Warburg and Living Thought

Warburg and Living Thought
Author: Monica Centanni
Publisher: Ronzani Editore
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2022-07-18
Genre: History
ISBN:

Aby Warburg, the founder of a new Science of Culture, the scholar who gave back word to the image; a “militant” intellectual (so wrote Gertrud Bing), for whom no distinction exists between life and thought; pioneer of new research methods, inventing ‘machines’ of knowledge; architect of spaces designed as arenas of thought. The Library for the Science of Culture (transferred from Hamburg to London in 1933) and the Mnemosyne Atlas are the achievements to which the most substantial part of his heritage is linked. The ten essays here collected for the first time, all stemming from the Italian cultural milieu, trace with clarity Warburg’s “living thought”. Giorgio Pasquali, Mario Praz, Gertrud Bing, Arsenio Frugoni, Giorgio Agamben, Guglielmo Bilancioni, Alessandro Dal Lago, Gianni Carchia, Salvatore Settis, Kurt W. Forster, Maurizio Ghelardi: the polyphonic dialogue, whether from close up or at a distance, between scholars of diverse backgrounds casts a new beacon of light that illuminates with clarity and precision Warburg’s personality and intellectual legacy. Summary Foreword by Monica Centanni Giorgio Pasquali, A Tribute to Aby Warburg [1930] Mario Praz, Aby Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften [1934] Gertrud Bing, Aby M. Warburg [1960] Arsenio Frugoni, The Renewal of Aby Warburg [1967] Giorgio Agamben, Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science [1975, 19842] Guglielmo Bilancioni, Aby Warburg, the great Lord of the Labyrinth [1984] Alessandro Dal Lago, The Archaic and its Double: Aby Warburg and Anthropology [1984] Gianni Carchia, Aby Warburg: Symbol and Tragedy [1984] Salvatore Settis, Warburg continuatus. The Description of a Library [1985, 19952] Kurt W. Forster, Aby Warburg, A Cartographer of Passions [1999] Maurizio Ghelardi, The final Warburg [2004] Afterword Monica Centanni, Aby Warburg and Living Thought Monica Centanni Monica Centanni, a classical philologist, teaches Greek Language and Literature in Venice, where the activities of the “Seminario Mnemosyne” take place since 2000. Centanni is the director of

Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images

Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images
Author: Christopher D. Johnson
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2012-09-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0801464536

The work of German cultural theorist and art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) has had a lasting effect on how we think about images. This book is the first in English to focus on his last project, the encyclopedic Atlas of Images: Mnemosyne. Begun in earnest in 1927, and left unfinished at the time of Warburg’s death in 1929, the Atlas consisted of sixty-three large wooden panels covered with black cloth. On these panels Warburg carefully, intuitively arranged some thousand black-and-white photographs of classical and Renaissance art objects, as well as of astrological and astronomical images ranging from ancient Babylon to Weimar Germany. Here and there, he also included maps, manuscript pages, and contemporary images taken from newspapers. Trying through these constellations of images to make visible the many polarities that fueled antiquity’s afterlife, Warburg envisioned the Atlas as a vital form of metaphoric thought. While the nondiscursive, frequently digressive character of the Atlas complicates any linear narrative of its themes and contents, Christopher D. Johnson traces several thematic sequences in the panels. By drawing on Warburg’s published and unpublished writings and by attending to Warburg’s cardinal idea that "pathos formulas" structure the West’s cultural memory, Johnson maps numerous tensions between word and image in the Atlas. In addition to examining the work itself, he considers the literary, philosophical, and intellectual-historical implications of the Atlas. As Johnson demonstrates, the Atlas is not simply the culmination of Warburg’s lifelong study of Renaissance culture but the ultimate expression of his now literal, now metaphoric search for syncretic solutions to the urgent problems posed by the history of art and culture.

Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne

Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne
Author: Aby Warburg
Publisher: Hatje Cantz
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2020-03-23
Genre:
ISBN: 9783775746939

From 1925 until his death in 1929 the Hamburg-based art and cultural scholar Aby Warburg worked on his Mnemosyne Atlas, a volume of plates that has, in the meanwhile, taken on mythical status in the study of modern art and visual studies. With this project, Warburg created a visual reference system that was far ahead of its time. Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil have now undertaken the task of finding all of the individual pictures from the atlas and displaying these reproductions of artworks from the Middle East, European antiquity, and the Renaissance in the same way that Warburg himself showed them, on panels hung with black fabric. This folio volume and the exhibition in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin succeed in restoring Warburg's vanished legacy-something that researchers have long considered impossible.

The Surviving Image

The Surviving Image
Author: Georges Didi-Huberman
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-01-09
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780271072098

Originally published in French in 2002, examines the life and work of art historian Aby Warburg. Demonstrates the complexity and importance of Warburg's ideas, addressing broader questions regarding art historians' conceptions of time, memory, symbols, and the relationship between art and the rational and irrational forces of the psyche.

