In December , Warburg started to compose a work in the form of a picture atlas named Mnemosyne. Working with photographs was by no. The lines of conflict run through the very people involved — and through the works. During these years all the efforts of Warburg and his colleagues were dedicated to two endeavours, the Mnemosyne and the establishment of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg K.
To a certain degree, the Portugaleser medal might stand as a symbol for various problems Warburg had to face and the questions he had raised. Logically there have been attempts to reconstruct the original structure, in particular by Bing and Gombrich in the s, in order to demostrate the programme of Warburgian research, but all attempts have been considered as unsatisfying.
You can deduce this e. Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences, 10 1: The WEL is mainly based on the collections of the research department and tries to digitize and classify its contents in a new way. Whereas such an endeavour is only possible with the support of innumerous contributors, the post-encyclopaedic atlas is often engendered by the obsession of a single author and based on his own collection gathered together over decades. In methodological mnemosne it is a kind mnemossyne echo to the fundamental and ultimately unsolvable problems of an encyclopaedic taxonomy based on the principles of comprehensive knowledge, systematic structure, classification, alphabetic order etc.
But what remains ambigious is whether such mastery is more apparent than real; Agrippa wrote De occulta philosophia libri tres, an influential account of magic and hermetic thought, and De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium, a sweeping polemic against epistemologi- cal certainty.
Indeed, the last image no. Yet they also confirm that the phenomenology of history must be paramount in any Bildwissenschaft. Below the images were added captions, which generally identify artist, subject, and sometimes medium. In the short exegetical texts accompanying individual panels, Gombrich stresses certain themes and details. But most notably, his introduction, Though a contemporary of the early surrealists, Warburg did not believe that the most effec- tive images and metaphors were aleatory or disjunctive; instead, for him, the image has fixed, predict- able historical roots.
Placing signs [Zeichensetzung] is what inaugurates this creation of thought-space. Misuse or misrecognition of the sign-function [is] the danger that culture repeatedly threatened and threatens. Because the originary sign, the image like the name, hides within it the danger of hypostasis. To begin with, the methodological and cognitive roles Warburg assigns to metaphor ignore the limited, exemplify- ing function Kant ascribes to symbols. Indeed, another Gombrich, Geburtstagsatlas.
This iconology is based not on the meaning of his figures. But as his own book eloquently demonstrates, cinema is also a language. This is quoted and discussed briefly in Gombrich, Aby Warburg, Based on materials gathered on his trip to the American Southwest in to observe Hopi rituals, the Kreuzlingen talk was prompted by his need to prove to himself and his psychiatrist, Ludwig Binswanger, that he had sufficiently recovered his mental equilibrium to return to Hamburg and continue his scholarship.
Per mo[n]stra ad astra: the gods have placed the monster on the path to the Idea. As such, the Kreuzlingen talk was an exercise in per- sonal memory as well as comparative and symbolic thought. See Gerhard Richter, Atlas, ed. Binswanger later endeavored to rec- oncile existential philosophy and psychotherapy. Quoted in the introduction to RPA, 25, 67— See Aby M. Warburg, Schlangenritual: Ein Reisebericht, ed.
Michael P. There he describes how the reemergence of Hellenistic astrological Warburg, Images, 1—2; Warburg, Schlangenritual, They are clearly no longer primitive, merely tactile humans [Sie sind keine wirklich primi- tiven Greifmenschen mehr], for whom no action directed toward the future can exist; but neither are they technologically secure Europeans, for whom future events are ex- pected to be organically or mechanically determined.
They stand in between [in der Mitte] magic and logos, and their instrument of orientation is the symbol. And for this stage of symbolic thought and conduct, the dances of the Pueblo Indians are exemplary. The Hopis danced with live serpents to cause rain and lightning, the latter sym- bolically depicted on their pottery as serpents descending from the clouds.
Warburg, Schlangenritual, 9. Warburg, Images, 17 translation modified ; Warburg, Schlangenritual, Warburg, Images, 38— Warburg, Images, 44 translation modified ; Warburg, Schlangenritual, See Kany, Mnemosyne als Programm, , on Umfangsbestimmung, its classificatory function, and its constitutive role in forming the symbol. Because its connections with sensuous experience have been constricted, the serpent becomes increasingly hieroglyphic, even as its astronomical content becomes available to mathematics.
