ICONOLOGY /

BILDWISSENSCHAFT
WARBURG

György E. Szönyi
BILDWISSENSCHAFT
P Relations of text and pictures
P Ut pictura poesis
P Cultural representations
P The iconological approach
P The “linguistic turn,” the Saussurian model
P The semiotic approach
P The “pictorial turn” (a pragmatic model)
P The role of the body as subsemiotic
(post-semiotics)
ABY WARBURG (1866-1929)
Father: MORITZ WARBURG (1838-1910)
Brothers:
MAX (1867-1946), successful banker in Hamburg
PAUL (1868-1932), founder of the US Federal Reserve Bank
FELIX (1871-1937), banker and investor in New Yorkban
FRITZ (1879-1962), investor and philantrope in Sweden

A cousin:
Sir SIGISMUND (1902-1982),
Who revived the City of London
after 1945
ABY WARBURG (1866-1929)
Education (at the age of 13he made “a deal” with Max):
1886-1889: art historical studies (Bonn, München, Strassburg),
travel to Florence, acquintance with Mary Hertz.
1891: PhD on Botticelli.
1893-: Florence, his trip to America in 1895/6.
1912: Great success at the international art history congress in
Rome. He start developing the Warburg Library.
1918: manic depression, hospitalization.
1924: recovers, lecture on the snake ritual.
1928-1929: the Mnemosyné-project.

"Warburg was without doubt the most original

thinker of art history of our time, and entirely
changed the course of arthistorical studies"
(Kenneth Clark).
WARBURG AND BILDWISSENSCHAFT
The Library P Thematic collection
P Open shelves
P Symbolic building – the
library as cosmos
WARBURG AND BILDWISSENSCHAFT
Iconology
WARBURG IN AMERICA (1895/6)

PUEBLO WORLD
WARBURG IN HOLBROOK
Merchant Keam
and Mennonite Missionary
Voth
Warburg in Oraibi
Natural forms and representation
UNCLE SAM
 Then and Today... 1.

Holbrook Station
Then and Today... 2.

Oraibi Village
Then and Today... 3.

Keam's Canyon
Then and Today... 4.

Zuni Pueblo Village

Then and Today... 5.

Oraibi Village
LECTURE ON THE SNAKE RITUAL 1.
LECTURE ON THE SNAKE RITUAL 2.
God sent upon the Israelites poisonous and fiery
snakes as punishment for their disobedience (Isa.
14,29; 30,6) but when they repented, Moses put
up a bronze serpent and those who looked at it
got healed (Num. 21,4-9).

Giulio Romano, "Vendor of Antidote against

Snakebite".
WARBURG AND CULTURAL ARCHEOLOGY
Warburg's Theories of Culture
P 1/ Warburg’s concept of mnémé as a link toward Rezeptionsaesthetik and
reader/viewer response criticism
P 2/ Warburg’s theory of pathosformeln in the context of Darwin’s psychology of
expression and Jung’s collective unconsciousness.
P 3/ The leitmotif of his work:“What was the meaning of the survival of Antiquity for
the Western Man?”. Through these investigations he discovered the double face of
the classical heritage: the rational on the one hand and the demonic on the other.

The roots of Warburg's intuitions concerning cultural reception. An important inspiration: Charles Darwin's
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Human gestures were the vague remnants of once
practical and effective actions. On the analogy of this theory Warburg created the term Pathosformeln:
the repertory of gestures and mimics in classical art was nothing else but repressed traces of barbaric
rituals and orgiastic ceremonies. And the reception of these Pathosformeln in the Renaissance resulted in
the formation of the humanistic conventions of symbolization.

Edgar WIND: "in the course of the history of images their pre-existing expressive values undergo a
polarization. It is only by means of this theory of polarity that the role of an image within a culture as a
whole is to be determined..." The link between the archaic deeds and the Pathosformeln was the myth-
ologies which transferred the old religious meanings and offered them either for classicizing rationalization
or for a demonic recreation.
WARBURG AND CULTURAL ARCHEOLOGY
The Mnemosyne-project

As opposed to Jung, for Warburg myths had no predetermined meaning. He was

convinced that while the act of remembering always works on the myth, the
result of this work is open: it can signify either liberation or degradation. And
since meaning remains open, the work remains incomplete without the
interpreting user, without the act of reception.