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Iconology of the interval: Aby Warburg's legacyMatt hewa Rampley
To cite this article: Matt hewa Rampley (2001) Iconology of the int erval: Aby Warburg's legacy, Word & Image: A Journal of
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1 - The
term
'iconology'
predated
Warburg by many centuries. In the
si..xteenth century
'iconology'
referred to
the identification of allegorical
and
symbolical figures, for which a number
of
iconological
manuals
were produced.
The
most
famous was
perhaps Cesare Ripa's
lcorlOlogia (Rome,
1593).
The term
remained
in
LIse throughout
the following
centuries, usually being indistin.guishable
from 'iconography'. Until the late
nineteenth century the
terms 'iconology'
and 'iconography' denoted a tool for use
by artists, and this was thc
function of
the
iconological
manuals. The attempt
to re
establish iconography on a scientific basis
as
an art-historical
method
of
interpretation was first undertaken
by the
French
art historian Eugene
Muntz.
Having
already completed a study on
The
History
oj
Art During
the Renaissance
(Paris,
1895),
which made
use
of
iconographical
research,
Muntz
delivered a
paper
to
the
International Congress in
Art
History of
1898 on
The Necessity ofIconographical
Research'. This also led to the founding in
1902 of
the
'International
Society for
Iconographic Study'. See Peter Schmidt,
A
b),
lvI.
vVarhurg und die
lkonologie
(Wiesbaden, 1989).
See, also,
Jan
Bialostocki,
'Iconography
and Ieonology',
in Encydopaedia of
H'orld
Art
(New York,
1963),
VII, pp.
769-85; William
Heckscher, 'The Genesis ofIconology', in
Heckscher, Art
and
Literature, Studies
in
Relationship, ed. E. Verheyen (Baden
Baden,
1985)
pp.
253-81.
2 -
The contemporary importance
of
iconology and the issues it raises
is
made
evident by
the continued publication
of
works
on
the subject. See, for
example,
Brendan Cassidy, ed.,
lconologv at
the
Crossroads (Princeton, 1993);
W . 1
T.
Nlitchell, leonologv (Chicago,
1986).
Iconology of the interval: Aby
Warburg's legacy
M A T T H E W
R A M P L E Y
It has long been recognized that Aby \I\Tarburg played a central role,
perhaps even the central
role,
in elevating
the
role
of
iconology in Art
History. Having been traditionally regarded as an
ancillary
activity, icono
logical
interpretation
came to
displace the concern
with
aesthetic form
and
style predominant in
late
nineteenth-century
art
historical discourse.
Through
the
work
of
collaborators, students
and followers
such
as Fritz
Saxl, Edgar \l\Tind, Erwin Panofsky or Ernst Gombrich, iconology became,
from the
I930S
onwards, established
as a canonical method
in
art historical
interpretation. Although
semiological,
psychoanalytical
and cultural
materialist interpretations have
subsequently
dislodged iconology from its
central place in
the practice of
Art History, iconology
still
maintains
prominence
in
much
contemporary scholarship.'
Indeed, while iconological
methods are often regarded as the culmination of the bourgeois tradition
of
scholarship in
Art
History,
it
has
also been
argued
that iconology, especially
as formulated by Warburg's student Panofsky,
in
many ways anticipated
subsequent theoretical positions,
in particular, the
semiological analysis of
images.
3
However,
although the idea of the iconological 'method' is
common currency,
its
origins in
the
writings of Warburg have become
largely obscured.
The reasons for this
are
quite clear. Until the recent
trans
lation of The Renewal of Pagan Antiquiry, most of \l\Tarburg's work has
remained
inaccessible to
anglophone
readers,
and
those few
other
writings
already translated lie scattered across a
variety
of different publications.'
Furthermore, the bulk of his work
remains
unpublished even in German:
the texts
gathered together
for
the
publication,
in I932,
of Die
Emeuerung der
heidnischen Antike, the first two volumes of a
projected
six-volume
edition
of
\l\Tarburg's
work, constitute only
a
small proportion
of his total output.')
Consequently Warburg's work, though
acknowledged
as ground-breaking,
has tended
to
be
eclipsed
by the
more
voluminous writings
of Panofsky,
Wittkower
and
others.
The
appearance,
therefore, of The Renewal of Pagan Alltiquiry,
presents an
opportune moment to reassess
the
legacy of
\I\T
arburg, and in this article I
intend
to examine
in
particular his notion of iconology. As I shall
indicate,
there are
important
differences
between
\l\Tarburg's
understanding
of
iconology
and better
known formulations of the concept, such as that of
Panofsky; these differences have often been overlooked as the thought of the
one has bec ome assimilated
to
that
of the
other.
I
do
not raise this
merely in
order to offer a corrective to the reading of
War
burg. Rather, my intention
is to draw
out the distinct implications
of Warburg's
thinking,
and to
examine the critical issues raised as its
intellectual
legacy. In particular, a
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central focus of Warburg's writing was what he termed the 'iconology of the
interval', a
conception
of
iconology
intimately connected with questions of
representation, spectatorship
and cultural memory.6 Accordingly, I shall
first discuss his
conception
of iconology before examining
in
turn his
treatment
of the questions of subjectivity and memory.
Iconology of
the interval
The iconological
method
is
most
immediately and
most
often
associated
with vVarburg's student Panofsky. In
Studies
ill lconology Panofsky lays out his
famous
tripartite
schema of
natural,
iconographic and
iconologicallevels
of
interpretation.?
In particular, using the example of a man offering a
greeting
with his
hat, Panofsky
distinguishes between the
putatively
natural
recognition of the main raising his hat, the socially embedded meaning, or
iconography, of the
gesture
of
raising
a
hat in mid-twentieth-century
Europe, and the iconological meaning of the gesture,
in
which it is set
against
a
background of implicit values and assumptions, including
knowledge
of the character of
the
man
in
question. In
terms
of visual
repre
sentations these three levels of interpretation
correspond
to three
strata of
meaning or content within the
representation, namely,
primary or natural
subject-matter, secondary
or
conventional subject-matter,
and intrinsic
meanmg.
Panofsky's
tripartite scheme
is open to a variety of criticisms. First, it
has
become commonplace
to
point
out
that the
notion of a
'natural'
level of
interpretation
is
highly
problematic.
s
Second, while
the
meaning
of the
distinction between iconographical and iconological analysis is perhaps
clear
in
the simplified example of the man
raising
his
hat,
Pan of ky
himself
frequently
elides the difference between the two
in
his actual historical
inter
pretations. His study
of early
Netherlandish
painting, for
example,
focuses
on
the presence
of socially
encoded
moti£5 and themes, and
largely
fails
to
explore the dimension of
tacit
symbolism and values that would inform the
'intrinsic
meaning'.
9
Hence,
while 'iconology'
analyses
the
unconscious
assumption of symbolic codes and
meanings,
Panofsky's studies tend to focus
on the conscious artistic use of symbols
and
conventions. Despite such
weaknesses, Panofsky's method offered a crucial art historical insight,
namely, recognition
of the social
mediation
of
pictorial meaning. Thus,
the
iconological
interpretation
attends to the presence of visual symbols and
their
conventionalized meanings, coupled
with an
examination
of
parallels
in
other cultural practices such as literature, philosophy,
law
and so forth.
In this, Panofsky was also indebted to Ernst Cassirer's
philosophy
of
symbolic forms, though only following through the full implications of the
latter's historicized Kantianism in a few essays, such as his studies of perspec
tive
or
proportion. (J
I t is
possible
to perceive
an
affinity
between
Panofsky's
notion
of
iconology as the study of the social mediation of pictorial representation
and
the Marxist attention
to the ideological determinants of the visual arts.
Iconology
can thus
be
regarded as a form of ideological analysis,
albeit
without
the materialist basis of
Marxist
strategies.
Furthermore, Panofsky's
iconology takes part
in
the wider shift
that
has occurred in the Humanities
and
the Social
Sciences,
namely, the spatialization of culture. In the
nineteenth century culture was primarily viewed
in
historical, genetic terms,
304
M A T T H E W R A M P LE Y
3 - See, for example, Michael Ann Holly,
PanoJsky and the Foundations oj Art
(Ithaca, 1984) p. 181 ff.:
Giulio Argan,
'Ideology and Iconology', Critical
2
(1975), pp. 297-3
0
5.
4 - Aby vVarburg, The Renewal oJPagan
Antiqui v, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles,
1999). Other
translations of
Warburg's
work into English include 'The Entry of
the Idealising
Classical Style
in the
Painting of
the
Early
Renaissance in
Florence', trans. Matthew Rampley, in
Aby Warburg,
cd.
Richard Woodfield
(New
York, forthcoming); InzagesJrom the Region
oj
he PIleblo Indian" q North America, trans.
Michael Steinberg (Ithaca, 1995):
'Italian
Art
and
International
Astrology in the
Palazzo
Schifanoia in Ferrara',
trans.
Peter \'Vortsman,
in German 1<-ssays Oil Art
HistolY, ed. Gert Schiff (New York, 1988)
pp. 234-54, Sir Ernst Gombrich's
monograph
on Warburg still offers a rich
source
of
textual material,
in
both
German
and
English translation, unavailable
elsewhere. See
Gombrich,
Aby
Warbuig.
An
Intelledual Biograph),
(London,
2nd
edn,
19
86
).
5 - Aby Warburg,
Gesammelte SdlriJien. Die
Emeuerung de,. heidnischen Antike (Leipzig
and Berlin, 1932). According to Fritz Saxl
the remaining five volumes
of
the
project
complete edition would have been: Vol. 2:
The 'Mnemosyne' Atlas and
accompanying materials; Vol.
3:
unpublished Lectures and Shorter Essays;
Vol. 4: Fragments on the 'Anthropological
Science
of
Expression'; Vol.
5:
Letters,
Aphorisms
and Autobiographical
Writings; Vol. 6: the Catalogue of
Warburg's Library.
Die Emeuenmg der
heidnis"hen Antike
has
recently been
republished as part of a renewed project of
the complete
works
of
War
burg.
6 - vVarburg uses the
phrase'
Iconology of
the Interva]",
'Ikonologie
des
Zwischenraumes'
in
a draft
Introduction
to his AlnenlOsyne project. Warburg
Archive, \"'arburg Institute,
No. 102.1.2,
p.6.
7 - Erwin Panofsky,
Studi,,' in Iconology
(Oxford,
1939)
pp.
3-31.
8 - This was already recognized as
problematic by Alois Riegl, who pointed
out that perception is historically and
culturally variable, and that consequently
representation can never be traced
back to some putative natural state of
vision. See
Riegl, Sptrmische Kunstindustrie
(Darmstadt [1905J, 1992) pp. 1-22. More
recently, this idea has come under the
most
persistent
criticism from the
perspective
of the
semiology of
the image.
Sec Norman Bryson, l'ision and Painting.
The Logic oj
he
Ga.;:e
(London, 1983).
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9 - Erwin Pan
of
ky , Earll' Netherlalldish
Painting (New York,
1971).
