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History of Art, Reason 113conjunction—although itself historical—had for Panofsky a kind oftimeless value, ultimately the value of an ideal program for history: ifVasari is Kantian and if Kant is a humanist, if humanism reinventshistory ...then history, the history of art, will be humanist in itsvery structure. Which clarifies the title of the essay whose first linesconsist of the anecdote about Kant: ‘‘The History of Art Is a HumanisticDiscipline’’ 77 —not content with its having been; for it was thusfrom its origin, in accordance with its Kantian ends.So in Panofsky’s account, the ‘‘history of art as a humanistic discipline,’’after having designated a historical moment (the Renaissanceversus the Middle Ages), after having provided a dialectical momentof the exposition (the ‘‘humanities’’ versus the natural sciences), proceedsto become the center and synthesis of an argument as historicalas it is dialectical: implicitly, the Renaissance will become law forother periods of history, and humanist knowledge will itself becomethat organic situation henceforth assimilable, for the reader, to an absolutemodel of knowledge. Initially, Panofsky opposed the natural sciences,capable of analyzing their objects of knowledge withoutsubjectivism, to the situation of the historian (or the humanist), who‘‘dealing as he does with human actions and creations, has to engagein a mental process of a synthetic and subjective character: he hasmentally to re-enact the actions and to re-create the creations.’’ 78 Butfrom that point forward the ‘‘Kantian tone’’ proceeds to demonstrateits efficacy, its magical powers of conversion: an exposition of (subjective)limits becomes within a few sentences the exposition of a selflegitimizingcertainty.First, what was ‘‘limit’’ becomes existence, and the only one possiblefor the art object: ‘‘It is in fact by this process that the real objectsof the humanities come into being.’’ 79 Whatever the mind synthesizesand recreates, then, is—voilà!—certain to exist. Second, the analyticfaculty, at first distinct from the historical domain and providing thecriterion of difference from that of the natural sciences, proceeds toreappear in the humanities through what Panofsky calls—withoutreally justifying it—‘‘rational archeological analysis.’’ 80 Is it becausearcheology works with concrete objects (shards, fragments, pillagedtombs) that it is capable of analysis? Panofsky admits that the ‘‘mate-