The will to devotional zeal is an embodied form of the don- ning of a mask. In the process that we call cultural progress, the being exacting this devotion gradually loses its monstrous concreteness, and, in the end, becomes a spiritualized, invisible symbol.
We require the mediation of symbols with their Umfangsbestimmung, even though over time such symbols repeatedly verge toward Warburg, Images, 44— In practice, such models permit the progress and success of science. Indeed, insofar as all symbols are necessarily imperfect and so demand to be recollected, if they are to provide access to more lasting truths, Warburg belongs to the same Neoplatonic tradition as Poliziano, Botticelli, and the other late quattrocento fig- ures he so admired.
Musing on some lines by Goethe, Warburg first argues that our abil- ity to see and thus to know is grounded in our common, sensuous relation to nature. See Warburg, Images, Warburg, Images, Warburg, Images, 52—53 translation modified ; Warburg, Schlangenritual, Mn em o syne—Its Origins, Motives, and Scope 35 he has wrested lightning from nature.
The Kreuzlingen talk concludes: Natural forces are no longer seen in anthropomorphic or biomorphic guise [Um- fang], but rather as infinite waves obedient to the human touch. With these waves, the culture of the machine age destroys what the natural sciences, born of myth, so arduously achieved: the space for devotion, which evolved in turn into the space re- quired for reflection [den Andachtsraum, der sich in den Denkraum verwandelte]. Telegram and telephone destroy the cosmos. Warburg, Images, 54 translation modified ; Warburg, Schlangenritual, In the Kreuzlingen talk he seems to discover that the polarity of magic and technol- ogy parallels that of paganism and rationality.
The serpent is the site of the uncanny and the ambiguous. It is transmitted through Western culture, through the Hebrew and Christian Bibles and Greek mythology into the syncretism of me- dieval and early modern manifestations through the rationalizations of modernity. The road to Enlightenment deepens the uncanny and the ambiguous. Quos ego—!
Winds, do you dare now to mix earth with sky without my say, to raise such heights? Whom I—but it is better first to calm the moving waves! Here the pathos in the Pathosformel is neatly emblemized by the rhetorical figure of aposiopesis, or when one stops in mid- sentence to express wonder, outrage, etc.
Logic, which creates the thought-space—between man and object—by a conceptually special designation, and Magic, which destroys again this very thought-space through a superstitious—theoretical or practical—association between man and object, these we observe in the divinatory thought of astrology as a single, primitive tool with which the astrologer can at once measure and work magic.
Norbert Miller Munich: Carl Hanser, — , Dichotomy of Visual Wit Pictorial wit can either spiritualize the body, or corporealize the spirit. Originally, where man with the world still blossomed grafted to a single stem, this double-trope was still none at all; man did not compare dissimilar things but rather proclaimed identity; metaphors were, as is the case with children, merely forcibly displaced synonyms of bodies and minds.
As in writing, ideograms came before let- ters, so metaphor, in so far as it designated relations and not objects, was the earliest word, which gradually had to be made into a proper, colorless expression. Tropolog- ical ensoulment and embodiment still coincided as one, because self and world still coalesced. Thus every language is, in view of mental-spiritual relations, a dictionary of faded metaphors. GS, I. The text runs almost forty folio pages.
A transcription appears in Frauke Berndt and Heinz J. All quotations are from this edition. Zumbusch, Wissenschaft in Bildern, —; see also — Zumbusch, Wissenschaft in Bildern, To promote the effectiveness of the Bilderreihe technique, Warburg even traveled to Scharbeutz to meet with Albert Einstein, who sat on the board of the Hanover Planetarium.
Six panels remain from the exhibit, including one entitled Christianisierung des Sternglaubens. Mn em o syne—Its Origins, Motives, and Scope 41 persuade spectators not steeped in the same arcane materials as the researchers at the K.
Another Bilderreihe, which compared the medieval and Renaissance recep- tion of Ovidian representations of the gods, accompanied a exhibition at the K.
