Essais d' iconologie

“NRF” Collection.

Translated from English by Claude HERBETTE and Bernard TEYSSÈDRE.

“Iconology consists, through the analysis of artistic themes, in reconstituting the history of creative imagination. Erwin Panofsky is its most prestigious representative. He founded art history, at a time dominated by psychological, physiological, and aesthetic explanations, or reduced to a rather naive iconographic description, as a science of interpretation.Thus, he particularly endeavors to trace the metamorphoses of ancient traditions: time, love, death, or the genesis of the world. These are all strange and learned mini-odysseys, whose episodes consist of fusions and confusions of concepts and images, misunderstandings, omissions, resurrections, and renaissances of all kinds. And suddenly, the enigma of a work is resolved: artistic chemistry has given the theme a new meaning. Renaissance humanism occupies such a prominent place in Panofsky's work precisely because, in its pursuit of all "returns to sources," it was the agent par excellence of these crystallizations.A luminous exposition of the Neoplatonic system shows how much, in this doctrine of humanist "resurrections," everything confirms the predominance of image-based thought over discursive thought; the material world itself is merely an image, it calls, so to speak, for an iconology that would provide access to its meaning.”