Piero's Light

by Larry Witham

  For his own time, Cassirer was struggling to find a way that modern thought could unite both science and culture. This led to his signature philosophy, published as The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923). A new mathematics of “logical relations” had given Cassirer the tools to argue that knowledge was also a form of relations, and thus true knowledge could include symbols of meaning as well as the facts unearthed by scientific investigation.60 Building upon Kant’s categories of the mind, Cassirer said that the mind actually had a wide array of innate forms of knowledge—symbolic forms—indeed, many more than Kant could have imagined. One example for Cassirer was Einstein’s new theory of relativity. Relativity defied normal sense experience. It spoke mathematically and unintuitively of strange time-space “events” in the physical universe rather than the old Newtonian model, with measurable times and places. And yet, Cassirer said, humans understand relativity because it must be a form in the mind. These forms—almost like mental versions of Plato’s Ideas—were able to reconcile scientific and cultural knowledge.61

  Meanwhile, Hamburg University was turning out to be a consequential meeting place for these new approaches to art. It was there that the young art scholar Erwin Panofsky heard Cassirer’s lectures and in time became a university instructor as well.62 Panofsky had begun his research on Albrecht Dürer’s “theory of art.” In this, he was another thinker who opposed Wölfflin, who may have shown that styles do indeed change but didn’t show why. Drawing upon Warburg and Cassirer, and not a little German idealism, Panofsky set out to answer the “why” question. His most powerful tool was Cassirer’s symbolic form. Cassirer crafted it as a psychological model of knowledge, specifically bridging culture and science (for Cassirer wrote only once on the topic of art). Panofsky applied symbolic form expansively to art objects. In his hands, artworks became living entities in themselves, substantial symbolic forms pregnant with all the “intrinsic meanings” of the time in which they were made. Unanticipated even by Panofsky, his use of this approach spread the Warburgian iconological method across the English-speaking world. The claim of Panofsky’s biographer—that he was “arguably the most influential historian of art in the twentieth century”—was barely an exaggeration.63

  For much of the Warburg circle, the rise of National Socialism became a dark, dispersing power. Warburg died in 1929, not seeing the worst to come. While Panofsky’s family still resided in Germany, he was recruited in 1931 to lecture at New York University. During this time, he was offered a permanent American haven and a means to leave Germany, where he soon was dismissed from Hamburg University in 1933 for being Jewish. Thus, Panofsky made his final home at the independent Institute for Advanced Study (also Albert Einstein’s outpost until his death in 1955) in the town of Princeton, New Jersey. On settling in America, his theory of symbolic form began to shape the young field of art history among Americans (although it also has been argued that Wölfflin’s comparative, factual approach dominated the American classroom teaching of art history). The Warburg Library itself spread a similar influence. After attempts were made in Hamburg to ship the vast Library’s holdings to the United States, Holland, or Italy, it was finally solicited by the University of London. Thus was born the Warburg Institute, the voluminous collection of Aby Warburg finding its first crowded home in Thames House and, after the Second World War, joining the University of London.

  With this migration, the unique combination of German thought, often rich with philosophical idealism, began to sow its influence in the institutions of Anglo-American art history. Cassirer taught at Oxford and later in Sweden and the U.S., while the Warburg Institute became a magnet for other talented art historians fleeing Germany.

  Already, in 1925, Panofsky had applied the idea of symbolic form to one of the mainstays of the Renaissance: linear perspective. In this, he posed an indirect challenge to Piero’s claim that it was an objective “science.” The nature of this challenge was plain enough in Panofsky’s title, Perspective as Symbolic Form. Having mastered the life and work of Albrecht Dürer and showing how Dürer had adopted Italian perspective theory, Panofsky argued that perspective was not objective science, but rather a cultural product of the mind. As a symbolic form, it was a system of visual knowledge invented by Western experience. It began with attempts to look through a “window,” and it ended in a cultural propensity of Westerners to seek a single domineering viewpoint. “The Renaissance would interpret the meaning of perspective entirely differently from” other times and places, Panofsky said.64 Perspective was about cultural “meaning,” not about Piero’s true science.

