As an epilogue to "Über die vier Meister von Reims," a study attempting to assert a new chronology for the four master builders of the cathedral at Reims published in 1927 in the Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Erwin Panofsky wrote a short theoretical text on the problem of historical time. These theoretical reflections were reprinted as "Zum Problem der historischen Zeit" in a collection of Panofsky's German essays of the nineteen-tens and twenties published in 1980.¹ More recently the entire study has been reprinted as part of a new collection containing all of Panofsky's German writings.² These theoretical reflections were never meant to stand alone and are actually an epilogue to the appendix in which he addresses the chronology of the sculpture adorning the cathedral. Panofsky developed this chronology in the process of trying to reconstruct the building history because he found it necessary to use the stylistic attributes of the sculpture and sculptural decoration and their position on the building to determine when certain architectural elements were put in place. In attempting to connect the stylistic development of the sculpture to the building history, Panofsky discovered that there were limitations to applying stylistic change in establishing chronology because the presence of disparate styles in the same period of time seemed to contradict the possibility of drawing parallels between stylistic and historical developments.

This study was written at a time when Panofsky was working through the theoretical issues that would underlie the art historical methodology he would later develop in the United States after leaving Germany in 1933. For this reason, it should be read in conjunction with his important essays "Der Begriff des Kunstwollens," "Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst," and "Die Perspektive als symbolische Form," in which Panofsky was coming to terms with the theories of his contemporaries Alois Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin, and Ernst Cassirer, respectively. These essays, all published before 1927, focused on the anatomy of the art object as reflected in the problem of stylistic change and the problem of meaning per se.³ In considering the problem of historical time, Panofsky shifted his attention by looking at how stylistic divergences seem to contradict and make impossible the placement of works of art into a diachronic series, whereby his subject became the problem of history itself. By bringing together ideas about historical temporality from Georg Simmel's 1916 essay "Das Problem der historischen Zeit" with Cassirer's neo-Kantian emphasis on both time and space as the "pillars" upon which cognition and knowledge stand,⁴ Panofsky outlined the process by which it is possible to connect the cultural order and the natural order through the symbolic form of historical time.

While Panofsky's study of the chronology at Reims, which was based upon the misconception that the no longer extant labyrinth held the key to understanding the building history of the cathedral, is outdated and of interest primarily to the specialist in the historiography of medieval art history,⁵ his observations on historical time are relevant in attempting to reconstruct the genesis of Panofsky's art historical methodology. The most significant ideas articulated in the reflections on historical time are related to the discussion of periods and their validity, a theme Panofsky develops more fully in Renaissance and Renascences,⁶ as well as the attempt to reconcile the polarization of knowledge between the Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences) and the Geisteswissenschaften (cultural sciences or humanities), making possible a greater understanding of human culture, which is one of the central points of "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline." The importance of this enterprise is frequently discussed in the literature and is fundamentally related to Panofsky's neo-Kantian roots.⁷ In addition to outlining these larger themes, it is in a footnote to the text on historical time that he first draws the connection between the connoisseur and the art historian, both of whom, according to Panofsky, are engaged in an organic process of understanding whereby the diagnosis and the identification of symptoms take place all at once. While he does not cite the earlier essay in "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline," the passage in the later work bears a strong resemblance to the text of the second footnote. ⁸ There are aspects of the text, moreover—such as the discussion of primary and secondary orders in relation to natural and historical time—that seem to anticipate the distinction between primary and secondary subject matter so central to Panofsky's iconological method as outlined in "Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art."⁹

—Johanna Bauman

In the preceding text, the author has dared to propose a provisional and in many cases emendable grouping of the most important sculptures at Reims. Such an undertaking arose out of the realization that attempting to reevaluate the succession of architects at Reims also required taking a position on the problem of the sculpture. (It is, however, up to more qualified scholars to rectify any erroneous claims and, especially, to explore more closely the relationship of Reims to Amiens, as well as the possible relationship of Reims to Chartres.)¹⁰

