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Category: Readings

Articles published in this section discuss publications that are relevant to the research conducted by the project; they reflect ongoing conversations between its members.

Aby Warburgs Bilderkosmos. “Eine Art Weltkrieg” von Anselm Franke und Erhard Schüttpelz

Der unscheinbar daherkommende Band Eine Art Weltkrieg von Anselm Franke und Erhard Schüttpelz (Spector Books 2021) unternimmt den Versuch, den „meistgelesene[n] Text Warburgs und der Kunstgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts“ (S. 14), namentlich Aby Warburgs sogenanntes Schlangenritual, und die sich seither um diese Ausführungen rankenden – oder sollte man sagen: schlängelnden? – Diskurse wie Bilddiskkurse neu einzuordnen.

A posthumous publication: Frank Martin’s “Camillo Rusconi: ein Bildhauer des Spätbarock in Rom” (2019)

When recently I took Frank Martin’s posthumously published book off the shelf at the Warburg Institute I was pursuing issues relating to eighteenth-century Italian sculpture, in particular the making and use of models. But the book attracted me also on a personal level. Frank Martin died unexpectedly at the age of 53 in 2014. I knew him well from periods when we had worked at the same institutions, in 1993 at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, where he was a postdoctoral fellow, and again in 1996 at the Warburg Institute, where he held a three-month Frances Yates Fellowship.

The Ideological Origins of American Insurrection

In the preface to the 50th anniversary edition of his Pulitzer prize winning study, ‘The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution’, the Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn reflects back on his book’s original argument of 1967, one based on an unprecedented attention to the language and rhetoric of the manifold political pamphlets that circulated in the American colonies between 1760 and 1776. Towards the end of his retrospection, Bailyn underlines the importance of the reception of ancient Roman republicanism among the American revolutionaries and cites one of the most well-known expressions of whiggish sentiment of the time—Trenchard and Gordon’s essays from the 1720s known as ‘Cato’s Letters’. Quoting the letters’ assertion that “words are too weak” to express the magnitude of the impact of the history of ancient Rome on the 18th century republican mind, Bailyn wonders if pictures might come closer to the mark.

Rosalind Krauss: The Optical Unconscious

Here is why I am addressing Chapter Six of Rosalind Krauss’ The Optical Unconscious, in which she considers the mid-career paintings made by the artist Cy Twombly: I am writing about Rosalind Krauss on Cy Twombly’s ‘chalkboard’ paintings as way of thinking about mark and repetition, eventually as applied to my new theoretical work on the English baroque. I am writing about Krauss on Twombly because I am trying to think about the boundaries between art criticism, personal emotion, and art history in new and productive ways, both for myself and for my work for the project. Finally, I am writing about Krauss on Twombly because I both disagree with her, and owe her the foundation on which I myself am able to mount a critique.

Synthesis of Text and Image: Sarnath Banerjee’s Graphic Fiction

Is it likely that contemporary Indian graphic novelists draw inspiration from medieval Indian artists who composed illustrated manuscripts? There is negligible research on the transference of Indo-Persian artistic practices in the works of modern and contemporary artists in India. One of the causes maybe the disadvantage concerning scholars familiar with Urdu and Persian languages, limiting access to the literary and art historical discourse in circulation, during the early twentieth century. Scholars researching modernism in the art of Muslim South Asia, however, have attempted to address the issue; but more studies are awaited.

„Ubuntu“ als Möglichkeitsraum politischen Handelns für das Zukünftige? Über Felwine Sarrs „Afrotopia“

Ein kompromissloses Manifest ist Felwine Sarr mit dem Buch „Afrotopia“ gelungen, das 2016 erschien und seit diesem Jahr in deutscher und demnächst in englischer Übersetzung vorliegt. Fragt man sich, welche Leserschaft der Autor anspricht und vermutet aufgrund des vom Titel alludierten Themenhorizonts es adressiere allein diejenigen, die sich mit den Zukünften Afrikas befassen wollen, sei man zwar nicht enttäuscht, aber doch aufgefordert einige längere Blicke hinein zu werfen.

Aby Warburg: “Italienische Kunst und internationale Astrologie im Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara” (1912/1922)

The different modes that are brought together in this image may be summarized as “movement” and “stillness”, “tamed” and “untamed”, a central dialectic in the handling of falcons. On the one side, a hunting party is depicted with hooded and hence calm falcons, on the other a restless rider on horseback (note his garments, fluttering in motion), whose falcon almost flies away from his fist and is about to launch itself at the beholders of the artwork. Falcon and image are transformed here into a mirror of princes by shaping the courtiers’ actions and habitus.

