The Research Project
This research project intends to deepen some aspects of the figure and work of Aby Warburg by following interdisciplinary and transversal methodological guidelines. In recent years, Warburg's work has been the subject of renewed scientific and academic interest, even in disciplinary fields other than art history. Although in this discipline Warburg has now become an important and undisputed name and has contributed significantly to the definition of a new method of analysis and work that does not only pertain to the strictly historical-artistic sphere, his work has not yet been sufficiently studied in its critical, philosophical and cultural complexity.
Warburg's work starts from an innovative approach to art history, not an "aestheticizing" method as was typical of his time, but an iconological one: that is, he opposes formalism and the purely formal consideration of the work of art while underlining the relevance of the "power" of images, their "energy" and their capacity to move and constantly change over time. Hence, starting from the first decades of the 20th century, thanks to Warburgthe traditional Kunstgeschichte bearing a Winckelmannian imprint becomes a Nietzschean Kulturwissenschaft, to wit, a science of culture which is open and attentive to the mnemonic traces of time that are deposited on the artwork. Already in the Sixties of the 20th century Carlo Ginzburg emphasized the double purpose of Warburg's research: to consider the works of art on the one hand as a source for the historical reconstruction, on the other hand as a product and symptom of history (C. Ginzburg, Da Aby Warburg a Ernst H. Gombrich, in Id., Miti, emblemi, spie. Morfologia e storia, Torino 1992, pp. 29-106).
This project aims therefore to emphasise the possibility of extending the issues posed by Warburg to other humanities and to apply his methodology to the history of literature, with particular reference to the relationship between "word" and "image"; a critical analysis that proceeds not in a chronological way, or by following genres or artistic currents, but in a dynamic and cross-cutting way, will foster to bring out new and unexplored aspects of the sciences of culture, points of contact or distortions and divergences between different works and cultures.
In the wake of the first work that Ernst H. Gombrich dedicated to Warburg (Aby Warburg. An intellectual biography, London 1970), Georges Didi-Huberman stressed the importance of the "movement" in Warburg's writings, understood both as the "object" of his studies (the "Nymph"), and as a "method" of study: on the one hand Warburg's theories hark back to Goethe's "morphology" of the eternal metamorphosis of forms, according to which the "original" form remains in change, nothing dies, but everything is transformed, and on the other hand we can conceive the "movement" as the very motion of the history of culture and the methodology of study.
Starting from this premise the project aims to "analyze" the concept of movement, or dynamic energy, and at the same time "apply" it to the study of literature, arts, philosophy; such a methodology, which is focused on a spatial and temporal dynamism, namely on interdisciplinary research on the one hand and on the survival over time of particular iconological motifs on the other, cannot neglect the element of otherness from one's own field of inquiry.
In other words, to "exceed" one's field of research, by taking temporal and spatial distances from it, turning to the alien and the distant, stressing the eccentric and finally returning to the culture of his own, should enrich and transform one's own culture as well as one's own research field. It follows that the object of research is also transformed: in a historical period like the present one, characterized by the emergence of new populisms and new nationalisms, attention to the "alien", the "outsider", or the "other", may appear as an "eccentric", but fundamental path to overcome clichés and a fossilized state of art.
Transgress the national, cultural, temporal and disciplinary boundaries, in order to follow the mnemonic traces of culture that are still invisible and impalpable and pay attention to the eccentric and apparently disturbing or "pathological" elements of it, is the very objective of this project. «Everywhere that there existed frontiers between disciplines, the library sought to establish links», writes Didi-Huberman (G. Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image. Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms. Aby Warburg's History of Art, Pennsylvania U.P. 2017 [12002], p. 21). If Warburg has entrusted the image with a function of «organ of social memory and engram of spiritual tensions» (G. Agamben, Aby Warburg e la scienza senza nome, in Id., La potenza del pensiero, Vicenza 2005, p. 123-146, here p. 135), this project intends to identify all those images that can serve to reconstruct some aspects of our culture and draw a "patography of the modern".
