an intellectual construct.
A Neglected Tradition?
Art History as Bildwissenschaft
Horst Bredekamp
1. The Image and the Arts: An Artificial Split
Because the meaning of the German word Bild includes image, picture,
figure, and illustration, the term Bildwissenschaft has no equivalence in the
English language. It seems as if this linguistic difference is deepening an
ongoing distinction between English- and German-speaking art history.
In Austria and Germany the principal elements of the discipline were
created around 1900 and continued to be developed until 1933. After 1970
a major revival of art history as Bildwissenschaft took place in German art
history. Advertisements, photography, nonart mass photography, film,
video, and political iconography became regular subjects. When digital and
netart became feasible, they were almost immediately included within the
history of art.1 Historically, then, two essential points comprise Bildwissen-
schaft: first, art history embraced the whole field of images beyond the visual
arts, and, secondly, it took all of these objects seriously.
In the English-speaking world, though, the proliferation of media has
not been the only complicating factor in reaching a consensus on how Bild-
Critical Inquiry / Spring 2003 419
2. Webpage for Visual Studies, http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/routledge/1472586X.html
3. See Hans Belting, Bild-Anthropologie: Entwu¨ rfe fu¨ r eine Bildwissenschaft (Munich, 2001), p. 15.
4. See ibid., p. 17.
5. See Heinrich Dilly, Kunstgeschichte als Institution: Studien zur Geschichte einer Disziplin
(Frankfurt am Main, 1979), p. 149. The more recent literature is given in Wiebke Ratzeburg,
“Mediendiskussion im 19. Jahrhundert: Wie die Kunstgeschichte ihre wissenschaftliche Grundlage
in der Fotografie fand,” Kritische Berichte 30, no. 1 (2002): 22–39, and Ingeborg Reichle,
“Medienbru¨ che,” Kritische Berichte 30, no. 1 (2002): 40–56.
wissenschaft should be defined. In a very recent advertisement of the journal
Visual Studies, we find the following statement: “The cross-disciplinary and
multi-modal nature of the journal will be reflected by the coverage of an-
thropology, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, visual culture, sym-
bolic interaction, documentary photography . . . , information technology,
visual literacy, visual intelligence and communication studies.”2 Visual stud-
ies therefore is everything that the narrowest definition of art history is not.
This kind of separation of art history and visual studies in the English-
speaking world has been a significant development in Germany and Austria
as well, where similar efforts to establish a Bildwissenschaft by completely ex-
cluding art history have been undertaken. Perhaps because modern scholars
have internalized this development the memory of what Bildwissenschaft
once was is now in danger of being lost. Recently it has been argued that
art history had failed as Bildwissenschaft because it never confronted mod-
ern media; iconology would have become a Bildwissenschaft if Erwin Pa-
nofsky had not encapsulated this method into an analysis of Renaissance
allegory.3 Therefore, following the tradition of the nineteenth century, art
history has been forced to neglect the media arts and deal only with works
of “high” art.4
This argument, which comes from a leading art historian whose name
stands for a very open-minded conceptualization of the discipline, can be
taken as symptomatic. The concept of art history as Bildwissenschaft is ob-
viously the object of a conscious amnesia; one has to reconstruct it and ask
for the reasons for this general oblivion.
2. Bildgeschichte through Photography
Heinrich Dilly argued more than twenty years ago that the rise of aca-
demic art history at German universities in the nineteenth century would
have been impossible without photography.5 It is indeed astonishing how
H o r s t B r e d e k a m p is professor of art history at Humboldt University, Berlin,
is the author of The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine (1995), Thomas
Hobbes’s Visual Strategies (1999), and Sankt Peter in Rom und das Prinzip der
produktiven Zersto¨rung: Bau und Abbau von Bramante bis Bernini (2000).
420 Horst Bredekamp / Art History as Bildwissenschaft
6. See Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848–
1871 (New Haven, Conn., 1994), pp. 274–77, 292, and Dorothea Peters, “‘ . . . die Teilnahme fu¨ r
Kunst im Publikum zu steigern und den Geschmack zu veredeln’: Fotografische
Kunstreproduktionen nach Werken der Berliner Nationalgalerie in der A¨ ra Jordan (1874–1896),”
in Verwandlungen durch Licht: Fotografieren in Museen & Archiven & Bibliotheken, ed.