  This undermining of linear perspective as a fact of nature was an early indication of how far the new interpretative art history could go in the hands of Panofsky, iconology, and symbolic form. For Piero, perspective had been a geometrical science of how God allowed humans to see the world in a proper way, free of illusions and misconceptions. With a similar belief in objectivity, modern science saw perspective as a law of optics, much as eyeglasses function on all people’s eyes despite differences of culture or “meaning.” By contrast, symbolic form made perspective a subjective experience.

  Working from the Platonist tradition, Piero and Panofsky had arrived at starkly different conclusions about perspective. For Piero it was objective, given by God and nature, while for Panofsky it was subjective, a product of psychology and culture. As a Christian Platonist, Piero believed that the world, with its laws of nature, basically matched up with the human mind as a matter of how God created all things. Looking for something deeper, non-theistic, and secular perhaps, a psychological Platonist (that is, a Kantian) like Panofsky believed that the mind could overrule the physical world, a more extreme application of the Platonist legacy.

  Following Warburg’s lead, Panofsky would turn connoisseur­ship into a kind of priest­hood in search of the secret forces and forms behind art. He explained this quest in a seminal book, Studies in Iconology (1939). Ordinary art interpretation operates at two normal levels, Panofsky said. It looks first at surface facts and then at the content, which was already the role of traditional iconography. After that, a deeper iconography—namely, iconology—probes at a third level. At this level, art objects are taken to be symbolic forms, organic and living entities that crystallize—through the act of the artist—all the meanings of the world in which the artist had lived.

  Digging at this level requires interpreters to have a power of “synthetic intuition,” which Panofsky describes as “a mental faculty comparable to that of a diagnostician.” With this ability, an iconologist can reveal the true “intrinsic meaning” and “symbolic values” attached to material art objects. This level of interpretation requires a careful and disciplined comparison of all available knowledge, Panofsky says, conceding that the complexity of the process can go awry, even at times seem irrational. Still, synthetic intuition combined with academic research may also discover the hidden “cultural symptoms” of a period. This is a reality so deep that it may be “unknown to the artist himself and may even emphatically differ from what he consciously intended to express.”65

  As part of the Platonist legacy, deep iconology had roots across the history of idealist thought. They can be found in the medieval idea of God-given human imagination and, after that, in Kant’s theory of intuitive categories of the mind. Cassirer modified this into symbolic forms that mediate all human knowledge of reality. In the wake of Kant, this had been called the idealist or “tran­scen­dental” tradition, which even theologians tried to apply to modern religion. Art was its own religion, however. So iconology jettisoned both Plato’s tran­scen­dent Ideas and the mind of God. Symbolic forms now played the ultimate role as mediators of knowledge between humans and reality. To its critics, it was a kind of secular mysticism. Yet in its many guises (it has been called tran­scen­dental, postmodern, semiotic, and more), this post-Kantian approach has been the primary alternative to simple positivism, a brutally “factual” approach to l
ife that has dominated the natural and human sciences and, to an extent, textbook art history.

  Put another way, deep iconology suggested no less than a psychoanalysis of the unconsciousness of art and culture. On the crest of the mid-century Freudian revival in the West (and alongside that, the psychological symbolism of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, too), iconology had a natural appeal. It would inevitably put Piero della Fran­cesca on the couch, so to speak.