IO - See, for example,
Perspective
as
Form,
trans. Christopher vYood (New
York,
1992);
'The History of
the
Theory of
Human
Proportions as a Reflection of the
History
of Styles',
in AIearlillg ,'" the Visual
Arts
(Harmondsworth, 1970)
pp. 82-138.
Cassircr enjoyed a close reI a tionsh i p with
Warburg and
his
library. Although
Warburg had already developed most of
his ideas by the time he met Cassirer, he
was aware of the
striking
parallels
between
their projects. See Silvia Feretti, Cass;r,r,
Panofskl' and Warburg: Sl'mbol, Art and
Hislor},
trans. R. Pierce
(New
Haven,
1989);
Jiirgen Habennas, 'Die
befreiende
Kraft der symbolischen Formgebung.
Ernst Cassirers
humanistisches
Erbe und
die Bibliothek vYarburg', in Vortriige ails
dem TYarburg-HanI,
Vol. I (Berlin, 1997)
PP·3-
2
9·
II
- Aby Warburg, 'Sandro Botticelli's
Birth of Venus and Spring', in
Warburg,
The
Renewal
of
Pagan Antiqui(v,
pp.
89-'56.
This
will
be
referred to as
Renewal.
12 - Warburg, 'Pagan-Antique Prophecy
in Words and Imag'es
in
the
Age of
Luther', in Warburg,
Renewal, pp.
597-
697·
'3 - \,yarburg, 'Italienische Antike im
Zeitalter
Rembrandts',
Warburg
Archive,
Warburg Institute, No. 97.2.
14 - Warburg also mentions a
triumphal
arch
erected
to celebrate the
victory
of
Prince
Maurice
at Groningen in 1584.
'A
triumphal arch
on the
Prinsenho[ awaited
him, at
its
top
Neptune
with
his tritons,
and inside Claudius Civilis with several
Romans
at
his feet,
vainly
attempting to
escape. Beneath one
could
read following
verses by Spieghel: "Claudius Civilis drove
out the hard
might
of the
Romans
from
the Rhineland and the areas bordering
Batavia.
Oh, may this
freedom
be
achieved again by the hero of Nassau'"
Warburg. 'Italienische
Antike
im Zeitalter
Rembrandts', p. 63.
15 -
Warburg,
'Italienische Antike im
Zeitalter
Rembrandts',
pp. 44-5.
16 - This conception forms the basis of
Dieter ,,yuttke's reading
of
Warburg, in
particular
vYarburg's
attention
to
'Beiwerk', or 'incidental detail'. See
\,yuttke,
TVarbllrgs
Aiethode
als
Anregung
und
4th edn
(Wiesbaden,
1990)
p.66.
but from the early twentieth century cultural formations increasingly come
to
be placed
within a
synchronic
network of signs and symbols. Although
Panofsky does not use such terminology, his notion of iconology can be seen
as
anticipating
a conception of culture as a symbolic
or
discursive space, and
it is undoubtedly on account of this
that
parallels have been drawn between
iconology
and semiology.
The
precedent for Panofsky's interpretation of iconology can
be
seen in
many of the
writings
of
Aby W·arburg. His doctoral study
of
Botti
celli's Birth
oj Venus and Primavera presents an exemplary case of careful, attentive recon
struction
of the
cultural
milieu, Quattrocento
Florence, within which Botti
celli's
paintings were produced.
In that
study,
Warburg
reconstructs the
discourse of Antiquity current in Renaissance Florence, drawing on a
variety of other cultural documents of
the
time, including
the
poetry of
writers such as Angelo Poliziano and Zanobio Acciaiuoli, certain passages
from
Alberti's
De
PictzlTa,
a cassone representation of Venus and Aeneas,
or
a
medal struck by Niccolo Fiorentino
for Lorenzo Tornabuoni.
A
similar
process can
be
seen at work
in
Warburg's
other
major
study,
that
of the meaning
and
use of astrological symbols in Reformation
Germany,
in
which the significance of Di.irer's famous engraving Jvfelencolia I
is set
against the background
of the obsession with
astrology in
mid
sixteenth-century Germany. > In this study vVarburg explores the manifold
ways
in which supposedly
'primitive' astrological beliefs persisted into
the
Reformation
in
Germany,
even
among supporters of Luther, who
personally
discouraged such
practices. Amongst
1\7arburg's voluminous unpublished
writings, too,
there are examples
of a
similar
method at work. In his
lecture
of I926 on 'Italian Antiquity
in
the Age of Rembrandt',
3
Warburg
explores
the cultural
symbolism
and
resonance
of Roman
antiquity
for
the early
Dutch Republic,
highlighting,
for example, the popularity of Antonio
Tempesta's engraved illustrations
of
Ovid
and Tacitus,
or
the
prominence
of
the mythic Batavian leader Claudius Civilis
in
official pageants, literary
works such
as
Vondel's
drama
The
BatazJian
Brothers,
or in the
original
decoration of
the
town hall of Amstndam
q
The
impression which a cursory reading of these texts might give, namely,
that Warburg was concerned above all with the reconstruction of the histori
cal
milieu of specific works of art, is misleading. At the beginning of the
lecture on Rembrandt's he distances himself from historicism
and
a vague
sense of
the spirit
of the age, which arises,
he
argues,
'all
the
while the
various parallels of word and image are not brought into a systematically
ordered series of
luminous
objects, and as
long
as the material and formal
connections between
art
and drama (whether
that
consists of cultic perfor
mances,
mime plays,
or theatre
with
dialogue and
singing)
are
not seen
in
the light of their mutual significance (let alone viewed together system
atically'. 5
Despite
his stress
on
a
systematic
method,
vVarburg
does
not
offer
a system
in
the manner of Panofsky; but his emphasis invites comparison
with his
student,
who
has most
often been regarded as completing
much
of
the work of Warburg, endowing it with greater
philosophical rigour.
Warburg's
emphasis
on the necessity of
systematic method has
been
viewed by some as exemplified
in
his painstaking attention to details,
summed up in
the
famous maxim
that
'God
is
in
the detail'. 6 However,
such an interpretation misrepresents Warburg's
interest
in culture as a
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dynamic process rather than a fixed network of connections. While both
Panofsky and
Warburg
draw out the
web of horizontal relations
between
various practices wi thin
one
cultural space, vVarburg lays a further
emphasis on
the
historical
axis which crosses
the
synchrony of
any
particular
historical cultural time. This dimension is largely absent
in
the mature
iconology of Panofsky,
and its eclipse
corresponds
to the wider process
of
the
spatialization
of culture I referred to earlier. It is
in
this context that the
meaning
of Warburg's project of an
'iconology
of the
interval'
needs to
be
explored
further.
An
indication of the specific
character
of
vVarburg's conception
of
iconology can
be found early in
his
Rembrandt
lecture, when
he
asserts that
'One can furthermore draw conclusions about the
"spirit
of the age" indir
ectly,
when one
comes to perceive it as
the
conscious or unconscious
principle
of selection
informing
the
artistic
treatment of an
ancient inheri
tance preserved
in the
memory'.I7 The specific inheritance Warburg is
referring to
is
Roman
and Greek
antiquity, which he sees as providing the
basis of vVestern European culture even
in
his own time. Yet although it
forms a cultural foundation, the
meaning
of antiquity does
not
remain
constant;
vVarburg's iconology is concerned less with the
preservation
of
Greek
and Roman culture than with their transformatioll.
Antiquity
functions
as a
kind
of barometer; Warburg's method explores the dialectic of negation
and
preservation,
and the identity of a particular
culture;
for
example,
Quattrocento
Florence, seventeenth-century Holland, or even early
twentieth-century Europe, lies
in
the
interval between
the two.
The phrase 'iconology of the interval' occurs as
part
of a longer formula
tion
of
what Warburg perceived
to
be
his
method, in which he analysed 'Art
historical material for a developmental psychology of the oscillation between
a
theory of causation based
on
images
and
one based on
signs'.J8
The intro
duction of
the
notion of a developmental
psychology introduces
a
factor
that
is largely absent in the later Panofsky, and also tends to
be
lacking in most
other
conceptions
of
iconology,
namely, the
role
of
subjectivity.19 I
shall
explore this in the following section,
but
it is important to
note
that
whereas
Panofsky's system consists of a
triangulation
of primary - conventional -
intrinsic (ideological) levels of interpretation, vVarburg's functions on an
entirely different
basis. In vVarburg the
opposition
between 'a theory of
causation
based
on images and one based on signs' translates into an opposi
tion
between
mimetic
and semiotic forms
of representation,
with the
third
point of the triangle formed by the subjectivity of
both
the spectator
and
the
artist.
Warburg's method is
underpinned
by a conception of visual representa
tion, and
indeed
the wider culture of which
the representations
are a
part,
as placed within a field of tensions
governed
by what
one
might term, pace
Foucault,
psychically energized regimes
of
representation. His
own
formula
tion of iconology thus attends to culture as a dialectical process, and this
plays itself out
in
a number of ways. Warburg's concern with
the meaning
of
the Florentine
Renaissance
offers a prime example. As I noted earlier,
Warburg was drawn to the
Renaissance because
of
the
significance of its
appropriation of classical antiquity; constituting the
threshold
of modernity,
it
represented
for him a particularly absorbing case of the conflict between
mimetic
and semiotic regimes of
representation,
classical tradition and the
306 M A T T H E v V
R A I \ I I P L E Y
17
- Warburg, 'Italienische Antike
im
Zeitalter Rembrandts',
p. 46.
18
- vVarburg. 'j\1IlenIOSYlle Introduction
[Draft]" p. 6.
19
Panofsky's early writings
are
an
exception to this. In
particular,
his works
in German develop much more fully
Warburg's interest in
the
historicizing of
the Kantian subject by Ernst Cassirer. See
PanoLSky, A I/siit:;:e .,u Grllndfragell
der
Klinstwissellschajl. eds H. Oberer
and
E.
Verheyen
(Berlin. 1998); Panofsky,
'The
History of the Theory of Human
Proportions
as a Reflection of the
History
of Styles', in Atleanillg
ill the
Visual Arts
(Harmondsworth,
1970) pp. 82-138.
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Figure
I.
Laocoon Group. 50 i l l : (Rome,
Vatican). Photo: Institute.
20 - See Charlotte Schoell-Glass,
Akl
H'a,bwg ,md de, A,,[is<miti.wllIs
(Frankfurt
am Main,
Igg8).
present.
.Moreover,
vVarburg's interest in the Renaissance
also
implied
a
critique
of the
historiographical
tradition from Ranke onwards, which
stressed
the notion
of
historical objectivity.
Just as
the Renaissance was
an
appropriation,
rather than a faithful historical re-enactment of classical
antiquity,
so
the
historian
describes
the past
through the
perspective
of
the
present.
As
has become
evident
subsequently,
this applied to ' ' ' 'arburg, too,
for his interest
in
the
dialectic
of the Renaissance was motivated by contem
porary events,
in
particular
the
rise of
anti-semitism in
the
late nineteenth
century.'"
