Is it possible to compose a history of images? It is obvious that history can be composed only from that which is intrinsically historical; history has an order of its own because it interprets and clarifies an order which already exists in the facts. But is there an order in the birth, multiplication, combination, dissolution and re-synthesis of images? Mannerism had discredited or demystified form with its pretense of reproducing an order which does not exist in reality. But is the world of existence, like the world of images, chaos or cosmos? Erwin Panofsky's' great merit consists in having understood that, in spite of its confused appearance, the world of images is an ordered world and that it is possible to do the history of art as the history of images. In order to do this, he had to begin, as indeed he did, with the demonstration that classical art, in spite of the deep-rooted theoretical certitude, is also an art of the image; its forms are nothing if not images to which one tries to attribute the consistency of concepts, with the sole result of demonstrating that even concepts are images and that the intellect is still another sector or segment of the image. Warburg and his circle in Hamburg, in which Panofsky first began to develop his ideas, had already demonstrated with patient philological research that the artistic culture of the Renaissance lives by the legacy of images received from classical antiquity. It lives, in other words, by his-