Erwin panofsky early netherlandish painting

Erwin Panofsky Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, 1953 susie nash Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character has undoubtedly been the most influential study on the art of this period yet written,1 inexorably shaping everything that came after it, whether subsequent scholars followed its methods and arguments or railed against them.

Where Panofsky’s work is neither discussed nor cited (a rarity, since there is hardly a publication on the subject after 1953 that does not refer to it), it was still often a discernible influence and remains a stimulus to investigation or rebuttal.

Although more nuanced and contextualised models for exploring the complex visual strategies of Netherlandish painters have replaced his much debated concept of ‘disguised symbolism’, and a mass of new evidence from technical examination and the investigations of social, economic and