A German-born art historian who became one of the twentieth century's most influential theorists of visual meaning. –– Trained at Freiburg, Berlin, and Munich, Panofsky taught at Hamburg alongside Aby Warburg and Ernst Cassirer before being dismissed by the Nazi regime in 1933, after which he emigrated to the United States and settled at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is best known for systematizing iconology — a method that read works of art as documents of the symbolic and intellectual culture that produced them — across landmark studies including Studies in Iconology (1939), Early Netherlandish Painting (1953), and Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955). His insistence that paintings could be deciphered like texts shaped art history into a humanistic discipline conversant with philosophy, theology, and literature, and his legacy endures in nearly every contemporary attempt to interpret images as carriers of ideas.