The appropriation of the classical legacy, its
place
within a
dialectical
process, manifested itself
in
a number of ways. First, the culture of classical
Greece and
Rome was itself a
complex
phenomenon. Influenced by
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Nietzsche, vVarburg stresses the dual Dionysian and Apollinian nature
of
classical antiquity. In several places vVarburg expressly contradicts the idea
of
classical antiquity which, beginning with vVinckelmann, stressed its 'noble
simplicity
and tranquil
grandeur'.'
Instead, the Laocoon statue
(figure
I),
the
occasion for vVinckelmann's formulation, exemplifies far more the Dionysian
current of classical
culture.
This was manifest not
only in the subject
of the
myth itselfbut also in the bodily contortions of the figures in the group.oo This
Dionysian current manifests itsel f elsewhere, too; for example, the heightened
ecstatic gestures of classical maenads (figure 2), or the
extreme
violence of
much official Roman sculpture, in
particular,
the frieze
ofTrajan
on the Arch
of
Constantine
(figure 3). As vVarburg states, 'Prefigured in classical
308
l \ , 1 / \ T T H E \ Y
RAlvI PL E ' l< '
Figure 2. Roman Triangular Base (Pari
Louvre). Photo: '.Varburg Institute.
21
-
Johann
Winckelmann,
'Thoug'hts
on
the Imitation of the
Painting
and
Sculpture of the Greeks', in
German
Aesthetic and
Criticism: ['Vinckelmalln,
Lessing. Hamann, Herder, Schiller.
Goetlze,
ed.
Hugh Nisbet '985) p. 2.
22
-
See in
particular, 'The Entry
of
the
Idealising Classical Style in the
Painting
of
the
Renaissance
in
Florence'.
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Figure 3. Relief from
the
Arch of
Constantine, Rome.
Photo: vVarburg
Institute.
23 -
vVarburg, Introduction
[Final Version]" p. 7.
24 - Warburg, 'Durer and Italian
Antiquity', in Warburg, Renewal,
pp.
553-
8.
25 - See Warburg, 'The Entry of the
Idealising Classical Style in the Painting
of
the Early
Renaissance'.
26 - A number of essays
by
Warburg
explore
the
theme
of
the
dialogue between
Flemish and Burgundian culture and
Florence. See
in
particular, 'Artistic
Exchanges between North and South
in
the Fifteenth
Century', in Renewal,
pp. 275-80: 'Flemish
Art
in Florentine
Early
Renaissance',
ibid.,
pp. 281-303;
'Flemish and Florentine Art in Lorenzo
de' Medici's Circle
around 1480',
ibid.,
pp. 305-7; 'Peasants
at
Work
in
Burgundian
Tapestries',
ibid., pp.
315-23:
'Airship
and
Submarine in the Medieval
Imagination',
ibid.,
pp.
333-7:
'Italienisches Festwesen', vVarburg
Archive, No.
98.3.1. See
too the lecture on
'Valois Tapestries', vVarburg
Archive, No.
9
6
.3.
sculpture, the
triumph of existence
confronted
the souls of
subsequent
genera
tions in all its shattering contradictoriness, as both the
affirmation
oflife and
the
negation of
the
self. They
could
see it
on the
pagan
sarcophagi
of
Dionysus
in the
tumult of his orgiastic following,
or in
the
form
of the
victory
procession
of the emperor on the Roman triumphal arch."3
At
times Warburg even
comes to
regard
classical
antiquity
as
wholly Dionysian,
a
zero point
of
barbarism
against
which all cultural progress is to be
measured.
One focus
of War
burg's interest was therefore the twofold appropriation of
the
classical
inheritance,
and if we return to his
early
Botticelli study, it
becomes
apparent
that
alongside
the putative
grace
and
elegance
of
Botti
celli's
paintings
War
burg
is also attentive to elements in
the paintings, in
particular
the animated way
in
which Botticelli has depicted the
drapery of
the figures,
which contradicts Winckelmann's version of antiquity. Already in the Renais
sance, therefore, a sensitivity to
the Dionysian can be
seen, and \ \ arburg
traces its manifestation in, for example, engravings by Durer,·4 or The Battle of
Constantine
by
the
School of Raphael (figure 4),
which
vVarburg
contrasts with
Piero della Francesca's version 5
The second
way in
which
the polarities
of
the
Renaissance
become
manifest is
through
the conflict
between
'classicism'
and
'realism'. \ \ arburg
returns repeatedly to
the
contradiction between the
introduction
of the
Dionysian
pathos of classical sculpture in the early Renaissance (and
\l\1arburg
regards
Donatello
as
central
to this process),
and
the continued
popularity
in Florence
of the courtly style of the late Mid dle Ages, apparent
in the
prominence, for
example,
of
Burgundian
tapestries.o
6
Specifically,
\ \
arburg is drawn to the conflict between the emergent historical sensibility
that underpinned the appropriation of classical forms in Quattrocento
Florence
and the fact that the art of
Flanders,
Germany and Burgundy
exhibits
a
remarkable lack
of
historical distance;
classical
subject-matter was
still presented
in
contemporary guise.
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In
his essay on
'Airship
and Submarine
in the
Medieval
Imagination',
'Neuburg
analyses an ara;:.;;.o
in the Palazzo Doria in Rome,
possibly
produced
for
Philip
the
Good in
Tournai
between
1450 and 1460 (figure
5).'7
Its subject-matter consists
of
two legends drawn from the many epic
and
romances
about
Alexander the Great. According
to
the
first,
in
order
to
explore the peak of an extraordinarily high
mountain
in
India, Alexander
had a
cage built, which
griffins
then
carried
up
to
the
top. In
the second
legend, Alexander explored the sea bed
in
a specially constructed submersi
ble. The first is of special
interest
to vVarburg, for
he
interprets it as a subli
mated
form of a primitive sun worship: 'The sunlit uplands of classical
culture seem to bear no relation to this underworld of childish phantasms;
and yet there
clearly
resides
in
all this
the nucleus
of an
authentic
Roman
Oriental
solar
religion.
To
my mind Alexander's
ascent
and
descent
clearly
echo the legend
and the
cult of the
sun
god, who
ascends and
descends every
day
in
his chariot - a chariot drawn,
in the
Syrian cult of .Malachbel, by a
team
of
four
griffins. 28 It is
noticeable in
this
regard
that
the legend
came
increasingly
to
be
interpreted
in
the Middle
Ages as
an
allegory
of human
vanity and hubris."9 vVarburg
is
therefore interested in
mapping
out the
transformation
in meaning
of a specific motif. vVith regard to the araz;:.o
in
question, it is also striking
that
the classical legend has been
portrayed
in the
contemporary
dress of the
Burgundian court,
indicating an
ability
to assimi
late the classical past to the present.
I have indicated elsewhere the extent to
which
this Northern
'realism'
exemplifies, for vVarburg, a
mimetic
form of representation,SO
and
it stands
3 I 0 · IA T T H E W R A M P L E Y
Figure 4. School
of
Raphael, Balli, qf
COllstantine
(Rome, Vatican).
Photo:
Warburg
Institute.
27 - The
association
with
Philip
the Good
traditionally lI'om the fact that in
1459
Pasquier Grenier
was commissioned
by Philip to produce a
'chambre
de
tap),sserie de l'istoire
d'Alixandre'. I t
has
been suggested that this association is not
secure. Sec
Jan
Duverger, 'Aantekeningen
betrcffende Laatmiddelecuwse
Tapijten
met
de Geschiedeni,
van Alexander de
Grote', Arle..-
Te.,' iles, 5 (1959-60)
pp.
31 -
43. Scc also Victor Schmidt, A Legend and
its Image.
The Aerial Flight oj Jlexander
the
Great
il1
Medieval Art (Groningcn, 1995)
p. I f
23 -
Warburg,
Renewal, p. 336.
29 -
In the
first versio n of
the legend,
the
fourth-century
Life and
1 1
'arks
of
Alexa/zder
"J Alac.doll by Pseudo-Callisthenes,
Alexander's flight culminates
in an
encounter with a 'flying human form' that
instructs
Alexander
to
return
to Earth. In
subsequent versions this becomes
an
encounter with the voice of God that gives
Alexander the same
instructions.
God also
features in the
( Ref 30 ovcrieaj)
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Figure
5. The Ascent of
Alexander
the
Great. Flemish Tapestry, 15th century
(Rome, Palazzo Doria).
Photo: \Varburg
Institute.
30 - See
my
article 'From Symbol to
Allegory. Aby Warburg's
Theory
of Art',
Art Bulletill, LXXIX I (1997) pp. 41-55.
I I I
contrast
with the sense of
historical distance achieved in
the Florentine
Renaissance.
However,
a simple opposition between 'Northern' and
'Southern'
European
cultures,
quite
apart from the
gross simplicities
involved, would be misleading since, as vVarburg
noted, there
are contradic
tions
even within
the
On the one hand
the
fantastic events
of myth
are depicted
including,
on the
right,
Alexander slaying a dragon. At the
same
time,
Alexander's military
conquests are
represented in the
form
of
a
siege,
in
which
he
takes
advantage
of
the
latest military
technology
of the
fifteenth century: siege artillery.
In
the version of the Alexander legend
Warburg thought was the
direct source
of
the
ara;:.;:.o
narrative, namely,
the
Alexander romance of
Jean
vVauquelin, the griffins drawing the airship
began
to burn as it rose through the
ether
into
the
realm of fire,
in
response
to which Alexander doused them with a wet sponge and called upon God
for
protection.
In
contrast,
as Warburg points
out, in
the siege fire
has
3
11
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become
an instrument of
technical
mastery
through the
use of the cannon.
His conclusion
is worth
quoting at length:
The tapestry in the Palazzo Doria, not previously noticed
in
the literature, can
thus be
seen as a
revealing
document of the
evolution
of
historical
conscious
ness in the
age
of the revival of classical antiquity
in
Western Europe. The
exaggerated costume detail
and
the
fantastic
air
of romance . . .
should
not
close our eyes
to the fact that here
in
the
North
the
desire to
recall the
grandeur of antiquity was as vigorously felt and expressed as in Italy; and that
this 'Burgundian Antique,' like its counterpart, had a role of its
own
to
play in
the creation of modern man, with his determination to conquer
and
rule the
world. While continuing
to visualize
the elemental sphere
of fire as inaccessible
even
to the
preternatural
strength of
fabulous
oriental beasts, man himself,
through firearms, had already tamed
the
fiery
element
and pressed it into his
own service.
It
seems to
me
by no means far-fetched to tell
the
modern
aviator,
as
he
considers
the
'up-to-the-minute' problem of motor cooling
systems,
that
his
intellectual pedigree stretches back in line directly ..
, to
tt
grand Alixandre.
3
'
While
Warburg draws
out
historical
affinities, it is not
in
the serVIce of a
reductive search for origins,
but
rather in order to analyse the interplay of
historical
continuities
and discontinuities. I t is this dialectic of
the two
that
forms
the
centre of his
'iconology
of the interval', according
to which
a
parti
cular cultural synchrony is intersected by a historical dynamic linking a
series of
motivic transformations.