Landschaftsverband Rheinland und Rundbrief Fotografie (Dresden, 2000), pp. 168, 173.
7. “Die Photographie hat Holzschnitt und Kupferstich theils sekundirt, theils verdra¨ngt, theils
zum Wettkampf herausgefordert, Mittel und Aufgaben der ku¨ nstlerischen Nachscho¨ pfung aber in
das unendliche erweitert, erleichtert, vervollkommnet” (Alfred Woltmann, “Die Photographie im
Dienste der Kunstgeschichte,” Deutsche Jahrbu¨ cher fu¨ r Politik und Literatur 10 [1864]: 355; compare
Elisabeth Ziemer, Heinrich Gustav Hotho, 1802–1873: Ein Berliner Kunsthistoriker, Kunstkritiker, und
Philosoph [Berlin, 1994], p. 199).
8. “Das fotografische Bild eines mikroskopischen Gegenstandes ist unter Umsta¨nden fu¨ r
wichtiger, als diesen selbst” (Robert Koch, “Zur Untersuchung von pathogenen Organismen,”
Mittheilungen aus dem kaiserlichen Gesundheitsamte 1 [1881]: 11; see Thomas Schlich, “Die
Repra¨sentation von Krankheitserregern: Wie Robert Koch Bakterien als Krankheitsursache
dargestellt hat,” in Ra¨ume des Wissens: Repra¨sentation, Codierung, Spur, ed. Hans-Jo¨ rg
Rheinberger, Michael Hagner, and Bettina Wahrig-Schmidt [Berlin, 1997], pp. 165–90).
9. He meant the Photoalbum to be perhaps “wichtiger heute als die gro¨ sten Gallerien von
Originalen” (Herman Grimm, U¨ ber Ku¨ nstler und Kunstwerke [Berlin, 1865], p. 38).
10. “Trotz meiner Abneigung gegen Original-Kunstwerke fand ich die Tizian-Ausstellung sehr
scho¨ n” (Erwin Panofsky, letter to Fritz Saxl, Aug. 1935, Korrespondenz 1910–1968, ed. Dieter
Wuttke, 5 vols. [Wiesbaden, 2001], 1:848).
11. See “Wilhelm Lu¨ bke,” Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: Zweihundert Portra¨ts deutschsprachiger
Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten, ed. Peter Bethhausen et al. (Stuttgart, 1999), p. 249.
early, how enthusiastically, and, at the same time, how self-consciously some
of the leading art historians praised the new medium. In contrast to the
rejection of photography by artists, art critics, and members of their own
discipline,6 these scholars’ work thus constituted a new perspective towards
Bildgeschichte.
Alfred Woltmann, art historian in Karlsruhe, who tried to practice art
history in a scientifically precise fashion and renamed it artscience (Kunst-
wissenschaft), enthusiastically defended photography in 1864: “Photography
has partly assisted, displaced or paragonized woodcut and engraving, but
it has enlarged, facilitated, and improved the tools and aims of artistic rec-
reation infinitely.”7 And, in 1865, nearly twenty years before world famous
scientists like Robert Koch argued that “the photographic picture of a mi-
croscopic object can under certain circumstances be more important than
[the object] itself,”8 Hermann Grimm, who would become the first full pro-
fessor of art history at Berlin University in 1873, called for a collection of art
historical photographs, arguing that these archives could become “today of
higher importance than the greatest galleries of originals.”9 Grimm artic-
ulates here what Erwin Panofsky later called, ironically, the “rejection of
originals,”10 thus naming the basic conflict in art history: that it depends
largely on the autopsy of the original but that it questions it also through
the lens of photographic-founded knowledge. Wilhelm Lu¨ bke, probably the
most popular art historian of the nineteenth century,11 did not even see a
Critical Inquiry / Spring 2003 421
12. “In voller Beseelung” (Wilhelm Lu¨ bke, “Photographien nach Gema¨lden des Louvre:
Herausgegeben von der photographischen Gesellschaft in Berlin,” Kunst-Chronik 5, no. 1 [1869]:
45). Compare Ratzeburg, “Mediendiskussionim 19. Jahrhundert,” p. 33.
13. See Katja Amato, “Skizze und Fotografie bei Jacob Burckhardt,” in Darstellung und
Deutung: Abbilder der Kunstgeschichte, ed. Matthias Bruhn (Weimar, 2000), pp. 47–60.
