page_title: Erwin Panofsky
section_title: Three strata of subject matter or meaning
hierarchical_section_title: Erwin Panofsky / Iconology / Three strata of subject matter or meaning
context_page_description: Erwin Panofsky was a German-Jewish art historian, whose academic career was pursued mostly in the U.S. after the rise of the Nazi regime.
  Panofsky's work represents a high point in the modern academic study of iconography, which he used in hugely influential works like his "little book" Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art and his masterpiece, Early Netherlandish Painting.
  Many of his works are still in print, including Studies in Iconology: Humanist Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, Meaning in the Visual Arts, and his 1943 study The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer. Panofsky's ideas were also highly influential in intellectual history in general, particularly in his use of historical ideas to interpret artworks and vice versa.
context_section_description: In Studies in Iconology Panofsky details his idea of three levels of art-historical understanding  :
  Primary or natural subject matter: The most basic level of understanding, this stratum consists of perception of the work's pure form.  Take, for example, a painting of the Last Supper.  If we stopped at this first stratum, such a picture could only be perceived as a painting of 13 men seated at a table.  This first level is the most basic understanding of a work, devoid of any added cultural knowledge.
  Secondary or conventional subject matter (iconography): This stratum goes a step further and brings to the equation cultural and iconographic knowledge.  For example, a Western viewer would understand that the painting of 13 men around a table would represent the Last Supper.  Similarly, a representation of a haloed man with a lion could be interpreted as a depiction of St. Mark.
  Tertiary or intrinsic meaning or content (iconology): This level takes into account personal, technical, and cultural history into the understanding of a work.  It looks at art not as an isolated incident, but as the product of a historical environment.  Working in this stratum, the art historian can ask questions like “why did the artist choose to represent The Last Supper in this way?”  or “Why was St. Mark such an important saint to the patron of this work?”  Essentially, this last stratum is a synthesis; it is the art historian asking "what does it all mean?"
  For Panofsky, it was important to consider all three strata as one examines Renaissance art. Irving Lavin says  "it was this insistence on, and search for, meaning — especially in places where no one suspected there was any — that led Panofsky to understand art, as no previous historian had, as an intellectual endeavor on a par with the traditional liberal arts."
caption: Panofsky made important contributions to the study of iconography, including his interpretation of Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait (1434, pictured).
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