I pointed
out earlier
the influence of Nietzsche on Warburg, in particular
the influence of Nietzsche's notion of the dual Dionysian-Apollinian basis of
classical culture on \t\Tarburg's own rejection of Winckelmann. This link is
already well established,
and
has been subjected to detailed
scrutinyY
However, there
is a further affinity between the
two
which is often
ignored.
Specifically, \t\Tarburg's concern with an iconology of transformations
bears
comparison with
Nietzsche's genealogical
analyses. For both, the
continuity
of
formal
motifs
is
set
against semantic discontinuities.
In
the
case
of
Nietzsche, the classic example would
be
his analysis,
in
The
Genealogy oj
iv/orals, of the
meaning
of punishment,
in
which
he contrasts
the persistence
of punishment as a cultural
practice
with its successive transformations in
meaning.
33
Likewise vVarburg's often painstaking attention to historical
antecedents
and contemporary parallels is
bound
less to an impulse toward
encyclopaedic
documentation than to a
goal
of mapping out the historical
dynamic informing
a specific
motif or
symbol.
His
essay
on
Manet, for
example,
which links Manet's Dijezmer S1l1 l'Herbe to Marcantonio Raimon
di's
engraving of the
Judgement
of
Paris,
attends
to
the ways in
which Manet
has transformed the meaning of the motif, and the significance
of that
trans
formation as a
microcosm
of
the more general impact
of modernity.34
The
primitive
phobias
expressed in the original version
of
the
motif,
together
with the
violent
associations of the myth of
Paris
and Helen,
contrast
with
its function
in
Manet's painting as an image of the urban leisure of
modernity,
albeit replete with
classical
connotations.
Indeed
one
can extend
vVarburg's analysis by drawing on subsequent analyses of the rise of
absent
mindedness in modernity. As Jonathan Crary has pointed out,
in
the latter
half of the nineteenth
century there
was a
growing
concern
with perceptual
disorders such
as
aphasia
and agnosia, and
with the
general
problem of
3 I 2 l V I A T T H E \ V R A J \ , I P L E Y
31
-
Warburg, Renewal, p.
337.
32 See Helmut Pfotenhauer,
'Das
Nachleben der Antike: Aby Warburgs
Auseinandersetzung
mit
Nietzsche',
Nietzsche
Studien, XIV
(I g85) pp. 2g8-3 1
3.
33
Friedrich
Nietzsche,
The
Genealogy
of
lvIorals,
trans. '''1alter Kaufmann (New
York, Ig68)
pp.
57-g6.
34 - vVarburg, 'Manets "Dejeuner
sur
I'Herbe". Die
vorpragende Funktion
Elementargottheiten
fur die
Entwicklung
moclernen Naturgefuhls', in Kosmopolis der
Wissenschaft. Ernst
Robert
Curt;lls mId
das
Institllte, ed.
Dieter
Wuttke
(Baden Baden,
Ig8g)
pp.
260-72.
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35 - Jonathan
Crary, 'Unbinding
Vision',
October,
68 (1994) pp.
21-44·
36 - See Panofsky,
Renaissance and
Renascences in Western Art (London, 1970).
37 'lvlnernujyne
Introduction
[Final
Version]" p.
2.
38 - Warburg,
'Grisaille··
Mantegna',
Warburg Archive, No. 102.5, {sec}8.
39 - 'Mnemosyne Introduction [Final
Version]" p.
9.
attentiveness.
35
Specifically, the period
in question appears
to
have been
marked
by a decline
in
attentiveness, and for Crary
no artist
captured this
phenomenon
more
comprehensively
than
Manet.
In paintings
such as
In the
ConseTvatoT.J and On the Balcony a recurrent
feature
is an absent-minded
lack
of engagement between the central figures. This indifference characteristic
of
the late nineteenth century
can
be
contrasted all the more with what
Warburg took to be the fundamental feature
of
primitive
cognition, namely
fear. And it acts as
one
more marker of the process of
cognitive development
expressed, for Warburg,
in
a variety of motivic
transformations in
visual
representation.
Straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Warburg
embraces
both the genetic
history characteristic
of
nineteenth-century scholarship
and
also the
synchronic
spatial analysis
characteristic
of the twentieth century. I
have
stressed the
role
of diachronic
transformation in vVarburg's thinking,
but
this must not
be
at the expense of his use of spatial metaphors, which
occupy a
central place in
his
writing.
I have
already
outlined the
terms by
which Warburg
compares
Northern and
Southern
appropriations of
antiquity in
the
Renaissance,
as marked
by
either
the presence
or
lack
of a
sense of historical distance from the classical world. It is the emergence of
this sense of a historical
space
that
characterizes the Renaissance
for
Warburg, a characterization which Panofsky later formulated more system
atically.3
6
The metaphor of
space thus
plays a significant role
in
Warburg's
analysis of the cultures of the
Renaissance in
Northern and Southern
Europe,
but it
plays
a much broader
role in
his
cultural psychology, which
I
shall explore shortly. In this regard his
most succinct
formulation occurs
in
the opening of his Introduction to
Mnemo5.-vne,
his
projected pictorial
atlas,
where
he
states that 'One may
designate
the conscious creation of
distance
between oneself and the external world as the basic act of human
civilization
.. .'.37
Civilization
is
thus founded
on the
creation
of a psychic
space, and it is the absence or presence of this space
which
also underlies the
regime
of
representation
that
oscillates
between mimetic
and
semiotic.
The
connection
between
the two
for Warburg is
evident in one
of his many
unpublished notes from 1929, in which he writes of 'The loss of metaphorical
distance
-
Replacement
by the magical and
monstrous
confusion of image
and spectator'.3
8
We
are thus
already
confronted
with the psychological
basis of
War
burg's iconology, and it is thus
appropriate
to discuss this issue
directly.
The psychology of the subject
In the Introduction to lvlnemoS)me \l\Tarburg writes;
The
characterization of
the restoration
of antiquity as
the result
of
the recent
appearance
of
a consciousness
of
historical
facts
and
as
carefree artistic
empathy,
remains
an inadequate descriptive evolutionary
theory,
unless
one
simultaneously dares
to
descend into the deep human spiritual compulsion
and
become
enmeshed in the timeless
strata
of
the
material.
Only
then does one
reach the
mint that coins
the
expressive values of
pagan emotion which stem
from primal orgiastic experience: thiasotic tragedy.39
This passage makes explicit grounding of an
understanding
of
Renais
sance
culture
in
what
Warburg
perceives to
be mechanisms
of the
human
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psyche. The clearest examples of the application of this notion are to be
found in
his essay on 'Francesco Sassetti's Last Injunctions to His Sons',40
his psychological sketch of Botticelli,
41
or his various published
and
unpub
lished writings on astrology.4
0
The roots of this psychological
interest
are
various, including the emerging field of psychological aesthetics
in
the
latter
part
of
the
nineteenth century,
the
'intellectualist' orientation of
much
nineteenth-century anthropology, together with a more
general
sense
in
vVarburg's
time, across a
wide range
of
cultural
discourses, of the unstable
nature of human subjectivity. The first of these revolves around the critical
responses of philosophers such as Robert Vischer, Theodor Lipps, or August
Schmarsow to
the
formalist theories ofJohann
Herbart
and Robert Zimmer
mann.
The
second
can
be
seen
in
the
emerging
field of anthropology, and
the third
includes
the psychological
researches of figures as diverse as
Freud,
Wundt
and
Charcot
and also Georg
Simmel's
analyses of
the neurotic
condition of modern subjectivity, or
the interest in
dreams and the
uncon
scious of Karl Scherner
and
even, as Sigrid Schade has pointed out, the
literary
avant-garde
infin de siecle Paris.+3 I shall discuss each
in
turn.
The
most prominent exponent of formalist aesthetics in the mid
nineteenth century, Robert Zimmermann, developed a theory of aesthetic
experience that both
simplifies
and
fortifies
Kant's original theory
of
judgement, drawing in particular on the latter's notion of aesthetic disinter
estedness. In
the second volume of
his
General
Aesthetics
he argues
that
aesthetic experience is based on
'the completed
presentation of the content
of representation'
('das vollendete Vorstellen
des
Vorstellungsinhaltes').H
On the assumption
that
desire is motivated
by
incompleteness and lack,
Zimmermann
therefore argues that in aesthetic experience 'all subjective
affects, hope, longing, love and hate die away' 45 He
openly
acknowledges
that this
notion of completeness
gives his
theory of aesthetic experience
a
classical basis; its general
validity
stems
from the
fact,
he argues,
that
'The
area
of the classical is the "universally
human,"
and that of the
romantic
is
the
individual, national
and
historical'.-I
G
Zimmermann's model
of
aesthetic experience becomes even more abstract
than that of Kant, and it was
in response
to this empty generality that a
number of counter theories were
put
forward, of which perhaps the best
known is Robert
Vischer's
theory of empathy.n At the
core
of
Vischer's
theory, as formulated in his essay of 1873 on 'The Optical Sense
of
Form', is
the
fundamental
role of affective,
or
empathic, engagement with the
object
of judgement.
48
In
opposition to
Zimmermann's
disengaged aesthete
is
the
empathic spectator who mentally projects his or her own
carnal experience
onto the aesthetic object. Although it is Vischer whose formulation has
become best known,
indeed was
acknowledged
as
such
by 'Varburg,
the
motif of empathy, or of affective engagement, became widespread
in
the
aesthetic theory
of
the
late nineteenth
and
early twentieth
centuries.
In
his
Outline of Aesthetics Hermann
Lotze, for example, writes
that
'we
cannot
mentally represent
the most
abstract forms . . . without . . .
transposing
ourselves into their content and
sympathetically
enjoying the
peculiarly
coloured pleasure
or pain
which corresponds
to it' -19
Similarly
Theodor
Lipps
opens his FOllndations
if
Aesthetics of
1903
with
the
assertion that
'Aesthetics is
the
science of beauty . . .
An object
is
called beautiful because
it
gIves rise to,
or
is
able
to give rise to, a specific feeling within me . . . . This
314 l\IATTHE\\ r
40 - ' ' ' 'arburg, Reuewal, pp. 223-62.
4 [ - 'Sandro Botticelli,' in Renewal,
PP·157
6.J..
42 - Alongside the well-known
study
of
astrology in Lutheran Germany are
other
texts such as
the
lecture Ober astrologische
Druckwerke aus
alter
und
ncuer
Zeit'.
Warburg Archive, No. 81.2.
43 -
Schade,
'Charcot and the Spectacle of
the Hysterical Body.
The
"pathos
formula"
as an aesthetic sta,ging of
psychiatric discourse - a blind spot in the
reception onVarburg',
Art 18/4
(1994) PP·499-5I7·
44 - Robert Zimmermann,
Allgemeine
AeJtiutik
als
Formwissenschaft (Vienna,
1865), Vol. II, p. 18.
45 -
Ibid.,
p. 19·
46 -
Ibid.,
p. 97.
47 -
An account
of
the general
background to Vischer can be found in
Hermann
Glockner,
'Robert
Vischer unci
die Krisis der Geisteswissenschaften', in his
Friedrich
Theodo,
Viselzer und das
19.