14. See Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “Das Bild der Objektivita¨t,” in Ordnungen der
Sichtbarkeit: Fotografie in Wissenschaft, Kunst, und Technologie, ed. Peter Geimer (Frankfurt am
Main, 2002), p. 57.
15. See Heinrich Wo¨ lfflin, “Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll,” pts. 1 and 2, Zeitschrift fu¨ r
bildende Kunst 6 and 7, n.s. (1896, 1897): 224–28, 294–97.
16. See Panofsky, “Original und Faksimilereproduktion,” Deutschsprachige Aufsa¨tze, ed. Karen
Michels and Warnke, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1998), 2:1078-90, esp. p. 1088; compare Michael Diers, “Kunst
und Reproduktion: Der Hamburger Faksimilestreit—Zum Wiederabdruck eines unbekannt
gebliebenen Panofsky-Aufsatzes von 1930,” Idea 5 (1986): 125-37, and Anna M. Eifert-Ko¨ rnig,
“‘ . . . und sie wa¨ re dann nicht an der Reproduktion gestorben,’” in Der Photopionier Hermann
Krone: Photographie und Apparatur—Bildkultur und Phototechnik im 19. Jahrhundert, ed.
Wolfgang Hesse and Timm Starl (Marburg, 1998), pp. 267–78.
17. See Reichle, “Medienbru¨ che,” p. 42.
18. See Grimm, Beitra¨ge zur Deutschen Kulturgeshichte (Berlin, 1897), pp. 359–60.
conflict. In 1870 he saw that photography reproduced the breath of artistic
originality as an immediately apprehensible sediment left over from “full
animation.”12 Anton Springer, Germany’s first academic full professor of
art history, defended photography in media-historical terms: as bookprint-
ing put an end only to bad calligraphers, and as calligraphers had forced
bookprinting to become an art, so the manual graphic arts would not be
destroyed by photography; on the contrary, photography would strengthen
their artfulness. Finally, Jakob Burckhardt actually spoke of photography as
a treasure of aura. The danger that great works would disappear and lose
their power would be averted by photography.13
These pioneers of academic art history gave voice to the nineteenth-
century belief in technically aided objectivity,14 but they recognized at the
same time that photography was more than just a duplication of an object.
Instead, they opened up the study of the technological act of reproduction
by analyzing its autonomy. From Wo¨ lfflin’s 1897 critique of photographic
sculpture-reproduction15 one can draw a straight line to Panofsky’s brilliant
1930 essay on the original and the facsimile. Panofsky, after starting with the
confession that facsimile reproductions are neither right nor wrong but
have to be judged in their own stylistic realm, comes to the conclusion that
the eye has to sharpen its capacity to draw distinctions all the more as orig-
inals and reproductions seemingly become identical.16
Also, slide projection, which by 1900 had become standard in academic
art history,17 was not only used as a didactic instrument but as an autopoetic
guide to research. For Grimm the multiplying projection had the same
analytic approach as the microscope. He valued the slide projection over
the naked eye for its higher standard of representation of the artist’s orig-
inality.18 How much Grimm relied on slides to construct art history as Bild-
422 Horst Bredekamp / Art History as Bildwissenschaft
19. See Reichle, “Medienbru¨ che,” p. 50.
20. “Entwicklung des modernen Sehens” (Wo¨ lfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das
Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst [Basel, 1991], p. 23).
21. See Alfred Lichtwark, Die Bedeutung der Amateur-Photographie (Halle, 1894), and Ulrich
Keller, “The Myth of Art Photography: A Sociological Analysis,” History of Photography 8, no. 4
(1984): 252.
22. Quoted in Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon, Film, Typewriter, p. 129. The German reads: “Der
Krieg hat die u¨ berragende Macht von Bild und Film als Aufkla¨ rungs- und Beeinflussungsmittel
gezeigt” (Kittler, Grammophon, Film, Typewriter [Berlin, 1986], p. 197).
wissenschaft can be demonstrated by the fact that he hardly cared for books.
