From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg's Theory of Art

Author(s): Matthew Rampley

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Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 79, No. 1 (Mar., 1997), pp. 41-55
Published by: College Art Association
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From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg's Theory of Art
MatthewRampley
Recent years have seen a remarkable reawakening of critical
interest among Anglophone art historians in the German
roots of their discipline. In particular, Michael Podro's book
The Critical Historians of Art has seemingly acted as a catalyst
for renewed attention to a subject that has more usually been
restricted in its appeal, for obvious reasons, to German
scholars.' However, while Podro's book deals with a broad
tradition extending from Kant to Panofsky, discussing the
more famous figures in German art history as well as lesser-
known writers such as Adolf G611er, Anton Springer, or
Gottfried Semper, the main beneficiaries of this new critical
interest have tended to be Erwin Panofsky and Alois Riegl.
The reasons for the interest in Panofsky are fairly clear;
having immigrated to the United States during the 1930s,
Panofsky was already prominent in the field of Anglo-
American scholarship through books such as Studies in Iconol-
ogy or Early Netherlandish Painting.2 Hence, the "return" to
Panofsky consisted largely of an extension of interest in his
work to encompass those writings produced before Panofsky's
departure from Germany.3 Riegl, on the other hand, has
benefited from the recognition of surface similarities between
his structural analysis of the grammar of form and the current
"linguistic turn" in the social sciences. It is this topicality of
Riegl, perhaps, that motivates Margaret Iversen's study of
Riegl.4 In addition, at the time of writing, not only has Riegl's
Stilfragen been translated,5 but also translations are currently
under way of Das Holldndische Gruppenportrdtand Spdtromische
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.
1. Michael Podro, The CritzcalHistorians ofArt, New Haven, 1982.
2. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistzc Themes in the Art of the
Renaissance, New York, 1939; Early NetherlandzshPaintzng, Cambridge, Mass.,
1953.
3. This is certainly the case with Michael Ann Holly's study, as is confirmed
by the recent translation of Panofsky's pioneering paper on perspective. See
Holly, Panofsky and the Foundatzons of Art Hzstory, Ithaca, N.Y., 1984, and
Panofsky, Perspectiveas SymbolicForm, trans. C. Wood, New York, 1991.
4. Margaret Iversen, Alois Rzegl: Art Hzstory and Theory, Cambridge, Mass.,
1993.
5. Alois Riegl, Problemsof Style, trans. E. Kain, Princeton, N.J., 1992.
6. Alois Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. R. Wlnkes, Rome, 1985.
Excerpts from the forthcoming publication by Zone Books of Benjamin
Binstock's translation of Das Holldndzsche Gruppenportrtithave recently ap-
peared in Octoberg LXXIV,1995, 3-35.
7. Both Michael Podro and Heinrich Dilly have asked just this question,
namely, why should we be concerned with the history of art history? See Dilly,
"Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte-Wozu?" Ars Hunganca, xvIII, 1990, 7-14;
Michael Podro, "Art History and the Concept of Art," in Kategonen und
Methoden der deutschen Kunstgeschichte1900-1930, ed. Lorenz Dittmann, Stutt-
gart, 1985, 209-17.
8. Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg:An Intellectual Biography,2d ed., 1986.
9. Exceptions would be Kurt Forster, "Aby Warburg's History of Art:
Collective Memory and the Social Mediation of Images," Daedalus, cv, 1976,
169-76; Silvia Feretti, Casszrer,Panofsky and Warburg.Symbol, Art and Hzstory,
trans. R. Pierce, New Haven, 1989; Carlo Ginzburg, "From Aby Warburg to
E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method," in Myths, Emblems, Clues, trans. John
and Ann Tedeschi, London, 1990, 17-59; Margaret Iversen, "Retrieving
Warburg's Tradition," Art Hzstory,xvi, no. 4, 1993, 541-53; and the contribu-
tions of Iversen and Peter Burke to the Warburg Conference of 1990. See
Kunstindustrie, the latter having already been translated once
(though poorly) little more than ten years ago.6
Within this context one person remains notable by his
absence. I am referring to Aby Warburg, and it is all the more
curious that he should have suffered relative neglect, given
the continued existence of the institute bearing his name. It is
important not to read such an observation as recommending
that we merely resurrect his writings, as if the investigation
into the origins of art history were merely an archaeological
exercise. Indeed, if the return to the origins of art history has
any meaning, it can only be because the thought of the
discipline's German and Austrian "grandfathers" is still felt to
be of relevance today.7 Rather, I draw attention to the neglect
of Warburg precisely because it is through an engagement
with his thought, more than with that of Panofsky or Riegl,
that the continued importance of the philosophical concerns
of the art history of the beginning of this century becomes
most evident. And yet, if the example of Warburg can serve
above all as the locus of a meaningful dialogue with art
history's past, it is also the case that he has frequently been
seen as an antecedent, his work treated as a prelude rather
than as meriting substantial attention in its own right.
Consequently, since Sir Ernst Gombrich's worthy study of
1970,8 very little has been written in English on Warburg,9 an
omission that stands in contrast with the situation in Ger-
many.10
In this paper, therefore, I intend to indicate some of the
Margaret Iversen, "Aby Warburg and the New Art History," in Aby Warburg:
Akten des InternatzonalenSymposionsHamburg 1990, ed. H. Bredekamp, M. Diers,
C. Schoell-Glass, Weinheim, 1991, 281-87; Peter Burke, "Aby Warburg as
Historical Anthropologist," Akten, 39-44. Michael Ann Holly has recently
mounted a robust defense of Warburg against the charge by A. L. Rees and F.
Borzello, in their introduction to The New Art Hzstory,London, 1986, 2-10, that
German art history was hostile to theory. Holly, "Unwriting Iconology," in
Iconographyat the Crossroads,ed. Brendan Cassidy, Princeton, N.J., 1993, 17-25.
10. Most significant in this context is the forthcoming German publication
of Warburg's entire works, including the picture atlas "Mnemosyne" and
Warburg's numerous notes and fragments: Aby Warburg, GesammelteSchrften,
ed. N. Mann et al., Berlin, 1996-. The following represent some of the more
notable recent publications in German on Warburg: Dieter Wuttke, Aby
Warburgs Methode als Anregung und Aufgabe, Gbttingen, 1979; Werner Hof-
mann, Georg Syamken, and Martin Warnke, eds., Die Menschenrechtedes Auges:
UberAby Warburg,Frankfurt am Main, 1980; Martin Jesinghausen-Lauster, Die
Suche nach der SymbolischenForm:Der Kreis um dzekulturwzssenschaftlicheBzbliothek
Warburg, Baden-Baden, 1985; Yoshihiko Maikuma, Der Begnff der Kultur bei
Warburg, Nzetzscheund Burckhardt, K6nigstein, 1985; Roland Kany, Mnemosyne
als Programm:Geschichte,Erinnerung und dzeAndacht zm Werkvon Usener;Warburg
und Benjamzn, Tilbingen, 1987; Dorothee Bauerle, Gespenstergeschichtenfuir
Ganz Erwachsene:Ezn KommentarzuAby WarburgsBilderatlas Mnemosyne,Mlinster,
1988; Roland Kany, Die relzgionsgeschichtliche Forschungan derKulturwissenschaftlz-
chen Bzbliothek Warburg, Bamberg, 1989; Martin Warnke, "Warburg," in
Altmeister moderner Kunstgeschichte, ed. Heinrich Dilly, Berlin, 1990, 117-30;
Michael Diers, "Von der Ideologie- zur Ikonologiekritik: Die Warburg-
Renaissancen," in FrankfurterSchule und Kunstgeschichte,ed. Andreas Berndt et
al., Berlin, 1992; Salvatore Settis, "Kunstgeschichte als vergleichende Kultur-
wissenschaft: Aby Warburg, die Pueblolndianer und das Nachleben der
Antike," in KzinstlenscherAustausch/ArtzstzcExchange Akten des xxvIwInternatio-
nalen Kongressesftir Kunstgeschichte,Berlin, 15-20Julz 1992, ed. T. Gaehtgens,
42 ART BULLETIN MARCH 1997 VOLUME LXXIX NUMBER 1
philosophical, psychological, and art historiographical con-
cerns of Warburg's work that suggest why it should remain an
object of more than mere historical interest. Central to my
argument is the contention that in many respects the charac-
ter of Warburg's interest in the "Nachleben der Antike" has
been misrecognized. In particular, I intend to demonstrate
that Warburg's researches, symbolized perhaps in his dictum
"Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail" (God is in the detail)," have
often been interpreted, wrongly, as involving little more than
the amassing of philological data. This view of Warburg
thereby pays scant attention to the general cultural-theoreti-
cal perspective underpinning his work. Undoubtedly, War-
burg's own immersion in often arcane and esoteric bodies of
knowledge has contributed to the underplaying of the philo-
sophical basis of his thought. In contrast, however, a careful
study of Warburg's work throws up important parallels not
only with Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and other contem-
poraries, but also with figures such as Walter Benjamin, Georg
Lukaics, and Theodor Adorno, whose work still occupies a
prominent position in the contemporary intellectual land-
scape. In the case of Benjamin, a clear line of influence can be
seen; indeed, Benjamin's attempts to become associated with
the Warburg circle are well documented. Beyond Benjamin,
however, one can see common to Warburg and those others
mentioned an interest in the archaeology of modernity in all
its forms, and within that archaeological project, Warburg's
achievement lies in his analysis of the visual documents that chart
the emergence of a specifically modern cultural sensibility.
Warburg's first published work is his dissertation of 1893 on
Botticelli's Birth of Venusand Primavera, and while one has to
exercise extreme caution when imputing any unity to War-
burg's oeuvre, the dissertation introduces the one theme that
could be said to recur throughout his published and unpub-
lished writings, namely, the role of the mimetic in the history
of representation.