Jah'hlmdert
(Berlin, 193
I) pp.
168-269.
48 . Robert Vischer, 'On the
Optical
Sense of Form', in
Empathy,
Form and Space:
P1"Obiems
in German
Aesthetics
1873-1893, eds
Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios
Ikonomou (Santa Monica,
1994) pp.89-
23·
49 - Lotzc,
Qutiine qj'Aesthetics.
trans. and
ed. G. Ladd (Boston, 1885) p. 20.
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50 -
Theodor
Lipps, (;rundlegulIg de/
A,sthetik
(Hamburg
and Leipzig, 1903),
p I.
51
- Ibid., p.
I I.
52 - Schmarsow, 'Kunstwissenschaft
und
Vlkerpsychologie', ::'eitschrijifi;1"
Asthetik
l I l Id
.ll gemeine h"n1lStwissensehajt,
2
(1907)
pp. 305-39 and 469-500.
53 - Ibid., p. 3
10
.
54 - See, ff)r
example,
Introduction
[Final Version]', p. 11.
55 Sir
Edward
Tylor,
R,·.H'"rr w.r
in/o lhe
Early Histolj oj Mankil1d, [I 865J, 3rd edn
(London, 1878) p. 117.
56 - Tylor,
Primitiz'r
Cultllre (London,
1871), VA . I, p. 116.
57 .. Tylor, Rrswrclze.r, p. 123.
58 - Boas,
The
1\/ nd q
Primiti"" AI all
(New
York,
1924). Boas's
book
was based Dn
public lectures given
in
1910/1 I, and other
published material
dating
Ifom the 1890s.
A
German
edition
was published as i'lllt"r
.md Raas
(Berlin, 1922).
59
-- For an
account Df\Varburg's
expedition see
Benedetta
Cestelli
Guidi
and Nicholas
Mann,
eds,
Pholographs a/
Iii"
Frontier, Warburg ill America 1895-1896
(LondDn, 1998). Sec also
Ulrich
Raulff,
'Nachwort', in
Ab),
Warburg,
Schlallgenrit"al. Ei"
Reisr'ber;cht
(Berlin,
199
6
, pr·
51-95'
effect is . . . a psychological fact . . . aesthetics is therefore a psychological
discipline.'5
0
This feeling is
later identified
as a feeling of desireY This
psychological turn made itself felt
in
the field of art history, too. The art
historian August
Schmarsow,
a
contemporary of'tVarburg's, openly identi
fied aesthetic theory with psychology
in
his essay on 'Art History and Collec
tive
Psychology' Y
Here Schmarsow
posited the notion of
a
'psychology of
art' as a
vital
link between collective psychology and more traditional
notions of art history.
The
importance of this link
stemmed,
for
Schmarsow,
from the
general
understanding of
art
as 'a
creative
confrontation ['Ausei
nandersetzung'J between the individual and the world
they
are
placed
in . . .
thus
the result of all
true
art is a
growth in
the desire for existence and
the
value of life'
.53 Common
to all these positions is the rejection of the formalist
notion
of
the
autonomous
aesthetic
subject. Instead,
aesthetic experience
and artistic production are viewed as psychic processes of engagement with
both the
aesthetic object
and,
in the
case of
art,
with the world represented
by the
art
object.
Schmarsow's
term 'Auseinandersetzung', which denotes a
form of
debate or
argument is
of
significance
here,
for it
appears,
too, I I I
VVarburg's notion of art.
54
Contemporary with the rIse of psychological aesthetics was
the
rIse of
anthropology with
its
predominantly 'intellectualist' reading of so-called
primitive
cultures. A central figure
in
this regard was Edward
Tylor.
Tylor's
Primitive CultuJ"f of 1871,
widely read in Britain
and Germany
in the late
nineteenth century, was a
seminal text
for a generation of
anthropologists.
For Tylor, 'lVIan, in a low stage of culture, very commonly believes that
between
the object
and
the
image of it
there
is a
real connexion,
which does
not arise from a mere subjective process in the mind of the observer, and
that
it is
accordingly
possihle to
communicate
an
impression
to the
original
through the copy.'55 From this stems the practice of magic with its logic of
occult sympathies,
a
belief
according to
which 'association
of thought
must
involve
similar connexion
in
reality'
5
6
This logic survived into the
'old
medical
theory known
as
the "Doctrine
of
Signatures", which
supposed
that
plants and
minerals
indicated by
their
external characters
the
diseases for
which nature
has intended them
as remedies'.·\) In
contrast,
the achievement
of cultural advancement was
evident
through
the ability
to distinguish
between
representations
and
things and, ultimately,
between
the
self and the
objective world. A similar conception was
put
forward hy the
German
American anthropologist Franz Boas
in
The ivIind oj Primitive lvIan.·\s Boas
was of
particular
significance
in
this context. Not only
largely
responsible for
importing
European
anthropology
into
America, he
may also
have
influ
enced 'tVarburg's decision to study the Pueblo Indians of New
Mexico in
1896.59
The rise of empathy theory
and
psychological aesthetics forms a specific
case
of
a
more general growth
in interest
in
psychology in
the
latter half of
the nineteenth
century.
Initially such psychology was hardly
distinguishable
from philosophy. Indicative
of this
was the highly influential work by
Clemens
Brentano, Ps,),chologJljrom all Empirical Standpoint, puhlished
in
1874,
which, for all its highlighting of empirical psychology, was largely a study in
the
philosophy
of mind. Nonetheless, Brentano's work signalled a gradual
shift in the theoretical interest in consciousness to non-conscious states, such
as dreaming or sleeping, or states where the fragility of subjective rationality
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is
manifest, such as hysterical
and neurotic
conditions. Jonathan
Crary
has
outlined how,
during the
course of the nineteenth century, the substitution
of a material,
psychological
notion of
the
spectator for the
sovereign
observer
of the
camera obscura
served to
deprive
the
subject
of its rational
autonomy.50 As
early
as 1833 Johannes Muller's Handbook
of
Human Physiol
ogy had,
according
to Crary, theorized an observer whose processes of
perception were contingent
on a variety of
empirical, physiological
states,
thus rendering the basis of cognition 'unstable and mobile'." lVIore
generally, too, the growth of psychology underlined the instability of
rational subjective
identity; in
his Lectures on Human and Animal
Ps.vchology
the
pioneer
of experimental psychology Wilhelm "Vundt emphasizes the inter
connection
of
cognition
and affectivity,
or
the permeability of the division
between voluntary and involuntary, instinctual actions.
62
One theme of
considerable importance
was the
recognition
that
such
subjective instability manifests itself to a heightened degree under the condi
tions of
modern
life,
most
obviously
through
the widespread appearance of
neurosis. Freud
openly
linked neurosis with the conditions of repression
in
modernity, and
in
doing so
draws on
a
range
of authors that
had already
made
this connection, including Binswanger, Erb, Ehrenfels and Krafft
Ebbing."3 The sociologist Georg
Simmel
drew
similar
conclusions, most
famously,
perhaps,
in
his essay on 'The
Metropolis
and Mental Life',
in
which
he characterizes
the metropolitan subject as
neurotic,
a
state
brought
about by the 'atrophy of
the
individual and the hypertrophy of
objective
culture' 6+
At
the root
of
Simmers view of the metropolitan individual is a
psychological theory according to which the subject is torn between conflict
ing
impulses
towards mimetic
assimilation and differentiation. 55
In
Simmel's
theory one sees a parallel with vVarburg's acco unt; the creation of a mental
space which,
for vVarburg,
counts
as
the fundamental
act of
the
civilizing
process, constitutes an
overcoming
of the
mimetic impulse in
which
such
a
distance
is eclipsed.
In one
of
the
notes
from
his 'Basic
Fragments
for a
(Monistic) Psychology
of Art'
vVarburg
identifies this as a
central
concern:
The
acquisition
of
the
feeling of
distance between subject
and
object
lis] the
task of so-called cultivation
and
the criterion
of
progress
of
the human race. The
proper
object
of Cultural History
would be the description
of
the
prevalent
state ofreflectivity.66
vVarburg's historicizing
of this
subjective tension clearly
owes much
to
his
interest in
anthropology. Consequently his analysis of
Florence in the
Quattrocento should
be
seen as a
psychological anthropology of
the
Renais
sance.
The
creation of historical distance from antiquity and the growth of
antiquarian
interest in the past thus constitute
important
markers
of
the
mental
and cultural progress.
I
wrote
earlier
of Warburg's
interest in
regimes
of
representation.
Specifi
cally,
he
distinguishes between
mimetic
(or symbolic) and semiotic represen
tation. In the Introduction
he
sees it as
central to Art
History
that
it
should analyse
the 'circulation between a cosmology of images and
one
of signs',6 ) where signs,
most
especially
in the form
of
allegorical images,
exemplify
the
same achievement of
mental distance or
detachment.
Warburg's 'iconology of the interval' gains its force from the psychological
dynamic that underpins
the
production of varying representational types.
3
I
6 M A T T H E W R A M P L E Y
60 - Jonathan Crary, TechniqZl"" of
he
Observer. On Vision and Modernity
;n
the
Nineteenth Centmy
(Cambridge, MA,
1992).
61 -
Ibid.,
p. 91.
62 - vVilhelm vVundt,
Lectllres all Hllman
and
Allimal
trans. J. E. Creighton
and E.
B.
Titchener
(London,
1896).
63 -
Sigmund Freud,
, "Civilised" Sexual
Morality and Modern Nervous Illness', in
The Stalldard Edit;on
of
he Complete
Psychological Writings q[ Sigmund Freud
(London, 1959), IX, pp. 181-204.
64 - Simmel, 'Die Grossstadte und das
Gcistesleben', in Simmel,
Aufsiit;;.e
and
Abhandlungen 19a1-lga8
(Frankfurt am
Main, 1995), I, pp. 116-31.
65 - See, for example, Simmel's essay 'Zur
Psychologie der Mode', in Simmel,
A'ifsiit;;:.e
lind Abhalldillngen 1894-1900
(Frankfurt
am Main, 1992) pp. 105-14.
66 - Warburg, 'Grundlegende
Bruchstiicke zu
einer
monistischen
Kunstpsychologie', Warburg Archive, No.
+3.2, §3
28
.
67 - Introduction
[Final
Version]" p.
2.
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58 - E. E.
Evans-Pritchard,
Theories of
Primili ,
Rellgioll (Oxford,
1965);
C. E.
R.
Lloyd, l\Ientalitirs (Cambridge,
199
0
).
59 - Warburg, Il11agesjrolJ1 Ihe Regioll q(the
Pueblo
I"dial/s,
p.
17
70 - IVhen Nuer say
of
rain or lightning
that
it
is
God they
Clre makin'S
an
elliptical
statement.
"Vhat
is understood is not thal
the thing in
itself
is
spirit
but
that it
is
what
we would call
a
medium or
manifestation or sign of divine activity
.
Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Rdigioll (Oxford,
195
6
)
p.
