WARBURG C Iconology of the Interval-libre

23
This article was downloaded by: [ University of Birmingham ] On: 23 October 2013, At: 08:08 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK W ord & I mag e: A Journal of V er bal/ V is ual E nquir y Publicati on de t ails, i ncluding ins t ructions for authors and subs cript ion information: http:/ / www.tand fonline.com/ loi/ twim20 Iconology of the interval: Aby Warburg's legacy M att hewa R ampley To cite this article:  M att hewa R ampley ( 2001) Iconology of t he int erval: Aby W arburg's l ega cy , W ord & Imag e: A Journal of V erbal / V isual E nquir y , 17:4, 303 -324, DO I: 10.1080/ 02666286.2001.1043572 3 To link to this article: htt p:/ / dx.doi. org/ 10.1080 / 02 66 62 86.2001.1043 57 23 PLE ASE SCROLL DOWN FOR AR TI CLE T aylor & Franc is makes every effort t o ensure the accuracy of all the inform ation ( the “ Content” ) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection w ith, in relation t o or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://  www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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This article was downloaded by: [ University of Birmingham ]On: 23 October 2013, At: 08: 08

Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House

37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual EnquiryPublication details, including inst ruct ions for authors and subscript ion information:

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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

Verbal/ Visual Enquiry, 17:4, 303-324, DOI: 10.1080/ 02666286.2001.10435723To link to this article: htt p:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 02666286.2001.10435723

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTI CLE

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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

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).