Aby Warburg and Nature

About two years ago I became interested in the German art historian, Aby Warburg, after having a conversation about him with a colleague.  I knew his name, but had only a superficial understanding of his methodology and research interests.  I understood that his dissertation presented the idea of iconography, but, my formal studies of the history of iconography had centered around Erwin Panofsky.  Panofsky, like so many other Jewish scholars, emigrated to America in the 1930s and he published the foundational, Studies in Iconology: Humanist Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, in English in 1939.  Somewhere along the way, I just never gave much thought to Warburg, something I now regret after having done a little research about him.

I discovered that he was quite fascinating and his research focused on how themes transferred from ancient times into the Renaissance and in the role of memory.  His grand project, the Mnemosyne Atlas has become particularly interesting to me as it relates to both the study of art and the study of nature.  He coined a term, Bilderfahrzeuge, which means “image vehicles” and refers to the migration of ideas through time.

Warburg founded a private library devoted to cultural studies, The Warburg Institute, and within it, he worked on the Atlas, an arrangement of about 1,000 images into categorized groups to visually graph the connections between forms across time.  The possible correspondence between the study of art and the study of nature struck me.  The atlas functions like a taxonomy of form in art and Warburg, in this respect, was modelling his methodology on the practices of ecologists, or, as they were called in the early 20th century, natural historians.

These ideas have been percolating in the back of my mind for some time now and I am delighted to see that there is an upcoming workshop on Warburg hosted by the University of Hamburg in February, 2015.  The organizers are framing the workshop as follows:

Warburg’s basic project to link the study of the visual arts with cultural studies is itself strongly related to natural scientific models of his time. This can be seen in his idiosyncratic, often tentative adoptions of such terms and contaminations as mneme (mnemonic traces that operate in the life of images); Erbgut and Erbmasse (‘inheritance’; ‘hereditary mass’); kinetic and potential energy; dynamogram (a kind of ‘energetic sign’); engram (‘energetic’ mnemonic traces); and Energiekonserve (‘canned energy’). It is to these areas that our workshop wishes to apply itself – not simply to plumb the capacity and range of Warburg’s vocabulary, but rather to take a closer look at his intersecting of cultural studies and the natural sciences. What methodological status do genetics, evolutionary biology, social psychology, affect psychology, or even physics or mathematics have for Warburg’s understanding of images? What role do Warburg’s own systems of record, his sketches and formulas, play in all this? Is the importing of abstract concepts and models from the natural sciences just a matter of ‘nice analogies’, as Saxl would have us believe – or can we lay bare an epistemology of transfer between cultural studies and the natural sciences which could also be illuminating for current fluctuations between the two?

I lament the fact that I cannot attend this workshop due to limited financial resources, but I hope that good things will come from it (including a recording or transcript of the proceedings).  Perhaps you’ll be able to attend?  If so, please consider sharing your thoughts about the workshop here as a guest blogger!