Dora Panofsky (née Dorothea Mosse, born 24 July 1885 – 16 October 1965) was a German-American

art historian Art history is the study of aesthetic objects and visual expression in historical and stylistic context. Traditionally, the discipline of art history emphasized painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, ceramics and decorative arts; yet today ...

Life

Dorothea Mosse was born in 1885, the daughter of jurist

Albert Mosse Isaac Albert Mosse (1 October 1846 – 31 May 1925) was a German judge and legal scholar. Mosse's importance lies in his work on Japan's Meiji Constitution and his continuation of Litthauer's Comments on the German Commercial Code. Biography M ...

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...

. In 1915 she met the art historian

Erwin Panofsky Erwin Panofsky (March 30, 1892 in Hannover – March 14, 1968 in Princeton, New Jersey) was a German-Jewish art historian, whose academic career was pursued mostly in the U.S. after the rise of the Nazi regime. Panofsky's work represents a hig ...

, eight years her junior, in the Berlin seminar of medievalist

Adolph Goldschmidt Adolph Goldschmidt (15 January 1863 – 5 January 1944) was a Jewish German art historian. He taught at University of Berlin from 1892 to 1903, and University of Halle from 1904 to 1912. Biography He was born on 15 January 1863 in Hamburg, Ge ...

. The couple married in 1916,.Erwin Panofsky: Life, Work, and Legacy
''Institute for Advanced Science''. Accessed 28 March 2020. They had two sons, Hans (1917-1988) and

Wolfgang Wolfgang is a German male given name traditionally popular in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The name is a combination of the Old High German words ''wolf'', meaning "wolf", and ''gang'', meaning "path", "journey", "travel". Besides the regula ...

(1919-2007). In 1934 the family escaped Germany, and in 1940 Dora and Erwin became naturalized US citizens. In 1936 Dora worked with William Heckscher on an index of pathos formulae, though it was "only between 1943 and 1958 that she was able to undertake her own research and publish scientific papers". Erwin Panofsky was nicknamed 'Pan' and 'Pan-Dora' became a nickname for the couple. In 1950 "the couple resolved to accept the epithet as literary fate", and together embarked on a study of

Pandora's box Pandora's box is an artifact in Greek mythology connected with the myth of Pandora in Hesiod's c. 700 B.C. poem ''Works and Days''. Hesiod reported that curiosity led her to open a container left in the care of her husband, thus releasing phys ...

as a mythical symbol. Dora Panofsky, whose life had been restricted by ill health since the mid-1940s, died in October 1965.

Works

* 'Narcissus and Echo, Notes on Poussin's Birth of Bacchus in the Fogg Museum of Art', ''Art Bulletin'', Vol. 3, No. 1 (June 1949), p. 112-20. * (with

) ''Pandora's box: the changing aspects of a mythical symbol''.

Bollingen Series Bollingen is a village (''Kirchdorf'') within the municipality of Rapperswil-Jona in the Swiss canton of St. Gallen. Geography The village is located along the northern shore of the upper Lake Zürich (''Obersee'') between Jona and Schmeriko ...

53. New York: Pantheon Books, 1956. * (with Erwin Panofsky) 'The iconography of the Galerie François Ier at Fontainebleau', ''Gazette des Beaux Arts'', Vol. 2, 1958

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Panofsky, Dorothea Panofsky / Dora 1885 births 1965 deaths German art historians American art historians Women art historians Emigrants from Nazi Germany to the United States