Warburg Institute

À Berlin, deux expositions sont actuellement consacrées à Aby Warburg (1866-1929), historien de l’art allemand : Aby Warburg: Bilder­ atlas Mnemosyne – Das Original (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, jusqu’au 30 novembre 2020) et Zwischen Kosmos und Pathos. Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, jusqu’au 1er novembre 2020). Ce dispositif est pensé sous la forme de deux espaces complémentaires, dans des musées situés de part et d’autre du Tiergarten, le grand parc du centre-ville.

Saturn and Melancholy remains an iconic text in art history, intellectual history, and the study of culture, despite being long out of print in English. Rooted in the tradition established by Aby Warburg and the Warburg Library, this book has deeply influenced understandings of the interrelations between the humanities disciplines since its first publication in English in 1964. This new edition makes the original English text available for the first time in decades. Saturn and Melancholy offers an unparalleled inquiry into the origin and development of the philosophical and medical theories on which the ancient conception of the temperaments was based and discusses their connections to astrological and religious ideas. It also traces representations of melancholy in literature and the arts up to the sixteenth century, culminating in a landmark analysis of Dürer's most famous engraving, Melencolia I. This edition features Raymond Klibansky's additional introduction and bibliographical amendments for the German edition, as well as translations of source material and 155 original illustrations. An essay on the complex publication history of this pathbreaking project-which almost did not see the light of day-covers more than eighty years, including its more recent heritage. Making new a classic book that has been out of print for over four decades, this expanded edition presents fresh insights about Saturn and Melancholy and its legacy as a precursor to modern interdisciplinary studies.

The paper sketches the different stages of the collective project and subsequent publications of the Warburg Library on the representations of Saturn as a dark genius of Melancholy since Aby Warburg’s 1913 lecture on “The Migration of Planetary Images,” which ends with the famous engraving Melencolia I: from the 1923 volume by Fritz Saxl and Erwin Panofsky, titled Dürers „Melencolia I”, to the long delayed classic 1964 text in English of Saturn and Melancholy co-authored by Saxl, Panofsky and Raymond Klibansky, and finally to the French and German editions of the same work published under the guidance of Klibansky in 1989/90. The missing link in this complex publication history, the recently reappeared original German version of Melancholie und Saturn, from 1939, is here for the first time taken in account.

One of the unresolved riddles in the history of the humanities is the relationship between Aby Warburg and Ernst Cassirer, or, more precisely, the impact of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg on Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.  In engaging with this particular constellation I lay out a model of what I call epistemic surroundings and how they facilitate scholarly production in the humanities.  Therefore, this article sets out to describe the labor of humanists in terms of an historical epistemology.  In short, this is an essay in understanding humanist scholarship in the making and its afterlives as plastic knowledge in inevitable motion.

Nel 1966, a ventisette anni, Carlo Ginzburg pubblicava il suo primo libro, I Benandanti. Nello stesso anno il giovane storico – allievo, alla Scuola Normale di Pisa, di Delio Cantimori – pubblicava anche un’ampia rassegna intitolata Da A. Warburg a E.H. Gombrich. Note su un problema di metodo. Il problema di metodo riguardava “l’utilizzazione delle testimonianze figurate come fonti storiche”; i suoi dilemmi e le sue implicazioni erano messi in luce attraverso un’acuta e appassionante lettura critica delle grandi opere di Aby Warburg e dei suoi originali continuatori: Fritz Saxl, Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind, Ernst Gombrich. A distanza di cinquant’anni, il dialogo di Ginzburg con la molteplice eredità warburghiana mostra ancora tutta la sua vivacità.

Sale Monumentali, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venezia | giovedì 17 marzo 2022, ore 16.00 .

Presentazione dei volumi:
- Warburg e il pensiero vivente, a cura di Monica Centanni (Ronzani editore).
-Aby Warburg and Living Thought, edited by Monica Centanni and translated by Elisabeth Thomson (Ronzani editore).

Saluto di Stefano Campagnolo, Direttore della Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana.
Intervengono: Monica Centanni, Salvatore Settis e Bill Sherman.

Aby Warburg, fondatore di una nuova scienza della cultura, che restituisce parola all’immagine; figura di “intellettuale militante” (così Gertrud Bing), per il quale non si dà distinzione tra vita e pensiero; pioniere di nuovi metodi di ricerca che inventa macchine, nuovi ‘organi’ per attivare ed esercitare il sapere; architetto di spazi disegnati per essere arene del pensiero: la Biblioteca di Scienza della cultura (migrata da Amburgo a Londra nel 1933) e l’Atlante Mnemosyne, le imprese che costituiscono la parte più consistente della sua eredità.