In drawing attention to Warburg's "theory" of mimesis, I
am quite consciously working against a widespread interpreta-
tion of Warburg. This interpretation holds that Warburg's
thought marks the founding of the iconological "method,"
which calls for analysis of the meaning of works of art through
attention to parallels between motifs in the works in question
and other cultural phenomena of the time, including literary
and theological documents. Hence, Warburg's iconological
method is often taken as aiming merely toward the construc-
tion of an artistic and cultural milieu within which the work of
art takes its place and gains meaning. Mark Roskill writes, for
example, that "Aby Warburg, in reviving [iconology] ex-
plained it as the study and interpretation of historical pro-
Berlzn, 1993, 139-58; Robert Galztzand Brzta Reimers, eds., Aby Warburg:"Ekstatz-
sche Nymphe ... trauernderFluflgott," Portrait eines Gelehrten, Hamburg, 1995,
also the Proceedings of the 1990 Conference (as in n. 9). Mention should be
made of the forthcoming English translation of Warburg's GesammelteSchrzften
under the imprint of the Getty Center for the History of Art and the
Humanities. Publication is not imminent, however.
11. For some time there was debate over whether or not Warburg actually
said this. Recently, however, a literary fragment containing precisely this
dictum has been published in Warburg, AusgewahlteSchriftenund Wurdzgungen,
1992, 618.
12. Mark Roskill, The InterpretatzonofPzctures,Amherst, Mass., 1989, 96.
13. Colin Eisler, "Panofsky and His Peers in a Warburgian Psyche Glass,"
Source:Notes in theHzstory ofArt, Iv, nos. 2-3, 1985, 85;Jack Spector, "The State
cesses through visual images ... as embodied in the conven-
tions and beliefs or assumptions of a society."'2 Similarly,
Colin Eisler has argued that Warburg's "institute was devoted
to the unravelling of the recherche, to the demystification of
such varied monuments of visual authority as Botticelli's
allegories or American Indian sand paintings, all to be seen
through texts and understood by cultural context," while
more recently, according to Jack Spector, "Warburg's method
as presented by Gombrich involved his restoring images of the
past to their original setting, their cultural milieu."'3
This interpretation appears to be vindicated by an initial
reading of the dissertation. In his study of Botticelli Warburg
seems to be preoccupied with piecing together the web of
symbolic representations of antiquity dominant in quat-
trocento Florence. Of particular importance in this context is
the role of what Warburg terms the "bewegtes Beiwerk"
(Warburg, 1992, 18) in the Florentine re-creation of antiquity.
This is a difficult term to translate elegantly, but its sense may
best be rendered as "animated incidental detail" or "ani-
mated accessory." Warburg uses this notion to refer to the
emphasis, in Botticelli's Birth of Venus (Fig. 1), on Venus's
flowing, windswept locks or to the representation of the
mantle held out to her as fluttering in the wind, a sense of
animation repeated in Primavera (Fig. 2) in the dress of the
nymph Flora on the far right or of the goddess of Spring
scattering flowers in the foreground.
Warburg's study, by focusing on the presence of this
element in Botticelli, suggests that the re-creation of antiquity
in The Birth of Venusand Primavera differs substantially from
what even in Warburg's own time was the dominant image of
the ancient world, namely, Johann Winckelmann's idea of
"still grandeur."'14Further, the dissertation aims to place the
"bewegtes Beiwerk" of Botticelli's paintings within the wider
context of quattrocento Florentine culture by making refer-
ence to Botticelli's contemporaries Leon Battista Alberti and
Angelo Poliziano. Warburg draws attention to the remarkable
similarities between The Birth of Venusand Poliziano's poem
Giostra, and between Primavera and Poliziano's Latin bucolic
poem Rusticus. Warburg's interest does not lie exclusively in
demonstrating the influence of Poliziano on Botticelli, though
he also argues for this.'5 Instead, he is concerned to show that
both Botticelli and Poliziano fit into a wider understanding of
antiquity, one that finds parallels elsewhere, for example, in
Alberti's comments in De Pictura on the importance of
movement, or in the works of other Florentine poets, such as
Zanobio Acciaiuoli, whose Horatian ode "Ve[ne]ris Descrip-
tio" presents an image of Venus that highlights just those
animated features Warburg detects in Botticelli (Warburg,
1992, 50).16
of Psychoanalytic Research in Art History," Art Bulletzn, i.xx, no. 1, 1988, 67. It
should be added that Spector's remarks offer a peculiar reading of Gom-
brich's study.
14. Johann Winckelmann, Geschichteder Kunst des Altertums, Dresden, 1764,
167-68.
15. Warburg's argument for the influence of Poliziano on Botticelli has in
any case been disputed. See Ernst Gombrich, "Botticelli's Mythologies: A
Study in the Neo-Platonic Symbolism of His Circle," in Symbolwc Images, Oxford,
1972, 31-81.
16. Leon Battista Alberti, On Paintzng, trans. C. Grayson, Harmondsworth,
1991, 76 ff. Warburg notes in addition that the image of Venus in both
Botticelli paintings recalls a passage of the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius and
also one of Horace's odes (Book I, 30).
 ABY WARBURG'S THEORY OF ART 43

1 Sandro Botticelli, TheBirth of Venus.Florence, Uffizi Gallery (photo: Alinari)

2 Sandro Botticelli, Primavera.Florence, Uffizi Gallery (photo: Alinari)

44 ART BULLETIN MARCH 1997 VOLUME LXXIX NUMBER 1
Warburg's dissertation aims to establish the character of a
discourse of antiquity in quattrocento Florence, an aim that
would seem to confirm the picture of Warburg discussed
above, namely, as concerned to reconstruct a particular
sociohistorical cultural milieu. This reconstruction of the
cultural milieu of quattrocento Florence seems to be the
central goal of the study of Botticelli, thereby reinforcing the
popular view of Warburg I discussed above. It would be
wrong, however, to focus exclusively on this aspect of his work.
Specifically, such an approach would be singularly one-sided,
neglecting the considerable philosophical and psychological
themes governing the argument. An indication that the
dissertation has a wider purpose than the mere amassing of
philological and historical data can be seen in Warburg's
comments in the preface, where he notes the role of empathy
as a "force active in the generation of style" (Warburg, 1992,
13). Warburg's mention here of empathy is noteworthy, for
this concept is central to an understanding of the dissertation,
as is also his reference to the influential essay of Robert
Vischer of 1873, On the Optical Sense of Form.17As Edgar Wind
has argued, the philosophical significance of Warburg's
dissertation becomes clear only if one takes into account the
influence of Vischer's essay on empathy;18 consequently, I
shall now turn to discussion of the idea of empathy.
The origins of a philosophical interest in empathy lie in
German Romanticism, but empathy did not become a subject
of substantial debate until the second half of the nineteenth
century with the growth of interest in the psychology of
perception. The ground for Vischer's treatise had been well
prepared by the work of Johann Herbart, Hermann Lotze,
and Karl K6stlin. Indeed, in various ways Vischer's essay On the
Optical Sense of Form develops further ideas of his father,
Friedrich Theodor, first indicated in the "Kritik meiner
Asthetik" of 1866.19 Yet if Robert Vischer's essay was not the
first essay on empathy, it was this study that was to prove
seminal for an entire generation of art historians, including
Warburg, Heinrich W61lfflin,and Bernard Berenson.20
The inaugural moment for late-nineteenth-century empa-
thy theory can be located in Herbart's attempt to mediate
between empiricism and rationalism, based on the conviction
that "the doctrines either that the soul is originally a tabula
rasa or that it produces its representations from itself, can and
must be united."''21 In particular, Herbart took issue with
Immanuel Kant's notion of space as an a priori form of
intuition, arguing instead that the experience of space was an
abstraction based on the synthesis of tactile sensations. In this
process, Herbart claimed, a key role was taken up by the
movement of the body, for it is only "when one moves the eye
that sees and the hand that touches backwards and forwards"
that one builds up a representation of three-dimensional
17. Robert Vischer, Uber das OptzscheFormgefiihl: Ezn Beitrag zur Aesthetzk,
Leipzig, 1873. This has been recently translated as "On the Optical Sense of
Form," in Mallgrave and Ikonomou, 1994, 89-123. All references to the essay
will be to the English translation.
18. Wind wrote a hostile review of Gombrich's Aby Warburg-An Intellectual
Bzography,and one of his principal objections focused on precisely this point,
namely, the seminal role of Vischer, which Wind felt Gombrich had quite
wrongly passed over. See Edgar Wind, "On a Recent Biography of Warburg,"
in The Eloquence of Symbols:Studies zn Humanist Art, ed. J. Anderson, Oxford,
space.22 Underlying this theory was also the idea that vision
alone perceived the world in two dimensions: "space has its
origin in two dimensions ... the third dimension can evi-
dently not be seen at first, it must be regarded ... as
something supplementary."23 Such a theory is, of course,
highly problematic in its assumption that the visual field is
two-dimensional, but it was to prove highly influential for a
specific strand of nineteenth-century psychological aesthet-
ics, culminating, perhaps, in Adolf Hildebrand's Problem of
Form in theFine Arts of 1893 and Riegl's use of the haptic/optic
distinction.24 Herbart's stress on the interaction of the hand
and the eye and his argument that experience of the three-
dimensional world depends on the supplementing of visual
perception by an active bodily engagement with the world are
of central importance in this regard. His use of a dialectic of
the visual and the corporeal was to have a substantial impact
on general theories of perception since it paved the way for
the application of physiology, then a fast-growing field, to the
psychology of perception. Thus, a general orientation of
philosophy to science resulted, which remained dominant in
the mid-nineteenth century, through figures such as Her-
mann Helmholtz and Friedrich Lange, until the renewal of
Kantianism by Hermann Cohen and the so-called Marburg
School of neo-Kantians in the 1870s.25
Within the sphere of Aesthetics this conflation of the
cognitive and the physiological formed the basis of empathy
theory, whereby the aesthetic interest in the purely formal
aspects of the object was accompanied by an emotional
engagement with it. In Outlines of Aesthetics, for example,
Hermann Lotze writes that "we cannot mentally represent
the most abstract concepts ... without ... transposing our-
selves ... into their content and sympathetically enjoying the
peculiarly coloured pleasure or pain which corresponds to
it," adding later that
the impression exerted upon us, for example by the
symmetry of a figure, by the consistency of the curvature of
a line, by the peculiar contrast between the two equal
branches of an arabesque ... depends in large measure
upon the fact that all these individual phenomena secretly
remind us of this universal nature of the aforesaid three
great forms [space, time, motion] by means of which ...
the impossibility of ever withdrawing oneself from the
close union with reality is everywhere secured.2"
It is from this context that Vischer's treatise on empathy
and perception emerges. To translate the term "Einfiihlung"
as "empathy" is in one sense misleading in that it masks a
complex taxonomy of psychological responses outlined by
Vischer, including "Zuffihlung," "Nachffihlung," "An-
fihlung," and "Zusammenffihlung." Underlying all these
interrelated concepts, however, is a much more basic distinc-
1993, 106-13.
19. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, "Kntik meiner Asthetik," in KntzscheGange,
Stuttgart, 1866, v, 1-156, and vi, 1-131.
20. W61lfflin's doctoral dissertation of 1886 consisted of an application of
Robert Vischer's notion of empathy to architectural theory. See Heinrich
W1lfflin, "Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture," in Mallgrave and
Ikonomou, 1994, 148-90. As Edgar Wind has pointed out, while Berenson's
fame (or notoriety) now rests on his espousal of Morellian connoisseurship,
much of his interest in empathy and tactile values is derived directly from

tion between 'seeing' ('sehen') and 'looking' ('schauen').
This distinction rests on an opposition between simple passive
'seeing' as a physiological process of stimulus reception,
where the "impression received is still undifferentiated"
(Vischer, 93) and 'looking.' The latter, Vischer argues, "sets
out to analyze the forms dialectically... and to bring them
into a mechanical relationship.. . the impression of seeing is
repeated on a higher level" (Vischer, 94). A familiar philo-
sophical motif is being played out here, since Vischer is
implying the primary importance of the interaction of the
subject with the world, inasmuch as the world becomes
meaningful only through a process of reflection and analysis.
Indeed, the nature of this interaction is specified through
appeal to Herbart's work on the relation of optic and haptic;
as Vischer says, "the child learns to see by touching" (Vischer,
94). This analysis of form is not to be assimilated to a Hegelian
process of logical reflection, however, despite the surface
similarities, for Vischer is keen to stress that 'looking' involves
more than simply giving the phenomenon greater conceptual
determinacy. As will be apparent later, the consequence of the
active participation in the world central to looking is that the
world becomes invested with value. As Vischer notes, "I have
an enclosed, complete image, but one developed and filled
with emotion" (Vischer, 94); the "dead phenomenon" of
mere seeing is, through looking, "given a rhythmic enlivening
and revitalization" (Vischer, 94).
Following Vischer's argument, the basis of this "penetrat-
ing into the phenomenon" (Vischer, 101) is a mimetic
impulse, since, as he notes, "the criterion of sensation lies ...
in the concept of similarity ... not so much a harmony within
the object as a harmony between the object and the subject"
(Vischer, 101). This introduction of the notion of mimesis is
perhaps a key moment in Vischer's text since it opens up his
thought to much wider currents of thinking than what are
often held to be the rather narrow and dated concerns of
late-nineteenth-century physiological psychology. Specifically,
the concept of "mimesis" as presented here connects Vischer
with philosophers such as Max Scheler, Walter Benjamin,
Wilhelm Worringer, and even Theodor Adorno, for whom a
fundamental level of experience consists of a mimetic passing
over into the object. This is a theme to which I shall return later; at
present it is important merely to note that Vischer, and by
extension Warburg, through their attention to identification,
or mimesis, have a far greater community of interest with
twentieth-century philosophy than is usually acknowledged.
Vischer's brief discussion of the central role of similarity is
further developed through consideration of the body as the
measure of (dis)similarity. Much of his argument is marked by
the materialist discourse I have outlined above, and this
accords with Vischer's avowed aim of establishing the physi-
ological basis of the psychology of aesthetic experience.
Vischer. See Wind, Art and Anarchy,Oxford, 1985, 46, 127.
21.Johann Friedrich Herbart, Psychologie als Wissenschaft, [K6nigsberg,
1824-25], in SaimtlzcheWerke,ed. Karl Kehrbach, Langensalza, 1897-1912, v,
219.
22. Ibid., vi, 90.
23. Ibid., vi, 101.
24. Adolf Hildebrand, The Problemof Form in the Fine Arts, in Mallgrave and
Ikonomou, 1994, 227-79.
25. The best general account of this somewhat neglected period in the
ABY WARBURG'S THEORY OF ART 45
Vischer explores two other issues of central importance here,
which will clarify the nature of his influence on Warburg, that
is, his analyses of imagination and of the dream.
While the body serves as the indicator of similarity and
dissimilarity, it is the imagination, argues Vischer, that permits
such a mimetic entering into the object. In other words, while
the immediate sensation of pure seeing in some sense
presents the raw data of experience, it is the imagination that
functions as a "fluid medium" within which the subject
achieves an empathic reciprocity with the object, and it is also
because of the mediating role of the imagination that the
empathic object is invested with an emotional content. As
Vischer writes, "my kinship with the elements is too remote to
require any kind of compassion on my part. ... At this point,
however, our feeling rises up ... we miss red-blooded life and
precisely because we miss it we imagine the dead form as
living" (Vischer, 104). Hence, the imagination permits the
analogy with the body to extend so far as to invest the object
with the same animation as the subject's body itself. Mention
of the imagination also points toward art, since ultimately the
treatise is an inquiry into aesthetics. For, Vischer claims, art is
"an intensification of sensuousness" (Vischer, 116), and
therefore, through the artistic imagination the mimetic assimi-
lation of the subject to the object occurs in its most intense
form.
With the mention of art we are also introduced to a
secondary consideration, namely, the symbolization of em-
pathic sensation through myth. In a later part of the treatise
Vischer discusses the tendency in myth to symbolize natural
phenomena such as storms, avalanches, and so forth on the
basis of empathy, for the desire to explain them as the work of
mythical deities stems directly from the urge to "animate"
nature by analogy with the subject's own experience. It is a
familiar kind of argument, common in late-nineteenth-
century psychology and anthropology. Vischer first discusses
symbol formation within the context of his analysis of dreams,
and his argument draws heavily on Eduard von Hartmann's
Philosophie des Unbewussten(Philosophy of the Unconscious)
and Karl Scherner's Das Leben des Traums (The Life of the
Dream).27 Above all, argues Vischer, it is in dreams that
physical stimuli are translated into empathic symbols: "I
stimulate, on the basis of simple nerve sensations, a fixed
form that symbolises my body.... It does not matter whether
the object is imagined or actually perceived: as soon as our
idea of the self is projected into it, it always becomes an
imagined object" (Vischer, 101). This account of symbol
formation in dreams becomes the model for empathic symbol
formation in general, a highly significant move. For if myth-
making is seen as a primal form of symbol construction,
Vischer is engaging in a typically early modern equation of
the unconscious with the mythic, and ultimately the uncon-
history of German philosophy remains Herbert SchnTdelbach, Philosophy zn
Germany 1831-1933, trans. E. Matthews, Cambridge, 1983. See also Michael
Podro, TheManifold in Perception:TheoriesofArt from Kant to Hildebrand, Oxford,
1972, 61-91.
26. Hermann Lotze, Outlznes of Aesthetics, trans. and ed. G. Ladd, Boston,
1885, 20, 23.
27. Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophzedes Unbewussten: Versuchezner Weltan-
schauung, Berlin, 1869; Karl Scherner, Das Leben des Traums,Berlin, 1861.
46 ART BULLETIN MARCH 1997 VOLUME LXXIX NUMBER 1
scious with the primitive. As Vischer notes, "in the mythical
world we are of course, not dealing merely with playful
groping and attachment but with ideal primeval inten-
tions.... the natural emotions are filled with mythical con-
tent" (Vischer, 111).
This constellation of ideas is of significance not only in the
interpretation of Vischer but, more important, also as a
means of understanding Vischer's relevance to Warburg.
Warburg's consuming passion is in the tracing of the life of
symbols from their primitive empathic origins, and the
equation of the primitive with the unconscious and the dream
explains why in his later work Warburg engages with the
psychological studies of Richard Semon and Tito Vignoli.28 I
shall analyze more closely the way in which Warburg makes
use of Vischer's theory of empathic symbolism and, in
particular, how it applies to his interpretation of the Renais-
sance later on. Before doing so, however, it is important first
to engage once more in a discussion of the Botticelli disserta-
tion, especially to explore its links with Warburg's other
papers on the Renaissance.
