Iconology of the interval: Aby Warburg's legacy

Abstract

It has long been recognized that Aby Warburg played a central role, perhaps even he central role, in elevating the role of iconology in Art History. Having been traditionally regarded as an ancillary activity, iconological interpretation came to displace the concern with aesthetic form and style predominant in late nineteenth-century art historical discourse.1 Through the work of collaborators, students and followers such as Fritz Saxl, Edgar Wind, Erwin Panofsky or Ernst Gombrich, iconology became, from the 1930S onwards, established as a canonical method in art historical interpretation. Although semiological, psychoanalytical and culturalmaterialist interpretations have subsequently dislodged iconology from its central place in the practice of Art History, iconology still maintains prominence in much contemporary scholarship.2 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 translation of The Renewal if Pagan Antiquity, most of Warburg's work has remained inaccessible to anglophone readers, and those few other writings already translated lie scattered across a variety of different publications.4 Furthermore, the bulk of his work remains unpublished even in German: the texts gathered together for the publication, in 1932, of Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Antike, the first two volumes of a projected six-volume edition of Warburg's work, constitute only a small proportion of his total output.5 Consequently Warburg's work, though acknowledged as ground-breaking, has tended to be eclipsed by the more voluminous writings of Panofsky, Wittkower and others.