When Heinrich Wo¨ lfflin succeeded Grimm as the chair of art history in
Berlin in 1901, he found 1300 publications, but 15,000 slides.19
Using these slides, Wo¨ lfflin was able to demonstrate and at the same time
reflect upon his bipolar Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe through his mag-
ical style of double projections. By developing his categories from examples
of high art, Wo¨ lfflin meant them to be helpful in understanding the visual
culture of whole epochs in the broadest sense. He never used the term Bild-
geschichte, but he did call art history the “development of modern seeing,”
which is in fact a broader and deeper concept.20
Grimm, Lu¨ bke, Springer, Burckhardt, Wo¨ lfflin, and Panofsky come to-
gether in that they include photographs and slides inside the circle of the
estimation of orginals and that they value projections as research tools of
the highest order. Through the use of a mass of reproductions and slides
they all tried to underline and strengthen the aura of the reproduction and
at the same time increase the number of objects of study to develop new
levels of art historical tools in agreement with statistical methods. In en-
larging the circle of art history’s estimation of reproduction media, they
changed art history profoundly towards Bildwissenschaft.
3. From Photography to Mass Media
Photography was of course not only taken as a subject but also as an
object of research. Alfred Lichtwark, director of the Hamburgian Kunst-
halle, supported both artful and amateurish photography. His proposal to
collect in both directions has been followed by the Hamburg Museum of
Arts and Crafts since 1897.21 Through this concept of embracing not only
artful photography but also daily life snapshots, art history had become a
Bildwissenschaft in the full sense of being dedicated both to the arts and to
nonart images.
During the First World War, films, postcards, posters, and the illus-
trated press created an unparalleled concentration of the visual media; in
1917 the head of the German army, General Ludendorff, ordered 700 cin-
emas to be built along the frontlines, as “the war has demonstrated the
overwhelming power of images and the film as a form of reconnaissance
and influence.”22 In a strange coincidence, in the same year Aby Warburg
Critical Inquiry / Spring 2003 423
23. “Sagte zu ihm: ich sei Bildhistoriker, kein Kunsthistoriker” (Diers, Warburg aus Briefen:
Kommentare zu den Kopierbu¨ chern der Jahre 1905-1918 [Weinheim, 1991], p. 230 n. 142).
24. “‘Bilderpressefeldzu¨ ge’” (Diers, Schlagbilder: Zur politischen Ikonographie der Gegenwart
[Frankfurt am Main, 1997], p. 28; hereafter abbreviated S).
25. “‘Denn ganz abgesehen von dem Stu¨ ck Aufhellung u¨ ber Luther und seine Zeit, ist und
bleibt ohne eine bildgeschichtliche Untersuchung des Monstra-Glaubens die Funktion der
Greuelphantasie im jetzigen Kriege unfaßbar’” (S, p. 29).
26. “Bilder . . . im weitesten Sinn” (Aby Warburg, “Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild
zu Luthers Zeiten,” Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike: Kulturwissenschaftliche Beitra
¨ge zur
Geschichte der europa¨ischen Renaissance, ed. Horst Bredekamp and Diers, 2 vols. [Berlin, 1998], 2:490).
27. “Laboratorium kulturwissenschaftlicher Bildgeschichte” (ibid., 2:535); this is misleadingly
translated in the English version as “laboratory of the iconological science of civilisation” (Warburg,
“Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther,” The Renewal of Pagan
Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt [Los
Angeles, 1999], p. 651).
28. “‘Jeder Tag’ . . . ‘macht mich mehr und mehr zum Bildgeschichtler’” (S, p. 31).
29. See Ulrich Raulff, “Idea Victrix—Warburg und die Briefmarke,” Vortra¨ge aus dem Warburg-
Haus, ed. Wolfgang Kemp et al. (Berlin, 2002), 6:1–36.
30. “Nervo¨ se Auffangsorgane des zeitgeno¨ ssischen inneren und a¨ußeren Lebens” (Ernst
Gombrich, Aby Warburg [Berlin, 1981], p. 355).
31. “Ueber die Kunstwerkgeschichte zur Wissenschaft von der bildhaften Gestaltung” (S, p. 48
n. 34). See Warburg, Der Bilderatlas “Mnemosyne,” ed. Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink (Berlin,
2000); this is the official edition. Georges Didi-Huberman has recently given a new interpretation
of its interaction with the contemporary media and avant-garde; see Georges Didi-Huberman,
L’Image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des fantoˆmes selon Aby Warburg (Paris, 2002).
