge: diese Frage muss
jetzt verstummen” (E. Cassirer, Sprache und Mythos: Ein Beitrag zum Problem der
Götternamen, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg 6 (Leipzig/Berlin: Teubner, 1925),
6; Language and Myth. Trans. S.K. Langer (New York: Dover, 1953), 8).
22. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 3: 202.
23. Ibid., 191.
24. J. Habermas, “Die befreiende Kraft der symbolischen Formgebung.” In Vorträge aus
dem Warburg-Haus, Vol. 1 (Berlin: Akademie, 1997), 10–11.
25. E. Cassirer, The Individual and Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. Trans. Mario
Domandi (New York: Harper & Row, 1963[1927]), 182.
26. “Panofsky has shown that this discovery was made not only in mathematics and
in cosmology but in the plastic arts and in the art theory of the Renaissance as
well; and, in fact, that the theory of perspective anticipated the results of modem
mathematics and cosmology.” (Cassirer, The Individual and Cosmos in Renaissance
Philosophy, 182, footnote).
27. Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York:
Basic Books, 1975), 156.
28. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 2: 32.
29. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 41.
30. M.H. Pirenne, “The Scientific Basis of Leonardo da Vinci’s Theory of Perspective.”
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 3 (1952–3): 170.
31. Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History.
32. G. Vasari, “Life of Masaccio.” In G. Milanesi (ed.) Opere. Florence: Milanesi, 1973),
Vol. 2: 291.
33. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 62.
34. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 72.
35. L. Marin, Opacité de la peinture: Essais sur la représentation au Quattrocento (Paris:
Editions EHESS, 2006).
36. On Masaccio’s Trinity in the context of what the author calls a history of “aper-
spective,” see T. Hensel, “Aperspektive als symbolische Form: Eine Annäherung”
(IMAGE 1: Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Bildforschung. http://bit.ly/1KhYY6L,
2005). A. Perrig, “Masaccios ‘Trinità’ und der Sinn der Zentralperspektive”
(Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 21 (1986): 11–43) is still topical.
37. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 77, note 5.
38. Ibid., 41.
39. Ibid., 71.
40. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 3: 203.
41. Ibid., 158.
42. Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective.
43. Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, 25.
44. Here is the original wording: “The world of the humanities is determined by a
cultural theory of relativity, comparable to that of the physicist” (E. Panofsky, “The
69
Emmanuel Alloa
History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline.” Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York:
Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955[1939]), 7).
45. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 3: 1.
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