Under the hat of the art historian: Panofsky, Berenson, Warburg

Starting with Erwin Panofsky’s famous use of the hat as a device for iconological explanation, this essay builds upon a series of encounters with hats from within the discipline of history of art and its practices of writing. Such hats mark not only a gendered space; they also delimit an absence of the body. From Panofsky’s suggestion that in the act of taking one’s hat off there can be seen a residue of chivalric gestures, this essay examines the forensic approach of connoisseurship to images in order ultimately to read, in the guise of a deferred action, Aby Warburg’s discussion of the stovepipe hat worn by Uncle Sam as the embodiment of an anxiety for the body’s vulnerability in times of war. Documenting the use of the hat as a fictional tool for an art historian’s creative writing, but also refl ecting creatively on writing art history, art-historical interpretation is framed as the other side of bodily investment.