Warburg And Living Thought

Aby Warburg, the founder of a new Science of Culture, the scholar who gave back word to the image; a “militant” intellectual (so wrote Gertrud Bing), for whom no distinction exists between life and thought; pioneer of new research methods, inventing ‘machines’ of knowledge; architect of spaces designed as arenas of thought. The Library for the Science of Culture (transferred from Hamburg to London in 1933) and the Mnemosyne Atlas are the achievements to which the most substantial part of his heritage is linked. The ten essays here collected for the first time, all stemming from the Italian cultural milieu, trace with clarity Warburg’s “living thought”. Giorgio Pasquali, Mario Praz, Gertrud Bing, Arsenio Frugoni, Giorgio Agamben, Guglielmo Bilancioni, Alessandro Dal Lago, Gianni Carchia, Salvatore Settis, Kurt W. Forster, Maurizio Ghelardi: the polyphonic dialogue, whether from close up or at a distance, between scholars of diverse backgrounds casts a new beacon of light that illuminates with clarity and precision Warburg’s personality and intellectual legacy. Summary Foreword by Monica Centanni Giorgio Pasquali, A Tribute to Aby Warburg [1930] Mario Praz, Aby Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften [1934] Gertrud Bing, Aby M. Warburg [1960] Arsenio Frugoni, The Renewal of Aby Warburg [1967] Giorgio Agamben, Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science [1975, 19842] Guglielmo Bilancioni, Aby Warburg, the great Lord of the Labyrinth [1984] Alessandro Dal Lago, The Archaic and its Double: Aby Warburg and Anthropology [1984] Gianni Carchia, Aby Warburg: Symbol and Tragedy [1984] Salvatore Settis, Warburg continuatus. The Description of a Library [1985, 19952] Kurt W. Forster, Aby Warburg, A Cartographer of Passions [1999] Maurizio Ghelardi, The final Warburg [2004] Afterword Monica Centanni, Aby Warburg and Living Thought Monica Centanni Monica Centanni, a classical philologist, teaches Greek Language and Literature in Venice, where the activities of the “Seminario Mnemosyne” take place since 2000. Centanni is the director of

Originally published in French in 2002, examines the life and work of art historian Aby Warburg. Demonstrates the complexity and importance of Warburg's ideas, addressing broader questions regarding art historians' conceptions of time, memory, symbols, and the relationship between art and the rational and irrational forces of the psyche.

The work of German cultural theorist and art historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) has had a lasting effect on how we think about images. This book is the first in English to focus on his last project, the encyclopedic Atlas of Images: Mnemosyne. Begun in earnest in 1927, and left unfinished at the time of Warburg’s death in 1929, the Atlas consisted of sixty-three large wooden panels covered with black cloth. On these panels Warburg carefully, intuitively arranged some thousand black-and-white photographs of classical and Renaissance art objects, as well as of astrological and astronomical images ranging from ancient Babylon to Weimar Germany. Here and there, he also included maps, manuscript pages, and contemporary images taken from newspapers. Trying through these constellations of images to make visible the many polarities that fueled antiquity’s afterlife, Warburg envisioned the Atlas as a vital form of metaphoric thought. While the nondiscursive, frequently digressive character of the Atlas complicates any linear narrative of its themes and contents, Christopher D. Johnson traces several thematic sequences in the panels. By drawing on Warburg’s published and unpublished writings and by attending to Warburg’s cardinal idea that "pathos formulas" structure the West’s cultural memory, Johnson maps numerous tensions between word and image in the Atlas. In addition to examining the work itself, he considers the literary, philosophical, and intellectual-historical implications of the Atlas. As Johnson demonstrates, the Atlas is not simply the culmination of Warburg’s lifelong study of Renaissance culture but the ultimate expression of his now literal, now metaphoric search for syncretic solutions to the urgent problems posed by the history of art and culture.

Aby Warburg (1896-1929) was the scion of M. M. Warburg & CO the German Jewish banking empire. At thirteen, he made a pact with the youngest brother, by which he granted his birthright in exchange for the promise that the sibling would purchase for him every book he would desire. It is thus that the famous Warburg Library was born. During a long trip in Italy, as a young man, Warburg falls in love with Italian Renaissance and starts to accumulate all related texts. Once back home, in Hamburg, he further develops the nucleus of the library with volumes concerning unique and original disciplines, from Magic to Astrology, from Alchemy to Primitive Civilizations. Placed in a newly built, perfectly round library Warburg organizes the order of the volumes following his theory of "migration of symbols". Thanks to this visionary and revolutionary approach, the History of Art acquires a new dimension and a new tool of interpretation, through what would ultimately be called Iconology. With the explosion of the First World War, Warburg's mental equilibrium collapses and he is hospitalized in a Swiss psychiatric institution where he will remain for more than ten years. It is from here, that the fascinating narrative of Francesca Cernia Slovin starts, looking back at Aby's life in a compelling reconstruction as a flash back. The second part of the book continues when Warburg's disciple, Fritz Saxl, takes his place as director of what had become the famous Warburg Institute. After Aby's death, with the rise of Hitler, the Nazis threaten to burn down the library. On the night of December 12, 1933, with the help of a few assistants, Saxl with an heroic effort transported the entire library of over a hundred thousand volumes onto two small steamships and flees to London. Thanks to these few brave men and the hospitality of Lord Courtauld, today the Warburg Institute is a holy place of pilgrimage for every Art historian. With more than three hundred thousand titles and two hundred thousand periodicals the library contains forty percent of items missing at the British Library.