In his study of Botticelli and, specifically, in his exploration of
the role of the "bewegtes Beiwerk" in the two paintings under
discussion, Warburg is attempting more than simply an art
historical interpretation. By bringing out the parallels be-
tween Primavera, TheBirth of Venus,and various other phenom-
ena of quattrocento Florentine culture, such as the poetry of
Poliziano or the sculpture of Agostino di Duccio, Warburg is
reading Botticelli's work as a microcosm of Renaissance
Florence. Specifically, the focus of his research is the dialecti-
cal nature of the Renaissance appropriation of antiquity,
combining a "still grandeur" with a much more animated,
ecstatic vision inspired by the Bacchanalian excess of the
maenads of Dionysus. This dialectical vision accounts for the
simultaneous presence in Botticelli's Primavera of the still
figure of Venus and of the windswept nymph Flora, with her
counterpart in the three dancing Graces. This vision also
explains the intrusion in the otherwise dignified narrative of
Ghirlandaio's Birth of Saint John the Baptist of the bustling
"ninfa fiorentina," whom Warburg discusses in his fictitious
correspondence with his friend Andr Jolles around 1900.29
A crucial influence on Warburg's interpretation of the
Renaissance is Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy,as has been
widely recognized. Indeed, Warburg was a much more careful
and sympathetic reader of Nietzsche than many would admit;
as Margaret Iversen has argued, while Gombrich acknowl-
edges the influence of Nietzsche, he is also at pains to read
Warburg as ultimately privileging the rational and ordered at
the expense of the irrational, the ecstatic.30 There is a very
obvious coincidence of interests between Warburg and Nietz-
sche in their reading of antiquity and the Renaissance, but it is
28. The key works here are Richard Semon, Dze Mneme als erhaltendesPrznzip
zm Wechseldes organischen Geschehens,2d ed., Leipzig, 1904, and Tito Vignoli,
Mzto e Sczenza, Milan, 1879. Vignoli's book was translated into German very
shortly after publication as Mythus und Wzssenschaft,ezne Studze, Leipzig, 1880.
Gombrich discusses these authors in Gombnch, 68-72, 242-43.
29. The unpublished fragmentary notes and letters forming the "correspon-
dence" are gathered together in a folder dating from 1900 entitled "Ninfa
Fiorentina," in the Warburg Institute. The folder in question corresponds to
items 118 1-2 of Section Iv of Wuttke's listing of the Archives of the Institute.
also the case that their positions diverge considerably in key
respects, a divergence all the more notable given that they
both invest the Renaissance with a similar importance as a
critical juncture in the emergence of modernity.
For Nietzsche, one of the foremost characteristics of moder-
nity is the hypertrophy of Socratic culture. What Nietzsche
means with this phrase is the classifying discourse of logic,
marked by the impulse to categorize and to strive for scientific
intelligibility. Although finding its origins in Socrates the
Athenian, this stands in marked contrast to the traditional
wisdom of the Greeks, which acknowledged the necessity of a
Dionysian excess of meaning opening out onto the "abyss" of
Being. When comparing Nietzsche and Warburg, the key
moment is to be found in Nietzsche's comments on opera as
an attempt to resurrect Greek tragedy. For while opera was a
Renaissance reconstitution of tragedy, Nietzsche argues that
in contrast with tragedy, in which music and words form a
totality, opera imposes a Socratic will to intelligibility on the
operatic form, specifically through the stile rappresentativo,
which subordinates music to verbal intelligibility. Music, the
Dionysian art form par excellence, gives way to discourse. As
Nietzsche argues, "Opera is the offspring of theoretical man
... not the artist.... It was truly unmusical listeners who
demanded that the words should be understood above all
else." 1 Thus, the inversion in opera of the original function
of Greek tragedy, which formed an occasion for loss of self in
the face of a vision of Dionysian excess, symbolizes for
Nietzsche the more general conflict between the scientific,
Socratic values of modernity and the Dionysian wisdom of the
Greeks, which the young Nietzsche believed was being brought
back to life in the Wagnerian "Gesamtkunstwerk."
I have drawn attention to the issue of opera because in one
of his lesser-known papers Warburg discusses the early history
of opera, attending to much the same issues as Nietzsche,
though reaching somewhat different conclusions from the
earlier thinker. In "The Theatrical Costumes for the Inter-
mezzi of 1589" Warburg examines the pageant staged in May
1589 by Count Giovanni de' Bardi and Giacopo Peri in honor
of the wedding of Grand Duke Ferdinand de' Medici to
Christine of Lorraine.32 Warburg's attention is drawn both to
the productive "misappropriation" of classical motifs and
also to the subsequent attempt by Peri in 1594 to reinvent
tragedy in his opera Dafne.
The object of interest in Warburg's account is the contrast
between the first and third intermezzi. Music served as the
overarching theme uniting all six intermezzi; in particular,
intermezzi 2, 3, and 4 consisted of Neoplatonic allegorical
tableaux representing the cosmic significance of music,
whereas the others were episodes from classical myth con-
cerned with the psychological effects of music. Following the
contemporary description by Sebastiano de' Rossi, one of the
See Warburg, 1992, 593. Gombrich quotes extensively from the contents in
Gombrich, 107-27.
30. Iversen, 1993 (as in n. 9). Iversen also criticizes Panofsky for a similar
process of "de-problematising" Warburg. Panofsky's essay on Diirer and
antiquity, while frequently referring to Warburg's "Durer and the Italian
Antique," removes all sense of tension or dialectic by promoting the
reconciliation of opposites. Panofsky notes, for example, "the Italian Quat-
trocento was impressed and excited by the 'tragic unrest' of the Antique

organizers, it appears that the first intermezzo was a tableau
representing the harmony of the spheres. This tableau bore
all the hallmarks of Baroque spectacle coupled with an excess
of humanist Neoplatonic allegory, in contrast with the third
intermezzo, which represented Apollo's slaying of the Python
and employed choral accompaniment in very obvious refer-
ence to Greek tragedy. Warburg sees in this contrast another
symptom of the dialectic of Renaissance culture, which
oscillates between a Dionysian pathos and an all too evident
humanist learning, both of which represent the two cultural
extremes: on the one hand, the reawakening of Greek tragic
culture and, on the other, the self-conscious conceit of
Baroque allegorizing. He notes, for example, that spectators
who gave contemporary descriptions of the intermezzi com-
pletely missed the allegorical signification of the first inter-
mezzo. In contrast, in the third intermezzo, in order to attract
the interest of the audience, Bardi resorted to drama, one
might even say melodrama: "here a dramatic content was
incorporated, which could arouse the interest of the unedu-
cated public through fear and sympathy: that was the chorus
of Delphians ... which had to accompany the fight with the
python through word, song and pantomime" (Warburg,
1932, I, 434).
Unlike Nietzsche, Warburg does not see, with reference to
the intermezzi, cultural redemption either in the rebirth of a
pure Dionysian culture or in the suppression of the Dionysian
through the highly artificial language of humanist allegory.
The same is true, for Warburg, of the opera Dafne, whose
innovation of the monodic stile recitativo,so heavily criticized
by Nietzsche, represents an interplay of classical content and
Florentine humanist learning. Far from constituting a loss of
aesthetic sensibility, as Nietzsche claims, the growth of opera
is rather to be seen as a creative "misuse" of classical motifs to
form a new self-conscious aesthetic-symbolic language with
transformed expressive capacities.33 Warburg notes,
It was certainly one of the main tasks of the classicising
Riforma Melodrammaticato get rid of Baroque artificiality
not only in madrigalesque music but also in the external
frills which absorbed so much of the energy of inventors,
artists and tailors. But this reaction did not lead away from
the classical authors; on the contrary.. . the Florentines
... searched so long in the ancient authors until they
believed they had found there what they really owed only
to their own genius, the tragedia in musica and the stile
recitativo.34
Between Nietzsche and Warburg, therefore, there is obvi-
ously much in common, the most important feature being a
shared recognition of the dialectical character of the Renais-
sance. Nietzsche sees the Renaissance as revolving around the
polar opposites of a Dionysian classical legacy and a fundamen-
before it could appreciate and abandon itself to its 'classical calm.' "
Warburg's own essay explicitly attacks the "one-sided classicising doctrine of
'still grandeur' " (Warburg, 1992, 125). See Erwin Panofsky, "Albrecht Difrer
and Classical Antiquity," in Meanzng zn the Visual Arts, Harmondsworth, 1970,
277-339.
31. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Bzrth of Tragedy, trans. S. Whiteside, ed. M.
Tanner, Harmondsworth, 1993, 91.
32. First published in Italian as "I Costumi Teatrali per gli Intermezzi del
ABY WARBURG'S THEORY OF ART 47
tally nonaesthetic drive to scientific intelligibility, and for him
opera represents a use of classical forms to impoverished
ends. Warburg's position is rather more complex, stemming
from a different evaluation. Critical of the one-sided perspec-
tive of a Winckelmann, he stresses the presence of both a
sentimental (Dionysian) pathos and classical humanist learn-
ing, the intermezzi occupying the point of intersection of the
two. This emphasis on the dialectics of the Renaissance is
sustained in many of Warburg's other articles on the period.
In "Diirer and the Italian Antique," for example, he writes
that "already in the second half of the fifteenth century
Italian artists searched in the treasury of antique forms for
models for the mimesis of both a heightened pathos and also
a classic-idealizing tranquillity" (Warburg, 1992, 125). This
peculiar duality stems ultimately from the complex nature of
Florentine society itself, of which Warburg writes in "Portrai-
ture and the Florentine Bourgeoisie" of 1902, "The quite
heterogeneous qualities of the medieval Christian, knightly
romantic or classical-platonising idealist and the worldly,
Tuscan-heathen practical merchant interpenetrate and achieve
unity...." (Warburg, 1992, 74). In the discussion of the
intermezzi and early opera of the late sixteenth century a
different duality has been established. This should come as no
surprise, given that a hundred years have passed and that this
period hardly counts as the Renaissance anymore. The
dialectic here is not between the Dionysian-pagan and Apollo-
nian-idealist; instead, it is between the Dionysian and the
Baroque spectacle of allegory. In contrast to Nietzsche, the
Dionysian impulse for Warburg is not opposed to a lack of
artistry so much as to its hypertrophy-a self-conscious use of
symbolic forms emphasizing the intervention of human
artifice. This change is highly significant, since it will inform
Warburg's general account of modernity, to which I shall
return later.