collected and analyzed the whole Bildmaterial, expanding Lichtwark’s
methodology. It was an almost obsessive trial to take part in the war through
its images. Consequently, Warburg defined himself as a “picture-historian,
but not as an art historian.”23
But the opposition turned into a marriage. In reaction to the propaganda
of the First World War, Warburg worked on the “picture press campaigns”
during the Reformation;24 “the horror-fantasy of the ongoing war will be
inconceivable without a picture-historical analysis of the belief in mon-
sters.”25 In the introduction of his article Warburg argued that art history
could fulfil its responsibility for the arts only by enlarging the field to include
“images in the broadest sense.”26
This article became the founding text not only for political iconography
but also for the history of visual media. Its methodology led to the conception
of art history as a “laboratory of cultural-scientific picture-history.”27 “Each
day,” Warburg wrote again in 1917, “turns me more and more into a his-
torian of the image.”28 Not only Warburg’s snake ritual essay but also, of
course, his typologies of stamps demonstrate the concreteness of his ap-
proach.29 Warburg strongly emphasized the value of a picture beyond the
limits of the arts; they were, for him, the “nervous organs of perception of
the contemporary internal and external life.”30
The Bilderatlas “Mnemosyne” shows the product of Warburg’s concept
of art history as Bildwissenschaft or, as he wrote in 1925–26, “across the work-
of-art-history towards a science of pictorial shape” as its final goal.31 To give
424 Horst Bredekamp / Art History as Bildwissenschaft
32. See Charlotte Schoell-Glass, “Aby Warburg’s Late Comments on Symbol and Ritual,”
Science in Context 12, no. 4 (1999): 621–42.
33. See Kurt Korff, “Die Berliner Illustrirte,” Ullstein: 50 Jahre, 1877-1927 (Berlin, 1927),
pp. 290–92.
34. Warburg, Mnemosyne-Atlas, Begleittexte zur Ausstellung Aby Warburg-Mnemosyne,
Akademie der bildenden Ku¨ nste (Wien, 1993), pl. 79, p. 2.
one example, which has been analysed recently by Charlotte Schoell-Glass:
the last plate compiles scenes of eucharistic sacraments, sacrifices, and self-
sacrifices like the harakiri-sheet on top of the middle column.32 The center
of this stripe is filled by scenes of the concordat between Mussolini and Pope
Pius XI in July 1929, which Warburg witnessed in Rome. He contrasted the
abandonment of the Church’s authority over Rome with the brutish ap-
pearance of the fascists in a confident act of the highest symbolic order.
Especially telling is the presentation of a sheet of the 29 July edition of
the Hamburger Fremdenblatt. An image shows the pope during the proces-
sion. This photograph is juxtaposed with pictures of a Japanese golfer, a
group of other golfers, a golf champion, the mayor, a French harbor com-
mission, a rowing race, a students’ convent, young people departing for
England, a famous swimmer, and two race horses. The craziness of this mix-
ture was a product of a revolution in the daily press that had taken place in
the twenties in Berlin. Images overtook the textual space without any co-
herency, turning each gaze into journals like the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung
into a dadaistic event. The images were chosen less for their sense and more
for their formal aspects.33
Significantly, Warburg did not cut out the photograph of the pope but
pinned up the whole, crazy quilt sheet. He wanted to find a sense even in
what he characterized as a “salad of pictures” (Bildersalat). All the scenes
apart from that of the pope are “self-confident representations of human
excellencies” (selbstzufriedene Schaustellungen menschlicher Vortrefflichkeit),
and the sportsmen are “competing dynamics” (wettstreitende Dynamiker)
in a sphere of “mundane content” (zufriedene Diesseitigkeit). The images
constitute an antagonistic pole in relation to the pope giving up his worldly
reign. But although occupying the most space within the image, the pro-
cession is overlapped by the swimmer, thus overshadowing the “hoc est
corpus meum” through his ostentatious “hoc meum corpus est.” The di-
alectical tension thus turns into a “barbaric lack of style” (barbarischen Stil-
losigkeit).34 As Warburg takes a seemingly banal photograph as seriously as
a fresco by Raphael, he represents the essence of art history as Bildwissen-
schaft, which claimed to invest an unhindered energy in even the seemingly
marginal and worthless.
Critical Inquiry / Spring 2003 425
35. “Kinematographisch scheinwerfern” (Warburg, Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike,
2:478).
36. On Warburg and “the image in motion,” see Philippe-Alaid Michaud, Aby Warburg et
l’image en mouvement (Paris, 1998), p. 79.
