Warburg’s new concept of ‘antiquity’

Associated media

David Ecclestone explores part of the legacy of Aby Warburg, one of the 20th century’s most important art historians

Antiquity Unleashed: Aby Warburg, Dürer and Mantegna

‘Antiquity Unleashed, a small show (in Room 12, a very modest space) was billed as an appendix to the much larger show, ‘The Young Dürer’,  but the concept is significant enough to merit separate consideration.  It was a focused look at the impact of Aby Warburg (1866–1929), one of the most influential art historians of the 20th century.  There were three linked narratives, two modern and one from the turn of the 16th century.

Working backwards.  Warburg died in 1929, leaving behind in Hamburg a celebrated research library, which in 1933 was under threat from the Nazi regime.  With funds provided anonymously by Samuel Courtauld, the library was migrated to the Courtauld Institute in London. As early as 1905, Warburg (then the 39-year-old son of a banker) had spoken at the Hamburg Concert Hall and introduced a new concept of antiquity that pushed hard against the prevailing classicizing view that ancient art represented concepts of ‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur’.  While accepting this element, Warburg proposed that it remained in tension with an opposing element of passion, linked in the Classical mind to the god Dionysos, god of winemaking and ecstatic experience.  In evidence, he presented Dürer’s Death of Orpheus (c. 1494) and it was this drawing in pen and brown ink that formed the focus of this exhibition.

The posture of the three figures in Dürer’s The Death of Orpheus (1494) is mirrored with almost exact precision by a roughly contemporary engraving by Ferrara and it seems likely that the two representations are based on a lost image by Mantegna.  Whether this is so or not, Warburg’s identification of the passion in the Dürer with a similar strain of Dionysian ecstasy in classical models, conveyed to Dürer through Renaissance representations, is borne out by the group of four Mantegnas, from around 1475–80 that were positioned facing it in the exhibition.  The two panels depicting Mantegna’s the Battle of the Sea Gods, showing the divinities engaged in raw, agonising violence, display the same intense emotion as does the Dürer.  An interesting apposition of this ‘pathosformel’ (Warburg’s term for conventionalized depictions of strong emotion) with the restrained, idealized depiction of classical art can be seen in Mantegna’s Bacchanal with a Wine Press.  Here Mantegna inserts among the dissolute carousing revellers the calm, stabilizing figure of Bacchus himself, supporting with his right hand a waist-high cornucopia over-flowing with grapes, while his left reaches up for the crown. This posture combined with the sense of movement as the god shifts his weight on to his right foot, is that of the, then recently excavated, statue of the Apollo Belvedere.

Another Renaissance source is Antonio Pollaiuolo. The Battle of the Nudes (c. 1470–95) reminds us that this artist could make the muscles of the body almost as expressive as the face, especially in the depiction of struggle.  And what could more keenly convey the edges of steel raised to strike, than the contrast with the flowing organic shapes of the forest beyond?  As for sublime skill at conveying mood, Melencolia I, Dürer’s much-reproduced, but always powerful, depiction of depression, can make one feel the optimism drain from one.  There are moments when commentary is redundant, even presumptuous.

From 1926, Warburg, who founded London’s Warburg Institute,   was engaged in a major project left uncompleted at the time of his death in 1929. This was the creation of Mnemosyne, a picture atlas that was to bring together related images from across time and space in a relationship that informs and educates – a model of the best of art-history teaching.

If you want to discover as much of the history as possible, the catalogue, which has a foreword by Stephanie Buck and Andreas Stolzengurg and an introductory essay by Marcus Andrew Hurttig, is coherent, informative and very well illustrated.

Antiquity Unleashed: Aby Warburg, Dürer and Mantegna by Marcus Andrew Hurtig et al. is published  by Paul Holberton Publishing, 2013. 60pp. Fully illustrated, £11.96 ISBN 978-1907372582