In general, then, Warburg is suspending the kind of
judgment made by Nietzsche, since he does not share Nietz-
sche's metaphysics of culture whereby the Greeks are extraor-
dinarily privileged. It would be wrong, however, to see
Warburg as interested merely in the historical details of
Renaissance (and Mannerist) culture, as if his aim were
merely to correct hitherto partial pictures. To recall, the
declared aim of his doctoral dissertation is to make a
contribution to empathy theory. Hence, his work has a
philosophical foundation, according to which it theorizes the
dialectics of the Renaissance through the notion of empathy.
At this point, therefore, it is necessary to return once more to
the work of Vischer, in order to draw out the character of
Warburg's engagement with the theory of empathy.
As I indicated earlier, the focus of Vischer's theory of empathy
is the tendency of the subject to identify with the object, a
1589," this essay is not included in Warburg, 1992. See Warburg, 1932, I, 259 ff.
The German translation, excluding the quotations from contemporary
sources used in the original version, appears in the same volume, 422-38.
33. A similar point is made by Helmut Pfotenhauer, who examines the issue
in much greater depth. See Pfotenhauer, "Das Nachleben der Antike: Aby
Warburgs Auseinandersetzung mit Nietzsche," Nzetzsche Studzen, xIv, 1985,
298-313.
34. Warburg, 1932, I, 437.
48 ART BULLETIN MARCH 1997 VOLUME LXXIX NUMBER 1
passing over into the other that results in a negation of the
self. Central to this mimetic process is the body, which
functions as a common measure of comparison by which the
object is invested with the qualities of subjective embodied
experience. Furthermore, this comparison through the me-
dium of the body is possible on the basis of the subjective
imaginative capacity to symbolize; it is by virtue of the symbol
that two or more heterogeneous elements can be literally
thrown together on the basis of some perceived similarity.
Clearly, Warburg's account of Renaissance culture owes much
to this theory, most particularly in his attention to the
Dionysiac element at the birth of classical culture and the
Renaissance refashioning of it. The idea of the Dionysiac is
introduced in the reference to the "bewegtes Beiwerk" in the
Botticelli dissertation, where the importance of bodily move-
ment has very clear parallels with Vischer's stress on the
empathic projection of embodied experience onto the object.
What Warburg introduces in his dissertation is then discussed
elsewhere, for example, in his study on "Diirer and the Italian
Antique," which explores the various treatments in the
Renaissance of that most Dionysiac of classical myths, the
death of Orpheus. Warburg's adoption of Vischer's theory is
thus extended in two ways. First, Vischer's comments on the
role of symbolism are given much greater weight, and second,
the phenomenon of empathy (and its symbolism) is histori-
cized. I shall deal with each in turn.
It has all too frequently been assumed, as I suggested
earlier, that Warburg's method rests on a concept of the
image, or, indeed, any symbolic representation, as symptom-
atic of wider social practices and discursive formations.
Gombrich refers to the precedent of Hippolyte Taine, whose
work aimed at the construction of a historical intellectual
"milieu" without the metaphysical weight attached to Hege-
lian notions of a "Zeitgeist."'35Parallels have also been drawn
with Gottfried Leibniz, whose monads, interiorizing the
world, seem to prefigure Warburg's idea of the symbol.36 In
fact, while these writers undoubtedly have a significant bear-
ing on Warburg, one need only look to contemporary
historians of art such as W61fflin, Riegl, or Max Dvorak for a
similar approach to the social function of the image. For
example, Riegl's historical grammar of the arts quite clearly
relates the formal syntactic and morphological features of a
period style to wider extra-aesthetic beliefs,37 and W6lfflin's
Principles of Art History quite clearly operates according to the
notion of period-specific ways of seeing and their exemplifica-
tion in individual works of art. Such approaches to art were
common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
even if a Hegelian metaphysics of culture had been discarded.
Where Warburg's thought diverges from that of his contempo-
raries (and followers such as Panofsky) is in his refusal to
35. Gombrich is, of course, hostile to Hegel and is thus keen to dissociate
Warburg and Hegel. See Ernst Gombrich, "In Search of Cultural Tradition,"
in Ideals and Idols, Oxford, 1979, 24-59.
36. See William Heckscher, "PetztesPerceptzons:An Account of sortes Warburgi-
anae," in Art and Lzterature.Studzeszn Relatzonshzp,Baden-Baden, 1985, 435-80.
37. Riegl's concept of the "Kunstwollen" is supposed to indicate the
autonomy of art, but in the final section of Late Roman Art Industry (as in n. 6),
Riegl argues for parallels between the rise of Christianity and the emphasis on
reduce those formations to any single principle, leading to his
dialectical understanding of the Renaissance, which he sees
reproduced in Renaissance imagery. Indeed, one could argue
that Warburg's most sensitive follower was Walter Benjamin,
whose theories of the symbol and of historical inquiry closely
resemble Warburg's own.3s Moreover, Warburg's understand-
ing of the symbol takes the notion still further by virtue of
the fact that in his work the image does not simply act as
the archive of a specific historical experience, it also bears the
imprint of that experience. What I mean by this is that the
image, as a symbol of the empathic projection onto the other,
itself becomesthe empathized other. The symbolic representa-
tion loses its symbolic quality, the distinction between the
image and its symbolized object is collapsed, and the image is
subject to the same empathic identification as its represented
object.
Warburg's understanding of the symbol derives from Ro-
mantic theories of literary symbolism and, as will become
clear later, their concomitant denigration of allegory. In
particular, the symbol was held to be embodied in the work of
art; indeed, beauty itself was thought to appear only in the
symbol. In his Doctrine of the Gods Karl Philip Moritz argues
that in the work of art "we find total opposites brought
together," which "renders that poetry beautiful and it be-
comes here, as it were, a higher language which combines in a
single expression a good number of concepts that resound
harmoniously together whereas elsewhere they are dispersed
and separate." 39 Moritz's theory of beauty as the harmony of
opposites is repeated elsewhere, for example, in his claim that
"I view the [beautiful object] as something that finds comple-
tion not in me, but in itself, something that forms a self-
contained totality and gives me pleasure for its own sake."'4 In
other words, the symbolic work of art presents a formal unity,
resulting from a dialectical synthesis of opposites, a view
repeated in Friedrich Schelling's argument that "An infinite
dichotomy of opposed activities ... is ... the basis of every
aesthetic production and by each individual manifestation of
art it is wholly resolved.'"41Moreover, as Moritz indicates, the
symbol not only presents a formal unity of opposites, it is also
indivisible from its referent, in contrast with allegory, in which
allegorical form and content are external to one another.
This theme recurs throughout the aesthetic theory of the
time. In his "Doctrine of Art," for example, August Wilhelm
von Schlegel writes that "language passes from pure expres-
sion to arbitrary usage for the purpose of representation, but
when arbitrariness becomes its dominant feature ... lan-
guage is no longer anything but a collection of logical
ciphers."42 Similarly, Schelling notes that "Each figure in
mythology is to be taken for what it is, for it is precisely in this
way that it will be taken for what it signifies. The signifying
subjective interiority in late Roman art.
38. See especially Walter Benjamin's The Orngin of German Tragic Drama,
1985.
39. Karl Ph. Moritz, Gbtterlehre,oder mythologzscheDzchtungen der Alten, Lahr,
1948, 101-2.
40. Karl Ph. Moritz, "Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schonen Kuinste und
Wissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten," in Schnften
zur Aesthetikund Poetzk,Tubingen, 1962, 3

3 Domenico Ghirlandaio,
Foundingof the Orderof Saint
FrancisbyPopeHonoriusIII.
Florence, Santa Trinita
(photo: Witt Library)
here is at the same time the being itself, it has passed into the
object."43
It is perhaps no coincidence that Warburg's own interest in
the role of the symbol in art developed at the same time as the
late-nineteenth-century revival of such Romantic theories of
symbolism, language, and allegory, most obviously in the art
theories of the Symbolists, for example, in Charles Baude-
laire's doctrine of "correspondences." In this regard it is
important to take note, too, of Walter Benjamin's interest in
precisely this aspect of Baudelaire in articulating his own
theory of "aura."44 In his discussion of Domenico Ghirlan-
daio's Founding of the Orderof Saint Francis byPope Honorius III
in Santa Trinita (Fig. 3), Warburg notes, "The modest
privilege of the donor to piously occupy a corner of the image
is expanded by Ghirlandaio and his client without a second
thought into the right of their corporeal likeness to enter
freely into the sacred event as a spectator or even as an actor
in the story" (Warburg, 1992, 71). The fact that all the figures
in the foreground can be identified as various members of the
Sassetti and Medici households, Warburg argues, indicates
the loss of the sense of historical and symbolic distance
between viewer and representation.
In the same study Warburg also notes a parallel process in
the enormous growth in popularity during the Renaissance of
41. Friedrich Schelling, quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol,
trans. C. Porter, Oxford, 1982, 185.
42. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, quoted in Todorov (as in n. 41), 178.
43. Friedrich Schelling, Simmtliche Werke,Stuttgart, 1856-68, I Abteilung, v,
411.
44. On Benjamin's theory of aura, see Marlene Stoessel, Aura: Des Vergessene
Menschliche,Munich, 1983. For a general account of histories of the symbolic
see Todorov (as in n. 41) and Hazard Adams, Philosophyof the LiterarySymbolic,
ABY WARBURG'S THEORY OF ART 49
;ir
r~ 4'
.?t~l~I
Ir
L
vi z?
.... .
v
wax voti, which he interprets as a continuation of pagan cult
practices: "Through the practice of votive offerings to sacred
images, the Catholic church had, with penetrating insight,
provided converted pagans with a legitimate mode of expres-
sion for the ineradicable primal religious impulse to ap-
proach the divine ... and this could be done either in person
or in the form of a representation" (Warburg, 1992, 73).
