Portrait of Melancholy (Benjamin, Warburg, Panofsky)

Abstract

Although Walter Benjamin's face was always turned towards the future, he never quite could relinquish the image of the past. Amidst phrases and aphorisms that captured the hurriedness of modernity's present, that assessed the shock impact of modernity's turn to technology, one finds in his work encrypted kernels of insight that threaten to withdraw forever, to recede, to become irrecoverably lost, unless one is attentive to the flash of meaning they emit. These are images of incomparable beauty, laden with melancholic valor, as they memorialize tradition and past experiences. Amidst pronouncements that precisely register the numbing, anaesthetic effects of film and its de-humanizing disassembly of the real-from amidst such pronouncements emerge nostalgic glimpses of the past that speak of hands, and eyes, and mind, all coordinated organically, all synchronized, as Benjamin's reflections on the artisanal storyteller would put it.1 One such image, barely visible as it punctuates a discussion of technology, concerns the photographic portrait. Drawing the last contours of the human portrait and transforming it into a site of melancholic loss, Benjamin writes in his technology essay: It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty.2 Tellingly, the portraits of Walter Benjamin that have come down to us-from the hands of such renowned photographers as Gisele