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History of Art, Reason 123the meanings, then scarcely established, of the famous suffixes‘‘-graphy’’ and ‘‘-logy’’:‘‘Ethnology,’’ for instance, is defined as a ‘‘science of humanraces’’ by the same Oxford Dictionary that defines ‘‘ethnography’’as a ‘‘description of human races,’’ and Webster explicitlywarns against a confusion of the two terms inasmuch as‘‘ethnography is properly restricted to the purely descriptivetreatment of peoples and races while ethnology denotes theircomparative study.’’ So I conceive of iconology as an iconographyturned interpretive and thus becoming an integral partof the study of art instead of being confined to the role of apreliminary statistical survey. There is, however, admittedlysome danger that iconology will behave, not like ethnologyas opposed to ethnography, but like astrology as opposed toastrography. 103It is significant that, ten years later, Panofsky reworked—poundedout again, as it were—this passage in his preface to the French editionof Studies in Iconology; that he proposed to revert, once and for all, tothe common term ‘‘iconography,’’ said to be ‘‘more familiar and lesssubject to debate’’; and finally, that he capped the whole with a renewedcautius, asking, even imploring, ‘‘to be read with the greatestprudence.’’ 104 But how, exactly, is all this significant? The whole questioncomes down to knowing what we can and ought to do whenconfronted by the ‘‘riddle of the sphinx’’ to which Panofsky himselfrefers: 105 the riddle posed to us ceaselessly by even the most fragmentaryworks of art. If ‘‘iconology’’ runs the risk of becoming somethinganalogous to ‘‘astrology,’’ isn’t it because the seeming foundation ofits rigor—‘‘logos,’’ in the guise of Kantian reason—is, in its extremepliability, its polyvalence, and its ability to answer every riddle withother, discursive riddles, akin to ‘‘magic’’? Such, doubtless, was Panofsky’sfear: that the word ‘‘iconology’’ was only a Kantian, theoretical,and logocentric stand-in for imitation, that old magic word of classicalaesthetics.