Although Aby Warburg's writings do not constitute a unitary and organic , but rather appear as fragmentary, sometimes as the result of impromptu occasions, in them it is possible to find fundamental guidelines of his thought; Warburg's thinking faces a difficult dialectic between tendency to systematicity and complexity and fragmentariness, and reflects the fragile personality of the author, the insidious cultural spirit of the time and the methodology of study, linked – as can be seen by his latest great project, the Atlas – to the research of "details", which emerge in the images as (hidden) bearers of a cultural memory that still has to be deciphered.
Precisely the detail, the fragment, reveals the most important and enduring aspect of the work of art; this means that in the distortion, in the almost invisible, sedimented and latent presence of pathological symptoms, i.e. in elements of friction and Pathosformel , we can discover a truth of the image that gives meaning to an entire cultural era. These symptoms, phantasmal residues and memory traces, are at the same time meaningful in relation to the historical time and the different cultures in which they are perpetuated. Scrap and anachronism are therefore the "negative" of reality and historical time conceived as a continuous flow; the history of culture is rather conceived as a "tensive dialectic" between forms that never disappear completely and that return, revealing the "unconscious of time", the "psychology of culture".
From this perspective art appears as a Zwischenraum, an intermediate sphere between historical consciousness and cultural unconscious, in which the ancient forms that periodically reappear should not be understood simply as recurring motifs, but rather as "surviving" or latent motifs, which are not in themselves negative or positive, because they are "polarized" in the encounter with the new epoch, assuming from time to time new meanings.
If Warburg in his best-known studies on Renaissance painting and culture spoke of the Nachleben der Antike (A. Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, Los Angeles 1999 [1932]), it is significant that he then turned to the culture of the so-called "primitive" populations to find there the original traces of those elements that have been surviving over time and history.
The survivals of which Warburg speaks seem to manifest themselves as phantoms, elements that are not static, permanent, clear and constant, but "intermittent", such as movements of time, ephemeral and fleeting flashes, that can reveal in the instant the appearance of something eternal and recurring. This "morphology" of forms, based on the dialectic of transformation and survival, seems to follow the same principle of polarity of stillness and movement, plastic form and dynamism of flux, systole and diastole, that we find in Goethe's writings. Warburg speaks in particular of the polarity of and within the work of art, namely of a dynamic, pathetic and sentimental element that encounters a stable and universal element. The concept of Pathosformel refers to the interweaving of an emotional charge and an iconographic formula.
Warburg focuses on phantasmal images as symptoms of a malaise of culture: it is in times of crisis and disease that an era let emerge in cultural manifestations its need for change, its originality, its existential movement. The European culture itself appears to be the result of conflicting tendencies, «split into a tragic schizophrenia» (G. Agamben, op. cit., p. 138). The crisis, the disease, the pathos of a culture manifest themselves in art as movement and change, as a need to overcome and transform a critical and uncomfortable condition. Art turns out to be a dynamic movement with an own life, an inner which does not exhaust, but lasts in time and space. Art thus becomes, from the first exhibitions related to worship, a kind of exorcism, an act of liberation from an inner that is express in the work of art and freed through the artistic movement.
While in the aftermath of Aby Warburg's death his heirs began a work of collecting, publishing and bio-bibliographic reconstructing of their master (Gertrud Bing, Fritz Saxl, Erwin Panofsky), many scholars, since the 1960s, have rediscovered the importance of the "methodology-Warburg". In addition to the now classic works of Ernst Gombrich, Giorgio Agamben and Carlo Ginzburg, we find today in the Italian field the more recent writings of Claudia Cieri Via, Davide Stimilli, Monica Centanni, and Maurizio Ghelardi that shift the interest beyond the study of the History of Art and Renaissance.