I dieci contributi raccolti per la prima volta in questo volume, tutti fioriti in ambito italiano, tracciano in modo chiaro la linea del “pensiero vivente” di Warburg. Giorgio Pasquali, Mario Praz, Gertrud Bing, Arsenio Frugoni, Giorgio Agamben, Guglielmo Bilancioni, Alessandro Dal Lago, Gianni Carchia, Salvatore Settis, Kurt W. Forster, Maurizio Ghelardi: il dialogo polifonico, ravvicinato o a distanza, fra studiosi di formazione diversa, attiva un fascio di luce che illumina in modo inedito la personalità di Warburg e mette in risalto il profilo del suo lascito intellettuale.

La conferenza è disponibile sul canale YouTube della Biblioteca:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCesk4_I8FuO08GpqmnYJINg

Per leggere un estratto del volume (versione in italiano) vedi: "Warburg e il pensiero vivente" a cura di M. Centanni, Ronzani Editore, 2022.
https://www.academia.edu/82493547/ABY_WARBURG_and_MNEMOSYNE_ATLAS_Warburg_e_il_pensiero_vivente_2022_

To read an extract from the volume (English version) see:
https://www.academia.edu/82494171/ABY_WARBURG_and_MNEMOSYNE_ATLAS_Aby_Warburg_and_Living_Thought_2022_

Per ottenere il libro, consultare il seguente link:
To get the book use the following link:
https://bit.ly/RonzaniEd_WPV

The following pages examine aspects of Gombrich’s impact on the practice of art history at the Warburg Institute which he directed from 1959 to 1976. The first section focuses on Gombrich’s ideas on the interpretation of images, the next two sections examine his impact on the direction he gave to the Institute in terms of appointments, of the teaching programme he set up and of the care and development of the two major research instruments in his care: the Warburg Library and Photographic collection.

The pdf of the article will be made available in March 2019, one year after the book launch.

This paper analyses the relationship between Edgar Wind and Gertrud Bing through a reading of their correspondence, in order to shed light on a crucial chapter in the history of studies on Warburg’s legacy. The rift between Edgar Wind and those representatives of the Warburg Institute who transferred to London marks a wound in European cultural history that has yet to heal.
Philological research is still needed to reconstruct this history, which is presently characterised by confusion and gaps. This article should be seen as a first step towards a comprehensive survey of the Wind–Bing correspondence preserved and filed at the Bodleian Archive in Oxford and the Warburg Archive in London.

A) ARTÍCULOS
Andrea Mecacci, “Kitsch y neokitsch”.
Maximiliano Crespi, “La función antimoderna. Filología y estilística como modelos de investigación humanística en Héctor Ciocchini”.
B) NOTA CRÍTICA
José Jatuff y Fabio Campeotto, “Mesura y grandes relieves: William James, Victor Hugo y Correggio”.
C) COMENTARIOS BIBLIOGRÁFICOS
José de Nordenflycht, "Sandra Szir y María Amalia García (eds.). Entre la academia y la crítica. La construcción discursiva y disciplinar de la historia del arte. Argentina – Siglo XX"
Franco Liberati, "Gustav Theodor Fechner. Anatomía comparada de los ángeles/Sobre la danza [Vergleichende Anatomie der Engel/Über den Tanz]

Chapter 5.2.2. Art history according to Panofsky, Wittkower and Gombrich It is significant that it is not the work of Aby Warburg but that of Erwin Panofsky that is frequently quoted in postwar art historical literature. He shares this honor with researchers such as Rudolf Wittkower and later Ernst Gombrich. This common ground contributed to the fact that art history became an Anglo-Saxon affair in the course of the 1930s. On the run from National Socialism, Panofsky settled in America in 1933, while Wittkower (1934) and Gombrich (1936) started working at the Warburg Institute in London.

K.W. Forster, K. Mazzucco, Introduzione ad Aby Warburg e all'Atlante della Memoria, a cura di M. Centanni, Mondadori, 2002.

