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History of Art, Reason 115‘naive’ beholder differs from the art historian in that the latter is consciousof the situation.’’ And he immediately adds: ‘‘He knows.’’ 82 Forit stands to reason that there is no science without consciousness. Theproblem—the sophism—then becomes: If consciousness creates thevery existence of its scientific object, and if the history of art is a ‘‘scienceof the humanities,’’ then works of art will accept, in themselves,nothing but consciousness. They are like objects of consciousness, in allsenses ascribable to the genitive ‘‘of.’’ So the natural consequence ofthe ‘‘Kantian tone’’ adopted by the history of art is, then, abruptly,that the unconscious does not exist in it.Before going deeper into this crucial consequence, before interrogatingit again from another angle, we must duly note the most obviousmeaning that this absolute of consciousness assumes in Panofsky’svery text. This ‘‘science with conscience* is, needless to say, a matterof the soul, even of ethics. The pages under discussion were publishedin 1940 by an exile: which gives his praise of humanism, of the vitacontemplativa and the values that flourished in the Italian Renaissancespecific overtones. It is readily understandable that Panofsky shouldhave wanted to include in his gnosological project that of a recoveryof knowledge—recovered precisely along the bias of humanist history.So four centuries after Vasari, he again took up the torch of the idealman, at the very moment all of Europe was being consumed by theflames of what Panofsky calls a ‘‘satanocracy,’’ and he clarifies: a‘‘Middle Ages in reverse’’ . . . But against the destruction he invokesHistory, as if what had been took on in memory a stronger consistencythan all the ruined presents. Thus, against the ‘‘dictates of the subhuman,’’against death itself, there is the immortality of humanism.The torch of Vasari’s eterna fama becomes in Panofsky the quite otherwisetragic image of the Promethean fire surviving its tortured inventor:If the anthropocentric civilization of the Renaissance isheaded, as it seems to be, for a ‘‘Middle Ages in reverse’’—a*science avec conscience, the same phrase rendered in the previous paragraph as ‘‘sciencewith consciousness’’; wordplay enabled by the bivalence of conscience in French (consciousness/conscience),which informs the discussion that follows.