Page - 267 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

HOW GOMBRICH WILL BE REMEMBERED 267 fact that artists used a limited range of gestures for the expression of emotion, many of which had their origins in the art of classical antiquity. This idea had something in common with the theories of Gombrich’s teacher Emanuel Loewy on an- cient art, which were in turn applied to medieval art by Schlosser. Gombrich drew on this notion in another book he was working on at the same period as his study of Warburg. This was an introduction to iconography, intended primarily for students, which he was asked to write with Otto Kurz by Tom Boase, the Director of the Courtauld In- stitute. It was begun around 1938, but was put aside during the war, although Gombrich was still working on it in 1941. The manuscript is pre- served at the Warburg Institute. Kurz wrote the section on religious iconography, which is more or less finished, while Gombrich was responsible for the part on non-religious iconography, much of which survives. Each section had its own introduction. Both authors were aware of Panofsky’s discus- sions of iconography in his 1932 article in Logos and in Studies in Iconology, published in 1939, but, as one might expect, their own approach was much more pragmatic and less systematic.2 Kurz stressed that the study of iconography “ap- plies only to periods when tradition is a powerful force and when art is governed by patterns and by definite types”, referring to Loewy in connec- tion with the fact that artists used only a limited number of visual formulae, which had great per- sistence. He explained that: “The knowledge of the particular atmosphere in which the artist and his employers lived is the essential condition for any attempt at in- terpretation, as it is the only test for the prob- ability of the interpretation when made. Our only sure guide is the texts that were read and the reference books that were consulted, the sermons that were preached or the discus- sions that took place, at the time at which the work of art was created.” Kurz then qualified this with the statement that iconography was not just the investigation of the literary content of works of art, something which would reduce it to “being no more than an odd corner of literary history”. “Instead,” he stressed, “it has to investigate the interrelation of pictorial types and their significance”, this last phrase be- ing quoted from Panofsky’s article in Logos. Most of Gombrich’s section consisted of a wide-ranging survey of the different categories of non-religious art: allegory, mythology, history, exempla, and so on. The focus was on the typical, not the exceptional. As Gombrich put it: “The notion that Iconography, and especially secular iconography, is primarily a kind of technique of how to identify unknown subjects does much to confuse the issues and to blur the importance of iconographical knowledge. The works of art whose subject is completely unknown to us are after all so scarce that it seemed justifiable to leave them to the care of the few scholars who enjoy the solving of learned picture puzzles. But if we treat Iconography as the history of subject matters in art its importance is bound to rise considerably. For whatever our opinion about the illustrative function of art may be, there can be no possible doubt as to the importance which the past used to attach to it.” In his introduction Gombrich adopted a broader approach than Kurz, one that was clearly at odds with the argument outlined by Panof- sky in his introduction to Studies in Iconology, with its now famous distinction between pre- iconographical description and iconographical 2 E. Panofsky, Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst, in: Logos, XXI, 1932, pp. 103–119; idem, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, New York, 1939, pp. 3–17.