O conceito de Habitus e a obra de Erwin Panofsky: teoria e metodologia da história da arte e da arquitetura na primeira metade do século XX

Abstract

This work comprises the concept of habitus, according to Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism by Erwin Panofsky, aiming at its continuances from past historiographies such as the ones by Wölfflin, Riegl, Warburg or Cassirer , the debates that Panofsky´s work yielded among art historians, and the influence that his theory and methodology would have among later authors, in the most diverse areas, through this concept. Such influence would cause the concept to be reapropriated by authors such as Gombrich, Eco, Bourdieu and Chartier. These last two would recognize in the concept of habitus the overcoming, by Panofsky, of his criticisms on Wölfflins and Riegls works: the overcoming of positivism and formalism, as well as the abandonment of the search for a predecessor, the capacity and liberty of the individual invention, the psychological approach of the genius, and the distancing from the History of the Spirit. Besides its efficient theoretical solution for many historical problems that remained open until then (some of them common to the Annales school), very little attention by historians has been dedicated to this concept. Mostly, they only pay attention to his renowned Iconological method, or to the symbolic forms. Nevertheless there is, in the concept of habitus and in the Iconology, a very close historiographic genesis. Both came from Panofskys interest in the Gothic phenomenon, in Scholasticism especially in Aquinas and Suger and in the Holy Allegorism. The allegorism a medieval conception of revealing threefolded senses in texts and imagens is the basis on which Panofsky created his threefold method of investigating the artistic meaning the Iconology. In the same way, both the formulations of the concept of habitus and of his renowned thesis in Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism have a scholastic basis in common with the allegorism itself.