Perspective, Panofsky, and the Philosophy of History

For the things of the past are never viewed in their true perspective or receive their just value; but value and perception change with the individual or the nation that is looking back on its past.

Friedrich Nietzsche ¹

. . . the sign of history is henceforth not so much the real as the intelligible.

Roland Barthes, “The Discourse of History” ²

It is approximately forty years since the publication of Erwin Panofsky’s book Early Netherlandish Painting—a work that can be said to have transformed scholarly thinking about this period and place of artistic production. ³ Not only did Panofsky alter our views about the significance of Netherlandish painting but in doing so his book attracted dozens of scholars into this art historical period. It is fair to say that forty years after the event, we are still under its spell, that it has played the role of a Kuhnian paradigm, dictating the kind of work done in this field down to the present day. ⁴

How do we account for the long-lasting success of Panofsky’s book, for the hold it still has over our imaginations? What theoretical strategies did he use to persuade us of the validity of his claims? What was Panofsky’s conception of history and how do we evaluate his views on this subject today? Finally, how does current thinking in the philosophy of history help us come to terms with the nature of his contribution and how does it affect our own approach to issues of historical interpretation forty years later? It has always intrigued me that Panofsky should have opened his book on early Netherlandish painting, which was published in 1953, with a synopsis of his article “Perspective as Symbolic Form” which appeared in 1925, nearly thirty years earlier (EN 3–20). What is the relevance of a discussion of linear perspective for an artistic tradition that is not exactly identified with the geometric representation of space? Far from being an analysis of the particular illusionistic devices of Flemish painting, it is a lengthy account of the development and use of perspective throughout the history of European art. The account is clearly teleological. The Western tradition of perspective representation is viewed as a kind of Hegelian dialectic in which antithesis follows thesis in order to culminate in synthesis. The moral of his story is that the system of geometric perspective developed in the Renaissance is that which most closely coincided with later theories of space. As a consequence it is to be accorded a privileged place in the history of art. Panofsky, in fact, uses it as the canon by which to evaluate perspective systems of other times and places, including the naturalistic achievements of early Netherlandish painting: “the very weapons with which Jan Van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden were to achieve their victories had been forged in Siena and Florence” (EN 9). The basis on which Netherlandish painting is to be appreciated, the values that ensure it a place in the canon of great art around which the history of art is constructed, is its incorporation or appropriation of the most effective means of representing space illusionistically, the perspective system worked out in Italy during the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The introduction to Early Netherlandish Painting is both anomalous and ironic. Anomalous because it is as if opening a book on the art of the quattrocento, we should encounter an extended discussion of the descriptive qualities, the passion for detail, that is characteristic of Netherlandish painting, and that these values should be proposed as the basis for our appreciation of Italian art. Svetlana Alpers has, of course, already drawn our attention to the Italocentric values that inform Panofsky’s text, pointing out the ways in which they have severely distorted our understanding of Netherlandish art. ⁵ Instead of the active organizing eye implied by geometric perspective, Alpers insisted that Netherlandish painting depended on a passive eye, one on which the world is imprinted or recorded. Rather than address the perceptual theories that lie at the heart of the debate provoked by her analysis...