Mention of the atavism of wax voti introduces the second
way in which Warburg extends Robert Vischer's essay, namely,
by historicizing the phenomenon of empathy. Gombrich has
argued that the widespread influence of Darwinism and the
general acceptance of the theory of evolution were significant
for Warburg in this regard.45 Certainly, their importance
cannot be overlooked, but as Edgar Wind has forcefully
argued, one can locate a much more specific source for
Warburg's conceptual system, namely, the essay "Das Symbol"
by Friedrich Vischer, on the basis of which Warburg con-
structs a historical typology of orders of representation.46 In
this respect it is significant that Friedrich Vischer's essay is
mentioned immediately after Robert Vischer's treatise in the
preface to the Botticelli dissertation. For the elder Vischer,
symbolic representation oscillates between two polarities, the
one magical-associative, where the symbol and the symbolized
merge, and the other logical-dissociative, in which a relation
Tallahassee, Fla., 1983.
45. See Gombrich, "Aby Warburg und der Evolutionismus des 19. Jahrhun-
derts," in Galitz and Reimers (as in n. 10), 52-73.
46. Edgar Wind, "Warburg's Concept of Kulturwissenschaft,"in Wind (as in
n. 18), 26 ff. Vischer's original essay appears in PhilosophischeAufsdtze, Eduard
Zellerzu seinem 50 jdhrigen Doctor-Jubildumgewidmet, ed. F. T. Vischer, Leipzig,
1887, 153-93. Gombrich also mentions the influence of Vischer, though he
gives it less prominence than does Wind. See Gombrich, 72-75.
50 ART BULLETIN MARCH 1997 VOLUME LXXIX NUMBER I
of disjunction operates between the symbol and its object.
The lineage of such a conception is clear, since the notion of a
history of symbolization can be traced back to Giambattista
Vico's New Science,47and the distinction between the two
repeats the Romantic opposition of symbol and allegory. It is
implicit, too, in Robert Vischer's treatise. There, empathy was
discussed using the model of dream symbolization, and it is
only a short step to equating processes originating in the
unconscious with processes originating in primitive stages of
human development. This equation of empathic symboliza-
tion with the unconscious and the primitive would later
surface in Freud and Jung, while the historicizing of the
distinction between the magical-associative and the logical-
dissociative would perform a central role in Georg Lukacs's
early Theoryof the Novel of 1914 and Walter Benjamin's early
philosophical essays on language and experience.48 It also
informed the theories of modernity in the emerging disci-
pline of sociology, including, for example, Max Weber's
notion of the disenchantment of nature or Ferdinand T6n-
nies's distinction between the community ("Gemeinschaft")
and society ("Gesellschaft").49
Warburg falls exactly into this early modernist pattern, the
most obvious example being his study of the serpent ritual of
the Moki Indians.5o Writing of the Moki he notes, "They stand
on the middle ground between magic and logos, and their
instrument of orientation is the symbol. Between a culture of
touch and a culture of thought is the culture of symbolic
connection.""'51Shortly afterward he adds, "It is, one might
say, a Darwinism of mythical elective affinity which deter-
mines the lives of these so-called primitive people.""'52 More
significantly, in the final section of the study Warburg argues
that exactly the same "elective affinity" is to be found in
classical culture, where the participants in the festival of
Dionysus and the mythical maenads and Erinyes give expres-
sion to the same primitive mentality encountered among the
Moki.
We have returned full circle, since the reference to Dio-
nysus draws us back to Warburg's initial interest in the
"bewegtes Beiwerk" and its Dionysian connotations. Against
the background of the foregoing discussion it is perhaps clear
that for Warburg the Renaissance constitutes a period of
conflict between magical-associative (symbolic) and logical-
dissociative (allegorical-semiotic) modes of representation.
However, he does not interpret this to mean simply that the
Renaissance had recovered both the Dionysian and the
Apollonian drives of classical antiquity, since this would imply
that the Renaissance had formed a "correct" image of
antiquity, and such a conclusion is alien to Warburg's thought.
Rather, he sees the Renaissance as constituting a transitional
phase from the one to the other, where primitive symbolic
representation gives way to the allegorical-semiotic mode of
modernity. Nowhere is this clearer, perhaps, than in War-
47. Giambattista Vico, The New Science (1725), trans. T. Bergin and M. Fisch,
Ithaca, N.Y., 1948.
48. Georg Lukics, Theone des Romans (1914), Munich, 1994; Walter Benja-
min, "On Language as Such and on Human Language," in One WayStreetand
OtherWhtzngs,London, 1979, 107-23; and Benjamin, "Program of the Coming
Philosophy," in WalterBenjamzn:Phtlosophy,History, Aesthetics,ed. Gary Smith,
Chicago, 1989, 1-12.
49 Ferdinand T6nnies's widely influential study Gemeznschaftund Gesell-
burg's extensive study Heathen-Antique Prophecy in Word and
Image at the Timeof Luther53
The ostensible focus of interest in this work is the varying
use made of astrology by parties both supportive of and
opposed to Luther. This includes the falsification of Luther's
birthdate in order to make him fit into preestablished
astrological patterns and the reading of natural phenomena
as portending the Peasants' Revolt of 1524-25. The object of
study is thus the continued use of classical omens throughout
the Reformation, but Warburg's perspective is not limited to
collecting cases of such continued use. This is indicated in his
early observations that Renaissance astronomy succeeded in
combining the mathematized abstract thinking familiar to a
contemporary understanding of the subject with the cultic
superstition more associated with astrology. Warburg notes
that while in Italy the astrological symbols become allegorical
signs, a phenomenon also explored in his paper on the
Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara,54 in Germany the magical
conception of the astrological figures predominates. Conse-
quently, they are felt to inhabit the same world as humans and
affect actual historical events. Only in Luther himself does
Warburg observe a sense of unease with the hysterical
interpretation of natural phenomena, arguing that "God's
signs and the warnings of the angels are confused with the
messages and signs of Satan . .. such that everything becomes
intermingled and no distinction between them can be made"
(Warburg, 1992, 243). Yet if Luther's primary concern is with
the difficulty of reading omens correctly, Warburg sees in the
work of Albrecht Dfirer a further degree of skepticism,
whereby the omens and astrological symbols are transformed
into self-consciously allegorical figures or curiosities of natu-
ral history. Hence, in his engraving of the pig of Landser (Fig.
4) Dfirer has turned an (admittedly monstrous) misformed
eight-footed pig into an object of scientific interest, in stark
contrast with the reaction at the time of its birth in 1496, when
it was seen as a portent of things to come. Most dramatically of
all, Warburg points to Diirer's MelencoliaI, which represents a
creative transformation of the figure of Saturn, most fearful
of all the astrological deities, into an allegory of the melan-
cholic self-absorption of genius. Warburg concludes, "we
stand with [Luther and Duirer] in the midst of the struggle for
the inner and religious liberation of the modern individual,
albeit in its infancy" (Warburg, 1992, 261).
The general direction of the argument has so far suggested
that Warburg's obsessive focus on the Renaissance is aimed at
showing that the culture of quattrocento Florence repro-
duced both the antique sense of Dionysian self-loss and its
Apollonian "still grandeur." As the parallel with Nietzsche
might therefore lead one to conclude, Warburg has put
forward theories of both the Renaissance and of antiquity. If,
however, his conceptual system places the Renaissance at the
site of transition from the symbolic to the allegorical, the
Grundbegnffe der reznen Sozzologie,Leipzig, 1887, opposes a premodern
schaft"
"community" based on organic life to modern "society" founded on the
reduction of all to abstract, calculable quantities.
50. This was originally published as Aby Warburg, "A Lecture on Serpent
Ritual," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1I, 1938-39, 277-92.
While this lecture was first given in 1923, its basis was a journey to North
America undertaken in 1896, very shortly after Warburg completed his
dissertation. See, too, the German edition, Schlangenrtual En Reisebencht,ed.
 ABY WARBURG'S THEORY OF ART 51

question has to be raised as to the status of the intervening

period in Warburg's thought. In other words, if in the
Renaissance the Dionysian energies of antiquity were re-
trieved along with the classical knowledge of Florentine
humanism, what was the status of images before the quat-
trocento? A straightforward answer to this question is made
all the more difficult by the fact that Warburg wrote very little
about Early Christian and medieval art. An intimation of his
ideas can be gleaned, however, from his various comments on
Gothic realism.
One of the themes that preoccupied Warburg, and which I
have until now passed over, was the penchant of Florentine
culture for the art of the North, for example, Burgundian
tapestries or painters such as Hans Memling and Hugo van
der Goes. This taste caught Warburg's attention for the simple
reason that the works in question appeared so incongruous;
in scenes from pagan myth figures were represented as
clothed in contemporary dress. Such representations seemed
devoid of the classical learning sustaining those by Florentine
artists. Consequently, one finds, as he notes in "Flemish Art
and the Early Florentine Renaissance," that Giovanni de' 4 Albrecht Dfirer, TheMonstrousPig of Landser(photo: British
Medici's Burgundian tapestries displayed a "baroque mixture Museum)
of contemporary Burgundian dandyish costume and antique
disposition of the folds, of Florentine goldsmith's fantasy and
the extreme Flemish sense of reality" (Warburg, 1992, 104).