37. See Sergey Eisenstein, The Film Sense, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda (1942; London, 1986), p. 148;
Werner Hofmann, “Alles ha¨ ngt mit allem zusammen,” Eisenstein und Deutschland: Texte
Dokumente Briefe, ed. Akademie der Ku¨ nste (Berlin, 1998), p. 205; and Karl Clausberg, “Wiener
Schule—Russischer Formalismus—Prager Strukturalismus: Ein komparatistisches Kapitel
Kunstwissenschaft,” Idea 2 (1983): 152, 174.
38. See Victor Schamoni, “Das Lichtspiel: Mo¨ glichkeiten des absoluten Films” (Ph.D. diss.,
Mu¨ nster, 1926).
39. “Kinos sind unter allem Hund, woru¨ ber alle besseren Menschen sehr unglu¨ cklich sind”
(Panofsky, letter to Dora Panofsky, 14 Oct. 1931, Korrespondenz, 1:401).
40. “‘Kinematographisch zerlegende’ Darstellungsverfahren” (Panofsky, “Albrecht Du¨ rers
rhythmische Kunst,” Deutschsprachige Aufsa¨tze, 1:400).
41. “Durch eine Zerlegung des Bewegungsablaufs in mehrere kinematographisch
aufeinanderfolgende Einzelphasen” (ibid.; see also 1:402, 403 n. 26).
42. Panofsky, letter to Dora Panofsky, 9 Jan. 1932, Korrespondenz, 1:470.
4. Film and Bildwissenschaft
Warburg’s groundbreaking Schifanoja lecture from 1912 ended with the
confession that he had only been able to perform a “cinematographic pro-
jection.”35 It was apparently more than a captatio benevolentiae.36 Franz
Wickhoff ’s analysis of Vienna Genesis from 1895 had attempted already to
project the cinematographic gaze back into the history of art. Sergey Eisen-
stein at least saw Vienna Genesis as a paradigmatic study of running action
and as an essential impulse for the training of his film eyes.37
Victor Schamoni’s 1926 art historical dissertation on “the possibilities of
the absolute film,” which he did with Martin Wackernagel in Mu¨ nster,38 de-
veloped a theory of the film by using similar categories of ornament, move-
ment, and synaesthetics. His central term is rhythm, which he transfers from
architectural structures to film sequences.
But nobody saw more cinematographic rhythms than Panofsky. He was
a film maniac, and the only thing he objected to on his first trip to New
York in 1931 was that “the cinemas are extremely lousy.”39 In a long review
article on Du¨ rer in which he too judged Wikhoff ’s Vienna Genesis to be a
“cinematographic split up,”40 he saw in some of Du¨ rer’s works “cinemat-
ographic” sequences.41 And in a glowing letter from 1932 Panofsky com-
pared Greta Garbo to Du¨ rer; in the silent movies she had developed a style
“which relates to the regular art of acting as graphics to painting.” By lim-
iting herself to silent movies she had established an autonomous style simi-
lar to Du¨ rer’s mastership in copperplate print. But when she talked she
acted, according to Panofsky, like a watercolored etching done by Rem-
brandt.42
The letter sounds as if Panofsky had his book on Du¨ rer already in mind,
426 Horst Bredekamp / Art History as Bildwissenschaft
43. See Panofsky, Das Leben und die Kunst Albrecht Du¨ rers (1943; Munich, 1977), pp. 35–36. See
also Siegfried Kracauer and Erwin Panofsky, Briefwechsel, 1941–1966, ed. Volker Breidecker (Berlin,
1996), p. 204.
44. See Panofsky, Das Leben und die Kunst Albrecht Du¨ rers, p. 281.
45. “Das kommt daher, daß wir beide etwas von den Movies gelernt haben!” (Panofsky, letter
to Kracauer, 23 Dec. 1943, in Panofsky and Kracauer, Briefwechsel, 1941–1966, p. 27).
46. Panofsky, The “Codex Huygens” and Leonardo da Vinci’s Art Theory (London, 1940), pp. 24,
27, 128; see also pp. 29 and 123.
47. Irving Lavin, “Panofskys Humor,” in Panofsky, “Die ideologischen Vorla¨ufer des Rolls-Royce-
Ku¨ hlers” und “Stil und Medium im Film” (Frankfurt, 1993), pp. 9–15; pp. 9–13 gives an inspired
analysis of the new American style of Panofsky’s piece. “On Movies” was the original title of
Panofsky’s “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures.” See Panofsky, Three Essays on Style, ed.
