Aby Warburg

Dzieła

• 1923Bilder aus dem Gebiet der Pueblo-Indianer in Nord-Amerika (Obrazy z obszaru Indian Pueblo w Ameryce Północnej)

  Wykład wygłoszony w sanatorium w Kreuzlingen w 1923 roku na podstawie notatek z podróży z lat 1895–96: interpretuje ceremonie Pueblo, wśród nich ceremonię węża Hopi, znane mu jedynie z fotografii i relacji, jako symboliczne odpowiedzi na siły natury.

• 1929Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (Atlas obrazów „Mnemosyne”)

  Niedokończony atlas fotografii przypiętych do czarnych ekranów: w ostatniej wersji z jesieni 1929 roku 63 tablice z około 970 obrazami prowadzą od babilońskiej astrologii i rzeźby antycznej do sztuki renesansu, znaczków pocztowych i fotografii prasowych, śledząc wędrówki Pathosformeln.

Stanowisko

Warburg is on the map as a bridge figure from art history and cultural studies. He asked why Renaissance art took up ancient forms and found the answer not in calm and “noble simplicity” but in gestures of intense emotion – flowing hair and garments, the hurrying nymph, the maenad – which he called Pathosformeln: images that store the energy of past experience and are charged anew by later times. His studies of astrology, from the frescoes of the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara (1912) to the prophecies of Luther’s time (1920), showed how fear of astral demons and mathematical reason were bound together in the same images, and how even the reformers read signs in the sky. Culture, in his view, oscillates between magical fear and rational distance; images can create or destroy the “thinking space” (Denkraum) between them. His library, ordered by the “law of the good neighbour”, became a centre of research in 1920s Hamburg for Cassirer, Panofsky and Saxl and moved to London in 1933, where it became the Warburg Institute. Cassirer, Benjamin and later Agamben took up his work, and the iconic turn of the 1990s rediscovered Mnemosyne as a model of visual knowledge. His lecture on the Pueblo serpent ritual and the photographs of his journey are discussed today together with the wishes of the Hopi and other Pueblo communities; see “Context & critique”.

Życie i kontekst

Aby Moritz Warburg was born in Hamburg on 13 June 1866, the eldest son of a Jewish banking family; according to his brother Max, at thirteen he gave up his place in the family firm in return for the promise that Max would always buy him the books he needed. He studied art history, history and archaeology in Bonn, Munich and Strasbourg and took his doctorate in 1892 with a study of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring, printed in 1893. In 1895–96 he travelled in the American Southwest and visited Pueblo communities in New Mexico and Hopi villages in Arizona. After years in Florence he settled in Hamburg in 1902 as a private scholar. A severe psychosis in 1918 led to stays in clinics, from 1921 in Ludwig Binswanger’s sanatorium at Kreuzlingen, where he gave his lecture on the serpent ritual in 1923. Discharged in 1924, he opened the new building of his library in 1926 and worked on Mnemosyne until his death in Hamburg on 26 October 1929.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring (1893)
• Dürer and Italian Antiquity (1906)
• Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara (1912)
• Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther (1920)
• Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America (lecture 1923; published 1939)
• Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–29; ed. 2000)