See GS, II. For more on raptus, see also Grundbegriffe I, fol. Ovid is the chief intertext for panels 33 and 35 of the Atlas. In Aby Warburg, , Gombrich suggests a connection between metaphor and the search for a Mitte. Allgemeine Ideen, fol. From monstrous, mythological phobos to super-unhuman istic tragedy to metaphoric distance.
Nevertheless, there are good reasons for doing so. Warburg roots his Kulturwissenschaft in the Renaissance. And it is in the Renaissance, but especially late quattrocento Florence, that he discerns most clearly the ability to create metaphoric distance, an ability he would exercise in every intellectual arena he enters.
In this respect, Warburg has numerous allies, as metaphor was central to hu- manist hermeneutics. Ernesto Grassi, The Primordial Metaphor, trans. Met- aphoric language can thus be said to construct how we come to see the world and ourselves. The true verum and the made factum are interchangeable for Vico. In brief, metaphor for Vico and Viconians like Grassi is the originary act of signification and inter- pretation.
It finds similitudines in phenomenal difference. It precedes conceptual thought and indeed forms the very basis for concept formation. Because of the way it draws on the multiplicity of things and the rich semantic heritage of words, metaphor confirms that we are linguistic, historical, and thor- oughly contingent beings. Grassi, Primordial Metaphor, Timothy W. Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy, 7. To remedy this, he traces a counter- tradition privileging the metaphoric image.
By proceeding in this way, not only will the ground be better prepared for a close interpretation of the Atlas, which, with its panoptic, silent sweep of images, can seem frozen in an idiosyncratic formalism, but we will also become familiar with some of the specific art-historical objects and the broader cultural questions that compel Warburg throughout his career.
Though in Aby M. Elemental yet harmonious in his vitality, this enigmatic creature joyfully accepted every psychic impulse as an extension of his mental range [seelische Schwingung als Erweiterung seines geistigen Umfanges], to be developed and exploited at leisure.
Francesco Sas- setti is just such a type [Typus] of the honest and thoughtful bourgeois living in an age of transition who accepts the new without heroics and without abandoning the old. The theme of As the author of lively Italian dance and love lyrics, he was later prevailed on to follow Pulci in turning his hand to a courtly occa- sional poem in commemoration of another chivalric Medici occasion.
In the Giostra, his celebrated poem on the tournament held by Giuliano in honor of Simonetta Ves- pucci in , Poliziano captures his ephemeral theme with grace, freshness, and im- mediacy, while taking classical Latin models as his source. After learnedly adducing various pagan sources for the first part of this image, Warburg confronts the main theoretical problem that will trouble nearly all of his writings and unfinished projects: Here, at the point where unbridled pagan exuberance breaks in, lies the crucial test of our hypothesis of psychological balance [Ausgleichspsychologie]: for Francesco built his chapel in his own lifetime, and primarily in honor of his name saint.
It is just not possible to suppose that so strong a personality would have admitted this wild, pagan horde to his own Christian tomb out of some purely aesthetic delight in their formal qualities. RPA, 89, Ways of Seeing, Reading, a nd Collecting 49 frenzied pagan keening for the wrathful hunter of Calydon beneath him, then the re- spectful historian can only ask: How did Francesco Sassetti attempt to reconcile the pagan histronics of the sarcophagus with a traditional, medieval view of the world?
Hair should twist as if trying to break loose from its ties and rippling in the air like flames, some of it weaving in and out like vipers in a nest, some swelling here, some there. Branches should twist upward, then downward, outward and then inward, contorting like ropes. Folds should do the same: folds should grow like branches from the trunk of a tree. RPA, 95— Rocco Sinisgalli Rome: Edizioni Kappa, , — Sinisgalli establishes the priority of the vernacular over Latin version of the treatise.
In a passage in the Latin version just before the one War- burg quotes and interprets, Alberti offers this more general advice: Let one assign. It is necessary, then, that, in limbs the most important symptoms of great emotions of the mind are present [Tum denique maximarum animi perturbatio- num, maximae in membris significationes, adsint necesse est].
And surely, this proce- dure concerning the movements is completely common to every living being. But we will appro- priately [perapte] paint the celebrated daughter of Inachus who was transformed into a cow, while she was running perhaps, with the head up, feet raised and tail twisted. RPA, Ways of Seeing, Reading, a nd Collecting 51 the most appropriate vehicles for mediating strong emotions, becoming thereby Ausdruckswerte possessing universal cultural, psychological, and phenomenological meaning.
