Culture, change, and intellectual relations

Review of:
José Emilio Burucúa, Historia, Arte, Cultura. De Aby Warburg a Carlo Ginzburg,
Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2003, ISBN 9505575580, 199 pp.,
£ 24.94.

Historia, Arte, Cultura describes the intellectual development of a group of scholars

with wide ranging interests and diverse approaches to the history of art and culture,
centered around the figure of Aby Warburg (1866-1929) and his collection of books
and images. Displaying singular erudition, José Emilio Burucúa discusses their
theories and studies, as well as their institutional affiliations. This issue brings into
consideration the history of the Warburg Institute itself, its hazardous transfer from
Hamburg to England, and its incorporation to the University of London. The
relevance of the book as a general introduction to the group is enhanced by a forty
page appendix which includes texts written by distinguished members of the
Warburgian tradition.
The introduction to the book highlights the increased interest that European
historiography has devoted to Warburg, his theories, and his methods in the last
decades. In 1970, Ernst Gombrich published an intellectual biography of the
German art historian, revised and expanded in 1986. 1 That same year, Carlo
Ginzburg included the article 'Da Aby Warburg a Ernst Gombrich. Note su un
problema di metodo' in his book Miti, Emblemi, Spie. 2 Gombrich's and Ginzburg's
reflections heralded the appearance of several translations of Warburg's texts that
made them accessible to the non-German speaking world. Until the 1990s only an
Italian translation, La Rinascita del Paganesimo Antico, edited by Gertrud Bing, 3 was
available. In 1990 part of the book was translated into French; in 1999 it was
published in full in English. Other texts followed, including a selection of
Warburgiana in Spanish, published in Buenos Aires in 1992 by Burucúa and his
colleagues, 4 which revitalized the Argentine Warburgian tradition, started in the
1970s by Héctor Ciocchini, Ángel Castellan, and Adolfo Ribera, three of Burucúa's
professors.
In the first chapter of the book, Burucúa studies what he considers the three
main nuclei in Warburg's work. First, his conception of the Renaissance as the
historical time that inaugurates western modernity. Second, the devising of a
methodology for research and discovery in the field of cultural history. Third, his
approach to ethnology to understand the meaning of magical practices, both in

1 Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg. An intellectual biography, with a memoir on the history of the library by
F. Saxl, Oxford: Phaidon, 1986.
2 Carlo Ginzburg, Miti, Emblemi, Spie. Morfologia e storia, Torino: Einaudi, 1986. Originally published in
Carlo Ginzburg: 'Da A. Warburg a E. H. Gombrich (Note su un problema di metodo)', Studi medievali,
year VII, fasc. II, December 1966, pp. 1015-1065.
3 Aby Warburg, La Rinascita del Paganesimo Antico. Contributi alla storia della cultura, Florence: La
Nuova Italia, 1966. With an introductory essay by Gertrud Bing, it was republished in 1980 and 1996
4 José Emilio Burucúa et al., Historia de las imágenes e historia de las ideas. La escuela de Aby Warburg,
Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1992.

Journal of Art Historiography Number 1 December 2009

Nicolás Kwiatkowski Review of: José Emilio Burucúa

ancient and contemporary cultures. Warburg devoted part of his intellectual efforts
to the understanding of the complex relationship between das Nachleben der Antike
(the coming back to life of Antiquity) and the awakening of modernity in the
Renaissance. According to this explanation, the active and dynamic members of the
bourgeoisie that controlled the Italian city-states were leading lives different to those
of their Medieval predecessors. Hence, these homines novi found it difficult to
comprehend their new experiences and ideals in the cultural framework set by
Christianity. The discovery and renewal of classical human and philosophic
experiences allowed them to overcome some of the fears and anxieties of their own
times. In the course of these explorations, Warburg encountered certain continuities
and transformations in a set of artistic and cultural formulae that were at the core of
the issues that interested him. Those Pathosformeln became for him the key to
understanding the cultural history of humanity. Warburg studied one of these
motifs (the figure of the nymph) from Greek vases to Botticelli's paintings and,
based on his discoveries, conceived an ambitious project to build an iconographic
atlas of our civilization: the never concluded, although properly named, Mnemosyne.
Regarding magic, the German historian produced a study of the religious and
political uses of ancient fortune telling and astrology in the times of Martin Luther.
But also, in 1895 and 1896, Warburg headed his own ethnographic expedition to
analyze the rituals of the Hopi and Pueblo Indians in New Mexico. Besides his
detailed description of the role played by the serpent and the serpentine form in
those ceremonies, Warburg derived another key concept from this trip, the
Denkraum or “thought-distance”: 'Mythical and symbolic thinking strive to form
spiritual bonds between humanity and the surrounding world, shaping distance
into the space required for devotion and reflection'. 5
The rest of Burucúa's book studies the development of several international
Warburgians, from Warburg's disciples themselves to Carlo Ginzburg. Chapter 2,
'Intellectuals and works in the Institute in the 1920s', discusses the activities of the
group prior to the relocation of the library to London, in 1933. It was in those years
that several scholars explored subjects neighboring Warburg's interests. Fritz Saxl
and Erwin Panofsky analyzed the theme of Melancholy in Dürer, fruitfully studying
the relationships between art, science, religion and philosophy. 6 In 1927, Panofsky
himself attempted to understand the development of linear perspective as symbolic
form during the Renaissance, both in terms of individual subjectivity and universal
representation. 7 There is also room for a discussion on the implicit and explicit links
between the Institute and Ernst Cassirer's early studies, as well as with Walter
Benjamin's reflections regarding The Origin of German Tragic Drama, his doctoral
dissertation.
The third chapter addresses the activities of the Institute after Warburg's
death, once it was established in London. The relocation, an adventure led by Fritz
Saxl and Gertrud Bing, was an attempt to preserve the collection of books and
images that Warburg had gathered from the threats posed by Nazism. It was Bing,

5 Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 1995, p. 54.
6 Dürers ‘Melencolia I’. Eine quellen- und typengeschichtliche Untersuchung, Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1923.
7 'Die Perspective als symbolische Form', in the Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, 1927.

