ONE OF THE BEST-SELLING novels of all time, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, told the story of finding a shocking secret message in Leonard da Vinci’s Last Supper fresco in Milan, Italy. This was fiction, of course, but the search for secret codes in historic artwork also has its nonfiction realm.
For a very long time, painters have been presumed to put hidden meanings in their paintings. Take the case of the famous Dutch artist Hans Holbein, who painted at the English court in late 1520s. Holbein painted two portraits and a sketch of Sir Thomas More and his family circle. One scholar argued that one of the family portraits contains eighty symbols that assert King Richard III innocent of killing two rival prince-heirs.
Such inquiries into the deeper meaning of paintings took perhaps their most radical turn in Germany between the two great wars, when the philosophical underpinnings of German Idealism and Kantian “intuition”—the non-rational apprehension of truth—were being dusted off for modern application.
Two pioneers in this were Abby Warburg, a scion of the great German Jewish banking family, and Ernst Cassirer, a modern interpreter of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Warburg, who in Hamburg amassed one of Europe’s largest art libraries, refocused the science of evolution and anthropology onto art, interpreting the passage of deep symbolic meanings in paintings. He hinted that, like Idealism and Kant, symbols had realities beyond human ken.
Cassirer, teaching at the University of Hamburg, asserted that knowledge itself had “symbolic form,” a kind of true knowledge that is more intuitive than rational or empirical. Appropriately, his greatest work was titled The Problem of Knowledge, written at a time when empirical science was being shaken by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.
A Cassirer student was Erwin Panovsky, who would adopt such notions and become one of the most important influences on the conduct of art history.
Panovsky would take the ideas of Warburg and Cassirer to the limit. In one significant work, “Perspective as Symbolic Form,” he argued that the Western “invention” of linear perspective in painting was not a discovery of empirical optical science, but rather a way of seeing born of Western culture. In short, it was a Western symbolic bias (whereas Asian art painted distance and space as flat).
Like many such intellectuals in Germany, Panovsky fled the Nazi Reich, ending up at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in the town of Princeton, New Jersey, an independent think tank where Albert Einstein was also a fellow. Panovsky altered two concepts in art. He elevated the art scholar-connoisseur to a new level, almost like a priesthood, for that expert’s ability to use “synthetic intuition” to discern the deep meaning of an artwork. He called this ability “a mental faculty comparable to that of a diagnostician.”
Next, he rebutted the empirical, or “positivist,” approach to art that was also taking place, especially in England. The positivists saw no secret meaning behind creative acts. They were born of historical facts, material limits, and biography. As a counter to Panovsky’s view of linear perspective as born of culture, for instance, the Austrian-British art historian Ernst Gombrich said that seeing in linear perspective was the same for all human beings. The proof? Corrective eyeglasses worked the same on everyone, East or West.
Nevertheless, Panovsky found a wide audience. Before him, art historians practiced “iconography,” interpreting symbols painters consciously added to their works (as did Holbein, in that case). Panovsky proposed a deeper new level in interpretation called “iconology” (knowledge of images). His 1939 book, Studies in Iconology, became an exemplar of what the profession of art history was soon to be about.
To iconologists, artworks reveal true “intrinsic meaning” and “symbolic values.” To find them, the practitioner must dig through levels of interpretation. The deepest level to be found is, in some way, an intuitive reality that connects all people and all history. At that level, Panovsky said, the hidden “cultural symptoms” of a period of an artist’s work are revealed. Indeed, this reality is so deep that it may be “unknown to the artist himself and may even emphatically differ from what he consciously intended to express.”
What Panovsky called a deep “iconology,” modern thinkers, both art historians and literary scholars, now speak of as postmodernism. The main point is that things like artworks or works of literature should not be taken as face-value products of a particular artist. Rather, such works are carriers of ideas, cultures, and prejudices that artists are not even aware of.
The next step, of course, is to say that the author, in effect, didn’t matter. In this “death of the author” approach, it was everyone else who imbued true meaning to a work. We also have the field of “semiotics,” a kind of iconology for literature that plumbs it’s depths for unconscious truths, regardless of what authors intend.
This new outlook has prevailed in the art history discipline. Art historians, perhaps tired of writing about the size of paintings, who owned them, and paint chemicals, relished the idea of being investigators of deeper meaning.
A mid-century, one art historian had complained that the discipline was “writing more and more about less and less,” mired in minutia. By the new century, the counter trend was postmodernism. Art historians began to find “more and more” hidden meanings in art. The actual painter of the artwork, if revived from the dead, would surely be surprised by what they find.