On Aby Warburg (Umeni, Prague, 2001)

Oxford Art Online, 1996

Article contents  Iconography and iconology. o I. Introduction. o II. History of practice.  1. Early history, 16th century to early 19th  2. Early 19th century to early 20th.  3. The schools of Aby Warburg, G. J. Hoogewerff and Erwin Panofsky. o III. Specific studies.  1. Analysis of motifs, themes and types.  (i) Introduction.  (ii) Transformations.  (iii) Imitation theory.  (iv) Vehicles of transmission.  (v) Motivkunde.  2. Analysis of symbolic meaning.  (i) Introduction.  (ii) Panofsky's study of Early Netherlandish painting.  (iii) Late 20th-century studies of 17th-century Dutch genre painting. o IV. Indices and classifications. o Bibliography  Early sources  Methodology  General iconography  Christian iconography  Secular and classical iconography  Early Netherlandish and Dutch art

The Irish journal of French studies, 2011

Since the turn of the century, Georges Didi-Huberman has rapidly gained prominence as one of France's best known and most intellectually challenging specialists in the theory and history of art. The year 2002 saw the publication of two major new works by this prolific author, both reflecting his passionate interest in the work of the German art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929). The first, L'Image survivante, offers an ambitious and comprehensive study of Warburg's significance as an historian and theorist of art. It runs to almost 600 pages, far longer than the companion work, Ninfa Moderna, which, at less than 200 pages, may be considered a spin-off of L'Image survivante, taking the form of an extended essay on one particular aspect of Warburg's broadly anthropological approach to iconology. I hasten to add that, on the few occasions Didi-Huberman applies the term 'iconology' to Warburg's theories and working methods, he does so with reluctance, for fear of making any suggestion that Warburg's achievement might be reduced to the parameters of 'iconology' as subsequently laid down in the more canonical writings of Erwin Panofsky. Rather, he affirms their radical difference: L'iconologie magistralement constituée par Erwin Panofsky s'est débarrassée in petto de tous les grands défis théoriques dont l'oeuvre warburgienne avait été porteuse. Panofsky a voulu définir la 'signification' (meaning) des images là où Warburg cherchait à saisir leur 'vie' (Leben) même, leur paradoxale 'survie'. Panofsky a voulu interpréter les contenus et les 'thèmes' figuratifs au-delà de leur expression, là où Warburg cherchait à comprendre la 'valeur expressive' des images au-delà même de 1. Georges Didi-Huberman, L'Image survivante. Histoire de l'art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Minuit, 2002), p. 493, hereafter IS in the text.

History of Humanities, 2018

A B S T R A C T In this essay, Edgar Wind's and Erwin Panofsky's practices of art historical iconology are interpreted through their respective adaptations of the epistemological premises of American Pragmatism and German neo-Kantianism. By leveraging the history of these intellectual traditions alongside Wind's and Panofsky's programmatic statements, the essay identifies a central and much overlooked difference between Wind's and Panofsky's scholarship that speaks to long-standing questions of hermeneutics. Against this background, Wind's and Panofsky's corresponding yet divergent appeals to the writings of early modern neo-Platonists to make their iconological arguments are interpreted as symptoms of their own twentieth-century philosophical commitments. The implications of the abstract epistemological distinction that is initially drawn between Wind's and Panofsky's scholarship are then tracked through their disagreement over Titian's Venus Blinding Cupid. By culminating with a discussion of Panofsky's and Wind's analyses of this specific painting, this essay attempts to identify two specific instances of the unity of theory and practice within art historical interpretation and to assess the lasting value of Wind's and Panofsky's scholarship.

In the last thirty years, images have been a focus of scholarship from many different viewpoints, and they have been pivotal in the many scholarly movements, or “turns”, attempting to methodologically reframe the study of art history in general. Can you briefly explain which was your original focus of interest and in which directions your scholarly approach developed over the course of time? In 2004, at the beginning of my academic career, I became involved in an interdisciplinary research program on one verse: John 20, 17. The research team consisted of an exegete, an anthropologist, and myself as an art historian. For me, the Noli me tangere project was not only pars pro toto for a turn into the senses, but also led to the concept of Interspace. Interspace concerns the “magnetic field” between word and image, or the methodical translation of a literary corpus into the iconographic tradition. The insights from this interdisciplinary collaboration, have given me the methodological resilience for the follow-up projects on the iconography of the bleeding woman from Mark, and on the context of the so-called Johannesschüssel. These latter projects not only challenged the relationship between high & low material culture, but also fundamentally questioned the original concept of Interspace once again. Where iconography appeared to have no safety net in primary sources, and knowledge of functions of textless phenomena remained “blind,” other approaches forced themselves upon us.