The Haunting of Style: Emanuel Löwy on the “Origins of Visual Art”

In a lecture delivered at the Vienna Academy of Sciences in 1930, the classical archaeologist Emanuel Löwy (1857–1938) sought to excavate the “origins of art” in Greece. His earlier writings had traced the linear and isolated appearance of ancient figural representations to underlying “memory-pictures” that had been reproduced uncritically, before a new “physiological” sense of observation launched the birth of classical art. Similar to children’s drawings, as Löwy argued, at this stage man created images that were suggested by reality but essentially conjured from within the mind. His Vienna lecture probed these very same stylistic features, but on different premises. In this paper it is not the mechanics of the mind, but its irrational anxieties that mobilize objects against evil spirits and thus ultimately propel artistic change.

Kavita Singh: “Real Birds in Imagined Gardens: Mughal Painting between Persia and Europe”.

“Real Birds in Imagined Gardens”, arises out of Kavita Singh’s lecture titled, “Looking East, Looking West: Mughal Painting between Persia and Europe” as part of the Getty Research Institute Council’s lecture series, held at the Getty Centre in 2015. As outlined in the foreword, the book joins the rich stream of ongoing research ‘that transcends the traditional boundaries of Western art history.’ (p.vii). At the core of the volume, lies the endeavour to underline how Mughal painters enthusiastically received and responded to the arts of Europe. In addition, Singh also considers the interests, precedents and legacies of Mughal painting occasioned through the circulation of objects, ideas and individuals from Safavid Iran to Mughal India (Hindustan).  

Allison Stielau: The Case of the Case for Early Modern Objects.

On 17th and 18th June 2019 the first workshop of the second round of the research group Bilderfahrzeuge took place at the Warburg Institute, London. Under the title “Image/Vessel” it dealt with the methodological and theoretical relation of two important topics of art historical research: image theory and thing theory. Based on the first text of the readings section of the workshop, The Case of the Case for Early Modern Objects and Images by Allison Stielau, we began with an examination of the relation between container and contained. In light of this essay and the ensuing discussion, I would like to present some central questions and reflections of the workshop.

Marc Bloch: “Réflections d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre”

“Items of false news, in all the multiplicity of their forms – simple gossip, deceptions, legends – have filled the life of humanity. How are they born? From what elements do they take shape? How do they propagate themselves, gaining strength as they pass from mouth to mouth or writing to writing?” – In 1921, three years after the end of the First World War, the historian Marc Bloch posed these questions in his essay Reflections of an Historian on the False News of the War.

Edgar Wind: ‘Hume and the Heroic Portrait’

Often understood as a mode of Geistesgeschichte, Wind’s lecture was a pioneering effort to think about canonical works of 18th century British art through the larger philosophical discourse of their time, most notably through the debates aroused by the skeptical arguments of David Hume concerning human nature. How might paintings, Wind asked, have been involved in the period’s questioning and championing of human reason as a trustworthy cognitive capacity that purportedly elevates man above other animals?

Barbara Wittmann: ‘Bedeutungsvolle Kritzeleien. Eine Kultur- und Wissensgeschichte der Kinderzeichung, 1500-1950’

There is no dearth of scholarship on modern artists’ reception and appropriation of children’s drawings, but Wittmann’s book tells a decidedly different – and more ambitious – story. Employing an interdisciplinary approach informed as much by the history of science as by the history of art, the author sets her sights on the operative function of the children’s drawing within the discourses, practices and institutions that shaped modern childhood as such. By addressing a wide range of social and scientific contexts – from experimental psychology to progressive education, from intelligence testing to psychoanalysis – the author reveals the diverse and often contradictory ways in which these fields implemented the children’s drawing both as an object and an instrument of knowledge.

Carlo Severi: ‘The Universe of the Arts of Memory’

“The Universe of the Arts of Memory” (Chapter Three), pp. 61-97, in: Capturing Imagination. A Proposal for an Anthropology of Thought by Carlo Severi. The comprehensive aim of this essay is to further develop the anthropology of memory which the author earlier proposed in his work The Chimera Principle: An Anthropology of Memory and Imagination (French ed. 2007; English ed. 2015). The latter opens with a discussion on Aby Warburg’s work on the biology of images in regard to Hopi pictograms.