Figural Philology

Though inspired by a Panofskyan legacy, this book diverges at certain points from Erwin Panofsky's declared objectives, and calls attention to several of aspects that were until now less accentuated in his intellectual reception. Insisting on the importance of iconology as a method for art history and the humanities in general, it shows how examining this promotes a cooperation between the history of art and the history of philosophy. It discusses whether Panofsky's method could be of use for general questions in the epistemology of the historical sciences that examine human works.
Figural Philology also shows that Panofsky shares affinities with twentieth-century romance philology. A reading of Panofsky's work alongside the philological enterprise of Erich Auerbach and several other authors demonstrates that a proper appropriation of the philological impulse can provide a way out of the methodological antimony still hanging between hyper-formalist and hyper-theoretical approaches to the history of art.

Adi Efal is Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Cologne, Germany.

Acknowledgements

1 Philological rationality and the constitution of the history of art
2 Archimedean points: monuments as duration reservoirs
Panofsky's Riegl
Philological imperatives in Riegl's methods
The curse and the blessing in the study of artworks
Art history as Korrektur of monuments
Riegl's Alterswert
Kunstwollen and meaning
Philological reproduction of past realities
3 Forms and figures: two fundamental modes of pictorial production
Forms and figures within the pictorial domain
Figuration in the history of art
The figural situation
Figuration and meaning
Forms and figures
From the plastic to the pictorial
4 Pictorial validities in art and history
Panofsky's Idea and the disclosure of the iconoclastic structure
Ideas between truth and reality in Idea
Auerbach's 'Figura': plasticity and history
?Real and historical': the figural mechanics of validation
Reality, value and truth: two versions of realist argumentation
Iconophilic method
5 Sub figuralitate historiæ
The figure and the reality of the past
Figural and historical meaning
6 Iconological space: Panofsky with Warburg
Panofsky's historical space-time
Simmel's historical time
Warburg's art history and philology
Warburg's philological gaze
Vitalisms and archaism
Iconology and philology
7 The figural synthesis of historical reality in the iconology table
Synthesis
Symbols, ideas and values
From symbolic value to synthetic intuition
Intuition and synthesis
Figural synthesis
8 Philology's recollective habitus: Panofsky with Spitzer, Auerbach and Curtius
The Aristotelian distinction between memory and recollection
Two modes of memory
The role of figures in recollection
Humanism as a recollective activity
Hylomorphist humanism
Figural distinction: a model for the recollective disjunction
Elastic hylomorphism
9 Figural content and the past as a res extensa
Iconoclasm, iconism and the reality of the past
The past reality of a work versus historical meaning
The unseen prototypes of the artwork
Vanishing point and carrying surface: spatialities of historical explication
Past reality of works and the reality of the past
The distance between the reality of the past and the historical reality of a work Nonseen and figured
Conclusion: towards a figural philology
The domain
Historical meaning, past reality, historical reality
Philological production
Figural synthesis
Distinctive realism
Untemporal history
Moderate historicism
Panofsky
Notes
Bibliography
Index