Product Description

Bibliophile, scholar, founder of what would become the Warburg Institute, Aby Warburg (1866-1929) ranks as one of the most original and brilliant art historians of this century. Warburg looked beyond iconography to more psychological aspects of artistic creation, and in particular he contemplated the meaning of the re-use of ancient motifs. His scholarship--published in German in 1932 in two volumes encompassing all of his published essays along with manuscript notes in his working copies--has had a crucial influence on the work of twentieth-century art historians. Now, with the publication of this new translation of The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, these seminal volumes are available in their entirety in English for the first time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #661352 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-09
• Original language: German
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 868 pages

From Library Journal
Warburg (1866-1929) was a preeminent influence in the development of 20th-century art history. A disciple of Jacob Burckhardt, he believed that art history studies focusing solely on stylistic elements were incomplete and thus developed an approach similar to the Kulturwissenschaft of turn-of-the-century anthropologists. From his studies of Renaissance Florence, he began to question the resurgence of pagan symbols in 15th-century Italy, which led to a focus on the influence of antiquity on modern European civilization. That focus then became the center of his personal library (and the core collection for the Warburg Institute). The 1932 edition of the first two volumes of Warburg's Gesammelte Schriften (Collected Writings) has just been reprinted, but this impressively large tome is its first translation into English. The text is dense and the illustrations are the modest sort commonly used 60 years ago, but the content is of extraordinary value to scholars of Renaissance art. Recommended for specialized art collections.AMary Morgan Smith, Northland P.L., Pittsburgh
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"Finally allow[s] English speakers to read for themselves the complex, cantankerous, minutiae-driven scholarship." -- Bryn Mawr Classical Review
Review

"Of extraordinary value to scholars of Renaissance art." -- Library Journal

"The fascinating details and complexity of Warburg's life are masterful recreated." -- CAA Reviews

"Warburg's achievement... should now reclaim its position as central to our understanding of the aims and the methods of art history." -- The New Republic

"With its richness of cross-reference and documentation, this handsome book is an essential addition to any scholarly library, and one that will be treasured by individual purchasers." -- ForeWord

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

Customer Reviews

Translators who love too much
Translating is always, as they say, a labor of love, and yet the eyes of lovers are famous for falsifying their beloved. While we cannot accuse Britt's long awaited and long needed translation of Warburg into English of neglect, unfortunately the very care and attentiveness that he lavishes on the text, and his often overwrought attempt to get at its original meaning, results in almost grotesque distortions, as if, worried about how his beloved might appear under the gaze of his contemporaries, he feels the need to mask his beloved's true virtues with invented conceits. Two examples will suffice: the translation of "ideal" as "ideological," --- as if he were ashamed of Warburg's somewhat naive reference to the transcendental tendencies of the Italian renaissance --- and of "pathos" as "pagan histrionics," as if an American readership would necessarily stumble over this technical term from Aristotle's Poetics.

Warburg on Renaissance & Antiquity in English.
Thanks to the Getty Research Institute, Kurt W. Forster, and David Britt for bringing this extremely important volume to us in English. The arrival of this book--a new edition of the 1932 work--has been much anticipated. Finally the bulk of Warburg's essays on the relationships between antique and Renaissance imagery are now readily available. The original book is not widely available even to those who can read the German or Italian texts of these early essays. This book will now allow much greater possibilites for research into Warburg, the Warburg Tradition, and his important contributions to the history of art and its intellectual history. A generation of scholars will be thankful to the editors of the Getty Texts & Documents series: Julia Bloomfield, Kurt Forster, Harry Mallgrave, Michael Roth, and Salvatore Settis.

Epochal Scholarship Finally Available in English
It has been seven decades since the idea of bringing this work to the English-reading public was first broached; I learned German over twenty years ago, among other reasons, because I simply could wait no longer! Thanks to David Britt and the tireless labor of the staff of the Getty Center, the wait has been worth it.

I believe Warburg represents not only one of the most gifted thinkers in art history, a true father of the discipline and a vital bridge to its professional incarnation in the 20th century, but also a bridge into the neuroscientific concerns of the early 21rst century, when we are even more attuned to the emotional formulas (Pathosformeln) in the worlds of art, cinema and commercial design.

No doubt about it, this work is not for the uninitiated. But patient reading will pay off handsomely! I would suggest first obtaining Ernst Gombrich's intellectual biography (1970/1986) and Richard Woodfield's handy anthology of recent scholarship about Warburg's "projects."