In his explanation of this so-called realism, Warburg describes
it as a "naive realism which lacks any sense of distance displaced by the classicizing language of Dionysian pathos. At
between the present and the past" (Warburg, 1932, I, 74). the same time, both are functionally isomorphic in terms of
This explanation was to form the basis, subsequently, of the status of the representation itself. Warburg says very little
Panofsky's own attempt to define the Renaissance as a about medieval imagery, but it is perhaps not too bold to
coincidence of classical form and content, though Warburg's suggest that his interpretation of Northern realism can be
interpretation aims at something else.55 For Warburg's inter- extended to form a more general theory of pre-Renaissance
est is in understanding the meaning of late medieval and representation, a theory following which the medieval venera-
Northern realism. His comments on the lack of distance in tion of images, for example, would testify to the power of
this art point the way, perhaps, to the place this phenomenon symbolic magical-associative representation. Although not
would occupy within Warburg's system. In its lack of symbolic acknowledged as a source, Warburg's work in this area has
distance from the object, Northern realism obviously brings been continued recently in Hans Belting's monumental study
back to mind the "realism" of those Florentine altarpieces of Byzantine icons, Likeness and Presence, which develops a
where the donor literally steps into the image. That incorpora- similar function-theoretical history of the image from late
tion of the donor into the mythical/allegorical representation antiquity until the Renaissance.56
was interpreted as an example of the same empathic drive While Warburg traces the history of representation from
underlying the Dionysian undercurrent in Botticelli, and the the magical-associative to the logical-dissociative, he also
realism of Northern art can also be read in this way. Indeed, in maintains a conviction of the constant possibility of a recidi-
the final paragraph of his study of Burgundian tapestries vist return to magic, to the alogical. It has often been thought
Warburg draws out the explicit parallels between the two, that Warburg's own nervous breakdown contributed directly
when he says that "the monumental genre art of these to this belief (although it has also been suggested that
illustrated Burgundian tapestries was, as it were, the source of Warburg's breakdown was a consequenceof his theories5'), but
that Northern verism which set up its life-mirroring humor as this is to ignore the psychological theories that lie at the
a counterweight to Dionysian pathos, in the contest over the origin of Warburg's "system." Robert Vischer's equation of
stylization of vital life" (Warburg, 1992, 171). empathy and its symbolizing with the symbol formation of
For Warburg, then, late medieval realism was an alternative dreams can easily be seen to imply a constant subconscious
mode of symbolizing empathic identification, one that was empathic drive, which on occasions is reawakened. It is only a

U. Raulff, Berlin, 1988. Recently a new edition has been published, Aby
Warburg, Imagesfrom the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, trans. and
ed. Michael Steinberg, Ithaca, N.Y., 1995.
51. Warburg, 1995 (as in n. 50), 17.
52. Ibid., 19-20.
53. Warburg, 1992, 199-309.
54. Warburg, "Italienische Kunst und internationale Astrologie im Palazzo
Schifanoja zu Ferrara," in Warburg, 1992, 173-98. This is also translated as
"Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara,"
in GermanEssays in Art History, ed. Gert Schiff, NewYork, 1988, 234-54.
55. See Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascencesin WesternArt, New York,
1969.
56. Hans Belting, Likenessand Presence,Chicago, 1987.
57. See Martin Warnke, "Der Leidschatz wird humaner Besitz," in Hof-
mann, Syamken, and Warnke (as in n. 10), 151.
52 ART BULLETIN MARCH 1997 VOLUME LXXIX NUMBER 1
short step from here to Warburg's own recognition of the ever
present potential for the "reanimation of demonic antiquity"
(Warburg, 1992, 267). In his later notes Warburg ultimately
comes to see the unconscious as a storehouse of just such
repressed memories and impulses, a view that underlies his
theory of collective memory. The immediate source of this
view is Richard Semon's book Die Mneme, but it easily follows
from Vischer's work.
The general shape of Warburg's thought is thus becoming
clearer. The Renaissance is central to his interests, since it is
seen as a pivotal point in the transition from the symbol to the
allegory and, being an "era of transition" (Warburg, 1992,
260), is a site of conflict, of tensions between two contradic-
tory attitudes toward representation. The images Warburg
discusses are themselves representative of much wider changes,
perhaps most succinctly interpreted as the evolution from a
primarily metaphorical pattern of thinking to predominantly
abstract-conceptual thought. This process is itself parallel (or
even bears a causal relation) to the loss of empathy-this
much is evident from Warburg's frequent comments on
distance. "Logic," he notes, "creates ... conceptual space
between individual and object," while "magic ... in turn
destroys this same conceptual space" (Warburg, 1992, 202).
However, although Warburg's thought would seem to signal a
sense of the loss of artistic culture, manifest in the dominance
of the logical sign, Warburg's actual conclusion is quite the
reverse. In contrast with Nietzsche, for whom the loss of the
Dionysian heralded the birth of modern, scientific, Socratic
culture, the transformation signifies for Warburg a growth of
aesthetic creativity. The distance of the sign from its object
indicates the intervention of human artifice, as had been
implied in Warburg's study of the intermezzi and early opera.
This process finds its most extreme expression in the Ba-
roque, where, as Warburg writes in one of his notebooks,
"expressive values were cut loose from the mint of real life in
movement."58
Warburg's thought therefore appears to consist of an
innovative response to problems preoccupying German aes-
thetics and psychology of the late nineteenth century. It also
appears to enter into a creative dialogue with what in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the fast-growing
field of anthropology, suggesting that the categories of anthro-
pological thought should be directed away from an exclusive
interest in the colonial "other" toward the more recent
history of Western culture. I have already indicated above the
extent to which the interest of Warburg's writings goes
beyond the historically specific concerns to which he was
responding.
In her recent article "Retrieving Warburg's Tradition"
Margaret Iversen has argued that in Warburg one can see an
anticipation of feminist critiques of art history's goal of a
position of objectivity, as embodied, for example, in Panof-
58. Warburg, quoted in Gombrich, 250.
59. Iversen, 1993 (as in n. 9).
60. Warburg, quoted in Gombrich, 250
61. Warburg, quoted in Gombrich, 248.
62. SeeJose Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, trans. T Cochran, Minneapolis,
1986.
sky's search for an Archimedean point from which to survey
the history of art.59 Although Iversen's study indicates the
political connotations of Warburg's work, however, it is also
the case that Warburg's concerns extended beyond those
outlined by Iversen. Indeed, any parallels between Warburg
and feminism stem from the fact that both represent mo-
ments within the decentering of subjectivity that has increas-
ingly taken place in philosophy and the humanities during
the last one hundred years. Clearly, Warburg's awareness of
the recurrent danger of a reanimation of demonic antiquity is
closely allied to the fear of regression, both psychological and
political, and Warburg's well-known hostility to Fascism is
often interpreted in this context. Social memory, however, is
not merely a deposit of regressive impulses. In particular,
Warburg came to regard memory as a form of resistance to
what he termed the "disconnected dynamograms"'60 of the
Baroque, which as noted above, divorced meaning from
subjective experience. In his NotebooksWarburg wrote, "the
task of social memory emerges quite clearly: through renewed
contact with the monuments of the past the sap should be
enabled to rise directly from the subsoil of the past."''1 This
offers scant evidence of the concern, so often imputed to
Warburg, to avoid Alexandrian irrationality; memory is seen
as crucial in the resistance to the hypertrophy of rootless,
allegorical signification. Implicit in this account is the view
that not only is the regression to Dionysian symbolization to
be resisted, but also the excess of allegory; in this, Warburg's
thought looks forward to more recent studies of the Baroque,
which focus on the relation between Baroque spectacle and
authoritarianism.62 Crucial for Warburg is social memory,
which serves both as a tool of redemption and as a focus of
regression.
Mention of the role of memory together with that of
allegory invites comparison once more with Walter Benjamin,
a comparison all the more obvious given Benjamin's attempts
to gain access to the Warburg circle and, specifically, given the
nature of his interests in The Origin of German Tragic Drama.
This work, which now occupies a central place in the
understanding of Benjamin's oeuvre, makes numerous refer-
ences to Warburg and associates of Warburg such as Fritz Saxl,
Panofsky, and Karl Giehlow. I have already mentioned a
certain congruence between Benjamin and Warburg over the
question of historical inquiry. Warburg's attention to the
dialectical character of Renaissance culture bears a remark-
able similarity to Benjamin's contention in the "Epistemo-
Critical Prologue" to The Origin of German Tragic Drama that
"ideas come to life only when extremes are assembled around
them" (Benjamin, 35) and that "From the point of view of the
philosophy of art the extremes are necessary" (Benjamin,
38). Notable, too, is the parallel between Warburg's monado-
logical understanding of the symbol and Benjamin's own
reference to Leibniz, or their common interest in Dadaist
montage as a technique. The parallel is most apparent,
63. See Wolfgang Kemp, "Fernbilder: Benjamin und die Kunstwissen-
schaft," in WalterBenjamin im Kontext, ed. Burckhardt Lindner, Frankfurt am
Main, 1978, 246-54
64. See Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Lafolze du vozr De l'esthitzquedu Baroque,
Pans, 1986, and idem., Baroque The Aesthetzcsof Modernity, London,
Reason"

perhaps, in Warburg's incomplete pictorial atlas "Mnemo-
syne" (Fig. 5), a collection of over eighty panels that map the
transformation of various pictorial motifs, or "engrams,"
from antiquity to the present, through the juxtaposition of
different incarnations of the motif on one and the same
display panel. This unfinished project could in many respects
be interpreted as a visual counterpart to the montage of
Benjamin's ArcadesProject,an exploration of the prehistory of
Parisian modernity. Much of this relation has already been
explored by Wolfgang Kemp,63 and a clear line of influence
can be traced from Warburg to Benjamin with regard to
methodological considerations. But there are also other ways
in which their concerns intersect.
I argued that the study of the emergence of allegory from
the symbol during the Renaissance is central to Warburg, for
whom this process denotes the emergence of a distinctly
"modern" cultural sensibility predicated on a logical-
dissociative order of representation. Ironically, however, while
for Nietzsche, so important to Warburg, this process signified
the hypertrophy of Socratic reason and the loss of artistic
impulse, for Warburg it actually indicates an excess of artistic
production. At no stage does Warburg actually present these
themes as part of a unified theory, but given his interest in
montage and the dialectics of culture, this is not surprising.
The closest one comes to such an equation in Warburg's
published writings is his study of the intermezzi, where certain
of the tableaux are so semantically overdetermined that their
status as signs prevents identification with the represented
objects. Arguably, it is Benjamin who, despite his fondness for
the fragmentary, draws out the implications of Warburg's
work most fully.