Put another way, if Alberti in the early fifteenth century reads Ovid to help him describe how images conveying great emotion should decorously func- tion, then Warburg in the early twentieth century turns to Alberti and Ovid to help him map the metaphoric function of Pathosformeln—those dynamic recursive images, topoi, or forms that have from Homer to Mussolini helped humanity rec- oncile or alienate the forces of reason and unreason.
Yet for all this dependence on the alien techne- of rhetoric and its figurative re- sources, Alberti, so Baxandall argues, is able to achieve real analytic rigor in his interpretation of painting. Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, In this sense, his criticism is at once formal and empirical.
This altarpiece, surrounded by twelve frescoes and the actual tombs of Sassetti and his wife, serves as the focal point for a Denkraum in which sundry forms of translatio are accomplished—in space between images, observer and observed, east and west, north and south, earth and sky and time between antiquity and the Renaissance, Warburg and his classical and Renaissance models, and us and Warburg and his classical and Renaissance models. In sum, the tools of both verbal and visual criticism are needed to interpret the Adoration.
Containing three different inscriptions two in the painting proper, one on the frame , the painting is already something of a verbal artifact, a document inviting philological as well as art-historical interpretations.
Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, ; see also — Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, trans. Probably com- posed by the humanist Bartholomaeus Fontius ca. Moreover, the sarcophagus within the painting is complemented by the two actual tombs in the chapel—thus giving the painting further allegorical weight.
Similarly, the two gray columns behind the tomb, which support a humble straw roof over the makeshift manger, appear to be the ruins of the Roman Temple of Peace ara pacis , which was predicted to endure until a virgin should give birth to a child. The sarcophagus, in short, emblemizes a new order of things. The spatial translatio of the proces- sion thus becomes a historical and spiritual one as well, wherein pagan triumph is marginalized, mediated, and supplanted by the humble but metaphysical scene dominating the painting.
See Ronald G. My interpretation of the Adoration is indebted to Kecks and to Jeanne K. Finally, that Joseph, who occupies the very center of the painting, directs his searching gaze to some place above and outside the painting, indicates either that he should be seen as con- templating the metaphysical paradox inscribed on the frame which concerns him personally as well as spiritually , or that he should be interpreted as musing on the four Sibyls in the ceiling frescoes, and hence also on the Virgilian prophecy in the fourth Eclogue of a miraculous child who would herald a new golden age.
Such symbolism, though, forms but the surface of a larger historical dynamic exem- plified by Sassetti. See Kecks, Domenico Ghirlandaio und die Malerei, Ways of Seeing, Reading, a nd Collecting 55 Warburg, therefore, is more synchronic than diachronic, more formal than causal. Nonetheless, they need to be addressed, especially as War- burg tends to swing back and forth in his preference for the term metaphor or symbol, while in practice he often argues by metonymy in order to unfold what has been plausibly taken as an allegorical vision of history and culture.
But both iconography, which gen- erally pursues the task of interpretation by thickening various discursive contexts informing an artwork, and iconology, which would decipher the larger symbolic meanings of an artwork, often employ the tropes of rhetoric with maddening de- grees of imprecision.
Our language, in fact, fa- vours this twilight region between the literal and the metaphorical. Con- fusion, superstition, and stultifying abstraction may result when the stringencies of language, the tyrannies of taste, the thirst for power, and ideological, methodolog- ical, or systematic certainty become supreme. Ways of Seeing, Reading, a nd Collecting 57 of various, conflicting meanings in one intuitive gesture. As Ripa writes in his Proemio, Leaving aside then that part of the image of which the orator makes use, and of which Aristotle treats in the third book of his Rhetoric, I will talk only about that which per- tains to painters, or about those who, whether by means of color or by another visible means, can represent some visible thing different from the part of the image that Ar- istotle discusses , and in conformity with another thing.
I will talk of it because, just as this persuades many times by means of the eyes, that other thing moves the will by means of the word, and because this concerns things like metaphors, things that lie beyond humanity, but which are conjoined to us, and are therefore termed essential.