Lavin (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), pp. 91–128; Lavin’s “Panofskys Humor” appears in expanded
form as that collection’s introduction.
48. Sam Hunter, introduction, The Museum of Modern Art, New York: The History and the
Collection (New York, 1984), p. 11.
49. Barr himself proposed as first director Gustav Hartlaub, head of the Kunsthalle in
Mannheim, a specialist in the Renaissance, who at the same time had brought the avant-garde into
the museum, who had created the term Neue Sachlichkeit, and against whom the campaign of
degenerate art was directed for the first time; see Kracauer and Panofsky, Briefwechsel, 1941–1966,
p. 211 n. 531. As Barr remembered, the museum was organized in the first two decades according to
the model of the German Kunstvereine. The Kunstvereine were interested in and open to all levels
and aspects of visual culture; already in 1839 a number of them had arranged exhibitions on
photography; see Ulrich Pohlmann, “‘Harmonie zwischen Kunst und Industrie’: Zur Geschichte
der ersten Photoausstellungen (1839–1868),” in Silber und Salz: Zur Fru¨ hzeit der Photographie im
deutschen Sprachraum 1839-1860 (exhibition catalog, Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle, Cologne, 9 June–
23 July 1989), p. 498.
which he published eleven years later. He compared Du¨ rer’s workshop with
Walt Disney’s atelier,43 and he even analyzed the portraits according to cin-
ematographic categories,44 confirming to his friend Siegfried Kracauer “that
we both learned something from the movies!”45 The same is true of the
Leonardesque Codex Huygens, in which Panofsky saw not only the “kinetic
possibilities” but also the “‘cinematographic’ representation” and the pre-
formation of “the modern cinema.”46
5. “On Movies”
Panofsky’s “On Movies” was published within the same time frame as
these observations.47 With this essay we touch on the unwritten history of
art history as Bildwissenschaft in the U.S.
Alfred Barr, the young, newly designated director of the Museum of
Modern Art in New York, travelled to the Netherlands, the Soviet Union,
and Germany, where he got strongly favorable impressions of the Bauhaus:
“‘A fabulous institution . . . , painting, graphic arts, architecture, the crafts,
typography, theater, cinema, photography, industrial design for mass pro-
duction—all were studied and taught together in a large new modern build-
ing.’”48 This experience, as is well known, became the model of the MOMA
and its founding of the film library in 1935,49 which later would be called the
Critical Inquiry / Spring 2003 427
50. “Ich bin sogar Mitglied des Advisory Committee fu¨ r diese Film-Sammlung, was aber nicht
ausschließt, daß ich mich in ma¨ßigem Umfang immer noch fu¨ r Kunstgeschichte interessiere”
(Panofsky, letter to Saxl, 25 Mar. 1936, Korrespondenz, 1:893).
51. See Walter Benjamin, “L’Oeuvre d’art a` l’e´ poque de sa reproduction me´ canise´ e,” trans.
Pierre Klossowski, Zeitschrift fu¨ r Sozialforschung 5, no. 1 (1936): 40–68.
52. See Rolf Tiedeman and Hermann Schweppenhauser, “Anmerkungen der Herausgeber,” in
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tiedeman and Schweppenhauser, 7 vols. in 14 (Frankfurt am
Main, 1972-1989), 1:3:1029, 1030.
53. See Hugo von Hofmannsthal, letter to Panofsky, 12 Dec. 1927, Korrespondenz, 1:246; see also
Gerhard Scholem, letter to Saxl, 24 May 1928, Korrespondenz, 1:276; Saxl, letter to Scholem, 17 June
1928, Korrespondenz, 1:286; and Panofsky, letter to Saxl, Korrespondenz, 1:289.
54. See Tiedeman and Schweppenhauser, “Anmerkungen der Herausgeber,” 1:3:1050 and
“Anmerkungen der Herausgeber,” Gesammelte Schriften, 7:2:679.
55. Panofsky, Albrecht Du¨ rer, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1943), 1:45.
Vatican of film history. It was strongly supported by Panofsky. In a letter
from early 1936 he declared his lecture “On Movies” a support for MOMA’s
film collection: films “are at least as worthy of being collected as pictures
and books; I even became a member of the Advisory Committee for this
film collection,” which he continued ironically, “does not exclude that on
a minor level I am still interested in art history.”50 Given Panofsky’s enthu-
siasm for film and MOMA’s film library, one understands why in his film
essay he defined cinema as the only relevant art of modernity.
