Perspective as Symbolic Form - Hardcover

Panofsky, Erwin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0942299523 ISBN 13: 9780942299526

Publisher: MIT Press, 1992

Synopsis

Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form is one of the great works of modern intellectual history, the legendary text that has dominated all art-historical and philosophical discussions on the topic of perspective in this century. Finally available in English, this unrivaled example of Panofsky’s early method places him within broader developments in theories of knowledge and cultural change.

Here, drawing on a massive body of learning that ranges over ancient philosophy, theology, science, and optics as well as the history of art, Panofsky produces a type of “archaeology” of Western representation that far surpasses the usual scope of art historical studies.

Perspective in Panofsky’s hands becomes a central component of a Western “will to form,” the expression of a schema linking the social, cognitive, psychological, and especially technical practices of a given culture into harmonious and integrated wholes. He demonstrates how the perceptual schema of each historical culture or epoch is unique and how each gives rise to a different but equally full vision of the world.

Panofsky articulates these distinct spatial systems, explicating their particular coherence and compatibility with the modes of knowledge, belief, and exchange that characterized the cultures in which they arose. Our own modernity, Panofsky shows, is inseparable from its peculiarly mathematical expression of the concept of the infinite, within a space that is both continuous and homogenous.

About this title

Review

" Here at last is a published translation of this classic essay, available for many years in every major European language except English. It first appeared in 1927 ... and its status has since been established by the numerous commentators who have referred to it as the source of a new kind of interpretation of perspective." -- Robin Evans, AA Files & quot; Here at last is a published translation of this classic essay, available for many years in every major European language except English. It first appeared in 1927 ... and its status has since been established by the numerous commentators who have referred to it as the source of a new kind of interpretation of perspective.& quot; -- Robin Evans, AA Files "Here at last is a published translation of this classic essay, available for many years in every major European language except English. It first appeared in 1927 ... and its status has since been established by the numerous commentators who have referred to it as the source of a new kind of interpretation of perspective."-- Robin Evans, "AA Files"

About the Author

Christopher S. Wood is Professor in the Department of History of Art, Yale University. He is the author of Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape, and the editor of The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (Zone Books, 2000).

Edition details

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0942299523
• ISBN 13: 9780942299526
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 198