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Nicolás Kwiatkowski Review of: José Emilio Burucúa

precisely, who edited Saxl's works posthumously, in 1957: in those texts, later
criticized by Ginzburg as tautological, the history of images is always studied in
relationship with contemporary religious and political developments. Other sections
include a study of Panofsky's research in Princeton, 8 away from the Institute but
always linked to Warburg's original interests, and a discussion of the production of
Daniel P. Walker 9 and Frances Yates 10 regarding magic, hermetism, and philosophy
in their connections to religion during the Renaissance. There is also a detailed
analysis of Ernst Gombrich's works on the psychological aspects of mimetic
representation 11 and of his Popperian approach to Warburg's theory of culture,
which are relevant in themselves, but also because Gombrich was the director of the
Institute between 1959 and 1976. Discussions of the works of Rudolf Wittkower,
Svetlana Alpers, Michael Baxandall and Héctor Ciocchini ensue. In every case,
Burucúa reviews the innovations and discoveries of Warburgian scholars, but also
gives examples of their shortcomings and of the criticism that arose after the
publication of their research.
The final chapter studies the Institute's historiography and its relations with
Italian scholarship. Burucúa recognizes that echoes of Warburgian scholarship can
be heard in France, Spain, and the Americas, and he cites several instances of such
appropriations. However, he believes that 'it is in Italy that the Warburgian tradition
has borne its fruit in a fashion comparable to that of London'. 12 The author considers
that both Salvatore Settis and Carlo Del Bravo are major exponents of the tradition
under study in the field of art history. 13 He also provides evidence of the Institute's
modus operandi in Paolo Rossi's and Eugenio Garin's studies on magic, science and
philosophy in the Renaissance. 14 But Burucúa is convinced that the works of Carlo
Ginzburg provide the best examples of the vitality of this tradition, not only because
of the thematic proximity to the interests of other scholars in the Institute (magic,
witchcraft, religion, symbolic continuance, relations between texts and images), but
mostly due to Ginzburg's proposal of a semiotic paradigm, based on signs and
clues, which Burucúa defines as 'an enhanced version of Warburg's method'.
Ginzburg himself chose Warburg as a methodological model, quoting Aby's dictum
'God is in the details' in the epigraph to his article.
Such diversity of scholarly interests as analyzed in this book implies that the
term “School” might be inadequate to describe the Warburgians. Nevertheless, these
academics are part of a common tradition that stems partially from Warburg's large
collection of books and images, described by Carlo Ginzburg as a “machine for
thought”: the library preserves today, as part of the Institute in London, the original

8 Studies in Iconology, New York: Oxford University Press, 1939; Renaissance and Renascences in
Western Art, New York: Almqvist & Wiskells, 1957.
9 Spiritual and demonic magic from Ficino to Campanella, London: Warburg Institute, University of
London, 1958.
10 Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.
11 Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. London: Phaidon 1960.
12 Historia, arte y cultura..., p. 111.
13 Carlo Del Bravo, Le risposte dell’arte, Florence: Sansoni, 1985. Salvatore Settis, La “Tempesta”
interpretata. Giorgione, I committenti, il soggetto, Torino: Einaudi, 1978.
14 Paolo Rossi, Francesco Bacone. Dalla magia alla scienza, Bari: Laterza, 1957; Eugenio Garin, Lo zodiaco
della vita. La polemica sull’astrologia dal Trescento al Cinquecento, Bari: Laterza, 1957.

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Nicolás Kwiatkowski Review of: José Emilio Burucúa

topography devised by its founder, which encourages the research of relationships

and associations between texts, images, people and ideas. Burucúa's book provides
other possible signs of participation in the Warburgian tradition, common to the
scholars included in his study, but not necessarily to every interpretation of
Warburg's legacy available today. Firstly, Burucúa's description of one of Warburg's
most important concepts, i.e. the notion of Pathosformeln, emphasizes that such
formulae take shape historically and that they change in time. Consequently, they
should not be considered as psychological or anthropological constants. Secondly,
the author's insistence on the links between Warburg's method and the one put
forward by Ginzburg underlines the importance of an interest in very specific
subjects, only to find in such details the greatest issues of mankind's cultural history.
At the same time an intellectual, institutional and cultural history that grants access
to Early Modern European culture through the study of the works and troubles of
twentieth-century academics, Burucúa's Historia, arte y cultura is also a subtle
proposition of a model of interpretation of human culture and the explanation of
historical change.

Nicolás Kwiatkowski
IDAES-CONICET
Paraná 145
5th Floor
Buenos Aires
Argentina

[email protected]