Warburg in Rome

Warburg in Rome
Author: James Carroll
Publisher: HMH
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2014-07-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0547738951

In post-WWII Italy, an American uncovers a Vatican scandal in a “thriller with deeply serious historical undertones” by a National Book Award winner (Alan Cheuse, NPR, All Things Considered). David Warburg, newly minted director of the US War Refugee Board, arrives in Rome at war’s end, determined to bring aid to the destitute European Jews streaming into the city. Marguerite d’Erasmo, a French-Italian Red Cross worker with a shadowed past, is initially Warburg’s guide—while a charismatic young American Catholic priest, Monsignor Kevin Deane, seems equally committed to aiding Italian Jews. But the city is a labyrinth of desperate fugitives: runaway Nazis, Jewish resisters, and criminal Church figures. Marguerite, caught between justice and revenge, is forced to play a double game. At the center of the maze, Warburg discovers one of history’s great scandals: the Vatican ratline, a clandestine escape route maintained by Church officials and providing scores of Nazi war criminals with secret passage to South America. Turning to American intelligence officials, he learns that the dark secret is not as secret as he thought—and that even those he trusts may betray him—in this “complex and compelling novel of the Vatican and morality during World War II” (Library Journal). Warburg in Rome has “the breathtaking pace of a thriller and the gravitas of a genuine moral center—as if John LeCarré and Graham Greene collaborated” (Mary Gordon). “A high-stakes battle between good and evil [and] a plot full of twists and turns.” —The Boston Globe “A suspenseful historical drama set in Rome at the end of WWII and centering on Vatican complicity in the flight of Nazi fugitives to Argentina.” —Publishers Weekly “Recommend this utterly engaging thriller to fans of Joseph Kanon’s The Good German and James R. Benn’s Death’s Door.” —Booklist, starred review

The Theatre of Death – The Uncanny in Mimesis

The Theatre of Death – The Uncanny in Mimesis
Author: Mischa Twitchin
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2016-10-20
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137478721

This book is concerned with such questions as the following: What is the life of the past in the present? How might “the theatre of death” and “the uncanny in mimesis” allow us to conceive of the afterlife of a supposedly ephemeral art practice? How might a theatrical iconology engage with such fundamental social relations as those between the living and the dead? Distinct from the dominant expectation that actors should appear life-like onstage, why is it that some theatre artists – from Craig to Castellucci – have conceived of the actor in the image of the dead? Furthermore, how might an iconology of the actor allow us to imagine the afterlife of an apparently ephemeral art practice? This book explores such questions through the implications of the twofold analogy proposed in its very title: as theatre is to the uncanny, so death is to mimesis; and as theatre is to mimesis, so death is to the uncanny. Walter Benjamin once observed that: “The point at issue in the theatre today can be more accurately defined in relation to the stage than to the play. It concerns the filling-in of the orchestra pit. The abyss which separates the actors from the audience like the dead from the living...” If the relation between the living and the dead can be thought of in terms of an analogy with ancient theatre, how might avant-garde theatre be thought of in terms of this same relation “today”?

The Warburgs

The Warburgs
Author: Ron Chernow
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 881
Release: 2012-01-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307813509

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning bestselling author of Alexander Hamilton, the inspiration for the hit Broadway musical, comes this definitive biography of the Warburgs, one of the great German-Jewish banking families of the twentieth century. Bankers, philanthropists, scholars, socialites, artists, and politicians, the Warburgs stood at the pinnacle of German (and, later, of German-American) Jewry. They forged economic dynasties, built mansions and estates, assembled libraries, endowed charities, and advised a German kaiser and two American presidents. But their very success made the Warburgs lightning rods for anti-Semitism, and their sense of patriotism became increasingly dangerous in a Germany that had declared Jews the enemy. Ron Chernow's hugely fascinating history is a group portrait of a clan whose members were renowned for their brilliance, culture, and personal energy yet tragically vulnerable to the dark and irrational currents of the twentieth century.

Weimar Thought

Weimar Thought
Author: Peter E. Gordon
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2013
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691135118

A comprehensive look at the intellectual and cultural innovations of the Weimar period During its short lifespan, the Weimar Republic (1918–33) witnessed an unprecedented flowering of achievements in many areas, including psychology, political theory, physics, philosophy, literary and cultural criticism, and the arts. Leading intellectuals, scholars, and critics—such as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Martin Heidegger—emerged during this time to become the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century. Even today, the Weimar era remains a vital resource for new intellectual movements. In this incomparable collection, Weimar Thought presents both the specialist and the general reader a comprehensive guide and unified portrait of the most important innovators, themes, and trends of this fascinating period. The book is divided into four thematic sections: law, politics, and society; philosophy, theology, and science; aesthetics, literature, and film; and general cultural and social themes of the Weimar period. The volume brings together established and emerging scholars from a remarkable array of fields, and each individual essay serves as an overview for a particular discipline while offering distinctive critical engagement with relevant problems and debates. Whether used as an introductory companion or advanced scholarly resource, Weimar Thought provides insight into the rich developments behind the intellectual foundations of modernity.

The Thinking Book

The Thinking Book
Author: Sandol Stoddard Warburg
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-05
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 9781623260880

A child explains he is slow this morning because he is so busy thinking. Not to be deterred by a hurried schedule or the start of school, a child takes his time to carefully consider whatever flights of fancy come to mind. Delicious, juicy watermelons, bubbling streams and playful puddles, and even particles of dust that dance in the sunlight distract the inventive child from his daily tasks.

Art, Agency and Living Presence

Art, Agency and Living Presence
Author: Caroline van Eck
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 413
Release: 2015-03-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3110380358

Throughout history, and all over the world, viewers have treated works of art as if they are living beings: speaking to them, falling in love with them, kissing or beating them. Although over the past 20 years the catalogue of individual cases of such behavior towards art has increased immensely, there are few attempts at formulating a theoretical account of them, or writing the history of how such responses were considered, defined or understood. That is what this book sets out to do: to reconstruct some crucial chapters in the history of thought about such reflections in Western Europe, and to offer some building blocks towards a theoretical account of such responses, drawing on the work of Aby Warburg and Alfred Gell.