71 - Evans-Pritchard, TI-ilchcrajl, "fagic IlI,,1
Oracles aillong the A"lll1dl'
(Oxford,
19371
72
- Rodney
Needham, Belief, Lallguage
a"d E"pt'I"iencl' (Cambridge,
1972).
This is what is most distinctive about vVarburg's method and yet what is
also
most problematic.
This becomes apparent
once
his
rdiance
on
notions
of collective psychology and memory are subjected to closer scrutiny.
As I
stated above, vVarburg's thought draws on
a
tradition in
which
the
psychology of the individual is projected onto the larger social collective.
This is
most
apparent
in anthropological
theories
of primitive culture, the
most
important aspect of
which
is
the
emphasis on the idea of
primitive
'mentality' or psychology.
In
certain respects this conflation of the indivi
dual and
the
social can
be
traced back to Hegel. Although this
intellectual
debt
remains implicit, there is a elear antecedent in Hegel's conflation of
ontogcncsis and phylogencsis, and
in
his mapping of
thc
parallels bct\NCCn
the genesis of self-consciousness and the evolution of the social Geist. This
notion
of a collective
primitive
psychology
has been
tl1f
object of
consider
able criticism within anthropology. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and more
recently
G. E. R.
Lloyd,
have highlighted
the
difficulties that arise
with the
idea
of
the
primitive
mind.
08
In particular, such theories tend to focus
em
religious
ritual
beliefs
and practices,
and "Varburg is
no exception
to this
rule. His lecture based on his experience with the Pueblo Indians of South
'tVestern America focuses
almost
exclusively on the variety of ritual
dances
he
witnesses. Specifically, his
assertion that the Indians 'stand on the middle
ground between magic
and logos '" a culture of touch and a culture of
thought'
G
9 is
based
on his analysis of
the
role of religious
symbolism where,
for
example, complex meteorological phenomena
such as lightning
are
expressed through the concrete symbol of the snake,
and
where the snake
dance invoking
the
weather god
involves
imitation
of
the
snake.
However,
as Evans-Pritchard suggested nearly 50 years ago, while
such purportedly
primitive
religions rely
heavily on concrete
symbols,
the
symbols themselves
may well function as little more than signs or indices;
hence
the snake
symbol may simply operate as a metaphor.
70
Furthermore, attention to the
specific
question
of religion ignores
the
greater part of the social life of so
called 'primitives', which
relies
on just the
same form
of
instrumental
reason
supposedly characteristic only
of
modernity.
In his
study
of the
Azande
Evans-Pritchard highlights the fact that supposedly sacred spaces and
objects
are frequently
treated by
the
Azande as normal
profane
artefacts
and
places.7
1
The
theory
of
primitive mentality
would
have
to explain
such
contradictions
as a manifestation of schizophrenia, and it is not at all
clear
how an
entire
society
or
culture
could be
regarded as
schizophrenic;
often
the use of such vocabulary
in
this case serves simply to highlight the
presence
of some
cultural
contradiction, rather than to make a substantive
psychoanalytic point.
More generally, too, the notion of
primitive, indeed
any
collective
mentalities
rests to a large extent on
the
assumption of beliefs
held
by
the
culture
being
studied,
belief in
demons, in
magic,
in
occult
sympathies, in
identity
of
representation
and
object
and
so forth.
But it
has
been argued
by
Rodney Needham that
the
use of 'belief' as a
term
of cross
cultural
analysis may
be
severely
problematic.)"
Not
only
is it
almost impos
sible to
identify any
specific
mental state corresponding
to believing, but
also the very concept of belief is
particular
to vVestern culture, having few
counterparts
in other
cultures. I shall return to this theme later.
vVarburg's own attempt to construct an anthropological psychology
of
the
Renaissance
seems
just
as problematic, therefore, as those psychological and
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anthropological
theories on
which
he was relying. Ifwe
return
to the
tapestry
depicting
Alexander
the Great's
legendary
journeys
to
the top
of
the heavens
and
the bottom of
the
sea,
the tapestry would have
to be read as
the
projec
tion
of two
competing
mentalities,
one
a
monstrous primitive
imagination
that
still believes
in
griffins
and
the
fiery
realm
above the
ether, and
the
other
a
technocratic reason that concerns itself with constructing
siege
artillery. To
read
this as
symbol of
a
cultural schizophrenia
seems to
contradict what
vVarburg himself emphasized, namely, the
ease
with which two different
pictorial
regimes sit alongside
each other within the one image.
There seems
none
of
the genuine
conflict associated
with
clinical
schizophrenia.
The weakness of vVarburg's reading bccomcs
apparent,
too,
in
his essay
on Francesco
Sassetti.
Here vVarburg attends
to
the
paradox
that while
Sassetti appears to
be
the embodiment of Burckhardt's
notion
of autono
mous, rational Renaissance man,
'the "lVIiddle
Ages"
. . . seems
not only
to
persist
in the
habitual religious
sentiments
of his vita (ontemplatilla, but to
determine
his
l]ita actil]a'.7:J And
this
is
evident
in the fact that he continues
to
hold
a
variety
of superstitious beliefs,
including belief in th e
goddess
Fortuna. Warburg
notes,
'both
Sassetti
and [Giovanni] Rucellai reveal how
in
that upheaval of subjective sensibility
they aspired
to a
new
balance of
energies:
they
faced
the world with
a
heightened assurance founded on
two
still-compatible
forms
of the cult of
memory,
Christian-ascetic and antique
heroic'
H
In
other
words,
they
symbolize
the peculiar
mixture of worldliness
and
religious
devotioll characteristic of
the Florentine
Renaissance.
There
are two ways of reading vVarburg's essay.
Either he is
asserting that
Sassetti
was schizophrenic, or he is claiming that
Sassetti
was the symptom
of a 'transitional'
mentality. The
first seems
hardly tenable,
since
vVarburg
at
all
times
sees
Sassetti
as
the symptom of
a
wider
cultural phenomenon
rather
than being interested in
an individual
diagnostic
case. In
the
case
of
second
reading,
and vVarburg's reference to a
' transitional phase
in subjec
tive
sensibility'
supports
it,
the fundamental question has
to
be posed
regarding
what
a
transitional
mentality night
actually
be.
I f
anything,
what
vVarburg's paper
shows is
that the
Quattrocento
was
a
time of
transition in
which
competing
men
ali tics clashed,
with the new eventually superseding
the older. However, \Varburg's assumption of
a
mental
conflict
depends
on
one crucial assumption, namely,
that Sassetti
actually
believed in
the
goddess
Fortuna
or,
if we return to
the
Alexander tapestry, that
the
owners believed
in
the
Alexander myth. vVarburg's reading of
the Renaissance
thus raises
the same problems of belief impinging on any
anthropological
account.
It
could
be
objected at
this point that
in the Renaissance 'belief' did
have a
central
role,
and that therefore \Varburg's interpretation
would
be immune
to the kinds of criticism put
forward
by Needham.
However,
as Wilfred
Smith has pointed out, the notion
of
belief
as an
'opinion' or 'presupposition'
only emerged in
European
culture
ajtt'/"
the Renaissance.
i5
Although
at
the
end
of
the seventeenth century John Locke characterized belief
as
' the
admitting
or receiving any
proposition
for
true
. . . without certain
knowledge', Francis Bacon at the
beginning
of the century had written of
' the belief
of
truth',
meaning 'holding truth
dear'.)"
In
general,
therefore,
before
the late seventeenth
century
'belief'
was
connected with
notions of
holding dear,
pledging
allegiance,
and
this was
the
case
not only in English
but
also in
Latin,
for
example,
where
'credo in unum Deum'
was a
3 I 8 l \ L \ . T T H E W
R A l \ I P L E Y
73 - 'Varburg, Rem ,ai, p. 239·
7-J.
- Ibid.,
p
2+0.
75
Willi-eel
Cantwell Smith,
Belie/and
Histo])' (Charlottesville, 1977).
76 Both eited
in
Byron Good, llltdicill",
Rat;al/alit)' alld
E.\pniellC<'
(Cambridge,
199+) p. 16.
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77 - Gombrich in particular gjves a full
> ccount on'Varburg's debt to Richard
Semon and Tito Vignoli, Gombrich,
op.
cit.
78 - See for
example,
'Italian Art ancl
International Astrology in
the
Palazzo
Schifanoia
in Ferrara', In '(Ther
astrologische
Druckwerke
aus
alter
und
neuer Zeit', \Varburg
cites
(pp. 34) : Th e
canopy of
the heavens
is a g'enuine product
of
Greek culture,
pl"Oduced by
the
dual gift
of the ancient Greeks for
concrete
poetic
intuition
and
abstract mathematical
ima.gination . . . through empathy
they
brought order
to
the infinitely distant
shimmering planetary bodies, by gatbering
together individual
stars
into groups, in
the
silhouettes
of
which it was believed
could
be seen
creatures
and things . . . the
,""pacity for abstract mathematical
imagination further permitted the
development
of this
pictorial schema into
a
calcul"ble system
of
points . . . which made
it
possible
to
ascen"in their place and
an)'
change oflocatiol1
by
means
of an
idealised system
of lines.'
79
-
An illuminating comparison is made
in
Roland Kany,
als
Progralll.lII
(Stutlgc,-rr, 1987). See too my Rcmembrallc.
of
Things Past.
011 A.bl' AI.
Wllrburg alld
TValtn
Benjamin (Wiesbaden, forthcoming).
80 - ]\,faurice Halbwachs, Le.\ Cadre.\"
Socia".\· de
la
/vIimoire (Paris, 1928).
statement of allegiance
to
God rather than belief
in
His
existence.
Thus even
for
the Renaissance, reference
to
belief
(in
the modern
sense)
has
to
bc
exercized, ifat all,
with extreme caution, and
this also affects the psychologi
cal anthropology dependent on the assumption
of belief. I shall
return
to
the
consequences of
this
problem
in
the conclusion.
Mnernosyne
An essential
part
of vVarburg's
analysis
of the 'oscillation
between
a
theory
of
causation based
on signs' was his
theory
of collective
memory. The
origins
of his
ideas on memory in the work of Richard
Semon
and Ti
to
Vignoli are
well documented.
ii
The heart of his
theory
rests
on the notion
that visual
symbols function
as
archives of the mental state
of
the
producer. Hence
a
whole
range of cognitive and
emotional
states
somehow imprint
themselves
on the
visual symbol,
in the
form of 'pathos
formulae', the
term he
used
to
denote
representations
of
the bodily
expression of
human
affectivity. The
symbol itself he referred
to as
an 'engram' or 'dynamogram'.
As a conse
quence of his
interest in
genealogy,
vVarburg
was
concerned above
all
with
the
original impression of
a
variety
of visual symbols which, being traced
back to
primitive
origins,
almost
always have
their
roots in a
Dionysian state
of
primal
fear.
