Warburg before and after the Renaissance

Classical quotations between archaeology and psychohistory

Abstract

Aby Warburg (1866–1929) made Nachleben the central theme of his anthropological approach to Western art. In Georges Didi-Huberman’s reinterpretation, it is studied in terms of its logic, sources and philosophical resonances, ranging from historicity according to Burckhardt to the unconscious according to Freud, via eternal return according to Nietzsche and biological memory according to Darwin. A multiplicity of approaches is the only means of describing the paradoxical ‘life’ of images and through which Warburg introduces the constitutive paradoxes of the image itself: its nature as a ‘ghost’, its power to convey pathos, its structure as a ‘symptom’. With this in mind, the essay analyses works by Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Delvaux, Salvador Dalí and Albert Moore, together with some examples of early Christian art, in an attempt to demonstrate that while it is possible to apply Warburg’s reflections to the arts of the 19th and 20th centuries, the same cannot be said for those prior to the Renaissance, which do not seem to lend themselves to a retrospective analysis.

https://www.lim.it/it/imago/7096-imago-musicae-xxxiv-97855435024.html#/2-tipo_prodotto-libro