Erwin Panofsky - Biography

Biography

Erwin Panofsky was born in Hannover, Germany. He studied at the universities of Berlin, Munich, and Freiburg, receiving his Ph.D. in 1914 from the University of Freiburg. His academic career in art history took him to the universities of Berlin, Munich, and finally to Hamburg, where he taught from 1920 to 1933. It was during this period when his first major writings on art history began to appear. A significant early work was Idea: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunstheorie (1924; translated into English as Idea: A Concept in Art Theory).

Panofsky first came to the United States in 1931 to teach at New York University. Although initially allowed to spend alternate terms in Hamburg and New York, after the Nazis came to power in Germany his appointment in Hamburg was terminated, and he remained permanently in the United States with his wife, Dorothea (Dora) Mosse. By 1934 he was teaching concurrently at New York University and Princeton University. In 1935, he was invited to join the faculty of the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Panofsky was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy and a number of other national academies. In 1962 he received the Haskins Medal of The Medieval Academy of America. In 1947–1948 Panofsky was the Charles Eliot Norton professor at Harvard University.

Panofsky became particularly well known for his studies of symbols and iconography within works of art. First in a 1934 article, then in his Early Netherlandish Painting, Panofsky was the first to interpret Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait (1434) as not only a depiction of a wedding ceremony, but also a visual contract testifying to the act of marriage. Panofsky identifies a plethora of hidden symbols that all point to the sacrament of marriage. In recent years, this conclusion has been challenged, but Panofsky's work with what he called "hidden" or "disguised" symbolism is still very much influential in the study and understanding of Northern Renaissance art.

Panofsky was known to be friends with physicists Wolfgang Pauli and Albert Einstein. His son, Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, became a renowned physicist who specialized in particle accelerators. His other son was a meteorologist. As Wolfgang Panofsky related, his father used to call his sons "meine beiden Klempner" ("my two plumbers"), which revealed the usual attitude of the German elite educated in the humanities, who looked down upon those trained in the sciences.