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118 Confronting Imagesately closing off ‘‘the relation of the soul to the world of the eye,’’ bytracing the loop of an art where the intellect imitates itself and conformsto itself, Panofsky founded with Kant a gnosological notion ofart, in which the verb to see is conjugated in a finally transparent waywith the verb to know. The practical resonance still retained by theterm imitation could henceforth be encompassed and subsumed bythat of iconology—second magic word (even if it works), second totemnotion.It tells us that art images imitate the invisible as much as thevisible. It tells us that the sensible ‘‘forms’’ of painting, sculpture, andarchitecture are made to translate those, invisible, of concepts or ideasthat reason ‘‘forms.’’Panofsky, as we know, definitively associated his name with thegreat discipline of iconology. 87 He enshrined it in the title of his famousStudies in Iconology, although in the 1939 edition it is primarily aquestion of ‘‘iconographical interpretation in a deeper sense.’’ 88 Theprogrammatic argument of ‘‘Iconography and Iconology’’ dates from1955, and only then is the suffix ‘‘-logy’’ properly justified: with‘‘logos,’’ Panofsky says in gist, we have absolute reason, whereas thesuffix ‘‘-graphy’’ ‘‘implies a purely descriptive . . . method of procedure.’’89 In short, the term ‘‘iconology’’ is laden with the stakes of adiscipline that will no longer offer inventories of artistic phenomena,but their fundamental interpretation, legitimated in reason. It is curious,moreover, that at the time Panofsky should have failed to indicatehis terminological debt, remaining silent about the origin of the‘‘good old word’’ that he ‘‘propose[d] to revive.’’ 90 For Iconologia indeedbelonged to the humanist mental landscape: at the end of theRenaissance; a book appeared bearing this title that can be considereda classic of the ‘‘science of art,’’ what The Interpretation of Dreams byArtemidorus was for the ancient ‘‘science of dreams.’’ 91What, then, is the value of Panofsky’s return to the Iconologia ofCesare Ripa? What principal benefits resulted from it? First, withoutdoubt, that of having access to the elaboration, beginning in the Cinquecento,of a common trait* between the visible and the legible: weknow that Iconologia looks at itself, because it consists of a series of*trait.