Per ulteriori approfondimenti su Aby Warburg, l'Atlante Mnemosyne e il suo metodo di ricerca, vedi: "Warburg e il pensiero vivente" a cura di M. Centanni, Ronzani Editore, 2022.
https://www.academia.edu/3650355/ABY_WARBURG_AND_MNEMOSYNE_ATLAS_Warburg_e_il_pensiero_vivente_2022_


For further details on Aby Warburg, the Mnemosyne Atlas and his research method, see the English edition of: "Aby Warburg and Living Thought" ed. by M. Centanni, Ronzani Editore, 2022.
https://www.academia.edu/82494171/ABY_WARBURG_and_MNEMOSYNE_ATLAS_Aby_Warburg_and_Living_Thought_2022_

Tracing a general map of recurrences of the lemma Nachleben in documents of the Warburg Library may help in shedding some light on a peculiar lexical question within the intellectual dynamics of the so-called Warburg Kreis. As already under- lined, the term is not attested in Aby Warburg’s published works, except in very few cases, mainly as an adjective. The first occurrence of the noun in Warburg’s letters corresponds, in fact, to an expression by the young Fritz Saxl, presenting his re- search interest: “My core question [...] is the Nachleben of Antiquity in the Middle Ages,” (1913). In the early 1920s the Warburg Library, created as a private collection, was then turned into a research institute. In those years, the library was described by Fritz Saxl (1921) as a “question-library” (Problem-Bibliothek), with questions relating to the posthumous, or afterlife, of Antiq- uity (Nachleben der Antike) being at its centre. Saxl initiated as well the Library’s two publication series: Studies (Studien) and Lectures (Vorträge). Here within the Warburg Kreis we first find a discussion of the phenomenon of the Nachleben of forms. The term is again present in a later introductory text about the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg by Warburg and Saxl (1927), and is then further documented in the original plan for the system of both the Bücher- and Bildersammlung of the KBW (1927-1930) later on reformulated in London after the move from Germany. By means of commenting some loci of this map, the paper re-discusses the dynamic meaning of the Begriff Nachleben in the context of the Warburg Library’s ‘intellectual biography’.

Die Biographie des ungarischen und jüdischen Kunsthistorikers Jenö Lányi (1902-1940) ist pragmatisch für die europäische Geschichte des XX. Jahrhunderts, weil sie deren Konflikte und Brüche widerspiegelt. Das 1920 verabschiedete Numerus-Clausus-Gesetz, welches den Anteil jüdischer Studenten auf ungarischen Universitäten beschränkte, zwang Lányi, das Studium der Kunstgeschichte in Wien zu absolvieren.
Weitere historische, antisemitische Entwicklungen haben sein Leben diktiert: Die Machtergreifung Hitlers, die italienischen rassistischen Gesetzen, die notgedrungene Flucht nach London sowie sein frühes Tod.
Doch kann man auch in Bezug auf die Forschung des Kunsthistorikers weitere interessante Bruchlinien gegenüber der Tradition festhalten.
Die akademische Ausbildung Lányis in Wien ist geprägt von herausragenden Forschern, die um die Jahrhundertwende an der Universität der österreichischen Hauptstadt die Entwicklung der kunstwissenschaftliche Methode bestimmt haben. Grundlegend für die über mehrere Generationen reichende wissenschaftliche Evolution der sogenannten Wiener Schule sind vor allem die Beiträge von Alois Riegl und Max Dvorak, wobei die Entfaltung des Phänomens durch eine längere Reihe von Gelehrten geschehen ist, die jeweils auf den Erkenntnissen ihrer Vorgänger aufbauten.
In der 1936 veröffentlichten Artikel „Zur Pragmatik der Florentiner Quattrocentoplastik (Donatello)“ erläuterte Lányi die von ihm bevorzugte kunsthistorische Methode. Die Betrachtung von Kunstwerken soll sich weder auf eine intuitive, auf stilistischen Merkmalen basierende Analyse, noch auf die bloße Untersuchung von historischen Dokumenten beschränken. Vielmehr sollen sich beide Vorgehensweisen ergänzen: Nur dadurch kann die Deutung einzelner Kunstwerken und gesamter Oeuvre schlüssig werden.
Seinen kunstwissenschaftlichen Ansatz drückt Lányi 1939 in London erneut aus. Am Warburg Institut, bei The Art Worker’s Guild und an der Deutschen Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft hielt er vier Konferenzen, in denen er nicht nur seine neueste Erkenntnisse über Donatello und seine enorme fotografische Dokumentation dessen Werke präsentierte, sondern auch seine kunstwissenschaftliche Ideen äußerte. Auf der Basis der in diesen noch nie publizierten Texten beinhalteten Thesen, sowie aufgrund Lányi starkes Interesse für die Fotografie als Hilfsmittel der Kunstgeschichte kann man behaupten, dass Lányis Forschungsmethode eine Bruchlinie zu den traditionellen methodologischen Ansätzen der Kunstgeschichte und insbesondere zu den Überzeugungen von Wissenschaftlern der Wiener Schule darstellt. Das Referat setzt sich als Ziel, diese Behauptung näher zu erläutern.