At almost exactly the same time that Panofsky wrote his essay, Walter
Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproduction” was
published in New York in its French version.51 Nobody, as far as I know, has
ever touched on this coincidence nor on the fact that Jay Leyda, a collab-
orator of Eisenstein and the new curator of the MOMA film library, asked
for the German version of Benjamin’s article so he could publish an English
translation under the auspices of the film library. Horkheimer, disgusted by
the article, hindered the plan in full panic, as did Adorno in 1938 when
Meyer Shapiro also asked for the German ur-text.52
There is no direct evidence known, but it seems possible, if not certain,
that Panofsky got to know Benjamin’s text through the MOMA film library.
They knew each other; Benjamin wanted to collaborate with the Warburg
Library in Hamburg, and, although he could not succeed, Panofsky re-
spected his Trauerspiel-book.53 Benjamin maintained his admiration of Pa-
nofsky; when he had to defend his article in June 1935 in Paris, he prepared
himself by rereading Panofsky’s article on perspective.54
The reception of Benjamin’s article was more or less nonexistent before
the sixties; its fame came as a politically correct answer to McLuhan’s Un-
derstanding Media. The only significant reaction, in my view, was Panofsky’s
second, enlarged edition of his “On Movies” in 1947. In this text he strength-
ened everything that Benjamin had denied. Even the slogan of the “magic
of the multiplying arts,”55 which Panofsky had put forward in the Du¨ rer
428 Horst Bredekamp / Art History as Bildwissenschaft
56. Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (third
version), Gesammelte Schriften, 7:1:379 n. 16.
57. See Breidecker, “‘Ferne Na¨he’: Kracauer, Panofsky, und ‘the Warburg tradition,’” in
Kracauer and Panofsky, Briefwechsel, 1941–1966, p. 197.
58. See Bredekamp, “Words, Images, Ellipses,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the
Outside: A Centennial Commemoration of Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), ed. Lavin (Princeton, N.J.,
1995), pp. 363–71.
59. Compare Katerina Duskova’s review of several of Elkins’s works in The Art Bulletin 84
(Mar. 2002): 188.
60. Mitchell attacks the false originality of visual studies as a narrow encapsulation of art. See
W. J. T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,” in Art History, Aethetics, Visual
Studies, ed. Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (Williamstown, Mass., 2002), pp. 231–50.
book, can be seen as an affront to Benjamin’s theses about the loss of aura
through reproduction.
Nevertheless both are united in the long-established media-historical
approach to art history as Bildgeschichte and thus agree that film, like the
visual arts before, has to do with questions of life and death. Benjamin fo-
cuses on “shock,”56 whereas Panofsky nominates four essential elements of
film as folk art: horror, pornography, humor, and a clear-cut moral.57
6. Bildwissenschaft and Visual Studies
Art history as Bildwissenschaft, never excluding seemingly low art objects
from its field of research, has been influential for Claude Le´ vi-Strauss’s
structuralism and Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus theory, to name just two gen-
eral fields of study.58 Of course it was never forgotten in art history; Giulio
Carlo Argan spoke in favor of art historians as Bildhistoriker, which Ernst
Gombrich’s work, reaching from studies of Renaissance iconology to Art
and Illusion, represented in its full sense.
But to come back to the problem mentioned at the beginning of this
essay: although in the English-speaking world there are of course many art
historians like David Freedberg who represent art history as Bildwissen-
schaft, one has the impression that, for example, Barbara Stafford and James
Elkins are perceived not as regular art historians any more, but as heretical
“visual studysists”59 and that W. J. T. Mitchell is seen not as a builder, but
as a burner of bridges.60 This kind of camp thinking is disastrous for both
sides—and for art history on both sides of the Atlantic. The separation of
visual studies from art history and the retreat of the more conservative
members of this discipline onto precious little islands would put an end to
art history as Bildgeschichte. Seen through the lens of, say, 1930, the success
of the turn to the visual in our epoch seems to depend on whether art history
projects its precision of description, its formal and contextual analysis to-
wards all fields of historical Bildwissenschaft or if it turns itself into a splen-
did second archaeology.
