Tyler Professor Emerita Gerda Panofsky-Soergel was a pixie of a woman with a prodigious intellect that earned her widespread recognition as one of the 20th century scholars who helped define the study of Italian art of the 15th to 17th centuries.

Beloved by her students and colleagues alike, she was slight and wiry, with a soft voice—all of which belied her muscled, driven, and courageous scholarship in art history. Her students remember her as dedicated, humble, energetic, and robust of spirit.

Panofsky-Soergel, Professor Emerita in the Art History Department, passed away in September at the age of 95.   

As an educator, she blended her enthusiasm for learning with a disciplined methodology that made the then Tyler School of Art a prized destination to study and research the art of the Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance.

Born in Wiesbaden, Germany in 1929, she earned her doctorate from the University of Cologne with the dissertation, Untersuchungen über den theoretischen Architekturentwurf von 1450-1550 in Italien (Investigations into the Theory of Italian Architectural Design of 1450-1550), published in 1958. She worked in several European institutions before moving to the United States to work as an assistant to art historian Millard Meiss at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study in 1965-1966. In 1975, she joined the Art History Department at what was then the Tyler School of Art, where she taught until her retirement in 1995.

Throughout her long teaching career and into her retirement, Panofsky-Soergel turned her gaze from the Middle Ages to art of the Italian Renaissance through the 19th century.  After the death of her husband Erwin Panofsky in 1968, she revised, updated, and re-published his Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St. Denis and Its Art Treasures (1979), incorporating new scholarship on St.-Denis in the three decades after its original publication in 1949.

In 1991, she wrote a book on the patronage and iconography of Michelangelo’s statue of “Christ” in S. Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, Michelangelos "Christus" und sein römischer Auftraggeber (Michelangelo’s Christ and His Roman Clientele).

After her retirement, Panofsky-Soergel spent years in Russia researching Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin in Germany: Fiction as Facts (2010), four studies on the famous Russian writer and historian and his connections to Germany.

In 2014, she published her husband’s long-lost Die Gestaltungsprincipien Michelangelos besonders in ihrem Verhältnis zu denen Raffaels (de Gruyter), providing an introduction. She translated it into English for Princeton University Press in 2020 (Michelangelo's Design Principles, Particularly in Relation to Those of Raphael).
 

Tina Waldeier Bizzarro, Professor of History of Art at Rosemont College, and Jane Rose Evans, Chair of the Tyler Art History Department, contributed to this article.