  The influence of iconology would begin to reach a peak after the Second World War, a time when some of the first English-language books on Piero began to appear. Interpreting Piero now became a philosophical, if not ideological, topic worthy of debate. To vastly oversimplify, art interpretation was veering in two diametrically opposed directions. One sought deeper meanings in art. The other seized upon the tools of positivist science, quantifying and describing art. The first was often a journey into the human unconscious. The second preferred simple data, whether about economic and political forces or how the physical brain operates. There was no area of art history in which this bifurcation of methods became more aggravated than the Renaissance, drawing Piero inexorably into the maelstrom.66

  The first glimmer of Piero’s involvement appeared in 1951 when a former assistant to Berenson in Florence, the Englishman Kenneth Clark, wrote his book, Piero della Fran­cesca. It was literally the first full treatment of Piero’s art in English in three hundred years. It was also the first presentation of color photographs of works by Piero. But if Berenson celebrated ineloquence, Clark excelled in not only one of the most eloquent surveys of Piero, but perhaps the first one that included a psychological treatment of the artist and the meaning of his works. A gifted writer, Clark ranged over a number of standard findings on Piero, adding a strong measure of traditional art appreciation by his frequent use of the adjective “beautiful.”67 He found Platonism in some of Piero’s imagery. And he took some normal iconographical risks by offering an interpretation of Piero’s enigmatic Flagellation: he said it was Piero’s commentary on the Italian crusade against the Turks (an association that had been made almost forty years earlier by Warburg).

  Riskier still, Clark ventured into Piero’s self-consciousness. He said that Piero had had the mind of a rustic, tied as he was to a farm culture. On the other hand, Piero was also a kind of universalist, tapping into a primal sense of mystery that impressed both the pagans and the Christians of his day. Clark’s example was the Resurrection fresco: “This country god, who rises in the grey light while humanity is still asleep, has been worshipped ever since man first knew that seed is not dead in the winter earth.” On Piero’s Nativity painting, moreover, Clark enthused that:

  No painter has shown more clearly the common foundations, in Mediterranean culture, of Christianity and paganism… . It is a serious antiquity, without either the frenzies of Dionysus or the lighter impulses of the Olympians. Yet it is more profoundly antique. This unquestioning sense of brotherhood, of dignity, of the returning seasons, and of the miraculous, has survived many changes of dogma and organization, and may yet save Western man from the consequences of materialism.68

  Such effusions were common enough in the writings of connoisseurs. After all, Clark was writing for the general public. He would go on to an illustrious career in public education, becoming director of the National Gallery in London, presenting television specials, and writing popular books. Because of Clark’s prominence, it was only a matter of time before someone called his speculations about the meaning of Piero a gambit of “danger” that is “destructive of” proper art history.69 That issuance of a danger signal about Clark was a bit overwrought, because Clark was never in the Panofsky camp; he once commented that iconology often ended up in “metaphysical fantasy” when it interpreted art.70 Clark was nevertheless looking for depth in art appreciation. He was congenial, for instance, to Sigmund Freud’s idea that the identical smile that Leonardo da Vinci put on his female figures, foremost the Mona Lisa, was Leonardo’s unconscious yearning for his mother. In the case of Clark’s interpretation of Piero, at least one contemporary felt that he had gone too far, a reaction that revealed a new and essential division between art historians.

  The danger warning against Clark was issued by Ernst Gombrich, another great art historian in London. As an immigrant, Gombrich liked to refer to himself as a “Viennese from England.” In 1936, he had fled Austria and been given a research appointment at the Warburg Institute in London. Already an expert in Renaissance art, Gombrich’s first assignment was to organize materials on the life of Warburg himself. He would eventually write Warburg’s intellectual biography. Respectful of his elders as a young scholar, Gombrich had begun by imitating Wölfflin. Later he followed Warburg, writing a deep-iconological paper on Botticelli’s Neoplatonism.

  Despite such congenial feelings toward his forebears, Gombrich finally broke with any kind of “ready-made paradigm,” even though such a break could never be complete. Reading Gombrich could at times seem like reading Wölfflin, a positivist in his own right. They both speak of “schemas” and the physical psychology of vision (that is, the “eye”). However, if Wölfflin had adopted a kind of Hegelian march to artistic development in history, Gombrich rejected all such idealist philosophies, and most especially the Germanic Hegel.71 Gombrich finally preferred a diverse scientific approach, revealing a particular interest in psychological science, which had a great deal to say about how the brain operates in visual perceptions.

