The Study of Image by Aby Warburg

Abstract

Warburg is one of the most inspiring figures in the German tradition of art historiography. Although one of the well-known aspects of Warburg’s intellectual work is its relation to iconology, this article seeks to go beyond the conventional understanding of Warburg to mapping a picture of his “special” view of the image as a whole. To this end, by re-reading the classic Warburg texts and new interpretations of those texts, an attempt has been made to examine the place of his approach to the “image” in the tradition of German art historiography and the key concepts of his intellectual system in this field. The findings of the article show that in this system of thought, we can see the traces of the ideas of thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Jakob Burckhardt and Robert Vischer. In this context, Nietzsche’s “Apollonian-Dionysian” dichotomy, Fisher’s concept of “empathy” and Hegelian Burckhardt’s totalitarianism were influential in formulating Warburg’s particular conception of the Renaissance art. In this regard, Warburg devotes himself to the study of a concept called the “afterlife” of antiquity and other concepts such as pathos formula, dialectic, and empathy in Renaissance art and thought. It seems that most of these concepts revolve around the idea of “survival.” According to Warburg, since art has a history, images also had remnants, remnants that reveal themselves in connection with the concept of memory and in connection with a concept called pathos-formula. In this sense, Warburg focuses on gestures and their transmission through art. The result of such an effort is a silent language design free from argument. Expressive gesture analysis offers an unusual way of looking at past shapes and allows the audience to find images of the past in the present. This is the meaning of the afterlife and the survival of the images.