Cieri Via – who supports this project as one of its extern member – provides a fundamental research devise to know and deepen the Warburghian investigation (C. Cieri Via, Introduzione a Aby Warburg, Roma-Bari 2011; Ead., Aby Warburg. Il concetto di Pathosformel fra religione, arte e scienza, in M. Bertozzi [ed.], Aby Warburg e le metamorfosi degli antichi dei, Modena 2002, pp. 114-140); with her laboratory at the IUAV University, Monica Centanni deals with finding in the work of Warburg a method for the study of the mechanisms of classical tradition (for Centanni's studies on Warburg see the website of the e-journal that she directs: <http://www.engramma.it/eOS/index.php> [13.2.2020]). Maurizio Ghelardi has recently re-published Warburg's works in Italian with an important critical presentation (Astrologica, Torino 2019 and Aby Warburg. Fra antropologia e storia dell'arte, Torino 2021).
In contemporary German field of study, we can't not mention the work of Horst Bredekamp (H. Bredekamp, C. Wedepohl [ed.], Warburg, Cassirer und Einstein im Gespräch, Berlin 2015), the Germanist Sigrid Weigel, who co-edited in 2010 the critical edition of Warburg's Complete Works by Suhrkamp (A. Warburg, Werke, S. Weigel, M. Treml [ed.], Frankfurt a.M. 2010), Claudia Wedepohl, Warburg Institute's archivist, who is dealing with bringing to light Warburg's unpublished writings (A. Warburg, “Per monstra ad sphaeram”, D. Stimilli, C. Wedepohl [ed.], Milano 2009 [12008]), Frank Fehrenbach (F. Fehrenbach [ed.], Kraft, Intensität, Energie. Zur Dynamik der Kunst, Berlin 2018; Id., C. Zumbusch [ed.], Warburg und die Natur, Berlin 2019), and Ulrich Raulff (U. Raulff, Wilde Energien. Vier Versuche zu Aby Warburg, Gottingen 2003), who both analyze the concept of "energy" in Warburg.
Georges Didi-Huberman, the best-known Warburg scholar in the French field, highlights in his many writings the relationship of Warburg's thought with modern history and philosophy (from Goethe to Nietzsche, from Burckhardt to Benjamin in The Surviving Image, cit.), with literature (Pasolini in Survival of the Fireflies, Minnesota, 2018 [2009], and Brecht in The Eye of History: When Images Take Positions, Cambridge, 2018 [2009]), with photography (the slides of the Salpetrière asylum in Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, Cambridge 2004 [1982]).
Other scholars have focused on the importance of Warburg's ideas for theatrical and dramaturgical criticism (Ulrich Port, Pathosformel. Die Tragödie und die Geschichte exaltierter Affekte 1755-1886, Paderborn 2005), for cinema (Philippe Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, Cambridge 2013 [1998]), for psychoanalysis (Davide Stimilli, La tintura di Warburg, in L. Binswanger, La guarigione infinita. Storia clinica di Aby Warburg, Vicenza 2005), for anthropology, with particular attention to the ritual of dances (Giovanni Careri, Aby Warburg. Rituel, Pathosformel et forme intermédiaire, in «L'Homme. Revue francaise d'anthropologie» 165 [2003], pp. 40-76; Id., Gli oggetti di Warburg, in C. Cieri Via, P. Montani [ed.], Lo sguardo di Giano. Aby Warburg fra tempo e memoria, Torino 2004, pp. 453-476; Carlo Severi, Boas e Warburg. Tra biologia delle immagini e morfologia, in Schifanoia, Pisa-Roma 2013, pp. 81-96, or Sigrid Weigel).
Despite the many important studies on the subject, however, there still seems to be a lack of study that considers Warburg's work as a nerve point and gravitational center of an absolutely modern constellation of ideas and that might serve for a deep, multifaceted, dynamic and lively analysis of the most intrinsic aspects of European culture.