In August 1939, Edgar Wind (1900-1971) – then Deputy-Director of the Warburg Institute – departed from London towards the United States, intending to stay for five months. Due to the outbreak of the Second World War, this journey would last sixteen years. Wind’s transatlantic career spanned lectures across the United States and employment in notorious academic institutions, at times acting as an ambassador to the Warburg Institute and as an overseas herald to Aby Warburg’s intellectual legacy. However, while Wind’s North American status flourished, his relationship to the Warburg Institute foundered, leading to a series of disagreements that would ultimately result in a falling-out; a watershed, both for Wind’s late career and for the subsequent heuristic goals of the Warburgkreis.
This article aims to (1) portray Wind’s activities in the United States from 1939 to 1945 and (2) elaborate on the reasons behind Wind’s severance of ties with the Warburg Institute in 1945, the background to such a decision and the consequences it entailed. As a complement, an extensive appendix of letters follows, detailing the transatlantic discussion between Wind, Saxl, Bing, Wittkower, and members of the Warburg family.

"El Simposio de la Maestría en Conservación de Acervos Documentales 2018 invita a repensar, desde aproximaciones teórico-prácticas, las diferencias entre bibliotecas, archivos y museos, con el objetivo de reevaluar su (in)actualidad, sopesar los desafíos comunes que enfrentan
unas y otras instituciones, y trazar posibles rutas futuras para la comprensión y el tratamiento de los acervos documentales que resguardan. Se busca interrogar a la biblioteca, el archivo y
el museo desde la teoría y la intervención, examinando conceptos, modelos y prácticas de conservación, así como sus intersecciones."
Simposio Internacional de la Maestría en Conservación de Acervos
Documentales, ENCRyM

Slides from a talk given at the Visual Social Media Lab's "Picturing the Social" workshop at Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, on 21 June, 2016. It calls for interdisciplinary participation of art historians for the study of imagery shared on the Internet, and invokes Aby Warburg as a forerunner whose interests spanned high & low culture and the use of modern technology.

Conference, 28 - 29 October 2021, Italian Cultural Institute, London | Edgar Wind: Art and Embodiment.

A two-day conference dedicated to art historian Edgar Wind, organised by Bernardino Branca (PhD cand. University of Kent) and Dr. Ben Thomas (Art History, University of Kent) in partnership with ICI London.

To watch the video of the lecture, follow the link:
https://vimeo.com/showcase/9017984/video/643470643#t=31:46

To read the essay included in the Conference Proceedings [2022] follow the link:
https://www.academia.edu/80617807/ABY_WARBURG_and_MNEMOSYNE_ATLAS_The_Rift_between_Edgar_Wind_and_the_Warburg_Institute_Seen_through_the_Correspondence_between_Edgar_Wind_and_Gertrud_Bing_A_Decisive_Chapter_in_the_mis_Fortune_of_Warburgian_Studies_2022_

Este artículo traza la relación entre un historiador de la filosofía y el círculo intelectual de la Kulturwissenschafltliche Bibliothek Warburg a través de un grupo de documentos archivísticos que han aparecido recientemente. Empapado del mundo multidisciplinario y colectivo de la biblioteca de Aby Warburg en Hamburgo, Raymond Klibansky maduró junto con la propia biblioteca, participando y dirigiendo una serie de proyectos central a la identidad del Warburg Institute, tal como renació en Inglaterra en la década de 1930, como por ejemplo la edición del Corpus Platonicum Medii Aevi en latín y arabe, y el famoso Saturn and Melancholy co-escrito con Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. Esta breve mirada ilustra la persistencia del enfoque en el pluralismo y la transmisión entendida como Nachleben en el corazón del empeño humanista, y esboza el alcance de la obra de este erudito, para quien el método warburgiano fue clave en su desarrollo y en su activismo a lo largo del siglo XX.

