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126 Confronting Imagessay, corresponds to nothing less than a ‘‘General History of Ideas,’’ orrather a ‘‘General History of the Mind’’ or Spirit (Allgemeine Geistesgeschichte),whereby ‘‘the greatness of an artistic production is ultimatelydependent upon the quantity of ‘Weltanschauung-energy’ that is incorporatedinto the worked material and radiates back from it to thespectator,’’ 111 like an Idea informing the imaging material so as toinstill into it its universal, universally accepted, universally graspedtruth. It is the very same thing that is called ‘‘symbolic form’’ (symbolischeForm) in the famous study of perspective, where from the startof the game the philosophical antitheses of singular versus universaland sensible versus intelligible are placed in the foreground only to betranscended and synthesized in an exactly idealist operation thatmight be called intelligible subsumption:But if perspective is not a factor of value, it is surely a factorof style. Indeed, it may even be characterized (to extendErnst Cassirer’s felicitous term to the history of art) as oneof those ‘‘symbolic forms’’ in which ‘‘spiritual meaning isattached to a concrete, material sign and intrinsically givento this sign.’’ This is why it is essential to ask of artistic periodsand regions not only whether they have perspective, butalso which perspective they have. 112What is in question in this ‘‘attachment,’’ and in a spiritual meaning’sbeing ‘‘intrinsically given’’ to a sensible sign? What exactly didPanofsky understand by ‘‘symbol,’’ a term that is essential to all thehuman sciences today, and one that Panofsky himself never abandoned?113 How does a symbol bring into play—or transform—the relationbetween the sensible and the intelligible? This way offormulating the question, and the system constructed to provide allthe answers to it, Panofsky found in the masterpiece of Ernst Cassirer,Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, whose first volume, devoted tolanguage and to a general introduction to the interpretive structure asa whole, appeared in 1923, which is to say on the threshold of a periodof deep theoretical reflection conducted in his own field by author ofIdea. 114