Unveiling the Other: Art, Images, and Cultures

Abstract

This paper is dedicated to Aby Warburg’s 1920-essay on the relationship between the Italian Renaissance and the German Renaissance in the period of the Reformation. His essay focuses on the use of propagandistic imagery at the time of Luther, in order to elucidate a historical-political and religious problem that Warburg explored against the background of the contemporary cultural debate between Germany and Italy in the years from 1915 to 1920. This was a period traumatically experienced by Warburg, and it led him to reflect, from a different perspective, on his own research focused on the “Survival of Antiquity” (Das Nachleben der Antike), in the rapport between Italian art and the art of northern Europe. It had a notable impact on his studies on the migration from East to West of the astrological tradition, presented between magic and mathematics, that permeated the religious debate of Luther’s time in and beyond Germany, in the cultural and religious clash with the Church of Rome.