Nevertheless, the author has not lost sight of the difficulty of this task, especially because of the singular way in which observing the sculptures at Reims engenders an image of an unending, polychrome web, within which the most diverging threads become intertwined, running now beside each other and now in opposite directions. These individual stylistic directions (their marked differences in quality notwithstanding, which would seem to prohibit proposing a coherent, linear evolution) do not merely progress in parallel, indifferent to any interconnections; rather they penetrate one another and, not only that, they return again and again. Reims can be viewed from the standpoint of the problem of generations or—more to the point—from the standpoint of what may be called the problem of historical time because the problem of generations is really just a specific instance of historical time, and not even the most important one at that. In fact, this problem appears pressing enough here that we may be justified not only in coming to terms with Reims under the aspect of the problem of historical time but, conversely, in coming to terms with the problem of historical time under the aspect of Reims. In the course of fewer than three human lifetimes, an impressive number of sculptural works were created here: within the confines of a single stonemason's lodge, under the direction of masters who, it must be assumed, were vested with unlimited authority; in the course of a fairly short and nearly uninterrupted building activity; and in the middle of an artistic movement whose impetus came not from the outside but rather—if such a thing is possible—emerged spontaneously. One may ask whether it makes any sense at all to assimilate art historical observations into a temporal course of events, given the circumstances in which contemporary works are stylistically so disparate that they appear to have been created at different times. It is self-evident, after all (and from the outset serves as a warning not to renounce too hastily the conception of simultaneity on principle), that the conception of historical simultaneity would require relinquishing its correlative counterpart, historical dissimultaneity, whereby the idea that there is a relationship between time and history would prove to be impractical, not to mention completely illogical.

1.See Erwin Panofsky, "Zum Problem der historischen Zeit," Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed. Hariolf Oberer and Egon Verheyen (Berlin, 1985), pp. 77–83.
2. See Panofsky, "Über die Reihenfolge der vier Meister von Reims," Deutschsprachige Aufsätze, ed. Karen Michels and Martin Warnke, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1998), 2:100–40.
3. These early essays have been variously studied and translated; see Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984); Sylvia Feretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History, trans. Richard Pierce (New Haven, Conn., 1989); and Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York, 1991) and "The Concept of Artistic Volition," trans. Kenneth J. Northcott and Joel Snyder, Critical Inquiry 8 (Autumn 1981): 17–33.
4. See Ernst Cassirer, "Mythischer, ästhetischer und theoretischer Raum," in Symbol, Technik, Sprache, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth and John Michael Krois (Hamburg, 1985), p. 93: "Raum und Zeit nehmen schon, wenn man sie lediglich als Objekte der Erkenntnis faßt, eine besondere und ausgezeichnete Stellung ein: sie bilden innerhalb des architektonischen Baues der Erkenntnis die beiden Grundpfeiler, die das Ganze tragen und das Ganze zusammenhalten." See also Georg Simmel, "Das Problem der historischen Zeit" (1916), Brücke und Tür: Essays des Philosophen zur Geschichte, Religion, Kunst, und Gesellschaft, ed. Michael Landmann (Stuttgart, 1957), pp. 3–31.
5. See Peter Kurmann, La Façade de la cathédrale de Reims: Architecture et sculpture des portails: Étude archéologique et stylistique, 2 vols. (Paris, 1987), pp. 26–30.
6. Panofsky even cites his earlier text in Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York, 1972), p. 3 n. 2.
7. See Panofsky, "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline," Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955; Chicago, 1982), p. 7 n. 6; originally published in The Meaning of the Humanities, ed. Theodore Meyer Greene (Princeton, N.J., 1938); for a discussion of the importance of this reconciliation, see Feretti, Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg, pp. 213–20, and Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, pp. 142–47. In a related essay, Edgar Wind effects a formal comparison between the methodologies of history and the natural sciences, leading him to conclude that both are objects of human knowledge and experience. Betraying his hermeneutic roots, Wind declares that both history and science are determined by the observing subject, whose intervention contributes to the final interpretation of data. The implication of Wind's essay is that developments in physics by such thinkers as Einstein and Heisenberg represent the sciences owning up to the fact that it is they who should aspire to be like the humanities and not the other way around. See Edgar Wind, "Some Points of Contact between History and the Natural Sciences," in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. Raymond Klibansky (New York, 1963), pp. 255–64.
8. See Panofsky, "The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline," pp. 18–19.
9. See Panofsky, "Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art," Meaning in the Visual Arts, pp. 28–29; originally published in Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York, 1939).
10. One might also want to approach the questions already posed elsewhere, if perhaps the style of the Strassburg ecclesiastical workshop was not only influenced by Chartres but may also have been influenced by Reims.