Art History, 1989

Art is made to be seen. Although few art historians, I trust, would quarrel with such a statement, most focus on the making rather than the seeing, or upon the intentions of the maker, not the reception, perception and interpretation of viewers, past or present. When deliberate attention is paid to the procedures by which images and viewers come together, many issues become problematic on both sides of what Roman J akobson in his famous diagram represents as an addresser sending a message to an addressee. 1 They are joined by those factors that enable communication to take place: context, the referent of the message; contact, the physical and psychological channels through which or by which addresser and addressee interact; and code, the communicative system shared by the two parties. Such a model has a certain utility. By focusing on the entire communicative process, the system transcends the traditional art-historical preoccupation with the makers of images through the inclusion of the intended audiences and shifts the enquiry towards the facilitators of communication. Works of art, however, usually outlast their primary producers or consumers, and necessarily do so in the case of medieval object that are extant today. Thus a private objet d'art, passed down through a family, survives only if later generations reaffirm its prior character or value at least to the extent of preserving it. The same is true of public art. For example, if a church fresco is no longer appreciated, a later congregation may replace it with something more appropriate for their needs. Thus for art after its inception, consumers become producers, always affirming or denying, perpetuating or transforming the object's significance for themselves and other audiences. As we approach our world, art historians playa major role in this process. In the nineteenth century, scholars literally appropriated medieval art from its inheritors, when monument commissions declared that a church or an altarpiece belonged not just to the local parish but also to the national patrimony, which was, in turn, largely defined by those same scholars. 2 Today art historians and the repositories of art are the producers of medieval art for a modern public. In transforming the medieval object into art, as defined by modern values, we direct and control the context, contact and code, inJakobson's terms. Occasionally we further attempt to give the object back to the Middle Ages.

ICO: Nordic Review of Iconography, 2024

Debates on the relationship between Iconology and Semiotics resurface constantly, but recent developments in the fields of Visual semiotics and Cognitive semiotics are seldom referred to. Instead, the use of Semiotics in art history is often reduced to the anglophone reception of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist theory in the field. The aim of the present article is to expand the debate and to show that Visual semiotics has long abandoned the dependence on Linguistics and Structuralism that originally limited both its applicability to the study of non-verbal communication, and its validity in terms of historical hermeneutics. This is done by reconsidering a series of scholarly contributions of formative importance for the development of Visual semiotics in the twentieth century: Meyer Schapiro's early studies of Romanesque art, Felix Thürlemann's combination of semiotics and historical methodology, and the Belgian Groupe µ's proposal for a unified analytical framework of visual semiotics and rhetoric. Drawing on Göran Sonesson's distinction between iconic signs and iconicity in his interpretation of the semiotic legacy of Peirce, it is shown that the category of secondary iconicity may be operative at all the three levels of meaning defined by Erwin Panofsky: pre-iconographic, iconographic, and iconological. Conceived in these terms, the methodological dialogue between semiotics and art history provides a common ground of inquiry that is very different from the alternative presented by Mieke Bal, Norman Bryson and other art historians more than 30 years ago.

Art Journal, 1988

Routledge eBooks, 2024

In the thirties of the 20th century Erwin Panofsky established the so called iconological method in the research field of artistic artefacts that is in commune use till nowadays. His method is based on ideas of Ernst Cassirer and Aby M. Warburg. But in contrast to the tendency of historicization of the artefacts Panofsky followed, Cassirer as well as Warburg originally showed their cultural relevance. Therefore, the latter understand the artefacts less as products of history than as medias of communication. In this respect, each work has its relevance for life. Insofar, it shows us an image of the world that can change our own view of it. According to both scholars the fundaments of this idea are based on sensations of feelings which are characterizing the process of perception (perception of expression/ " Ausdruckswahrnehmung ") and lies likewise in a creation of these feelings comprehensible for others in pictures (living forms/ " lebende Formen " ; pathos formula/Pathosformeln "). Both acts are basic for the transformation of Iconology to Image Science.