  Naturally, then, Gombrich used his review of Clark’s book to criticize all attempts to overly mystify or symbolize what could be explained by common sense. No one had written more pleasantly about Piero, Gombrich said of Clark. But Clark was allowing the fad of psycho­analysis to creep into his work. Clark had put Piero on the couch. Doing this is unnecessary, Gombrich said, because the facts of style and history are quite enough to understand why Piero did such paintings. “Seen in its historical setting Piero’s art stands in no need of support from archaic emotions and modern associations,” Gombrich said.72 There is really no “corn god” that Piero is thinking about. He was simply painting a Christian story.

  Gombrich’s main concern was that such a mainstream authority as Clark had gone down the perilously deep iconology road. Intentionally or not, Clark “lends his authority to psychological ideas which may ultimately prove no less destructive of the standards of rational historical criticism” than the wild speculation of less-learned iconologists. There were often limits to knowledge of the past, Gombrich reminded, and these should be quite acceptable: “It may turn out that the records of history are hardly ever sufficient to provide the psychologist with material for his [Clark’s] kind of interpretation.”73 Returning the non-compliment, perhaps, Clark would later write a review of three Gombrich books, and while praising the Austrian’s erudition, ended with a kind of blanket complaint: “sometimes the Warburgian approach seems to obsess him, and is worked out in such detail that we begin to grow a little impatient.”74 Clark was clearly aware that Gombrich was a positivist; but regardless, even positivists could lean Warburgian by hyper-analyzing a work of art to death.

  This sort of exchange was taking place between England’s two unparalleled experts on art, the two reigning voices for public art appreciation. No less than Clark, Gombrich had become an eloquent popularizer of art history. While still in Austria, he had worked on books for children, including an introduction to the story of art. This draft was highly attractive to a publisher in England. So Gombrich revised and completed the book in English, published in 1950 as The Story of Art. It would turn out to be the most widely read art-history text in the world (and in it, Piero was identified as “perhaps the greatest heir of Masaccio”).75 As early as his first draft of The Story of Art, Gombrich hinted at his ultimate life interest, which was to reconcile human perceptions of art with the new developments in biology and scientific theory.

  Going in this direction, Gombrich most starkly represent
ed an opposing trend to deep iconology, which often denied not only science but also the reality of “nature.” Gombrich’s skepticism and positivism were characterized by his frequent agreement with his close friend, the philosopher of science Karl Popper, a hardnosed empiricist who suffered no foolishness about Plato, Freud, or symbols being living entities. Meanwhile, the natural sciences of the twentieth century had begun to say a lot more about art and its origins. There was the Darwinian approach, of course, which explained art as a bright signal of sexual fitness in the struggle for survival (or, alternatively, an accidental side product of evolution, just like music, mathematics, and religious belief).76 And there was the approach of brain science: a soft machine inside the head perceiving the world, finding its shapes and colors quite interesting.

  None of these approaches allowed for a tran­scen­dental quality to art, and such approaches were even skeptical about so-called intuition. What Gombrich found most convincing was something like the Darwinian model, and, indeed, a model used in explaining progress in science as well: this was the model of trial-and-error. Applied to art, progress came by “making and matching”: putting down familiar images, then correcting them to match objects or perceptions, thus producing more excellent or innovative images. Added to that, Gombrich drew on psychological theories of how people develop those familiar images (schema) or expectations (mental sets). These visual and mental habits operate in art appreciation, but they also provide a target for rebellion in art. The net result is that art history is much like the fashion market. Clothing styles rise and fall, some gaining dominance for a period, only to be overthrown by rival designers who want to lead a new trend.77 By this logic, for example, Piero promulgated his geometric pictorialism as a competitor to the older Gothic styles, and in turn, the High Renaissance “mannerists” dismissed Piero as dry—namely, as old-hat—in order to catch the latest wave of fashion.