![]() His early exploration of excessive quantities of what he termed bewegtes Beiwerk, wittily translated by Gombrich as “accessories in motion” 2 -an inspired way of thinking about the pleats in garments worn by Botticelli’s female figures -later became a series of semi-scientific convictions about the literal inscription of memory images in the human nervous system.Īby Warburg, 1929 in Naples, Italy Courtesy The Warburg InstituteĪt the center of Warburg’s theory were visual forms he termed Pathosformeln, or repeating, historically traceable figurative gestures and expressions. Warburg was a scholar of the Italian Renaissance, yet he was also interested the art of Greece, Rome, and Northern Europe, and was most of all invested in wide-ranging questions regarding the meaning and evolution of images. The latter was the apex of critical prose, as far as Warburg was concerned. Yet, even as he absorbed more staid philological material, he was a super-fan of two interdisciplinary works, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laokoön (1766), a reflection on the representational capacities of painting and poetry, and Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1834), a satirical novel ostensibly about the history of fashion. Warburg began his art historical studies in a fairly standard way, completing his doctoral thesis at the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence, in 1892. In a biography, eminent art historian Ernst Gombrich wrote that he sometimes felt as though Warburg “had no method, but he had a message.” 1 His characterization gets at a major difficulty: by what criteria does one assess the work of a scholar who occasionally acted like an artist-who sought to undo what he termed the grenzpolizeiliche Befangenheit (border-police-style close-mindedness) of disciplinary practice? Hailing from an immensely wealthy banking family, Warburg was able to act as an independent scholar, gathering a library of books and tens of thousands of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs and other images documenting artworks that became the basis for the prestigious Warburg Institute, located in Hamburg until 1933 and subsequently in London. ![]() He, in turn, maintained a certain distance from academia and its tendency to privilege rote diachronic accounts of the development of art. ![]() ![]() Warburg is, to me, a figure of a certain mystery: he is now beloved by thinkers in every corner of the humanities for his innovative, comparative approach to the analysis of images, but during his lifetime his work was poorly understood. The German-Jewish art historian (1866–1929) is known for his “Bilderatlas Mnemosyne” project, a compendium of photographs of artworks as well as other print items from across time and cultures categorized and mounted on cloth, by means of which Warburg sought to illustrate his theory of collective memory. I suppose I am something of an Aby Warburg agnostic. ![]()
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