The extraordinary story of the Nazi-era scientific genius who discovered how cancer cells eat—and what it means for how we should. The Nobel laureate Otto Warburg—a cousin of the famous finance Warburgs—was widely regarded in his day as one of the most important biochemists of the twentieth century, a man whose research was integral to humanity’s understanding of cancer. He was also among the most despised figures in Nazi Germany. As a Jewish homosexual living openly with his male partner, Warburg represented all that the Third Reich abhorred. Yet Hitler and his top advisors dreaded cancer, and protected Warburg in the hope that he could cure it. In Ravenous, Sam Apple reclaims Otto Warburg as a forgotten, morally compromised genius who pursued cancer single-mindedly even as Europe disintegrated around him. While the vast majority of Jewish scientists fled Germany in the anxious years leading up to World War II, Warburg remained in Berlin, working under the watchful eye of the dictatorship. With the Nazis goose-stepping their way across Europe, systematically rounding up and murdering millions of Jews, Warburg awoke each morning in an elegant, antiques-filled home and rode horses with his partner, Jacob Heiss, before delving into his research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Hitler and other Nazi leaders, Apple shows, were deeply troubled by skyrocketing cancer rates across the Western world, viewing cancer as an existential threat akin to Judaism or homosexuality. Ironically, they viewed Warburg as Germany’s best chance of survival. Setting Warburg’s work against an absorbing history of cancer science, Apple follows him as he arrives at his central belief that cancer is a problem of metabolism. Though Warburg’s metabolic approach to cancer was considered groundbreaking, his work was soon eclipsed in the early postwar era, after the discovery of the structure of DNA set off a search for the genetic origins of cancer. Remarkably, Warburg’s theory has undergone a resurgence in our own time, as scientists have begun to investigate the dangers of sugar and the link between obesity and cancer, finding that the way we eat can influence how cancer cells take up nutrients and grow. Rooting his revelations in extensive archival research as well as dozens of interviews with today’s leading cancer authorities, Apple demonstrates how Warburg’s midcentury work may well hold the secret to why cancer became so common in the modern world and how we can reverse the trend. A tale of scientific discovery, personal peril, and the race to end a disastrous disease, Ravenous would be the stuff of the most inventive fiction were it not, in fact, true.

In this issue of Engramma: Giulia Zanon’s Zooming Mnemosyne deals with the use of details in Warburg’s Bilderatlas, Monica Centanni’s Collateral effects of the “visibile parlare” (Dante, Pg. X, v. 95) reconstructs the hypothesis of a visual model for the legend of Trajan’s Justice, according to Warburg intuition about it; this contribution is connected of the paper by Filippo Perfetti’s Dante, Botticelli, and Trajan. An Open Note where the author investigates how Botticelli could have come to know that the bas-relief of the Arch of Constantine liberatori urbis was related to an episode in Trajan's life”. The focus of this issue is then extended to Warburg's cultural environment. Matilde Sergio’s Aby Warburg, Walter Benjaming, and the Memory of Images investigates the influence of Warburg's essay about Luther, on Benjamin's thought, while Dorothee Gelhard’s Gertrud Bing’s Scientific Beginnings reconstructs the intellectual history of Bing's doctoral thesis and its influences on Warburgian work. The theme of Warburg’s Denkraum is the focal point of Salvatore Settis’ Anselm Kiefer's Logic of Inversion: a fundamental overview of Kiefer's Questi scritti, quando verranno bruciati, daranno finalmente un po’ di luce(Andrea Emo) on display at Sala dello Scrutinio in Palazzo Ducale, Venezia from March to October 2022. The third section of the issue is dedicated to new publications and exhibitions. Echoing Settis’ reflection on Denkraum, we present Clio Nicastro’s La Dialettica del Denkraum in Aby Warburg, published this year for Palermo University Press; an introduction to Cultural Memories: a series published by Peter Lang and edited by Katia Pizzi. Giacomo Calandra di Roccolino with Mary Hertz Warburg: Free and Unconventional reviews the exhibition of the artist Mary Hertz Warburg. The issue closes with the important Choral Reading of Il metodo di Aby Warburg by Kurt W. Forster. L’antico dei gesti. Il futuro della memoria, where Barbara Baert, Victoria Cirlot, Georges Didi-Huberman, Michael Diers, Andrea Pinotti and Ianick Takaes offer us their personal reading of Warburg’s life and thought as they are presented by Forster’s newly translated book, edited by Ronzani editore.