This research project therefore aims to establish a double objective; on the one hand to extrapolate from Warburg's writings – mostly of a historical-artistic nature – a "methodology" that can be applied in different disciplines. On this subject the critics are not unanimous, precisely because of the non-organicity and non-programmaticity of his work. Warburg has in fact operated in an extremely meticulous, almost obsessive way, in collecting, cataloguing, comparing, analyzing a vast repertoire of images and studies (just think of his Library and the Atlas), but he has left very few organic and compact writings that can help us interpret his thought in an unitary and definitive concept. Precisely in this apparent methodological non-organicity can be found, however, a new key of study and interpretation of modernity, by making use of its own means and by proceeding therefore from the investigation of details, fragments, symptoms, Pathosformel. At the same time, if Agamben, resorting to an expression by Robert Klein, called Warburg's discipline a «science without a name», i.e. a science that still has to be founded (G. Agamben, .), it is important to ask ourselves about the infinite potentialities contained in his work and the future possibility of founding a new discipline that considers in a cross-cultural and intertemporal way the different scientific branches, for the definition of culture as an open, supra- and trans-national, dynamic and centrifugal knowledge field.
Monica Centanni dedicated the issue 127 of «Engramma» (May-June 2015) at Brecht's relationship with Warburg Atlas Mnemosyne.
When Didi-Huberman points out the "excessive" aspect of Warburg's method, he seems to suggest a working methodology that "exceeds" its discipline and the knowledge acquired in its own field and epoch. Although the intersections, or interferences, between art history and other disciplines are evident in Warburg's thought, they have not always been the subject of in-depth studies. In philosophy, for example, there is a constant reference to Jacob Burckhardt's History of Culture, to Ernst Cassirer's studies of the symbolic forms, to Nietzsche's philosophy of the birth of tragedy as the result of a meeting of two opposite tendencies, or to Walter Benjamin's concept of "dialectical image" (cf. A. Barale,La malinconia dell’immagine. Rappresentazione e significato in Benjamin e Warburg, Firenze 2009; D. Stimilli [ed.], Aby Warburg. La dialettica dell’immagine, «Aut-Aut», 321-322 [2004]), while Warburg is rarely cited as a precursor of some philosophical tendencies of the second half of the 20th century (the perceptual turn or the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty).
Also in the anthropological field, whereas the influences of Hermann Usener or Tito Vignoli on Warburg are frequently highlighted, little attention is given to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, whose thought has, on the contrary, many points of contact with that of the author. Another important lack concerns studies that focus on Warburg's relationship with Freud's and Jung's psychoanalysis, on the comparison between the concept of and the Jungian concept of collective archetypes, but above all on the possibility of using Warburg's writings to trace a "cultural psychoanalysis".
This research project aims to take a first step to fill this gap in Warburghian studies and beyond; particular attention will be given however to the way in which these disciplines – philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis – come into contact with modern literature. Literary studies have so far also mostly focused on Warburg's relationship with classical literature, rarely laying the groundwork for a comparison with 19th and 20th-century literature. Although theoretically many authors have emphasized the importance of the relationship between word and image, literature and visual art, from Goethe to the 20th-century culture, little attention has been given to the "disturbing" or "pathetic" element of this relationship (cf. R. Venuti, Aby Warburg. Sismografo tra le culture, «Moderna» 6 [2], p. 13-21). Showing in art and literature forms in their mutability necessarily implies the acceptance of all those invasive, alien, non-proportioned, "pathetic" elements that burst forth from the work of art, breaking its plastic consistency, and contravening the principles of harmony and transparency.
A first cycle of meetings dedicated to Warburg has been organized in March/April 2020 by the proposer, Gabriele Guerra and Giulia Iannucci within the interdisciplinary seminar of the Master's degree class in Literature, Language and Translation Studies. It was also decided to dedicate to Warburg next issue of the magazine "links", a journal for German literature and culture directed by Gabriele Guerra.