Aby Warburg (1866-1929) is best known as the originator of the
discipline of iconology and as the founder of the institute that
bears his name. His followers included such celebrated art historians
of the twentieth century as Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind, and Fritz
Saxl. But his heirs developed, for the most part, a domesticated
iconology based on the interpretation of symbolic material. As
Phillippe-Alain Michaud shows in this important book, Warburg's own
project was remote from any positivist or neo-Kantian ambitions.
Nourished on the work of Nietzsche and Burckhardt, Warburg fashioned
a "critical iconology" to reveal the irrationality of the image in
Western culture. Opposing the grand teleological narratives of art
inaugurated by Vasari, Warburg's method operated through historical
anachronisms and discontinuities. Using "montage-collision" to create
textless collections of images, he brought together pagan artifacts
and masterpieces of Florentine Renaissance art, ancient Near East
astrology and the Lutheran Reformation, Mannerist festivals and the
sacred dances of Native Americans. Michaud insists that for Warburg,
the practice of art history was the discovery within the art work
itself of fracture, contradictions, tensions, and the energies of
magic, empathy, totemism, and animism. Challenging normative accounts
of Western European classicism, Warburg located the real sources of
the Renaissance in the Dionysian spirit, in the expression of
movement and dance, in the experience of trance personified in the
frenzied nymph or ecstatic maenad. Aby Warburg and the Image in
Motion is not only a book about Warburg but a book written with him;
Michaud uses Warburg's intuitions and discoveries to analyze other
categories of imagery, including the daguerreotype, the
chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey, early cinema, and the
dances of Loie Fuller. It will be essential reading for anyone
concerned with the origins of modern art history and the visual
culture of modernity.
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