Renaissance neoclassicism, he asserts, cuts down on the number of attributes, even as it strengthens the humanist basis for personifying the gods. But he would also give painters a language by which they can con- template their efforts.
For Gombrich, metaphor in the visual arts produces a unique cognitive effect: It is precisely because our world is comparatively stabilized by language that a fresh metaphor can be felt to be so illuminating.
We almost have the feeling it gave us a Ripa, Iconologia, This line of argument is not at all unique to Gombrich. As we shall see, Cassirer, Nietzsche, Blumenberg, and Hegel variously argue that metaphor making precedes concept formation. Ways of Seeing, Reading, a nd Collecting 59 fresh insight into the structure of the world by piercing the veil of ordinary speech. It is this experience, so it seems, that underlies the illumination of which we hear in the literature on imprese.
In his early essays and lectures, Warburg creates the foundations for the science of iconology, which will later be refined and practiced by Panofsky, Gombrich, Saxl, and others. Metaphor satisfies a natural thirst and admi- ration for the foreign and exotic. George A. See also Aristotle, Poetics b. Ways of Seeing, Reading, a nd Collecting 61 to observe the likeness even in things very different. But catachresis has often been confused with audacia or an overly bold or far-fetched metaphor.
Aristotle, Rhetoric a. As a result, one should make the language unfamiliar [xenin], for people are admirers of what is far off [aponton], and what is marvelous is sweet. Donald A. John Bender and David E. Quin- tilian discusses the relation between abusio and metaphor at Inst. While metaphor vividly fuels his numerous, often aphoristic, sometimes cryptic efforts to give an account of the con- tent, form, and aims of Mnemosyne, it also ultimately constitutes the intellectual idea l that Warburg fervently seeks to discover in his subject matter.
In particular, the metaphoric ability he finds in certain currents of Renaissance art and cosmog- raphy to compass difference while still giving expression to a single intuition is the same metahistorical and metarhetorical ability he aspires to in his novel version of intellectual history.
Metaphor for Warburg describes how artist and thinker create Distanz, that cog- nitive, psychological, historically self-conscious stance by which extreme emotion and scientific detachment, the vita activa and vita contemplativa, the ecstatic nymph and saturnine thinker, can coexist long enough for the spectator to recognize how certain formal, artistic, yet also contingent expressions of human experience repeat and transform themselves throughout history.
These expressions or Pathosformeln, with their fusion of content and form, Warburg casts as paradigmatic, combinatory elements in his Kulturwissenschaft. Pathos formulas are recurring forms of representation that mediate between the desire for the absolute and the pure contingency of sensuous experience. Richard Semon — wrote two books on memory, Die Mneme and Die mnemischen Empfindungen Gombrich, Aby Warburg, When translated into the Renaissance and beyond, these serve as markers for him to map the Denkraum in which the belated spectator can discover historical meaning, achieve perspective, and win that spiritual Ausgleich for which he yearns.
And yet for all of its subjective, psychological force, like much Renaissance encyclopedism, Mnemosyne depends inordinately, catachrestically, on basic spatial metaphorics to make its epis- temological claims.
RPA, — It was later enthusiastically adopted by Saxl, who saw it as nicely describing their joint work on the mi- gration of astrological symbolism in the Atlas. Ways of Seeing, Reading, a nd Collecting 65 with its metonymic and diagrammatic logics, would discover how cultural change circulates between east and west, north and south, as well as how it is affected over time.
The photographs of the constellations of photographs that remain are to us, for all their spectral qualities, still ostensive— to create metaphoric distance they point to artifacts presenting literal motion. We must now go into details.
At that one point we have penetrated the concrete structure of the matter of liter- ature. We have performed an analysis. If we get at a few dozen or a few hundred such facts, a system of points is established. They can be connected by lines; and this pro- duces figures. If we study and associate these, we arrive at a comprehensive picture Through correspondence about their various projects and occasional meetings, Curtius and Warburg became friendly in Rome in Willard R.
Or the synthesis issues from the analysis; and only a synthesis thus brought into existence is legitimate. Francke, , The book is far more real than the picture. Here we have a truly ontological relationship and real participation in an intellectual entity. One needs a technique to unravel them. Its name is philology. Since Literatur- wissenschaft has to deal with texts, it is helpless without philology.
