No offense taken at all. Just my good natured response to an old joke about my surname. Along with at least 100 million others I am a descendant of THE William, not through my surname but first through the Plantagenet, Southworth and Seabury lineages. I have the full documentation and it goes much further back than 1066. I'd be happy to share it.
I'm going to re-read Panofsky on this meaningless issue because I recall him devoting a lot of study to the distinction of form from subject and of both from content and thus he parses meaning. But I think you are right on the notion of form without meaning being revealed....but I would say without meaning being projected or constructed. That leaves us with a question about form itself, which implies some kind of wholeness or unity among parts. Is that unity also projected? I suspect it is. For Panofsky, this is where the humanist is distinguished from the scientist. The humanist deals with the cosmos of culture which means the history of human records whereas the scientist deals with the cosmos of matter (or energy). Panofsky says they overlap but the issue is where the emphasis is put. wc