The resentment and mutual accusations between Edgar Wind (1900-1971) and his Warburgian colleagues intensified after the former broke off ties with the Warburg Institute following a meeting with Fritz Saxl (1890-1948) in the United States in mid- June 1945. To the Warburgians, Wind was a cantankerous deserter who levied against them unfounded and unjust allegations. To Wind’s mind, the root cause of their estrangement was intellectual: his colleagues had steered the Institute away from the teachings and ideas of its founder, Aby Warburg (1866-1929), allowing ossified academic complacency to take the place of trailblazing transdisciplinary scholarship through a series of less than savoury managerial practices. In 1954, following a series of developments, Wind wrote a letter to his Oxford friend, Jean Seznec (1905-1983), appealing for some sort of satisfactory resolution concerning the fate of the Warburg Institute. This is a poignant document, which now survives only as a heavily revised draft letter in which Wind at length exposes not only his side of the argument but also his take on Warburg’s legacy (coloured by personal anecdotes). This short article aims to (I) frame the context of the letter’s production, as well as Wind’s relationship with Seznec; (II), raise some questions regarding Wind’s concern with the so-called Warburgian tradition; (III) provide a critical edition of the draft letter, edited for greater legibility.

Edited by Monica Centanni.
Translated by Elizabeth Thomson.

Aby Warburg, the founder of a new Science of Culture, the scholar who gave back word to the image; a “militant” intellectual (so wrote Gertrud Bing), for whom no distinction exists between life and thought; pioneer of new research methods, inventing ‘machines’ of knowledge; architect of spaces designed as arenas of thought. The Library for the Science of Culture (transferred from Hamburg to London in 1933) and the Mnemosyne Atlas are the achievements to which the most substantial part of his heritage is linked.

The ten essays here collected for the first time, all stemming from the Italian cultural milieu, trace with clarity Warburg’s “living thought”. Giorgio Pasquali, Mario Praz, Gertrud Bing, Arsenio Frugoni, Giorgio Agamben, Guglielmo Bilancioni, Alessandro Dal Lago, Gianni Carchia, Salvatore Settis, Kurt W. Forster, Maurizio Ghelardi: the polyphonic dialogue, whether from close up or at a distance, between scholars of diverse backgrounds casts a new beacon of light that illuminates with clarity and precision Warburg’s personality and intellectual legacy.

Summary

Foreword

Giorgio Pasquali, "A Tribute to Aby Warburg [1930]"
Mario Praz, "Aby Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften [1934]"
Gertrud Bing, "Aby M. Warburg [1960]"
Arsenio Frugoni, "The Renewal of Aby Warburg [1967]"
Giorgio Agamben, "Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science [1975, 1984]"
Guglielmo Bilancioni, "Aby Warburg, the great Lord of the Labyrinth [1984]"
Alessandro Dal Lago, "The Archaic and its Double: Aby Warburg and Anthropology [1984]"
Gianni Carchia, "Aby Warburg: Symbol and Tragedy [1984]"
Salvatore Settis, "Warburg continuatus. The Description of a Library [1985, 1995]"
Kurt W. Forster, "Aby Warburg, A Cartographer of Passions [1999]"
Maurizio Ghelardi, "The final Warburg [2004]"

Afterword

Monica Centanni, "Aby Warburg and Living Thought"

The book is available at the following link: https://bit.ly/Ronzani_WLT

Edited by: Monica Centanni, Anna Fressola, Maurizio Ghelardi. Including contributions by: Monica Centanni, Silvia De Laude, Philippe Despoix, Michael Diers, Anna Fressola, Maurizio Ghelardi, Ianick Takaes de Oliveira, Laura Tack, and Martin Treml.

Engramma issue No. 171, Aby Warburg, Unpublished and Critical Essays, is dedicated to Martin Warnke (1937-2019). It suggests a starting point and an epicentre for a future series of radial studies on the so-called Warburgkreis. It includes texts by Gertrud Bing, Delio Cantimori, Ernst H. Gombrich, Martin Warnke, Edgar Wind, and contributions by Monica Centanni, Silvia De Laude, Philippe Despoix, Michael Diers, Anna Fressola, Maurizio Ghelardi, Ianick Takaes de Oliveira, Laura Tack, and Martin Treml. An important contribution to the concept and realisation of the issue was made by the collective research of Seminario Mnemosyne, coordinated by Monica Centanni and including Giulia Bordignon, Giacomo Calandra di Roccolino, Giacomo Confortin, Monica Garavello, Vittoria Magnoler, Daniele Pisani, and  Daniela Sacco.

A complete bibliography of the writings of Gertrud Bing and of the curatorships, publications, and translations edited by herself. In addition, a review of the critical literature dedicated to her, as a scholar and intellectual (updated in November 2020). In the Appendix, a schematic Biographical note.