It works with pictures— and photographic slides. Here there is nothing intelligible. The same relation obtains between Dante and the cathedrals, and so on. Ways of Seeing, Reading, a nd Collecting 67 Arguably, however, the most important analogue to Mnemosyne, as Warburg suggests in various Tagebuch entries and as numerous commentators have observed, was his library.
As a Denkinstrument, an archive, a place for sympo- sia and conversation, and increasingly a publishing house, it thrived until the dire political circumstances and worsening economic situation forced the relocation of its some sixty thousand volumes to London in The unknown neighbour on the shelf contained the vital information, although from its title one might not have guessed this.
The overriding idea was that the books together—each containing its larger or smaller bit of information and being supplemented by its neighbours—should by their titles guide the student to perceive the essential forces of the human mind and its history. Jesinghausen- Lauster views the library as the symbolic locus, the Mitte, that resolves the tensions between the one and the many, history and theory, attention to detail and cultivation of ideas. Ide- ally, the scholar was meant to traverse these regions, ascending slowly, digressively, toward a reconciliation with the world.
Thus the Library in Hamburg was meant as a place of heurisis, a scholarly, geistiger Raum, that would furnish the means for redrawing and thereby preserving the humanist encyclopedia, the orbis doctrinae circle of learning. In this rhizomatic space. Curtius und das Warburg Institute; Briefe bis und andere Dokumente, ed. Both Atlas and Library privilege the cultivation of intuitive liens, a disdain for disciplinary boundaries, and, if you will, an ontology that suggests how and why historical being is recursive.
Tellingly, the panels of the Atlas were initially worked on and displayed in the Hamburg reading room of the K. Its syntax is, at least initially, visual rather than verbal. Its metonymic logic, mimicking the Nebeneinander inherent in visual art, works more swiftly than the Nacheinander of language, such that the persistence or reappearance of classical pathos formulas can be swiftly compassed and grasped.
A barely disguised exposition of the ideas and methods informing Mnemosyne, the lecture was sup- ported by a sequence of nine panels, containing some photographs, which were sequentially placed along three walls of a large lecture hall. Yet this, together with accounts of the event, confirms that it was a truly capacious talk. Drafts for the panels exist, though, in which he diagrammatically sketches how the some photographs GC might be arranged.
Metaphor Lost and Found 71 generally, made the case for placing art history in dialogue with the disciplines of archaeology, anthropology, psychology, and literary criticism. Still, I believe in the fruitfulness of establishing closer contact between archaeol- ogy, art history, and sociologically exact historiography. Hertziana, fol. Compare this with Grundbegriffe I, fol.
Hertziana, fols. A cavalry troop storms along, whose leader must stop if he does not want to trample the woman who throws herself toward him. We stand here before the energetic in- version in the interpretation of antique pathos formulas [Wir stehen hier vor der 5. Alden L. See GS, I. Anthony on the high altar at Padua and a depiction by the hand of Agostino di Duccio from the life of St.
Bernard on the facade of the oratory in Perugia, I will set out to explain [auseinandersetzen] what I understand as the process of energetic inversion, that is, the production of contrary interpretations.
Vorstufe zu Botticelli in der Auseinandersetzung m. Mixed style in relation to antiquity. Courtly life. Love symbol- ism. Preparatory stage for Botticelli in the contest with antiquity. On fol. In this, Warburg provides the model for E. Preceded by a heap of documents and baggage, it surpassed, in countless ways, the dimensions of a book. Each drawing tries to depict in synoptic fashion the major events of a canto. See pp. Er sprach bald frei, bald las er aus seinem Manuskript ab. This project was later entrusted to the young Ernst Gombrich, yet unfortunately remained unfinished.
Research lead: Claudia Wedepohl. Cornell project lead: Christopher Johnson. Jane O. Newman is our guide, with Laura Hatch. Panel 79 has as its principal theme the Eucharist. Christopher D. Johnson provides this guided pathway. Warburg Institute The Warburg Institute The Warburg Institute of the University of London exists principally to further the study of the classical tradition, that is of those elements of European thought News Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne.
Readings Aby M.
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