The Image in the Conception by Aby Warburg Cover Image
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Obraz w koncepcji Aby’ego Warburga
The Image in the Conception by Aby Warburg

Author(s): Ryszard Kasperowicz
Subject(s): Anthropology
Published by: Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk
Keywords: Warburg; image; symbol; art history

Summary/Abstract: The concept of the „image” assumed a key rank in the interpretations proposed by Aby Warburg. The latter did not accept the universally applied description, silently approved in the second half of the nineteenth century, which either referred to assorted formalistic aesthetics that granted autonomy to the form of the artwork, or situated the form in an abstractly constructed system of the development of historical forms. Warburg conceived the image as the outcome of a complex historical situation in which the artist’s intentions play a role just as essential as the needs of the patron or the certain mental inclinations of a milieu and inherited traditions. Constructing the image crosses the demands of aesthetics and is enrooted in a convoluted psychological process, indicating the anthropological justification of the image as man’s cultural-biological function. At the time this stand did not have a counterpart in the „classical” history of art and owed much to studies into religion and the myth, consistently aiming at an interpretation of art as the history of man’s visual expression transcending the traditional rigid rules of aesthetics.

  • Issue Year: 2011
  • Issue No: 02-03
  • Page Range: 33-40
  • Page Count: 8
  • Language: Polish