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History of Art, Reason 101each ‘‘higher’’ level conditions in advance the status of the ‘‘lower’’level:From the preceding, it follows that the simple description ofa work of art (to revise our terminology: the discovery ofmere phenomenal meaning) is in truth already an interpretationtrafficking in the history of forms, or at least implicitlycomprises [such an interpretation] [dass schon die primitive Deskriptioneines kunstwerks (um unsern Terminus zu wiederholen:die Aufdeckung des blossen Phänomensinns) in Wahrheit eine gestaltungsgeschichtlicheInterpretation ist, oder zum mindesten impliziteinschliesst]. 41So goes, in 1932, the critical movement that Panofsky proposed tothe history of art. An insistent, magisterial, disquieting movement. Amovement that is relayed and shifts the problem from place to place:every visible form already carries the ‘‘presentation-content’’ of an objector an event; every visible object or phenomenon already carriesits interpretive consequences. And interpretation? What does it consistof ? What is it going to carry or what does it already carry withinitself ? It is not irrelevant that Panofsky, when answering this questionin the final section of his text, had to appeal, not directly to Kant, butto a Heiddeggerian concept of interpretation drawn from the famousbook Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, published three years earlier:In Heidegger’s book on Kant, there are some remarkablesentences about the nature of interpretation, sentences thatat first glance seem to concern only the interpretation ofwritten philosophical texts, but that ultimately characterizevery well the general problem of interpretation. ‘‘If an interpretation[Interpretation],’’ writes Heidegger, ‘‘merely givesback what Kant has said expressly, then from the outset it isnot a laying-out [Auslegung], insofar as the task of a layingoutremains framed as the making visible in its own right ofwhat Kant had brought to light in his ground-laying over and