Informazioni sul corso

Aby Warburg is one of the most fashionable art historians in contemporary art history and beyond. Who has not heard terms such as Pathosformel, Bilderfahrzeug (“image vehicle”), or Mnemosyne? Warburg is regarded as one of the founders of image anthropology, a distinctive form of iconology, media theory, and political iconography/iconology. At the same time, there exists an extensive Warburgian “philology,” nourished by the fact that the art historian, or, as he preferred to call himself, the image historian, left behind a relatively small corpus of writings, much of it unfinished. In this seminar, we will attempt to gain a glimpse into the laboratory of Aby Warburg’s thought and its embeddedness within broader art-historiographical frameworks. Through the close reading and critical discussion of key texts, we will explore the ideas that have been central to the formation of the Warburgian mythos. The seminar will cover Warburg’s major writings, from his studies on Botticelli and Luther to his essays on the Palazzo Schifanoia, Rembrandt, and Manet, culminating in his Mnemosyne Atlas project and his so-called Serpent Ritual. The texts will be provided in both German and English.