Benjamin's treatise presented a seminal theory of allegory;
overturning long-established Romantic aesthetic theories that
denigrated allegory, it expanded beyond the limits of a
philological study of a neglected period in German literature
to offer a theory of allegory that still occupies a central place
in the account of specifically modern literary practice. As
such it represented a literary-theoretical counterpart to the
sociological theories of modernity of T6nnies, Weber, and
Georg Simmel. Recent writings by Christine Buci-Glucks-
mann and Craig Owens testify to the continued importance
of, and renewed interest in, Benjamin's study.64 Arguably,
Warburg's writings acted as a significant influence on the
formation of Benjamin's allegorical conception of the mod-
ern, as is indicated by Benjamin's comment on Dfirer's
MelencoliaIthat "this, the 'ripest and most mysterious fruit of
the cosmological culture of Maximilian's circle' as Warburg
has called it, may well be considered as a seed in which the
allegorical flower of the Baroque, still held in check by the
power of a genius, lies ready to burst into bloom" (Benjamin,
154).
The concepts so central to The Origin of German Tragic
Drama would subsequently become an integral part of Benja-
1994; Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmod-
ernism," Pts. 1 and 2, in Beyond Recognztzon,Los Angeles, 1992, 52-69. For
these authors, of course, allegory and the Baroque have a rather different
meaning from that argued for by Maravall (as in n. 62).
65. It is interesting that, as Jesinghausen-Lauster points out, Clemens
Lugowski, a member of the Warburg circle, offers a theory of the novel
ABY WARBURG'S THEORY OF ART 53
min's oeuvre in general, even if the motif of allegorical
distance would eventually be recast in a Marxist configura-
tion. These concerns, however, were by no means limited to
Benjamin, since the critique of allegorical signification feeds
into the modernist cultural-philosophical theories of figures
such as the young Lukaics, Siegfried Kracauer, and Adorno. I
am referring here to the common topos of modernity as a
rootless alienation from and loss of immediacy to Being. In
Theoryof the Novel, for example, Lukaicsdescribes this with the
notion of "transcendental homelessness," which becomes
central to the emergence of the novel form, of which
Cervantes's Don Quixote constitutes an important early ex-
ample.65 For Adorno the alienations of modernity are indi-
cated by the loss of the name as the primary constituent of
language, an age in which "the Enlightenment calls a halt
before the nomen, the exclusive, precise concept, the proper
name.'"66 At stake here is the notion of the creation of
distance through abstract conceptual language, an idea that
has an obvious resonance in Warburg's comments on the
creation (and destruction) of "Denkraum," or "conceptual
space," in the opening pages of his essay on Luther, Dfirer,
and astrology.
In drawing a comparison between such cultural-philosophi-
cal theories of modernity and the work of Warburg, one has
nevertheless to exercise a certain degree of caution. Lukaics,
Benjamin, and Adorno, not to mention T6nnies and Weber,
are concerned with outlining "modernity" both as a socio-
historical epoch and a cultural configuration, given most
obvious concrete form in the rationalizations of the Enlighten-
ment and the Industrial Revolution. Warburg shares little of
the interest in the much broader notions of the "modern"
that underpin the thought of those other figures. What I am
arguing, however, is that Warburg's "system" can be placed
within the context of a cultural and philosophical analysis of
the emergence of postmedieval European society that be-
came especially widespread in Germany in the latter years of
the nineteenth century. It is no coincidence that such
analyses grew in prominence at precisely this period, since the
authors in question were tracing the genealogy of their own
time back to the Renaissance and the loss of a "magical-
associative" sensibility. Warburg's exploration of art in primar-
ily the Florentine Renaissance is based on the fact that for
Warburg the Renaissance is understood as a pivotal moment
between the modern and the premodern. Perhaps the clear-
est indication of the overarching perspective that Warburg
brings to his concerns, and that links him with the writers
already discussed, can be seen in one of his unpublished
Notebooksof 1927-28:
Our attempt to understand the processes of stylistic evolu-
tion in their psychological necessity by viewing them
against the background of antiquity was bound ultimately
to lead to a criticism of the periodizations of history. Can
dialectically opposed to that of Lukics. SeeJesinghausen-Lauster (as in n. 10),
235 ff. The work in question is Lugowski's DzeForm der Indzvdualztdt im Roman,
Berlin, 1929.
66. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dzalectzcof Enlzghtenment,trans.
23.
J. Cumming, London, 1989,
54 ART BUILLETIN MARCH 1997 VOLUME LXXIX NUMBER 1

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5 Aby Warburg, "Mnemosyne," panel 56 (photo: Warburg Institute)


there, for instance, be an exact delimitation between the
Renaissance and the Middle Ages in the light of the
psychology of style? Such an attempt at drawing a purely
chronological dividing-line can never rest on evident
principles of categorization, since what we call the Middle
Ages and the Modern Age are merely our own attempts to
give a common name to the mental characteristics of a
given coherent group of people. Even though their exter-
nal habits of mind can be shown to be more or less
dominant, they are still rooted in the human psyche. ...
We attempt to grasp the spirit of the age in its impact on
style by comparing the same subject as it is treated in
various periods and various countries... .67
Of course, as Kany has argued, it is slightly misleading to think
of Warburg as interested only in art; he was also drawn to the
history of astrology and its transformation into astronomy,
alchemy's development into chemistry, or, more generally in
the various metamorphoses of religious belief and practice.68
Such comments notwithstanding, it is also generally true that
Warburg's interest was in the specifically visual documents of
such transformations, guided by a notion of symbolism and
representation derived from Vico, Vischer, and Romantic
aesthetic theory.
I have argued in this paper that Aby Warburg's thought, while
very much grounded in nineteenth-century psychological
theories, is still of continued relevance since it uses those
theories to map out the emergence of a modern order of
visual representation. My argument has been based on the
premise that despite the fact that Warburg's writihgs can in no
sense be regarded as a unified corpus, and despite the
discontinuities in the corpus of Warburg's work, one can
nevertheless discern a continuous strand of thought running
through the oeuvre. Central to this strand is,the analysis of the
transformation of symbols, in particular, the transformation
of their function from magical-associative symbols to logical-
dissociative allegorical signs. In turn, this transformation of
function is indicative of a history of experience; in which the
mimetic identification with phenomena passes over into a
sense of distance from them. Warburg thus historicizes
Robert Vischer's theory of empathy and at the same time gives
a greater weight to the unconscious roots of empathic
identification. It is this equation of the magical-associative
symbol with the unconscious that underlies Warburg's aware-
ness of the possibility of recidivism. It would be wrong to argue
that this thread constitutes the "essence" of his thought. I am
merely suggesting that if we wish to engage with Warburg, it is by
attending to this dimension of his work that the encounter will
67. Quoted in Gombrich, 268-69.
68. Kany, 1989 (as in n. 10). Kany points out that art historical studies form
only about a quarter of the total volume of research published by the Warburg
Institute in Hamburg and then London.
ABY WARBURG'S THEORY OF ART 55
possibly become a meaningful and fruitful one, rather than
an exercise in art historiographical archaeology.
If it is the case that Warburg's thought is organized around
such cultural-philosophical problems it is also true, however,
that his theoretical concerns always remain understated. In
this respect his vast corpus of notes is more revealing than his
published works. No doubt it is for this reason that the
functional-theoretical underpinning so crucial to the under-
standing of Warburg's oeuvre was from an early stage over-
looked. Already in the 1930s one can see Warburg's interest in
the historicity of representation being interpreted as an
exercise in cataloguing often overlooked and arcane symbols.
For example, Rudolf Wittkower's essay "Eagle and Serpent: A
Study in the Migration of Symbols" of 1938 consists primarily
of the empirical gathering of data testifying to the continued
presence of the symbols of the eagle and serpent, failing to
draw any further conclusion from such an observation.69
Much the same can be said, too, of Fritz Saxl's lecture on the
"Continuity and Variation in the Meaning of Images," which
opens with the assertion, "I am not a philosopher, nor am I
able to talk about the philosophy of history."''7 In contrast, the
continued importance of Warburg is directly related to the
cultural-philosophical perspective that at all times directed
his method and decided in advance the type of material to
which his attention was drawn. Indeed, if Warburg's work is of
interest today it is because it stands at the point of intersection
of a number of intellectual currents central to the understand-
ing of modernity, currents that still engage us.
Frequently Cited Sources
Benjamin, Walter, The Ongin of GermanTragicDrama, trans. J. Osborne,
London, 1985.
Gombrich,Ernst,AbyWarburg: An Intellectual
Biography,2d ed., Oxford, 1986.
Vischer,Robert, "On the Optical Sense of Form," in Empathy,Formand Space:
Problems 1873-1893, trans. and ed. H. Mallgraveand E.
zn GermanAesthetzcs
Ikonomou, SantaMonica, 1994.
Warburg,Aby,DzeErneuerung derheidnischen Gesammelte
Antzike: Schrften,ed. G.
Bing and F. Rougemont, Berlin, 1932.
Warburg,Aby, AusgewaihlteSchnftenund Wiirdzgungen, ed. D. Wuttke, Baden-
Baden,1992.
MatthewRampleyis a senior lecturerin art historyand visual culture
at the SurreyInstitute of Art & Design. He completeda Ph.D. on
Nietzsche's aesthetics at the University of St. Andrews. He has
published articles on Nietzsche,Heidegger,and Riegl. He is currently
writing a bookon Warburgand modernity[Facultyof Arts & Media,
SurreyInstitute of Art & Design, Falkner Road, Farnham, Surrey,
GU9 7DS, GreatBritain].
69. Rudolf Wittkower, "Eagle and Serpent," Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes,11, 1938-39, 293-325.
70. Fritz Saxl, "Continuity and Variation in the Meaning of Images," in
Lectures,London, 1957, I, 1.