Erwin Panofsky in the context of "Arnolfini Portrait"

The Meisterstiche ("master prints") by Dürer are three of his most famous engravings. They are Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), Melencolia I (1514) and St. Jerome in His Study (1514). These three large prints (about 7 by 10 inches (18 by 25 cm)) are often grouped together because of their perceived quality and unity of meaning, although this latter is a matter of scholarly dispute.

Art historian Erwin Panofsky has described them as showing meticulous care in execution and also having complexity and significance in terms of iconography. Panofsky, while recognising that these are Durer's "most famous engravings" and are "not unjustly, known as his 'Meisterstiche'", notes that they "have no appreciable compositional relationship with one another" and should not, in any technical sense, be "considered as 'companion pieces'". They do, Panofsky argues, form "a spiritual unity". Here, Panofsky refers to Friedrich Lippmann's noticing of the scholastic classification of the virtues they represent: the moral, the theological and the intellectual. The Knight showing "the life of the Christian in the practical world of decision and action"; St. Jerome showing "the life of the Saint in the spiritual world of sacred contemplation"; and Melencolia I showing the "life of the secular genius in the rational and imaginative worlds of science and art".

Pierre Bourdieu (UK: /bʊərˈdjɜː/, US: /bʊərˈd(j)uː/; French: [pjɛʁ buʁdjø]; Gascon: Pèir Bordièu; 1 August 1930 – 23 January 2002) was a French sociologist and public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence in several related academic fields (e.g. anthropology, media and cultural studies, education, popular culture, and the arts). During his academic career he was primarily associated with the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris and the Collège de France.

Bourdieu's work was primarily concerned with the dynamics of power in society, especially the diverse and subtle ways in which power is transferred and social order is maintained within and across generations. In conscious opposition to the idealist tradition of much of Western philosophy, his work often emphasized the corporeal nature of social life and stressed the role of practice and embodiment in social dynamics. Building upon and criticizing the theories of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Erwin Panofsky and Marcel Mauss among others, his research pioneered novel investigative frameworks and methods, and introduced such influential concepts as the cultural reproduction, the habitus, the field or location, symbolic violence, as well as cultural capital, social capital, and symbolic capital (as distinct from traditionally recognized economic forms of capital). Another notable influence on Bourdieu was Blaise Pascal, after whom Bourdieu titled his Pascalian Meditations.

Iconology is a method of interpretation in cultural history and the history of the visual arts used by Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky and their followers that uncovers the cultural, social, and historical background of themes and subjects in the visual arts. Though Panofsky differentiated between iconology and iconography, the distinction is not very widely followed, "and they have never been given definitions accepted by all iconographers and iconologists". Few 21st-century authors continue to use the term "iconology" consistently, and instead use iconography to cover both areas of scholarship.

To those who use the term, iconology is derived from synthesis rather than scattered analysis and examines symbolic meaning on more than its face value by reconciling it with its historical context and with the artist's body of work – in contrast to the widely descriptive iconography, which, as described by Panofsky, is an approach to studying the content and meaning of works of art that is primarily focused on classifying, establishing dates, provenance and other necessary fundamental knowledge concerning the subject matter of an artwork that is needed for further interpretation.

The Three Marys at the Tomb is a c. 1410–26 panel painting usually attributed to Hubert van Eyck, now in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. The painting was included at the seminal Exposition des primitifs flamands à Bruges in 1902.

Its authorship and dating have been particularly difficult to establish. For many years it was ascribed the only surviving work—excepting the Ghent Altarpiece—by Hubert, Jan van Eyck's older brother. Erwin Panofsky believed it a collaboration between the two men (similar to the Ghent Altarpiece); others see it as the c. 1440 output of a member of Jan's workshop, others again solely attribute Jan. Estimates of its date of completion range from 1410 to the year of Hubert's death, 1426.