Warburg In Rome

Arriving in Rome at war's end, determined to bring aid to the destitute European Jews, David Warburg, the new director of the U.S. War Refugee Board, becomes disillusioned when he discovers the Vatican ratline, an escape route maintained by church offices for Nazi war criminals. 30,000 first printing.

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

Aby Warburg is regarded as one of the great pioneers of modern cultural studies. This book brings together texts by many of the most renowned researchers in the field who have been influenced by his work. They address his extraordinary impact on the understanding of cultural transmission and the influence of images and texts across time and space. What emerges is the continuing significance of Warburg for our own times. No one concerned with the many forms of the survival of the past in the present and the infinitely complex relationships between images and society will want to miss this book. Published in cooperation with the Warburg Institute, London and with the assistance of a grant from the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, New York. Look inside

Originally published in German, Italian and French these articles have been translated into English for the first time by the author, the former archivist of The Warburg Institute, London. Aby Warburg’s research and writings centred on images, their origins and metamorphoses, and their explanations and interpretations. The articles include discussions of Warburg’s academic work with colleagues such as James Loeb, the American Hellenist and philanthropist, and founder of the Loeb Classical Library, and with Josef Strzygowski, the Polish-Austrian art historian of the Vienna School of Art History. Further articles include notes on Warburg’s Serpent Ritual lecture of 1923; his politico-cultural initiative in 1914–1915; his work on caricature, in particular the Struwwelpeter topic; and discussions on the topic of Judaica. The Viennese art historian Fritz Saxl became his trusted friend and collaborator helping to gather Warburg’s large collection of books and photographs into the foundation of an academic institution in Hamburg in the 1920s, and then for a second time in London in the 1930s. The Warburg Institute has become one of the world’s leading centres of intellectual history. (CS 1109).

From a leading art historian, a provocative exploration of the intersection of art, politics, and history in 1960s Italy Flashback, Eclipse is a groundbreaking study of 1960s Italian art and its troubled but also resourceful relation to the history and politics of the first part of the twentieth century and the aftermath of World War II. Most analyses have treated the 1960s in Italy as the decade of “presentism” par excellence, a political decade but one liberated from history. Romy Golan, however, makes the counterargument that 1960s Italian artists did not forget Italian and European history but rather reimagined it in oblique form. Her book identifies and explores this imaginary through two forms of nonlinear and decidedly nonpresentist forms of temporality—the flashback and the eclipse. In view of the photographic and filmic nature of these two concepts, the book’s analysis is largely mediated by black-and-white images culled from art, design, and architecture magazines, photo books, film stills, and exhibition documentation. The book begins in Turin with Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Mirror Paintings; moves on to Campo urbano, a one-day event in the city of Como; and ends with the Vitalità del Negativo exhibition in Rome. What is being recalled and at other moments occluded are not only episodes of Italian nationalism and Fascism but also various liberatory moments of political and cultural resistance. The book’s main protagonists are, in order of appearance, artists Michelangelo Pistoletto and Giosetta Fioroni, photographer Ugo Mulas, Ettore Sottsass (as critic rather than designer), graphic designer Bruno Munari, curators Luciano Caramel and Achille Bonito Oliva, architect Piero Sartogo, Carla Lonzi (as artist as much as critic), filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni and Bernardo Bertolucci, and, in flashback among the departed, painter Felice Casorati, writer Massimo Bontempelli, art historian Aby Warburg, architect Giuseppe Terragni, and Renaissance friar-philosopher-mathematician Giordano Bruno (as patron saint of the sixty-eighters).

In his best-selling travel memoir, The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain punningly refers to the black man who introduces him to Venetian Renaissance painting as a “contraband guide,” a term coined to describe fugitive slaves who assisted Union armies during the Civil War. By means of this and similar case studies, Paul H. D. Kaplan documents the ways in which American cultural encounters with Europe and its venerable artistic traditions influenced nineteenth-century concepts of race in the United States. Americans of the Civil War era were struck by the presence of people of color in European art and society, and American artists and authors, both black and white, adapted and transformed European visual material to respond to the particular struggles over the identity of African Americans. Taking up the work of both well- and lesser-known artists and writers—such as the travel writings of Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, the paintings of German American Emanuel Leutze, the epistolary exchange between John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, newspaper essays written by Frederick Douglass and William J. Wilson, and the sculpture of freed slave Eugène Warburg—Kaplan lays bare how racial attitudes expressed in mid-nineteenth-century American art were deeply inflected by European traditions. By highlighting the contributions people of black African descent made to the fine arts in the United States during this period, along with the ways in which they were represented, Contraband Guides provides a fresh perspective on the theme of race in Civil War–era American art. It will appeal to art historians, to specialists in African American studies and American studies, and to general readers interested in American art and African American history.