In addition, Warburg held that unmediated exposure
to a
primitive
engram
would
reawaken
the
same emotions,
primarily
fear,
that
fuelled
their original creation. An added dimension is thus given
to his
iconological method. I
have
already stressed
the importance
of motivic
transformation
to
Warburg's
approach, and
the
significance
of
that
process
now becomes clearer, inasmuch as
it is concerned
with
the reception of
a
psychic.ally c.harged
cultural
legacy. As I
have
shown, for vVarburg
the
Renaissance is
less a process of
simple repetition
of
antiquity
than
one
of
appropriation,
and
likewise cultural memory
is
more than simply a matter of
neutral
recollection. In
one
sense, for
each generation of
artists
the task
is
simple:
either
to
sublimate the primitive
memories which, like a
stubborn
residue, have become
attached
to
inherited
symbols
and
motifs,
or
to
regress
and
allow those
memories
to be
reactivated.
In this regard
one
recurrent
focus
of interest was
the
role
of astrology; the
figures
of
the
zodiac can be
traced
back to
primitive
origins, when they
were
actual deities that
were
held to
influence mundane events
in
a
very concrete manner.
Subsequently
they were
sublimated,
first,
into mythic
allegories,
then
into mere naviga
tional
aids,?3
Warburg's conception
of collective memory is highly suggestive,
and
has been compared with
vValter
Benjamin's philosophy
of
history,
to
which the notion
of remembrance
is
central.7
9
At thc
same
time, however,
it
also invites
comparison with the work of
a
student
of
Durkheim and
contemporary of vVarburg, Maurice
Halbwachs,
whose own
work
on
collective
memory
throws
up
some
of
the
difficulties
attending
vVarburg's
notion. In
his
study
of
1925
on
Les Cadres Sociaux de la Afimoire Halbwachs
interprets
collective
memory
as a reflection of
the
society
producing it
rather than of
embedded
psychological
trauma.
RD
Thus
it
explores
the
social factors
that determine the character of
social
memory; chief among
these
is
the fact that all memories
bear
an intimate relation to other
memories, many
of
which are publicly shared
social facts. As
Halbwachs
argues:
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Every memory, no
matter
how
private it may be, even
the
memory of events
to
which we were the only witness, the memory of thoughts
and
inexpressible
feelings,
is
linked to a whole collection of notions that many others possess . . .
when we summon LIp a memory . . . we connect it to others that surround it: in
truth
it is because all
around
us there are other memories connected to it,
inherent in
the
objects and beings of the milieu we inhabit, or in us ourselves:
reference points
in
space and time, conceptions of history,
geography,
biography,
politics
. . .
A'
Halbwachs
is
thus
concerned with the means
by which
social memory is
sustained
and passed on, and this has been
the
central focus of subsequent
scholarship
on
lhe
subjecl. A
recurrent feature has
been the
function
of
patterns of
repetition
in
ensuring
the preservation of social memory. These
range
from repetitive ritual ceremonies
to
the
use of
stereotypic formulae in
the oral histories of
pre-literate
societies.
8
"
It was also recognized
in
antiquity
that
memory requires training, cultiva
tion and various aides-menwire. vVhen
in
the twelfth century Abbot Suger of
St Denis stated that
'mens
hebes ad
verum per
materialia surgit' ['the young
mind achieves truth
through concrete things']
he was expressing a common
place
inherited
from
Roman
antiquity
that
recognized
the necessity of
external prompts in the guidance of
human
knowledge
and
memory.8:
l
Numerous studies have
analysed the
vanous
mnemomc techniques
developed in antiquity
and
which were to prove highly influential in the
Middle Ages and the As is well
known,
three canonical texts,
Quintilian's
Institl/tio aratoria,
the anonymous Ad HeTennium, and Cicero's
De
OratoTe
established
the
mnemotechnics of antiquity, central to which was the
employment of an organizing system that distinguished between recollection
of things
and words,
and highlighted the use of
images in facilitating the
process of remembrance. In short it was a
highly developed
technique which
implied that in the absence of such a system the process of recollection
would
be hindered or even
not
take
place.
In
contrast with
such
studies
of
the
institutions
of
cultural memory
and
the techniques
of recollection,
vVarburg
offers
no explanation
as to
how
primitive meanings
are
'remembered',
or what the vehicle of
such
transmis
sion
might
be.
vVarburg could be defended in one way,
for as
Jan Vansina
has
emphasized,
social memory can
be
articulated through bodily gestures,
and
vVarburg
was particularly drawn to the
meaning
of
gesture
and its
representation.
as
At the same time, however, Warburg, influenced by
Charles
Darwin, appeared to
neglect
the extent to which the
meaning
of
gesture is socially and historically mediated,
and
thus not a reliable vehicle
for
the
preservation of
primal
memories. lV10reover,
because
of his intellec
tual
debt to
Semon
and
Vignoli, vVarburg assumed that primitive memories
could be rea
wakened by unmedia ted exposure to their originary visual
symbols, as
if there
were some form
of
trans-historical
'natural'
representa
tion. According to this
picture,
while the
Renaissance
is characterized as an
appropriation of
the legacy of the classical cultural, it also consists of a
process of social
remembrance, in
which the
renewed encounter
with the
artefacts of antiquity brings
about
a recollection of the
primitive Dionysian
impulses that went
into their
making. His lecture on
'The Entry
of the
Idealising
Classical Style in the Painting of the Early Renaissance' analyses
the impact
of
classical
sarcophagi and Roman
triumphal
sculpture, together
3 2 0
i \ - I A T T H E ' RA; ' I , IPLEY
8,
- Ibid., pp. 51-2.
82 On the subject
of
collective memory
see Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember
(Cambridge, 1989);james
Fentress
and
Chris
Wickham, SOlial (Oxford,
199
2
).
83 Cited in Panofskv,
'Abbol
Suger ofSt
Denis', in
AJean;/lg ill the Visual Arts,
p. 164.
84 -
The
mDst obvious
is
perhaps Frances
Yates, The Art oIAlemol)' (London,
1966.1.
Sec, also, jacques Le Goff, History and
Aiemory, trans. Steven
Rendall
and
Elizabeth
Claman
(New York, 1992), esp.
pp.
51-99;
Aleida
Assmann and Dietrich
Harth, eds, Formell
'lJId
Funkt;on
del' Kiliturellen Erillnerwlg (Frankfurt am
Main,
1993).
85 -
jan
Vansina, 'InitiatiDn Rituals of
the
Bushong',
.' Fica, XXV (1955),
pp.
138-
53·
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86 - See Panofsky, Renai,'sance al1d
Renascences
ill
IVcstern Art (New York,
1969).
This
issue was
pursued
most
systematically by the Warburgian scholar
E.
R.
Curtius, whose European Literature
al1d
lhe Latin j\fiddle AgES, trans. W.
Trask
(London, 1953) foregrounds the
continuity
of motifs, or topoi fi'om classical
literature
throughout the medieval period.
87 -
Sigmund
Freud, Standard Editio1l, XII,
PP·147-5
6
.
88 - Ibid., p. 151.
89 -
Ibid.,
p. 155·
90 - Freud, 'Totem and Taboo', in
Standard Edition,
XIII,
p. 158.
with the
later discovery of
work such
as
the
Hellenistic Laocoon
sculpture.
This
raises a difficulty,
however,
for
W'arburg's
general
theory.
As
Warburg
knew only
too well, though
the Quattrocentro
witnessed an
enormous
expansion
in
the knowledge
of classical
culture,
including the
widespread
dissemination
of
Greek and Roman
texts, a
knowledge
of classical
antiquity
was
continuous
prior
to this
period.
86
In Italy
its
monuments were ever
present, most particularly in Rome, from the Arch
of
Constantine
to
the
Colosseum to Trajan's Column, but, inexplicably,
it
was
only during the
course
of
the
Quattrocento
that the authentic Dionysian and Apollinian
bases of antiquity were 'remembered',
in
contrast with
the
various degraded
versions
that
had
persisted through the Middle
Ages. 'Where a
contemporary
commentator might look for
relevant
social, economic or other historical
factors
that underlay
this difference,
vVarburg
fails
to account
for
the
mechanisms
that brought about this shift
in the
manner of recollection. And
in any
case this
notion
also
contradicts
his
theory
of
the engram, according
to
which
direct exposure
always
communicates
its full psychic impact.
vVarburg
does
not explain how
this full
psychic impact was somehow
deflected during
the
course of the Middle Ages. vVarburg's reading of
the
Laocoon,
though an important
part
of his
critique
of
the
view of
antiquity
stemming from Winckelmann,
also serves to
undermine
his
own
position.
For
Winckelmann's
'misreading'
of
the group, emphasizing
its
tranquillity,
should,
according
to vVarburg's
notion
of the engram, not even be
possible.
And in any
case,
vVarburg's own reading of the group, or
of Botticelli's
paintings, for
example, depends
on mediation
by
a vast array of
pictorial
and textual material. The concept
of
the unmediated encounter with the
engram thus
does not square
either with
'Varburg's
method or
with his
wider historical picture.
vVarburg's interest in
social
memory is thus deeply questionable
as it
stands, but can be retrieved if
reformulated
in
the
light of Freud, in
partiCll
lar,
his paper
of 1914 on 'Remembering, Repeating and Working
Through'
87
In
this
paper
Freud
distinguishes between repetition-compul
sion
and
recollection; repressed
traumatic experiences
are
not remembered
but rather
acted
out, without
the patient
realizing that the experience
is
being repeated. The greater the trauma, the more
likely it is
that the
repressed experience
will
surface through
a process
of compulsive repetition
than
through
a
genuine
act of remembrance. As
Freud
notes, 'the greater
the
resistance,
the more
extensively will
acting
out
(repetition) replaces
remembering' 88 Thus, though
the
compulsion to repeat
reiterates
a
repressed, forgotten, past experience, it functions
within
a
perpetual present,
acting in the place
of
memory. For Freud genuine
recollection arises
through the phenomenon of transference, 'the awakening
of
the memories,
which
appear without difficulty, as it were, after
the
resistance has
been
overcome'.89
Freud's discussion
is here concerned with the
specific issue of clinical
treatment, but in other works
his
account of trauma, repression and repeti
tion
functions as a
frame
of analysis for
wider cultural phenomena. Freud
frequently
returned to
the
question, 'what are
the
ways and
means
employed by one
generation
in order
to hand
on
its
mental
states to
the
next
one?'.9
0
In
'.Moses
and Monotheism' the emergence of Judaism and
its
eventual supplanting by
Christianity are
interpreted by
analogy with the
3
21
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psychopathology
of
the
individuapr
In
this his
most sustained
discussion of
collective
memory
Freud
argues that 'the
archaic heritage
of
human beings
comprises . . .
memory-traces
of
the experience
of
earlier generations', with
the further stipulation
that
repetition is
one of the two mechanisms
whereby such memories
enter into
the
collective
unconsciousY
Implicit
in
this
later account
is
also
the distinction
between archaic heritage
and
historical
recollection of tradition
based on the
vl"Orking-through of
repressed memories.
