"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 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 Antique philosophy, theology, science, and optics as well as the history of art, Panofsky produces a type of "archeology" 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 ownmodernity, Panofsky shows, is inseparable from its peculiarly mathematical expression of the concept of the infinite, within a space that is both continuous and homogenous. "Distributed for Zone Books"

Abstract: "In June 2012, an early manuscript by renowned art historian Erwin Panofsky was discovered in a vault in a government building in Munich. The manuscript was quickly identified as Panofsky's habilitationsschrift on Michelangelo, a long-missing and legendary document that certified Panofsky to lead university courses, and about which scholars had speculated for decades. The manuscript's origins date back to late spring of 1920 (and was completed when its author was twenty-eight), but in 1933, Panofsky was forced to flee Nazi Germany without being able to go through his office or papers. The manuscript disappeared in the years leading up to World War II and was thought destroyed in the fire-bombing of Hamburg. Following his emigration to the United States in 1934, Panofsky joined the faculty of the newly-formed Institute for Advanced Study, and went on to author a dozen books, including three with Princeton University Press.