Three Essays On Style

ArtForum, Summer, 1995 by Arthur Coleman Danto

Erwin Panofsky was perhaps the last, and certainly the boldest and most speculative, of the line of great art-historians who used the concept of style as the organizing concept of their investigations. His most famous conjecture was that linear perspective was not merely an optical method of organizing objects in spatial recession, but was a "symbolic form," a mode of representation that was expressed everywhere else in the culture of the period - in its politics, its moral codes, its philosophy, its poetics. Panofsky found similar stylistic resonances between Gothic architecture and the structures of scholastic philosophy, and the assumption was that further resonances in other dimensions of Gothic culture could be identified, as if the identical spirit permeated all aspects of the period.

Panofsky gave the name "iconology" to the study of these cultural wholes, and his work consisted more in the practice than in the analysis of this discipline. There is, for example, very little discussion that I know of in his work of why one period gives way to another, and similarly little concern with the larger implications of symbolic forms as modes of organizing the experience of people living in the same period. A great deal of discussion was fueled by Panofsky's ideas on perspective - as to whether it was a cultural convention, for example, or an optical discovery, an arbitrary way of representing the world or the exact way the world has to be represented if the representation is to be spatially true. There is a similar issue concerning scholastic philosophy: even once we acknowledge the parallels between its way of building arguments and the Gothic way of constructing cathedrals, Panofsky, finally, had little to say about the mechanisms that would explain how architects and philosophers, perhaps unfamiliar with one another's thought, should nonetheless produce works that seemed to satisfy the same general stylistic imperatives. Panofsky's gifts were synoptic and imaginative; he could unite vast amounts of art-historical information into single wholes. His erudition was matched only by his terrific gift in finding exactly the passage or image he needed to reveal an entire structure.

According to editor Irving Lavin, "This volume brings together all but one of the papers devoted to the subject of style written by Erwin Panofsky in English after he moved to America," in 1934. Two of the three essays are fascinating specimens of Panofsky's mind at work, undertaking to map respectively the style of a period and that of a culture construed as continuous through several periods. The latter essay concerns what one might think of as the British spirit, as it expresses itself down the ages in gardens, in architecture, in literature, and in - and this is the iconological rabbit pulled out of the art historian's topper - the familiar Rolls-Royce radiator grille. That grille is an emblem of luxury, as widely and instantly recognized as the classic Coca-Cola bottle. Yet few have paused to consider it iconically.

The Rolls-Royce grille is a composite ornament composed of a set of vertical chromium strips surmounted by a sort of pediment atop which is a "Silver Lady" wearing fluttering garments and poised for flight. The grille appeared in 1905, the height of the Edwardian period; the figure was designed by a member of the Royal Academy in 1911. It took an eye as sensitive to visual analogy as Panofsky's to see the verticals-with-pediment as a kind of temple, with metal strips replacing columns. Temple-plus-Silver Goddess together illustrate a certain "antimony" that for Panofsky defines English taste, whose most characteristic examples he describes as follows: "A severely formal rationalism, tending to look for support to classical antiquity, contrasts but coexists with a highly subjective emotionalism, drawing inspiration from fancy, nature, and the medieval past, which, for want of a better expression, may be described as 'Romantic.' And this antimony of opposite principles - analogous to the fact that social and institutional life in England is more strictly controlled by tradition and convention, yet gives more scope to individual 'eccentricity' than anywhere else - can be observed throughout the history of English art and letters."

Panofsky's effort to define the Baroque style in the previously unpublished "What Is Baroque?" is a good bit less adequate than the virtuoso, somewhat tongue-in-cheek "The Ideological Antecedents of the Rolls-Royce Radiator," which perhaps explains why he did not publish it. To summarize the Baroque by saying that it conveys the idea of "a lordly racket" is a fine flourish but hardly an iconological triumph. And Panofsky's repetition of much the same antimony that had worked so well with the Rolls-Royce radiator - "Baroque means . . . a deliberate reinstatement of classical principles and, at the same time, a reversion to nature, both stylistically and emotionally" - means that he had not gotten to the heart of what differentiates the Baroque from the English style. A great deal more would have to be done, also, to account for why the burning of Giordano Bruno was a Mannerist event while "the release of Campanella by Urban VIII was a Baroque event." The best that can be said is that this is less an essay than a sketch for one, with, of course, some masterly touches.