I believe
vVarburg
was
struggling towards
a
similar
view of social
memory,
though using
the
completely
inadequate
vocabulary of
Semon and
Vignoli. Specifically,
he
distinguishes
between the compulsive repetition
of
the primitive
psychic engram, and its
sublimation into
a symbolic cultural
narrative. Barbarism thus stands at the root of
all
culture,
and
through the
polarity of
Athens and Alexandria,
\Varburg
dramatized
the constant
tension between sublimation and
regression. As
he
notes, 'The
legacy
of
antiquity offers
the
artist, through
the
medium of historical recollection,
experiences of
a
passionate, active or
passive
orientation towards
the
world,
which
are
just
as essential a
part
of
the modern
social psyche as
childhood
recollections are to
the
life of
the ad
ul
f .
I f we follow Freud, however,
it
becomes apparent that another
aspect
of
vVarburg's account requires
modifying.
Strictly speaking, the
regression
into
primitive barbarism at the
root
of
all
engrams
does
not
constitute
a process
of
remembering, but
rather
one
leading to oblivion. True collective
memory,
in contrast,
only
emerges
through the
process of
sublimation,
and
not through
a process of regression. Collective
memory is thus always the
construction
of a
particular
social narrative,
and
this also indicates
the
role
of collective
memory in the construction
of a social, historical
identity, in
opposition to repetition-compulsion.
Ultimately,
this also has to apply to
the
inherited
forms of classical
antiquity. Far from presenting
a
'degree zero' of
culture,
as
vVarburg
often appears to believe,
they
are themselves sublimated
memories, mythic narratives
of an
original experience
that
can
never be
recalled
as
sllch.
vVarburg's failure to distinguish
between
these
two stems largely from
his
reliance on a
notion
of memory as a form of inscription. As
Aleida Assmann
has demonstrated,
this
stands at
the
end of
a
long established tradition that
described
memory as an
archive, using
metaphors of
the temple, the
library
or,
latterly, the Freud
was
himself no exception
to this;
in particular
he attempted
to
explain the function
of memory through
comparison with
the mystic writing pad.
9
:
However,
his
own
distinction between
repetition
and recollection
points towards an alternative model, such
as that
favoured
by much contemporary neurological research, which
views
memory
as
the
function
of
neural connections
and
networks
across
the entire
system, rather
than
as a
set
of
imprints stored somewhere
in
the mind. Such models
conceive of
the activity
of
the memory
as a process of
construction
rather
than
one
of storage.
9li
Such
a
metaphor
also
renders
the analogy between
individual
and
social, collective
memory
far less
problematic. Cultural
memory
consists of a
dynamic
system,
in
which
inherited
narratives,
symbols, icons
and
motifs
are continually assembled
and
reassembled in
varying configurations, rather than simply
being preserved in
a storehouse
of inherited meanings and
motifs.
Of course the nature and function
of
3
M A T T H
E \ \ . R A M
P I . E Y
91
- Freud, Stand"rd Edition, XXIII,
pp.
7-
137·
9
2
Ibid., p. 99.
93 Warburg, 'Gnmdbegrific', \Yarburg
Archive
No.
102.+ ,
Entry [or Q/5/1929.
9+ - Aleida Assmann, 'Zur
Metaphorik
der Erinnerung',
in
and
Harth,
eels,
Fonnen lind FlInk ioncn
der
k,dlllrellen Erinnerung, PI'· 13-35·
95 - Freud, 'A Note on the MystiGd
Pad',
in
Standard Editioll, XIX,
pp. 225-32.
96 - Siegfried Schmidt, 'Gedchtnis
Erzhlen- IelcntiUit', in Assmann
and
Harth, op. cit., p. 378.
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97 Michd Foucault, TIl, Order of Things
(London,
1989).
98 - Exceptions would bc Hillel
Schwartz,
The C"/(,,re
of
he
COp)'
:Cambridgc, MA,
1997);
Hans
Belting,
Likelless alld
Pr SPllcf
(Chicago, 1987).
99 -
Peter
Dews,
'Foucault and
the
Frcnch
Tradition of
Historical Epi,tcmology', in
The Limits ojDiml.dla7llml'lli (London,
1995) pp.
39-5
8
.
cultural
memory, and
its
impact
on the understanding of the Renaissance,
still
remains
to
be explored further. However,
it
is only on the
basis
of such
an understanding of cultural memory that a credible account
can
be made
of how the meaning
of classical
antiquity could vary
so
much between,
for
example, Quattrocento Florence and late medieval
Burgundy.
Conclusion
Although it has become
the
focus
of
a
resurgence of scholarly interest, much
of
the thought
of Aby VVarburg
has
now
become deeply problematic. In
particular, his reliance
on the notion
of a collective mentality and his
theory
of social
memory are open
to a
wide range of
criticisms.
In modified
form,
however, his
work
presents a rich legacy, and I shall
conclude by outlining
its
continuing importance.
I began my analysis of \'Varburg's 'iconology of
the interval' by means
of
a
comparison
with
Panofsky,
drawing particular attention
to
the importance
for
vVarburg of iconological differences.
A
crucial distinction
between
and W'arburg is the
latter's
interest in the
effect of
historical
shifts
on
specific historical synchronies. One
implication
of'Varburg's approach,
especially
with
regard to
the Renaissance, is the recognition
of
the
impor
tance of historical discontinuities and
ruptures,
which make themselves
felt
in the form
of
contradictions and
paradoxes 'within a
culture.
A
synchronic
analysis that simply registered
the
presence of ruptures
"vi thin
a
cultural
space or
system
would be reduced
to
mere
positivism,
without any
explana
tory
framework,
other, perhaps,
than regarding rupture as intrinsic to any
symbolic
system.
A key
element
of Warburg's iconological analysis
is the
tracing of
the
shift
from mimetic
to
semiotic regimes of representation. The psychological
underpinning
to this analysis
is
suspect, as I have suggested, but shorn of its
problematic psychological
basis,
such an
analysis
is
still
of crucial impor
tance.
I
drew attention
to
parallels with Foucault
earlier, and
one can
pursue
this
relation
a
little further.
In
The
Order
of
Things
Foucault
analyses
the
role
of resemblance in the Renaissance, describing it
as
the dominant
logic of
representation.
9
)
Foucault's
model is problematic,
for, as
the
work
of
'I\Tarburg
indicates, it is
difficult to refer to the
regime
of representation in
the
Renaissance, yet
his
study
does
at least
indicate
how
'I\Tarburg's
project
might
be developed when shorn
of its reliance on collective mentalities.
Although Foucault's book begins
with
an
analysis
of Velasquez's Las
Afenill(/s, the remainder focuses
on literary
forms of
representation.
vVarburg's work indicates the way in which
a
similar
analysis of visual
repre
sentation might be undertaken, an
area which
is in many respects still
under-explored.
98
At the same timc, however, Foucault's approach
is
limited
to the
kind
of positivism referred to earlier. In particular,
European
culture
since
the Renaissance appears,
for
Foucault,
to
have
been
consti
tuted by three monolithic and incommensurable epistemic
regimes,
which
succeeded each
other.
As
Peter
Dews has
argued, there is in
Foucault no
mechanism
for
explaining the
process of shift
from one regime
to
another,
and
this
stems from the fact that Foucault has attempted to account
for
European intellectual history
ahistorically.g9 vVarburg,
on the other hand,
was
profoundly
aware of the importance of the
diachronic
axis that
inter
sected
any
specific
historical
time, expressed
through the
form of
cultural
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memory. \Varburg's identification
of psychic oscillations as
the primary
motor
of epistemic change
is no longer tenable, but
his
account
does at least
highlight recognition of
the
fact
that
the
epistemic and
representational
regimcs of
the past were
not as self-contained as Foucault's
theory
suggests.
\Yarburg based
his
notion
of
representational
types
on
an idea of
specific
historical
mentalities. The idea of a 'mentality', for all its
importance
in
the
history of
anthropology,
for
example,
has proved
to be
deeply
questionable.
I raised
the
difficlll ty
earlier
of
talking
of
'men
ali ty'
in
the case of
Francesco
Sassetti,
in relation
to
the
problem of
belief,
and
a
more general critique
can
be made of the notion. G.
E.
R. Lloyd has
suggested that
the
idea
of
'mentalities' is better replaced
by a
notion
of
'modes
of
reasoning'. 1 0 0 Lloyd
argues
that
it is
possible to
outline different modes
of
reasoning, or
discursive
strategies, without
being
committed to
the
idea of a deeper supporting
mentality. Instead, one can speak
of varying discursive contexts,
in which
differing forms of
reasoning
are or are
not
permitted, or are used for
distinct
purposes.
Lloyd's own work on the emergence
of
Greek
science offers
examples of just such an
analysis,
where the formation
of recognizable
scien
tific discourses
can be explained without reliance on the speculative
supposi
tion of
a mass
subjective shift."" For example, in
his
study Polarirl' and
Analo. ;.v Lloyd
analyses
the emergence
of
two
types of
argumentation in early
Greek philosophy which, in the language
of vVarburg,
could
easily
be
seen
as symptomatic of
primitive
or
enlightened
mentalities,
being
reliant
on the
perception of
affinities
or
differences.
l n 2
Yet
as
Lloyd demonstrates,
these
may be regarded as
argumentational
strategies,
which by no means
involve
the attribution of
belief,
and they are
also forms
of reasoning
still
practised
today. \Vhen applied
to vVarburg's
own
focus of interest,
the
uses of this
procedure seem obvious. The fact that many Renaissance astronomers were
also astrologers
and magicians need
not be
interpreted
as
the
sign of a
cultural
pathology,
but rather as
indicative
of
the
possibility
ofa
plurality of
modes
of
reasoning within differing
contexts.
Again, the analogy with
pictorial practices presents
itself,
and
just
as
Lloyd analyses the strategic
timction
of different modes of reasoning,
so
it
is
important to think through
the' possibility of
analysing the strategic
roles of differing
pictorial
regimes.
Finally, vVarhurg's account of cultural memory points towards
the
analysis
of
the function
of mages in
the construction
ofa cultural
memory.
Although it
has been recognized that images
serve
an important role
in
preserving
social
memory,
scholarship has not attended to
the
significance of visual
representa
tions.
Instead, the
focus
has been the function
of
images within narrative
performances, common examples in Europe being
the
Homeric poems or epic
poems
of
the Middle
Ages
such
as
the Chanson
de
Roland or Beowulf. vVarburg
instead
turned to visual
representations and
to a
period much
closer to
our
own.
In
the Renaissance, the appropriation
of
antiquity emerges
less as a case
of
the reactivation
of
primitive,
embedded
memories,
but rather
as a
narrative recollection serving the construction
of
Florentine identity. In
this
regard vVarburg
reminds
us of
the dual
possibility of
tradition, either
as an
amnesiac repetition
of
the
past
or
as a
memorial construction, and it is
through attention
to
the continuitics and
discontinuities of this
construction
that
his
iconology of
the interval
finds its
proper place.
324 l\IATTHE' R A l \ I I ' L E Y
100
-
Lloyd, op.
cit. I l lo tc 68).
101
-
See Lloyd, j\lagic
RcaSOlllllld
EcpaielI(e 1979).
I
- Polari£J'
and
Allalogy. Two 7)peJ
of
Argumwtatioll ill Ear[J' (;rnk Thollgh.t
1986).