Erwin Panofsky explicitly states that the first half of the opening chapter of Studies in Iconology— his landmark American publication of 1939 — contains ‘the revised content of a methodological article published by the writer in 1932’, which is now translated for the first time in this issue of Critical Inquiry.1 That article, published in the philosophical journal Logos, is among his most important works. First, it marks the apogee of his series of philosophically reflective essays on how to do art history,2 that reach back, via a couple of major pieces on Alois Riegl, to the 1915 essay on Heinrich Wolfflin.3 Under the influence of his colleague at Hamburg Ernst Cassirer, the principal interpreter of Kant in the 1920s, Panofsky from 1915